Combolands Unlocks: Guilds, Neutral Levels & Endless

Everything unlocks gradually now

The version of Combolands you can buy today handles progression very differently from the first demo. The June 2026 demo rebuild — the developers called it a complete overhaul — changed the game so that “mechanics, guilds, buildings, and heirlooms are unlocked slowly, not all at once”, replacing a build where everything was available immediately. Everything below descends from that decision.

Guild unlocks, and why the Steam stats prove it

You do not start with all seven guilds. They arrive over time, and Steam’s public achievement stats make the order visible: 73.9% of owners have won with Agricultural and 72.6% with Frontier, while only 19.7% have won with Maritime. That spread is not a difficulty ranking — the community’s own vote puts Maritime first for strength. It is an availability ranking.

The practical consequence: early on you play the guilds you have rather than the guilds you want, and a pairing that sounds weak on the tier list may be the only one available to you. All 21 pairings can win; the player holding the all-combinations achievement said so directly.

Two more things you can track between runs:

• Guild XP moves faster than it used to. Demo v9 explicitly sped up guild XP and unlock progress.
• You can inspect your progress mid-run. Since demo v9 the pause menu shows guild progress, once you have at least one victory. A v1.0.4 fix also made the guild contents screen show your current level.

The Neutral track

Alongside the seven guilds there is a Neutral progression, and it gates two of the most useful things in the game:

• Ending a milestone early. A neutral unlock lets you close a milestone as soon as you hit its target instead of playing out the remaining weeks. It requires reaching Neutral level 7 and finishing a run — and if you already had a save when it was introduced, you had to reach level 7 again to get it.
• Endless mode, which is unlocked in the Neutral guild and was made to unlock sooner in demo v9.

Neutral also has its own buildings, which is why the Politician’s re-select-guild effect stripping neutral building access counted as a bug worth a v1.0.4 fix.

Council-gated unlocks

Some progression comes from the council rather than from levels. Councillor quests appear as a set of three in the centre of the screen, and a player describing the Steam Deck text problem notes they are themselves unlocked through neutral permanent progression.

The two secret guilds are the biggest example: Rogues comes from the Spymaster’s 75-gold council request, and Arcane from the Jewellery Box heirloom chain. Both stay unlocked permanently once earned — the guide that documented them says using the Spymaster vote adds Rogues “to your current and future games”.

The one trap: unlocks land when the run ends

New guilds register after a run finishes. That is fine in a normal run, and a problem in endless mode, which by definition does not finish. Players report the achievement sitting unearned until they restart the game — and patch v1.0.6 on 2026-08-28 added “a hook so that game checks whether you should get any pending achievements when it opens”, which makes restarting the sanctioned fix rather than a rumour.

If something you clearly earned has not appeared, close the game and reopen it before assuming it was lost. The full rarity table is on the achievements page.