December 7, 2023

Survivor.io Evo & Skill Guide + Tier List (Updated 2.3.2 with Eternal Effects)

During battles when you level up your EXP, you get different skill options presented that you can select from – so far so good, but you not only have 13 weapon skills to choose from, you also can combine them with 12 support skills to combine them in Evolution Skills.

That sound complicated? Well, It’s not but let me walk you through how Evolution Skills work in Survivor!.io and then also talk about my recommendations what skills you should pick first.

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Best Evolution Skill Tier List

Before we talk about the different ones, here you can see a full overview of all weapon evolution skills in Survivor!.io So, to make sure there’s no misunderstanding, if you want, let’s say, to get the Demon Blade, you will need to get katana to 5-Star and also get at least 1-Star Ronin Oyori to be able to pick up the Demon Blade.

But let’s now talk about which Evolution Skills are great and which ones are rather meh…

survivor.io total damage

Important! If you check your stats at the end to see the total damage done by each one you need to mind that the skills you pick first will automatically deal much more damage and they are not cumulated right – also, they seem to take overkill in account, meaning that a mine that deals 5x enemies with insane damage get the full insane damage accounted instead the net damage they dealt… so don’t trust that chart too much…

As the state of the skills is right now, there’s no real ‘bad’ one, but there are differences and I think we mainly need to classify them into two categories – single target and area target skills.

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Evolution Skills in Survivor!.io…

Okay, the basics first. Every time you pick up these small crystals, your EXP raises and once the bar is full, you will be able to select one of 3 skills.

survivor.io exp bar

This also happens randomly once you beat a boss, but let’s exclude that from this guide to streamline the process. So, you can either pick weapon skills (like Katana, Drill, Guardian, etc.) and also level them up themselves until they reach their full 5-Star potential.

But here’s the thing, 5-Star is not the maximum potential and you can Evo them by picking the according support skill. What skill fits what weapon is shown below the selection where you see the small ‘EVO:…’ printed

survivor.io select skill

So, once you have the skill then at 5-Star and you have the Evolution Skill activated as well (Level 1 is enough), you will be able to pick up the Evolution, as you can see here:

survivor.io evo skill

This is, in short, how you can get the Evolution Skills in Survivor!.io and they are the strongest ones to have. The only problem… well, you can’t get all of them. So, in my next section we’ll be taking a look which ones you should favor.

survivor.io evo skill in action

Important! Do not randomly pick all skills you see and think ‘oh, well, I will evo them by the end anyway…’! There is a cap and you can never have more than 5 weapon skills and 6 support skills, after that you will only get healing or gold bonus skills offered:

survivor.io max skill count

Your primary geared weapon, of course, is the 1st mandatory set weapon skill.

Best Strategy To Pick Skills

So, it can happen that you will have to pick skills you don’t want so you need to be a little strategic, especially in the beginning.

Pro Tip!

If you have a chest and you have the Evolution Skill and the Weapon Skill at 5-Star, you#re guaranteed to get the Evolution Upgrade 🙂

So, my tip is to also let the boss chests sit for some time until you can take it for the guaranteed Evolution Skill instead of getting some random support skills!

Conclusion

I hope you see that it’s important to understand not just to pick what skill seems good in that situation or randomly; it’s also a lot about planning ahead in terms of picking support evolution skills for weapon skills you want to max and so on. I’m pretty sure we will soon see more skills to be added to the game and it will get a lot more interesting in terms of options you will have.

Best Skills Guides for similar games:

AllClash Pro Team

Updated on December 10, 2023

Survivor!.io

Uno Online says:

July 3, 2023 at 5:39 pm

This game is fun, the only complain I have, as a free player, is the costs to obtain a new caracter and the extreme difficulty to obtain caracter pieces. If the prices weren’t so high I would buy the caracters or the battle pass, because I really enjoyed this game. By the way, thank you for this skill overview!

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1. Kevin says:
  
  August 30, 2023 at 11:06 am
  
  If you play the limit timed events you can get character pieces quite easily. I’ve gotten enough to unlock Catnip and one other character of my choosing with my legendary character piece chests just in the past few weeks.
  
  Reply
Guy who made a comment says:

June 7, 2023 at 3:46 pm

I do appreciate this their list, but everyone has their own opinions. The more and more I look at teir lists it seems that everything was created to be equal. It overall seems to depend on you playstyle, are you competitive and focused on damage or do you play the game for fun and just want to pass another level. Anyway great teir list! It’s always fun to see someone’s opinions and test out if you like it more than yours.

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Chris says:

February 20, 2023 at 11:15 pm

Forcefield needs to be higher up on the list. It may not be the best “damage dealer” per say, but it’s an instant win when picked up early. It instakills lower level mobs making the rest of the game super easy to stack whatever synergies you want on top of it making you “near untouchable”.

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jov says:

January 17, 2023 at 8:46 am

Some of the S tier skills here is useless without proper skill combination and lower tier skills are best
paired with proper lower tier skills. For example durian and super cell is just garbage if you don’t pair them with matrix and the rocket one. They don’t have enough damage and won’t help you to keep away stronger mobs when swarmed.

Defender, force field, fuel barrel, matrix , lightning , shuriken plus 50% damage passive is the best skill set for me. It’s the best combination there is keeps away mobs enough damage for bosses .Every time I get those skills its already over.

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1. Dark says:
  
  January 31, 2024 at 6:59 pm
  
  Tu dit vraiment n’importe quoi là foudre évoluer avec la pièce thec rouge fais énormément de dégâts de zone
  
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Marcos says:

December 15, 2022 at 2:11 pm

*sorry I meant the drone not the guardian

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Adrian says:

December 9, 2022 at 2:06 am

Just something to add:

Guardian’s knock-back and bullet erasure feature is extremely useful. There are a lot of stage with huge mobs that could be knocked back, or with lots of erase-able bullet. Guardian save you from these.

Fuel Barrel is extremely useful in several stage with lots of high damage toxic on ground (e.g. thrown by boss). Toxic on ground will be covered by fire which makes you easy to move around.

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Bob says:

December 8, 2022 at 9:07 am

Seriously

Forcefield should be S Ranked

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1. Smolder says:
  
  January 8, 2023 at 12:02 am
  
  Pressure Field is more or less either an A- tier or B+ tier since it technically doesn’t actually kill mobs, it takes nice chunks of HP off for sure but it usually takes the higher tier abilities to actually do good damage and deal finishing blows. I’ve tried several scenarios where I had very different abilities along with Pressure Field but the other abilities ended up dealing more damage overall in the “Total Damage” tab in the pause menu.
  Usually best to just focus on getting one or two really good abilities and main the passives as much as possible.
  
  Reply
Mike says:

December 5, 2022 at 10:04 am

Well I pretty too much disagree with everything that was written in this “guide”. Katana is the best weapon that Ive had experience using, simply because usually the issue is not the bosses but the infinite waves of mobs. Soccer ball is a s-tier as it kills bosses in seconds. Durian is f****** useless, as it does not do anywhere near the same amount of damage. Lightning cell is crap because it only targets random area and not the zombies that are attacking you. Guardian is F-tier, I don’t know why he’s it even in the game. It does not do anywhere near enough damage to kill anything. On the other hand force field is great because he does more damage and more importantly it slows the enemies.

So I don’t know what game were you playing but it’s clearly not survivor.io

Reply
1. Tim says:
  
  December 5, 2022 at 12:33 pm
  
  Although I appreciate comments that initiate a discussion in a constructive way, your comment was actually not only in facts wrong, I also don’t appreciate the attitude how you state your own opinions without facts by disrespecting the effort and work I put into my ‘guide’. Mike, I want to put out helpful content and I do that by sacrificing my free time, do you think comments like yours are helping to get useful content out for the community? You like the Katana, great, no problem with that but it’s not the best weapon just because you invested heavily into it and if you run the other weapons at the higher rarities you will see the difference, but as you’re cleary not up for a fact-bases discussion here I will not start telling you where your opinion lacks evidence (especially the part about the Force Field). Please also don’t swear on my website or I will remove further comments.
  
  Reply
  1. Marcos says:
    
    December 15, 2022 at 2:10 pm
    
    Thanks Tim for the guide you made, it really changed my game and overall experience, it’s the best guide for survivor.io. The only skill I disagree is Durian, because it really doesn’t do much damage against mobs, and against the boss I personally find it difficult to hit it even with the upgrade part. The best one damage wise for me with the tech part is the brick, but while it does great damage without the final evolution, in later stages it doesn’t kill the mobs. Guardian with the tech part is unstoppable, specially after evolved, it is now my primary skill against bosses and mobs. Ps: Mike up there really is still a newb in the game, thinking katana is the best weapon. With the void gun out there, mobs are the easiest part and you don’t even have to evolve it.
    
    Reply
Sparetime says:

November 7, 2022 at 11:36 pm

This guide is somewhat misleading. The meta isn’t to pick all the best individual skills, but to find synergies. Take these skill tiers with a grain of salt. The best builds I find are ones that are flexible and leave room for passive skills like the high power bullet which is an essential skill to have in all builds in my opinion. 50% atk damage is something you can’t even achieve with the best gear.

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Jani Järvinen says:

November 7, 2022 at 1:38 pm

Nice information, thank you😊👌🏻 I have a question, should I invest money to evolve the equipment or to the character evolve (that green capsule in the right)? Which one is more important/effective?

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1. Tim says:
  
  November 14, 2022 at 4:38 pm
  
  Depends what level you are, tbh. When you hit level 50+ your character evolve will slow down dramatically so you can catch up with equipment. But I don’t see one significantly more important than the other
  
  Reply
DD says:

November 1, 2022 at 10:00 pm

Hi, machine gun in this guide is S tier, while in the (Best Weapons in Survivor.io (Tier List) – with Void Power) guide, it’s C tier

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1. Tim says:
  
  November 1, 2022 at 10:02 pm
  
  Hi, sorry if that comes accross confusion. This is just about evolving your weapon as one of the most important EVO skills (no matter what weapon you run). If you run the weapon for Machine Gun it’s one of the best skill choices among the skills, although it’s not a good weapon. I should updated the description and icons probably 🙂
  
  Reply
James says:

October 26, 2022 at 1:18 am

I was hoping you would have a description of the modular mine with a list of its combinations – it’s probably only from the newest version. I have been able to combine it with molotov and lightening successfully, but it does not combine with drill, soccer ball, rpg, brick, durian, force field, laser, either drone, nor guardian. To combine, the molotov or lightening needs to be level 5, and when I have combined them, I did not have the evo support skill (gold-molotov/CD reduction-lightening).

Also I’d argue the soccer/quantum ball should be A tier. Movement speed is very useful for avoiding boss attacks and can be the difference between life or death if you are surrounded and overwhelmed but there is a small opening to run through (ideally you could just stand still and melt everything, but that doesn’t always happen). And if you run the soccer/quantum ball it is always going to provide one of if not the highest damage, even if the damage is random. The balls will also target bosses when they spawn and then do random damage to bosses while you dodge without needing to target the boss.

I would also put destroyer in A tier assuming you are able to get both drones. It consistently does a lot of damage and if you get the tech that allows destroyer to target enemies in range, it’s excellent. But B tier is fine with me because there is so much risk: if you go for one of the drones but can’t get the other, it can be near worthless.

A tip: One good reason to go for the drones is that it provides a free support slot (you don’t need a support skill to evo them). I’ll always go for the magnet because experience is critical and it is a hassle to collect everything without it. By the time you evo to destroyer, the boomerang can be a good choice to fill in the extra weapon skill slot that gets opened up when you evo to destroyer. The evo from boomerang to magnetic rebounder is actually very solid once you get to the end of a stage and the zombies really start swarming. The rebounder thins out/weakens mobs very well so that your primary weapon(s) can finish them off, and it usually ends up doing a fair-to-large amount of damage.

Reply
1. Tim says:
  
  October 26, 2022 at 4:37 pm
  
  Thanks for your comment, I updated with the new Modular Mine 🙂
  Also, I put Destroyer in A Tier now with the tech part that apply homing of missiles.
  The Quantum Ball is not bad, for sure, but if you look at the total damage statistics at the end you will see that it deals so much less damage although it ‘feels’ more while playing it.
  
  Reply
  1. James says:
    
    October 28, 2022 at 5:06 pm
    
    Thanks!
    Do you happen to know how the damage percentage is calculated?
    I.e. is it adding up all the damage each of the weapons are doing over the course of the whole stage? Or is it doing averages over the past 60 seconds or something like that?
    Because I have repeatedly found the ball is doing more than 20% of damage by the end of the stage, but maybe it is just because I don’t shy away from it, sometimes the soccer ball is my first non-primary weapon pick.
    
    Reply
    1. Tim says:
      
      October 28, 2022 at 6:21 pm
      
      Unfortunately, I don’t, but I think it’s throughout the full stage but you can try to monitor it and pick the ball up early and late in the same stage and then see how the difference is. I personally have played around with it and believe that it’s a total (also from the developer side easier to implement)
      
      Reply
      1. James says:
        
        November 4, 2022 at 6:42 pm
        
        Thanks for the reply. After some observation I agree it’s probably keeping track of total damage throughout the stage.
        I noticed an interesting thing which is that the modular mine (and its evos, especially) often ends up doing the most damage. However, the damage is overinflated because of overkill. E.g. if the modular mine does 50k damage but monster dies after 20k, that extra 30k is still counted for the damage chart. Of course, every weapon will have at least a small amount of overkill for practically every kill, the effect is just greater with the mine.
2. Lily says:
  
  December 10, 2022 at 1:02 am
  
  I honestly never go for magnet support skill, even if I grab boomerang I treat it as my “ok this is my extra support skill slot.” Instead what I tend to do is find a magnet early on, lure an elite towards it and kill it nearby without picking up the chest, then go off and collect exp normally until first boss is about to spawn and work my way back towards the chest since there’s an indicator saying where it is, as soon as boss spawns I pick up the magnet and chest, then when boss dies I rinse and repeat with the chest and magnet it drops
  
  Reply
  1. Gaebbul says:
    
    July 1, 2023 at 6:18 am
    
    That is a good tip, but they removed the chest indicator. 🙁
    
    Reply