Gem

More valuable than gold. Way more. Ridiculously more.

Shiny! Found on Piggy Island, Gems are shimmering blue crystals that can really turn the tide for their owners. They can power up robotic bodies, recharge lost energy, and so much more.

Games

Angry Birds Transformers

Gems are the "premium" currency of the game, and anyone semi-familiar with "free to play" games is already groaning. Gems are very powerful, and can really upgrade your characters super-fast, where other methods can mean hours or even days of not being able to do anything with a character until the process is complete. The game is designed to be a grind without spending Gems.

Earning Gems

It's actually not hard to earn Gems. There are a lot of places to get them, and the game often just hands them to you for free. But, it is by no means a quick process. Just as the game is designed to be a grind without Gems, it's designed to be a grind to amass large numbers of Gems unless you take one specific action...

• Chests

Occasionally, one to three Chests will appear on the game map (usually in the southwestern area), each one containing 1~20 Gems to be picked up for free. Of course, the number of chests and their yield are weighted toward lower numbers; anything over 3 is rare.

• Social media friend "thanks"

If you have the game hooked up to your Facebook account or whatever, people on your friends list can "use" your characters as CPU call-in bots. If they approve a thank-you after the stage is over, you usually get a 25 Coin bonus, but sometimes you get a single Gem instead.

• Achievements

These set tasks are once-only affairs, but they all give up Gem packages, from 5 to 20 Gems depending on difficulty (with one exception hitting 1000). Some you'll just hit naturally playing the game normally. Some, though, directly cost Gems to accomplish, and these cost far, far more than their reward, so why bother?

• Jenga Stage

Every couple of days, the prize for amassing enough Jenga points in a day changes from a few thousand Coins to 10 Gems. The 300-point goal for this prize can usually be accomplished in 4 runs, five at the most after the tiniest bit of practice.

• Space Bridge Missions

Each Space Bridge has the chance to offer Gems as one or more of the mystery prizes in their Missions, with higher odds of higher Gem packages (sometimes over a dozen Gems per) in the longest of each Bridge's three missions. Your best bet is to always shoot for the longest mission per Bridge; after all, you'll always earn at least one Key, two if you watch an ad as well.

• Pig Lab

Every combination of Materials you can toss into Professor Pig's contraption has a chance to come out as a Gem prize. The more valuable the Materials, the more Gems you might get (thanks to the randomized nature of the actual outcome), but the odds of it being more than a single-digit number of Gems is real slim.

• Daily Prizes

Gems are three of the seven Daily Prizes, awarded for simply booting up the game once every 24 hours. There's one for 5 Gems, 10 and 15. Once a "cycle" you can watch an ad to double your prize, so save that for the 15-Gem package. Note that prizes will not "stack": you have to claim one prize before the 24-hour countdown starts to claim the next one.

• Daily Quests

The eight random Quests (and one fixed "finish all the others" Quest) you are presented with every 24 hours have the chance to offer Gems as prizes, seemingly maxing out at 10 Gems per Quest.

• Crates

Gems are one of the possible prizes from Steel and Gold Crates. Amount varies by rarity.

• Shockwave's Spire

Gems are one the possible prizes that can be picked from cards in Shockwave's Spire. The higher you go, the more gems possible! You probably won't earn more than what you've spent on play-ons if your're insanely gem-rich and get all the way to floor 90!

After exiting the spire, there's a 2 gem "consolation prize" from the Spire's Daily Quest. There's also a new achievement that gives you gems for reaching floors 10, 30, and 60, which gives you 10, 200, and 1000 gems respectively.

Realize that this is the game being "generous".

• Just buy the damn things with real money

Yeah. The game allows you to buy hundreds of Gems instantly in packages with real actual legal tender. Packages range from 150 for $4.49 US to 5200 for $99.99. We're not making that last one up.

Christmas 2016 also added one more Gem IAP: The Gem Pass gives 50 Gems per day for 7 days. Considering that it's the same price as the 150 Gem Bundle, it can be tempting to buy it to buy a 2-star or Rare accessory or to balance your Gem supply in Challenge Events.

Spending Gems

This game really, really wants you to spend Gems willy-nilly, and gives you a lot of opportunities to do so. Because then when you're short Gems for that thing you want, you're tempted to toss some actual-factual money at the game for Gems. And yes we're gonna list all the ways they try and get you to spend because we're like that.

• Interrupt Eggbot cyberforming

New stages take varying amounts of time for the Eggbots to finish. Spending Gems will make the stage instantly available, and plop an Eggbot onto the player's path that they can shoot for extra Coins. The more time that was on the clock, the more Gems. If there's a relationship between Gems spent on how many Coins the Eggbot may drop, we don't know it because we sure ain't spending the Gems to find out. Possibly worth it to complete the higher-tier "collect Coins" Achievements, especially since one requires the Coins be gained from an Eggbot. (3 minutes or less left on the timer will only cost 1 Gem to interrupt.)

• Buy missing pigs

If you’re struggling to get a new bot on the map then don’t fret because if you have enough gems you can simply just use them to buy any missing piggies you need but be careful because the more pigs you need the more gems you need to spend.

• Unlock "Coin dome" stages

Every now and then, a big metal dome appears over a normal stage. These special stages give you the opportunity to earn more coins than normal at a 5x multiplier... but cost 10 Gems to unlock. Given how easy it is to amass Coins, this is generally not worth it. However, it's arguably worth it once to complete the 15-Gem-prize 3-star tier of the "Money is Everything" Achievement for gaining 50,000 Coins in a single stage... provided you go in with the right character (we recommend a Variant Version Squad member since they get a +100% Coin bonus on top of any other bonuses).

• In-stage recovery

Should the badguys get the best of you, Astrotrain will grab you with a tractor beam to pull you out. However, there's a six-second period where you can drop 10 Gems to instantly and fully heal, and get back to the action. The question is: will this be this worth it? (The answer is "very rarely, basically only if you have a phenomenal score on a Challenge Event run with the chance to earn even more".)

• Instant Upgrade/Repair

This is like the stage-based shortcut above, only you do this from the Barracks screens. Upgrades you can spend Gems for an instant level-up, rather than spending Coins and Materials and waiting however long it takes. Armor repair, you have to start the repair process with Coins, then click again to spend Gems to instantly end the process (though really just watch an ad it's 30 seconds you can go do anything else in for a free repair).

• Customizing

Every character has multiple Accessories that improve their stats, and every one of them costs Gems. Some, like common baseball caps, sunglasses and headphones, give small boosts and only cost 25~50 Gem. More character-specific Accessories that imbue much more powerful buffs, however, run from 300 to 1000 Gems. These prices are often slashed during Challenge Events, so the Gem cost is equal to the Token cost (see below).

• Changing stage characters

For a single Gem, you can change what character is assigned to a stage to another randomly-chosen character. This is really only "useful" if the current character is unavailable due to an Upgrade, Repair, or Mission, and you're impatient about clearing that stage. Sometimes worth it if you're shooting to complete your Daily Quests.

But with a recent update, the gem cost will consecutively increase each time you change a stage's character. So you better not change a character thrice unless you don't mind spending 6 Gems.

• Instant unavailability completion

Or, if the above method for some reason doesn't seem reasonable, you can spend Gems to have the thing that's keeping a character unavailable for an awaiting stage instantly finished (Missions, Upgrades, etc). The longer the timespan you're cutting short, the more Gems this costs.

• Refresh Missions

Don't like the Mission options you're given? 5 Gems will re-mix them. There's basically no real reason to ever do this unless you're super-impatient to unlock one of the Mission-unlockable characters.

• Send more characters on Missions

The Easy Bridge allows you to send two characters into a Mission, while Medium and Hard only allow one each. You can drop Gems to send more characters along, up to three per Mission. However, the cost is 100 per extra character on Easy and Medium, 200 on Hard. Frankly, no prize the Missions can offer is worth that, given most possible Gem earnings rarely exceed a dozen. This is required to complete an Achievement that requires a 700-Gem deposit to earn 20 back. Yeah, no.

• Open more Mission prizes

Space Bridge Missions are rewarded with up to five keys, which open five boxes with shuffled prizes inside. If you really, really want a prize from the wheel but have run out of Keys, you can spend Gems to open more boxes: 10 for Easy, 20 for Medium, and 30 for Hard. Again, given the low Gem payouts, this is really only worth it when the prize is a new character unlock, or if you've got 3 or 4 Keys and didn't get that character or Super Rareium you really need.

• Re-spin the Pig Lab prize

When using the Pig Lab, you have a 1 in 5 chance of getting the item you want. If you don't get it, you can spend 5 Gems to re-spin, minus the item you got the first time (which is completely discarded), then 10 for another spin, etc, doubling every time. Really only "worth" it, and that's very debatable, for the high-rated Energonicons that cost Super Rareium to make since that stuff isn't all that easy to come by.

• Recharge Challenge Event batteries

Once you've exhausted all four Challenge Event "batteries", you can wait an hour for one to recharge, then another hour for another... or recharge them all instantly at the cost of 10 Gems. Doing so again will cost 20 Gems, a third go 40, the fourth 60, fifth 80, and then capped at 100 per set of batteries. Thankfully the amount resets to 10 with the start of a new day in the Event. This is one case where a 10~20-Gem cost could easily be justified, since an extra four rounds can provide a heavy score boost and a lot of Tokens, and buying Accessories with Tokens is almost invariably a far better deal. Watch your timers though: if you're close to a "free" recharged run, wait, and if you're only 5 minutes away from the end-of-day, consider if you can actually use all four runs in the time left (probably not) and how many Tokens you may or may not earn for your Gem cost.

• Buy missing Tokens

Not got enough Tokens at the end of a Challenge Event for that prize you want? You can make up the difference with Gems, at a cost of 1 Gem per every 2 Tokens. In most cases you were better off spending the Gems on a battery recharge.

• Sparkrun reactivation & extra characters

Can't wait for the next day for more Spark from the Sparkrun? Just spend 100 Gems and you can play again one more time. Unlike other Gem-based shortcuts, this is a set cost and will not change whether it's 24 hours on the recharge clock or 24 seconds. You can also unlock a fourth character slot for 1000 gems and a fifth for 2500 gems to increase your level roster and overall score bonus.

• Buy Gold Crates

You can spend 200 Gems on Gold Crates for a random chance for Rare, Epic or Legendary prizes. This can vary from Coins, Pigs, Materials, Gems, Tokens, Accessories (and Accessory upgrades), or even new Bots or instant upgrades from Legendary pulls. You can also better your chances and open ten at time for 1800 gems.

• Unlock missing Plasma

Struggling to get more Plasma to unlock the Caves. Well don’t worry because if you have enough gems you can get all the plasma you need to open the gate. Although it is a bit of a waste to be honest.

• Play On in Shockwave's Spire

Is a Pig threatening to steal all the the prizes you got so far in Shockwave's Spire? Just spend gems to play on and remove the pig from the current floor! Beware, for the more Pigs you pick, the higher the gem cost each subsequent bailout will be. It'll start with 10, but the next will be 25, then 50, then 75, and so on. It can get into the hundreds and thousands if you're not careful! It's only recommended to play on at least once if you didn't strike out early, and have enough gems picked to compensate for gems spent.

• Buy Challenge Event character packages

While most Challenge Events offer "in-app purchases" to instantly unlock the top-prize character, starting with Elita One the cost was in Gems rather than real money. Reportedly, the cost and content of these packages can vary from player to player (or at least did at first), but most typically include the character, an Accessory, and a sum of Spark to "promote" your characters for higher bonuses, for 1000 Gems. Given a new character alone can take upward of 8000 Tokens to unlock (4000 Gems), that's a deal, freeing the player to spend Tokens on other prizes. Fairly dedicated play can typically earn a player more than enough Gems between new character reveals to buy the 1000-Gem packages as they pop up without spending actual cash. Prior character packages remain real-money-costing, however.

• Unlock the Jungle

You have to spend a whopping 2500 gems to unlock the new jungle area which is just a rehash of the one in some beach levels. The pack includes the jungle area and challenge run if you already have a combiner or the more expensive 3150 gem pack which includes the jungle, challenge run, and devastator (or this option will not be available if you already have him.) this can be a real grind for a new area but you do get a new mode and three extra nodes which means more coins on the map.

• Buy Bat Pigs

Ever since the big 2.0 update players who where struggling with getting enough bat pigs can now just fork out a few gems to get the new bot Nautica instantly. And the price isn’t as large only going for around 300 to 400 gems. But you could always save them up on a more worth it bot couldn’t you.

Notes

• Not that we're bitter or anything.