The six branches
Completing the entire tree earns the Fully Trained badge (110 Gems), which confirms it is meant to be finished within a run’s progression. Here is what each branch changes and when it earns its keep.
| Branch | What it does | When to buy |
|---|---|---|
| Token Income | More Tokens for every bucket you pour | Buy first. It compounds every future trip, so it funds every other upgrade faster. |
| Bucket Capacity | More water per bucket, so fewer round-trips | Buy alongside Token Income. Bigger buckets turn each drain into a larger payout. |
| Fill Speed | The bucket fills faster at the water | Helps when the fill wait, not the walk, is your slowest step. |
| Quick Drain | The pour/drain action finishes faster | Pick up once your income is strong and pouring feels like the bottleneck. |
| Diamond Rewards | More Gems from chests and treasure | A bonus branch. Worth it if you are farming buckets and want persistent currency faster. |
| Character | Movement speed | The one disputed call: BloxRant saves it for last because deep water shrinks the work area and checkpoints cut travel; Sportskeeda buys a little early to speed the first trips. Both agree it is not your main investment. |
Recommended buy order
Economy first, movement last. Token Income makes every pour pay more, and it funds everything else faster, so it comes before all of it. Bucket Capacity rides alongside it, because more water per trip multiplies the higher payout. Once those two are rolling, add Quick Drain when pouring feels slow, Diamond Rewards if you are farming Gems, and Character speed at the very end. Everything after the first two branches is situational, so read your own run rather than following a fixed script.
- Token Income — cheapest nodes first, for the best value per Token
- Bucket Capacity — keep it climbing next to Token Income
- Quick Drain — once income is strong and pouring is the wait
- Diamond Rewards — if you want persistent Gems for buckets faster
- Character (movement) — last for most players; a little early only if your trips feel slow
Cheaper nodes in each branch give the best value per Token — buy across the low tiers before pushing any single branch to its expensive end.
Why economy beats speed
It is tempting to buy movement speed early because walking feels slow, but income compounds and movement does not. A Token Income node pays off on every single bucket for the rest of the run, while a movement node only shaves a few seconds off trips that get shorter anyway as checkpoints bring the water closer to the drain.
Think of it in trips. Suppose a run is a few hundred pours from the surface to the phone. A Token Income upgrade raises the payout of all of those pours; a movement upgrade saves a little walking on the early ones only, before the checkpoints have tightened the route. The income upgrade wins on volume every time, and the Tokens it generates then buy the movement, capacity, and drain speed you wanted anyway.
That is why the fastest players look "slow" early — they are stacking income while others sprint around with a small bucket. By the mid checkpoints, around the Mineshaft where most runs stall, their payouts dwarf everyone else’s and the movement they skipped no longer matters.
How the branches work together
The branches are not independent — the reason the buy order works is that the first two multiply each other. Token Income raises the payout of every pour, and Bucket Capacity raises how much you pour each trip; stacked together, a full bucket at high capacity paid at a high rate is worth far more than either upgrade alone. That combined payout is what funds the rest of the tree.
Quick Drain and Fill Speed then attack whichever step has become your slowest — pouring or filling — once the economy is strong. Diamond Rewards sits slightly apart: it feeds the persistent Gem economy on the Buckets page rather than the current run, so it is the branch to prioritise on a chest-farming run and to skip on a pure speed run to the phone. Character speed rounds things out last, because checkpoints keep shortening your walk as you descend.
What is not confirmed yet
No source publishes the per-node Token costs, the number of levels in each branch, or the exact multiplier values. Those can only be captured in-game, and this wiki will add a full cost table once they are verified rather than print made-up numbers. The branch names, their effects, the buy order, and how they interact — all covered above — are the parts that are actually confirmed by first-party data and cross-checked player guides.
