Order Automatica Beginner's Guide: 13 Tips for Surviving Your First Rituals

Order Automatica is a dark little roguelite auto battler that costs $5.99 and takes place entirely on a 3×3 grid. It came out on September 4, 2026 from solo developer New Beings.

The pitch from the developer is “chess with demons,” which is close enough. I would call it dominoes with demons.

You do all of your thinking before the fight. You set the pieces up, you tip the first one over, and then you sit there and watch whatever you built play itself out.

If your setup was bad, you get to watch that too. Here is how to stop losing runs on day two.

How a fight actually works

Your “hand” is really a shop. You spend Essence there to buy units and items, and you place those units on your side of the grid.

Each of the nine cells has a number on it. Units attack in cell order, lowest number first, and your side always swings before the enemy does.

Both sides have three candles. Snuff out all of theirs and you win the fight, lose all of yours and the run is over.

Nothing you do during the fight matters, so every decision you make happens before it starts.

Learn the cell numbers before anything else

New players treat the grid like it is nine identical parking spots. It is not.

A unit sitting in cell 1 gets to act while the enemy board is still full. A unit in cell 9 acts after everything else has already traded blows, and it might be swinging at a corpse.

Put your damage and your ability triggers early in the order, and save the late cells for units that want the board softened up first.

Attack order is the single biggest thing separating a win from a loss in your first ten runs.

Look at the enemy grid every single round

During prep you can see the enemy’s units, their stats, and their effects. This is free information and most beginners ignore it completely.

If they have one terrifying unit in an early cell, you can line up something that deletes it before it ever swings. If their board is all fragile bodies, you can spread damage instead of stacking it.

You are not gambling here, you are solving a puzzle that is sitting face up in front of you.

Buy duplicates on purpose

Three of the same unit lined up in a row will merge into a stronger version with better stats and a better ability. The line can be horizontal, vertical, or diagonal.

That merged unit can merge again. People have pushed units past 100 attack and 100 defense this way.

So when the shop keeps offering you the same boring zombie, that is not bad luck. That is the game handing you a build.

Two of a kind is not a waste of Essence, it is two thirds of a monster.

Plan your merge lines around the attack order

Merging is a placement puzzle and an attack order puzzle at the same time.

A merged unit is only as good as the cell it ends up sitting in. Building your line across the three slowest cells means your best unit acts last.

Before you buy the third copy, look at where that merge is going to land and ask if you actually want it there.

Build your merge lines through the early cells whenever you have the choice.

Use the hold slot, it costs you nothing

There is a hold slot where you can park one unit for free. New players forget it exists for entire runs.

It is there so you can hang onto the third piece of a merge, or stash something strong you cannot afford to place yet.

If that slot is empty at the end of your prep phase, you probably left value on the table.

An empty hold slot is a wasted slot.

Treat essence like a savings account

Leftover Essence carries over to the next battle. That is the most important economic rule in the game.

Spend every last drop every round and you stay poor forever. Bank a little and your buying power snowballs, which is exactly how the big builds get started.

Rerolling the shop over and over feels productive. It is usually just you setting fire to next round’s budget.

A round you win with Essence left over is worth more than a round you barely win broke.

Items matter more than raw stats

Items go on individual units, and some of them buff a whole row or a whole column. Others fire off a chunk of damage before the battle even begins.

The weird ones are the good ones. A fairy triggers a unit’s special ability, a pickaxe makes cell effects permanent, keys let units move, and a fishing hook summons fish-men because of course it does.

Also worth knowing: buffs you apply during the preparation phase stick permanently, even though units reset to their pre-battle state.

A cheap unit with the right item beats an expensive unit holding nothing.

Distill the stuff you are not using

Distillation turns a unit or an item you do not need into a weakened version that gives a permanent buff when you equip it to something else.

That spare unit clogging your board is not garbage. It is a stat stick waiting to happen.

This is currently one of the easiest ways to pick up free stats, and it is the system most new players never touch.

Nothing in your shop is truly dead weight, it is just not distilled yet.

Be picky with indulgences, pickier with curses

At certain milestones you pick up Indulgences, which help you, and Curses, which help your opponent.

The catch is that the deeper you get, the more the game forces you to take more Curses than Indulgences. The disadvantage is designed to pile up.

So read every Curse against the build you are actually running, not against some imaginary perfect board. A Curse that punishes merging is a disaster for a merge build and almost nothing for a spread board.

The right Curse is the one your build barely notices.

Losing one fight is not losing the run

You have three candles. Losing a battle costs you one of them, not the run.

That means an early loss is cheap tuition. Watch what shredded you, note which cell it came from, and rebuild around that next round.

Bad players panic after one lost candle and start buying randomly. That is how you lose the other two.

Your first candle is a learning budget, so spend it learning something.

Stack understandings between runs

Runs feed a meta progression called Understandings, unlocked with points you earn as you play.

They are small perks rather than power spikes. Things like earning Essence when you merge, or getting free draws in the shop.

Small perks that touch your economy every single round add up much faster than they look on paper.

A dead run still pays you, as long as you keep playing.

Speed up the chain reactions

Once your setups get spicy, abilities start triggering off each other and a single round can take minutes to resolve.

There are hotkeys for this. Press 2 or 3 for 2x and 3x speed, or press 0 (right stick on a controller) for maximum speed.

True infinite loops are capped, since a unit can only fire its special ability nine times. The animation can still outlast your patience.

If you are watching the same effect fire for the twentieth time, hit the speed key instead of sitting there.

What a genuinely broken build looks like

Players have already found an Essence engine, and it is worth knowing about because it shows you what the game is capable of.

The setup uses two level 2 Cats holding two Fairies each, plus a Pig with one Fairy and one Inherence, with the Pig on the right, one Cat in the middle, and one Cat on the left.

Once the Pig hits level 9, you swap the Inherence for a Fairy and the Essence stops being a limit. One player hit 11,000 Essence by day 7 with 3,000 attack and 3,000 defense across the board.

Fair warning: the developer has already floated raising reroll costs, so this may not survive future patches.

Even if it gets patched, the lesson stays true, because Fairies plus repeatable ability triggers is where the real power lives.

Go tip the first domino

Order Automatica gives you simple rules and almost perfect information, then dares you to build something stupid with them.

Nothing here is hidden behind reflexes or dice. The fight you lose is the fight you built wrong.

So set your pieces up, get the numbers in your favor, and push the first one over.

Then go find out what your board does when you are not allowed to touch it.

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Images in this article are from the Order Automatica page on Steam and used under Fair Use.