Fellwood wizards

Magic is why Fellwood looks like a toy artillery range instead of a logging sim. Fire Wizard, Ice Wizard, and Electro Wizard are the three colors the demo and launch footage actually let you staff. Mages as a later portrait sit on How to Unlock Buildings. This page ranks the three you can argue about today, using Allerton Apps’ own balance notes and the Steam thread that claimed Electro was doing a hundred times the damage of a fair camp.

Ice Wizard — the default good wizard

Ice shards fly in a way humans can still aim. Shatter pays bonus damage after enough hits. Greater ice shard is the node people could not buy until they found the prestige-tier gate. Crit and pierce both exist on the line. In long playthroughs ice often leads the DPS meter without being a trap. If you can only staff one wizard, staff ice. Put it on a front slot. Use it as a clover gun during Events. Pair it with Collectors and Sawmill so the pretty crystals become gold.

Ice prestige that starts you with extra shard throwers is fine after start gold and mill pull. Before that, you are hiring artists for an empty gallery. How to Prestige repeats that sentence because wizard fans skip it.

Fire Wizard — needs space and the crit patch

Fireballs want a long drag. Back-row placement makes the shot physically impossible. Kindling, ignition, and expanded blast are the identity: delayed burn, chance to light the tree, a boom. Allerton Apps had to apply crit damage to the previous damage upgrade because without it Fire fell off late. If your Fire feels like a wet torch, check that you own the post-patch line and that you can actually pull back. Controls and Active Abilities matter more for Fire than for Ice.

Fire is a B-tier specialist, not a skip. It is a skip if you only play on a Steam Deck in a noisy cafe. Take it when you have a front slot to spare and you want a third damage color for additive stacking.

Electro Wizard — the thread that ate the demo

A player staffed about thirty attackers in every building except archers, upgraded evenly, and still saw Electro doing roughly 100× the damage. They asked if the formula was broken. That report matches the multiplicative era. The developer then switched the game to additive damage so a single building could not eat the design. Electro still received a slight damage and scaling buff after that switch, which sounds contradictory until you remember the goal: all buildings viable, Electro allowed to feel like lightning, not like the only purchase.

If you recreate the 100× screenshot on live Steam, you are probably:

• comparing a fully upgraded Electro to a neglected axe row, or
• reading a pre-patch clip, or
• stacking Electro population far beyond “even.”

Staff Electro as a third color, take chain / charged-bolt nodes, and stop when ricochet-equivalent chain upgrades get expensive. Do not sell the mill to feed it. The Buildings Hub already parked Electro in A/B depending on mix. This page is the why.

Mixing colors

Additive math wants at least two damage sources. Ice + axes is the boring correct pair. Ice + Electro is the spicy correct pair. Fire + anything works if Fire can aim. Three colors is a late-shop luxury. Cards that say “all elemental damage” are why you bother. Cards that say “axe damage only” are why you did not sell the throwers.

Sibling pages: Attack Buildings for the physical row you should not delete; Logs and Acorns because wizard crit farms rarity; Patch Notes for the exact sentences Allerton wrote; Review if you are here from a “just DEM with wizards” comment. Magic is a palette. The mill is still the point.