Towers of Olympia Ultimate Guide - Orna & Aethric

1. Introduction

Northern Forge released Towers of Olympia in February 2023 as a massive piece of "longform solo end game content" available to players of T9 and above in both Orna and Hero of Aethric. Find and climb Towers out in the world to defeat increasingly stronger enemies on each floor, ending with a Titan Superboss at the top! Collect a new currency called Tower Shards along the way by defeating enemies, to customise your character with celestial weapons, augmentations dropped from Titans, and there's even 22 new celestial classes available to unlock with new skills and passive abilities. This is arguably the biggest content drop in the game's history to date!

In this guide we're going to cover everything there is to know from finding towers, how to acquire olympia tower keys for entry, the different types of towers and their final titan superbosses, mechanics behind wild tower spawning in Orna, how the total floors grow over time allowing for greater hauls of tower shards, weekly reset, then we'll delve in to the Titan Workshop and explain exactly how to spend your hard-earned tower shards to construct and upgrade your own towers, craft  and augment celestial weapons, and finally unlock the new celestial classes!

Note both Orna and Hero of Aethric share most towers mechanics so any specific differences will be explicitly mentioned in the appropriate sections, otherwise you may correctly assume the sections are applicable to both games.​

2. Starting Quest with Pelops NPC 

Every worthy adventure starts with a quest, and Towers of Olympia is no different, although arguably the questline thus far is rather short-lived. 
Speak to Pelops, a new NPC who looks like they've guarded a tower or two in their time. Pelops will give you your first Olympia Tower Key which is used to enter towers.

• Orna: Pelops will be next to you like all quest NPCs
• HoA: Pelops is in New Lyonesse town

You may have to complete any outstanding side quests for Pelops to show up. Do these if you're +T9 and can't find them.

Once you've spoken to Pelops and started the Towers of Olympia quest, the new Tower Guardian T9 monster can now spawn in the world (cryptid rarity, cannot be cheese spawned with party resets), who can drop more tower keys (you don't actually need to complete the quest by ascending 2 tower floors, so if you fail your first tower early you can still find this mob to drop more keys). 

3. Finding Towers in the World

Orna

• Towers are randomly spawned around the world, and their density should hopefully mean you're never more than a few km from the nearest tower (devs may adjust in future depending on feedback). The best way to find towers is by using the Scouthawk from your Keep/Fortress/Castle Lookout function (it's the top option). Be sure to turn your compass map layer on! Use the Scouthawk on cooldown every hour because it can find new things each time.
• Towers appear on the buildings map layer.
• They do not take up or replace dungeon spawns or any other building spawns.
• You cannot interact with towers whilst in a wayvessel.
• Towers shuffle locations randomly every week on weekly reset (the same time as dungeons 00:00 UTC Sunday/Monday night).

HoA
There are currently 5 towers in Aethric with fixed map locations, giving you access to one of each type of tower:

• West Lyonesse: Tower of Themis
• North Lyonesse: Tower of Eos
• Dragon's Foot: Tower of Selene
• East Meropis: Tower of Oceanus
• South-West Balor: Tower of Prometheus

​

4. Finding More Olympia Tower Keys

1. There is 1 monster that can drop olympia tower keys; T9 Tower Guardian

• Kill them using +luck gear if you can, as the key drop is not guaranteed of course. Outside of towers they are a world spawn only i.e. they do not appear in dungeons.
• For world farming use max monster spawning equipment such as: Lover's Lost accessories, Amity with increased monster spawns, torch, occult candle and beast blood.
• Definitely also use affinity candles to filter out lower tier monsters, because the mobs we're chasing are T9.
• Using chaos scroll may be a useful choice for a greater chance of finding berserk guards, which can drop 2 keys and will guarantee at least 1 key drop. The only downside is chaos scrolls introduce more monsters in to the spawn pool.
• HoA zones to farm are the T9 zones around Balor and T10 zones around Olympia Trails.
• 🔥Hot tip - use world party play on +T9 bosses to spawn additional monsters, this often ignores spawn rarity and early reports say you can find more Tower Guards this way than from traveling around normal world farming. Use an alt or a friend if you have those!

2. Ascending floors inside the towers can give you a key as the random item reward.
3. Bazaars may rarely have some in stock!
​4. Runeshop $$$

Tower Guardian mob in Orna and Aethric that drops Olympia Tower Keys

World party play on T9 bosses makes finding Tower Guardians a breeze

5. Ascending the Towers - Gameplay

• The main goal of towers is to climb floors by defeating Floor Guardians, rewarding you with Tower Shards which you can then use to unlock cool stuff in the Titan Workshop.
• For those Orna players who have never played HoA you tap to move to the location inside the tower... "How to move?"...
• Towers are solo content so you will have to rely on your character's own strengths, wits and equipment to succeed.
• Towers cost 1 Olympia Tower Key per entry, with a 23 hour cooldown to re-enter the same tower. Different towers do not share cooldowns, just like dungeons (even towers of same type), so theoretically at least in Orna you could continuously travel around finding and entering new towers all day every day...
• ​Each floor can have a variety of Floor Guardians and Stray Monsters roaming around. These are different fights depending on the mob, and the fight can either be against a single enemy or multiple enemies. It goes without saying that typically the horde fights may be more challenging. Even some raid bosses show up as Floor Guardians every once in a while.
• Perhaps most importantly at the time of writing is that tower fights currently use your World loadout for equipment + skills, including any raids and the final titan fight. You can change your gear and skills outside of battle while walking around the floors as normal. Tower specific loadouts are currently heavily requested so may be introduced in the future by NF... 
  - Orna tip: Use View Distance gear to enter towers from further away, but remember to change your equipment once inside! 
• Killing just one Floor Guardian grants you access to ascend to the next floor up. However you may choose to continue killing all available mobs on the current floor to maximise your tower shard gain. It does not matter which Floor Guardian you kill to ascend, the next floor will be the same regardless.
• Ascending each floor gives you some bonus rewards in the form of the typical exp/gold/orns as well as a random item which can be either: random material of increasing quantities, summoning scroll, diluted mnemonic, olympia tower key... 
• Each battle you start with full HP & Mana - this is to prevent any blueline/redline cheese to start fights at near max battle passives.
• You must decide for yourself whether you want to min/max Tower Shard income per floor by killing everything available, or to kill only one Floor Guardian to quickly progress up the tower.
• Higher floors give greater rewards, however enemies grow stronger every floor you climb...
• Stray Monsters give much less shards than Floor Guardians, approximately 1/5 of the rewards.
• Tower Shard rewards scale linearly from the first floor until the last.
• The Titan Superboss appears on the final floor, dropping augments used in celestial weapons. These can have insane power and passive effects which we'll discuss later on. Each augment is lovingly named after a Titan body part.
• The towers are named after the Titan Superboss you'll meet on the final floor, so you should know which boss you will face at the end.

• Towers also utilise some roguelike mechanics, such as finding Tower Chests throughout the tower which can give you battle stat buffs to start all further fights. These buffs can be permanent single stat ups, and even powerful temporary single and double stat ups, temporary elemental immunities also available, and these can all really make your tower run easier, so it's worthwhile searching for chest to pick up the main stat-ups.

Tower Chest

• In the main tower floor there is a button in bottom right of your UI that gives info and stats on your current tower run, such as all your stat-ups found from chests, your current amount of accumulated tower shards and puzzle keys, plus a timer to remind you how much time you've spent ignoring all of your life's other responsibilities while you climb this tower to farm tower shards and the limbs of a titan superboss...
• If you die in the Tower, you lose half of all your Tower Shards gained up until that point in the run.
• If you feel things are getting a little too close for comfort you may choose to exit the tower by tapping the Exit button next to the stairs at the start of each floor. This allows you to safely exit the tower with all of your gained tower shards, but obviously you won't be able to loot any augments from the final boss.
• Speaking to the orange Lost Olympian NPCs on each floor will inform you of exactly how many people have perished on the current floor this week. Exciting or terrifying?!
• Floor layouts are semi-random, with different rooms, guardians, strays, and chests appearing in different internal rooms each week. However, each type of tower will actually have the same layout for everybody worldwide, across both games for the full week. So there opens the opportunity for community knowledge sharing the locations of tower chests for example...
• Sealed doors sometimes block your pathway to rooms or the next floor, challenging you with a puzzle to complete. You may have Puzzle Keys on hand to auto-complete these puzzles by tapping the key on the bottom right of the puzzle screen. You begin each tower with 1 key, and can find more from tower chests, however keys never leave the tower so you cannot amass vast quantities of these to use whenever you like in every tower.
• There is a video guide to completing all the puzzles in towers at the bottom of this written guide.
• You will notice other player sprites also climbing the towers! Tap on them to say hi! (chat speech bubbles when NF?)

• If you disconnect during a tower run you should be able to reconnect thanks to the latest tech update, similar to dungeons now too. If you are at the same IRL location you should also just be able to continue the tower. 
  Note for Orna; you can re-enter a Tower within 4 hours only, and if you start a dungeon you will only have the option to reconnect to the dungeon, not the Tower, but you should be able to re-enter if you remain physically next to the Tower IRL
• In Orna you can travel in GPS mode to find a tower, enter it, lock your phone (or keep playing if you're not driving/cycling), and move back to your home or a warm location to continue playing (cold weather tip).

​

6. Wild Tower Growth and Resets

• Each of the 5 tower types will have a different total number of floors, however these will actually be shared globally across both Orna and HoA for all players (wild towers only, not player constructed towers). e.g. every Tower of Eos in Orna and the one in HoA currently all have the exact same number of floors, and also have the same floor layout! 
• All towers grow taller and gain 1 floor every 4 - 5 hours, giving a total growth of 5 floor per day. Remember that higher floors means that higher tower shard rewards are available inside and also that titans have a greater chance of dropping more augments. Current growth time for all towers is as at (UTC timezone):
  • 01:00
  • 05:00
  • 10:00
  • 15:00
  • 20:00
• The maximum floor count is 50. The growth after this goes back to 15 floors, which is the minimum floor count. So each tower growth cycle of 35 floors from 15 to 50 lasts 140 hours (approx. every 5.8333 days) .
• Wild Towers function on schedule. They begin at 15 floors, and gain floors steadily throughout the week to a max of 50 floors. Shortly after reaching maximum height, they will reset to 15 floors. This process repeats for every tower, but each Tower resets on a different day at midnight (0000 UTC). Towers floor 50 schedule:
  Eos: Monday 0000UTC (end of Sunday)
  Oceanus: Tuesday 0000UTC (end of Monday)
  Themis: Wednesday 0000UTC (end of Tuesday)
  Prometheus: Thursday 0000UTC (end of Wednesday)
  Selene: Sunday 0000UTC (end of Saturday)
• Each tower type floor count is offset by 5 floors, and Knight411 has already set up Gilles bot in Orna Legends discord to track current floor count of every tower:

• This makes it possible to predict and plan how many floors each tower near you will have during the week, so you can decide where to spend your tower time!
  Remember that tower locations shuffle weekly in Orna.
• More information available in this sheet courtesy of Major: https://tinyurl.com/ornatowers​

7. Titan Workshop

This is where we spend all of our hard-earned tower shards 😄

Orna
After first speaking with Pelops to start the quest you can immediately build the Titan Workshop in your Origin Town, costing 2Mil orns and 1Bil gold.
HoA
Titan Workshop is already built for you for free in the NE region of the world map with same name. You access this zone via Fallen God's Rest in the first T10 zone. 
Players at T9 have access to Prometheus' Workshop in Balor town, which has all the same functions apart from the ability to construct your own towers, which can only be done in the T10 area. Make sure you unlock the waygate at the T10 area to allow fast access to your Titan's Workshop in the future!

Let's check out all the options available to use in the Titan's Workshop now...

7.a. Grand Crucible
​"Trade tower shards for useful items"

• Tower Core - needed to construct each one of your own 5 towers, and it's 1 core required per tower
• Tower Plane - need one per each tower floor upgrade, towers do not share upgrades of course
• Weapon Moulds - each of these are a one-off purchase thankfully, the mould grants you the ability to assemble the celestial weapon in Prometheus' Kiln

Note that your own towers that you build will remain permanently in your origin town - you do not have to worry about resets. 

7.b. Star Smelter

• Smelt Tower Shards in to Skyshards at a 10:1 ratio... I guess the only reason for Skyshards to exist is to make the more expensive purchases like celestial classes look cheaper by having one less zero on the end of the purchase cost?​

7.c. Selene's Workgrounds
Thanks again to Major for following information:

• Here you build your own Towers of Olympia. These Towers don't move, nor do they passively grow like wild Towers do. They are controlled by the player exclusively.
• Building your own Towers costs Tower Shards for the initial build which allows you to place a Tower yourself. Towers built this way begin with 10 floors, but may be upgraded to the maximum height of 50 floors by spending further shards and, additionally, orns.
• In Orna: GPS, Towers are built anywhere within your Origin Town.
  In Hero of Aethric, Towers are built in the custom Titan Workshop area within Asphodel. As such, Towers are T10 exclusive, as that area is inaccessible to T9s.
• You can only build 1 Tower per theme. That means you may build 5 Towers total: one of each Titan (Eos, Oceanus, Themis, Prometheus, and Selene). You cannot build multiple Towers of the same theme.
• As mentioned, upgrading your own Towers costs both shards and orns, but notably they cost significantly more orns than shards, relatively speaking. It costs more orns per floor upgrade as your Tower grows, but the tower shard cost remains the same at 2,500.
• Total currency required to build a tower up to floor 50:
  • 820 Mil orns
  • 115,000 tower shards​
• Check the google sheets for more costs information: https://tinyurl.com/ornatowers

7.d. Prometheus' Kiln

• Once you purchase a weapon mould you can then assemble the weapon here (buying the mould does not give you the weapon, we have to spend more shards first 🙃).
• T9 weapon mould costs 300 tower shards
• T10 weapon mould costs 1250 tower shards
• Note the text saying celestial weapons cannot be held in your off-hand i.e. no duel wielding two celestial weapons.
  

7.e. The Great Anvil

• Upgrade your celestial weapons here once you've assembled them in Prometheus' Kiln.
• Max levels for celestial weapons is 20, and they gain 1 augment slot every 5 levels starting with 1 slot when built, giving total of 5 slots available at level 20.
• Celestial weapons do not have RNG quality drops like normal gear, the base stats before augmentation will always be the same at each level for each weapon (RNG comes in the augments themselves).
• T9 weapon costs to assemble and upgrade to lvl 20: 11,080 skyshards (110,800 tower shards)
• T10 weapon costs to assemble and upgrade to lvl 20: 14,880 skyshards (148,800 tower shards)
• ​Check the towers google sheets info from Major for costs per level and more information: https://tinyurl.com/ornatowers . 😲​

7.f. Mammoth Vises

• Here we can attach augments to celestial weapons.
• Augments are only found from defeating the Titan Superboses on the final floor of towers (the augments are lovingly named after their body parts).
• Augments can only be used in celestial weapons.
• Celestial weapons cannot be filled with regular adornments (celestial weapons and augments only work together).
• For more information on augment stats and passives check Major's google sheet linked above.

7.g. Themis' Altar

• Here is where we unlock celestial classes. Check the video at the end of the guide for an overview of the new classes.
• Note there's an increasing purchase cost for subsequent celestial class unlocks.
• Skills learnt from celestial classes can be used by all other classes and celestial classes, in exactly the same way as before with normal classes until now, so if you want to unlock a celestial class just for the skills you learn from it to use on a different class, you can.
• Celestial classes share ascension levels with their base class e.g. if you have 10 ascension levels on Gilgamesh, then using Gilgamesh Hercules you will also have 10 ascension levels.
• Note from the dev team that celestial classes are meant as side-grades to lean in to certain playstyles, and are subject to future balancing. They've even hinted at adding more classes in the future for further build diversity.
• Keep your eye out for a separate guide/video discussing the celestial classes in greater detail - Shabbash.
• Costs for purchasing celestial classes differ between Orna and Aethric, please see table below with costs for T9 and T10 classes in both games:

Celestial class cost increases per class purchase

8. End

Hopefully you found this guide useful, I will update with more information and pictures as time goes on, I just wanted to get some initial information out there in the first instance. Video guide will surely be linked below once ready also. Thanks for reading as always, and big thanks to the Arisen Orna Legends for supporting me on Patreon and Twitch! Your support always greatly appreciated 😊
- Shabbash