Clicker Heroes is one of the most popular idle clicker games, blending the addictive nature of click games with deep role-playing elements.
At the start, the clicker game is straightforward. You click to defeat monsters, collect gold, and hire heroes to increase damage. Over time, it grows into a much deeper experience where planning and strategy become important.
One of the main features of Clicker Heroes is the prestige system.
The first stage is Ascension, which resets your progress but rewards you with Hero Souls.
Later, a second stage called Transcendence becomes available. This reset goes even further, wiping almost everything but giving you a much rarer and more powerful currency called Ancient Souls.
Clicker Heroes Ancient Souls are considered the ultimate currency in the game. They unlock Outsiders, improve the power of Hero Souls, and allow you to progress far into the late game.
So, understanding how to earn and use them is essential if you want to master Clicker Heroes and reach higher zones.
Understanding Clicker Heroes Ancient Souls
So what exactly are Ancient Souls? In Clicker Heroes, they represent the pinnacle of long-term progression.
While Hero Souls help you scale after Ascensions, Ancient Souls are tied to Transcendence and serve as the gateway from the mid-game into the deep late-game.
Hero Souls vs. Ancient Souls
Hero Souls are earned from defeating primal bosses and ascensions. They can be spent on Ancients to boost your damage and progression.
Ancient Souls, however, are much rarer and used exclusively to empower Outsiders, the next layer of progression.
You won’t see Ancient Souls until you unlock Transcendence, which becomes available once you reach around zone 300.
This is when the game introduces the second prestige layer and raises the ceiling for growth.
How to Earn Ancient Souls
So, how to get Ancient Souls in Clicker Heroes?
In Clicker Heroes, Ancient Souls are earned through a system called Transcendence.
When you transcend, normally available after zone 300, you sacrifice everything: your Hero Souls, Gilds, Ancients, Relics, and zone progress. In return, you receive Ancient Souls and Transcendent Power.
The number of Ancient Souls you gain depends on the total Hero Souls you have ever earned, both spent and unspent. The formula is logarithmic:
Ancient Souls = floor(5 × log₁₀(total Hero Souls sacrificed))This means every time your total Hero Souls increase by a factor of 10, you earn 5 more Ancient Souls.
For example, if you’ve sacrificed around 10,000 Hero Souls, you’ll earn 20 Ancient Souls; reaching 100,000 Hero Souls brings you to 25 Ancient Souls.
This formula highlights a core principle: patience pays off.
Transcending too early yields very few Ancient Souls. On the other hand, waiting until you’ve amassed significantly more Hero Souls before transcending offers far better returns.
Why Clicker Heroes Ancient Souls Are Important
Ancient Souls are one of the most valuable resources in Clicker Heroes, shaping how players progress in the late game.
Unlike Hero Souls, they are scarce and must be spent with careful thought. Their importance comes from the long-term advantages they unlock and here’s how to use Ancient Souls in Clicker Heroes:
- Access to Outsiders: Powerful entities that grant unique bonuses beyond normal Ancients
- Transcendent Power: Permanent boosts to Hero Soul drops from Primal Bosses
- Faster progression: The ability to push through zone walls and scale much further
- Strategic depth: Limited supply means every Ancient Soul spent has a lasting impact
Together, these benefits make Ancient Souls the cornerstone of deep progression, rewarding players who plan their transcensions carefully.
The Outsiders – Spending Ancient Souls Wisely
Outsiders are where Ancient Souls are spent, and each one influences a different aspect of gameplay.
Currently, there are 9 Outsiders in Clicker Heroes:
- Xyliqil: Improves idle bonuses, but loses value in higher zones and is often skipped by players.
- Chor’gorloth: Reduces ancient costs, making upgrades more affordable; a strong choice early on.
- Phandoryss: Boosts overall DPS, helping progression feel smoother.
- Ponyboy: Multiplies Hero Souls; one of the strongest for long-term scaling.
- Borb: Enhances Kumawakamaru, reducing monsters per zone and allowing deeper pushes.
- Rhageist: Strengthens Atman, increasing primal boss chance; situational but useful.
- K’Ariqua: Improves Bubos, reducing boss HP; effective for boss-heavy runs.
- Orphalas: Improves Chronos, extending boss timers; generally considered inefficient.
- Sen-Akhan: Boosts Dora, increasing treasure chest find chance.
But what to spend Ancient Souls on Clicker Heroes?
When it comes to Outsider leveling strategy, most players recommend focusing on Chor’gorloth, Borb, and Ponyboy during the early transcensions, since these directly improve efficiency and resource gain.
As you progress into the mid and late game, Phandoryss becomes more important for raw DPS, while support Outsiders like Rhageist and K’Ariqua can be added to fine-tune runs.
Orphalas is generally avoided due to its weak scaling, and Xyliqil becomes less relevant once idle playstyles fall off in higher zones.
Careful allocation is key, since Ancient Souls are scarce and every decision has long-term impact.
Read More: Best Idle Games 2025: Why Clicker Heroes Still Tops the Charts
Optimal Clicker Heroes Ancient Soul Distribution
Many players find that leveling just one Outsider exclusively quickly runs into diminishing returns, as each additional level yields a smaller impact.
That’s why a balanced approach tends to perform better: rather than dumping all Ancient Souls into one slot, allocating them across key Outsiders ensures consistent gains across multiple aspects of gameplay.
A commonly recommended progression is:
- Early game: Place Ancient Souls into Borb and Phandoryss. Borb reduces monsters per zone, allowing deeper progression by speeding up zone clearing. Phandoryss boosts DPS linearly, giving noticeable early benefits.
- Mid-game: Add Chor’gorloth into your build. This outsider lowers ancients’ cost, making your Hero Soul and DPS investments stretch further and improving efficiency.
- Late game: Start investing in Ponyboy, especially after mid-game scaling caps. Ponyboy dramatically increases Hero Souls from Primal Bosses, multiplying gains for every future run.
Throughout, community tools like the Outsider calculators are indispensable: they let you plug in your Ancient Soul count and see optimal Outsider builds instantly. Just paste your values and follow the suggested allocation for maximum efficiency.
When Should You Transcend?
Transcending resets your progress in exchange for Ancient Souls, but timing matters. Here are the signs that it’s time to transcend:
- Progress stalls: Zones take significantly longer to clear, and upgrades offer little forward momentum.
- Growing Hero Souls: You’ve accumulated significantly more Hero Souls than in previous ascensions.
- Efficiency dip: Your runs feel slower and less rewarding, even with optimized Ancient setups.
After your first transcendence, wait for 3–4 more ascensions that each yield more Ancient Soul gains before transcending again. This ensures you’re consistently pushing deeper and not losing efficiency.
Once your Transcendent Power approaches 24%, it’s wise to follow calculator suggestions rather than relying on raw intuition.
Strategies to Maximize Ancient Soul Gain
Maximizing Ancient Soul gains requires careful planning across all phases: before, during, and after a transcendence in Clicker Heroes.
Before Transcendence
Focus on amassing Hero Souls through reliable ascension loops.
Level up the best Ancients such as Atman (improves Primal Boss spawn chance) and Kumawakamaru (reduces monster required per zone) to turbocharge drops and streamline each run.
These boosts strengthen your accumulation pace prior to sacrificing progress.
During Transcendence
Choose a playstyle that suits your goals: idle, active, or hybrid.
Idle builds offer steady, passive progress but can be less effective at higher zones. Active builds, on the other hand, leveraging clicking and auto-clickers, deliver bursts of progress and often yield more Hero Souls.
Hybrid setups are especially common, combining idle with active engagement to maximize gains across different segments of a run.
After Transcendence and Spending Clicker Heroes Ancient Souls
Unlike Hero Souls, unspent Ancient Souls offer no passive benefits. So, spend them right away.
Reinvest immediately into Outsiders to speed up future ascensions, solidifying long-term progress with each transcendence.
Common Mistakes Players Make
Many players run into avoidable setbacks when managing Ancient Souls Clicker Heroes and transcensions.
One of the most common is hoarding Ancient Souls instead of spending them right away. Since they provide no passive value on their own, holding onto them only slows progress.
Another trap is over-investing in weaker Outsiders, particularly Xyliqil.
While it offers an idle bonus, most of the community agrees its returns are negligible compared to the core choices like Borb, Phandoryss, or Ponyboy.
Timing also plays a huge role. Transcending in Clicker Heroes too early with too few Hero Souls can rob you of efficiency.
Players often make the mistake of resetting after only one or two ascensions, but the most effective approach is usually to wait until you’ve banked a strong pool of Hero Souls, enough to give a meaningful boost after transcendence.
Lastly, it’s easy to ignore optimization tools and playstyle alignment. Community-built calculators can guide Outsider distribution far more effectively than guesswork.
Similarly, trying to stick with idle builds when your progress would benefit more from an active or hybrid approach can lead to wasted time and slower scaling.
By recognizing these pitfalls and planning around them, you can avoid wasted effort and make each transcendence cycle more impactful.
Read More: 5 Games Like Clicker Heroes: Top Idle Games to Play
Advanced Tips for Expert Players
Once players move past the mid-game grind and start aiming for higher milestones, transcension strategy becomes less about short-term gains and more about efficiency.
A common approach is to plan transcensions around milestone zones such as 1 million or 10 million, since these marks often provide significant boosts in Hero Soul multipliers.
Beyond that, pushing to zone 10,000 and above requires a more refined build, usually with a strong focus on Outsiders like Borb, Phandoryss, and Ponyboy.
Many veteran players adopt hybrid playstyles, combining idle farming for consistency with bursts of active clicking or skill use during critical moments to squeeze out extra efficiency.
Timing is also critical. Resetting too early wastes potential, but waiting too long stalls growth. The best results often come when Hero Soul income has clearly peaked.
At this level, Ancient Souls should be seen as a long-term investment, carefully distributed to create compounding benefits that continue to pay off across dozens of future transcensions.
Endgame and Beyond
The endgame of Clicker Heroes is defined by exponential scaling, where each transcendence feels like it unlocks a new layer of power.
Ancient Souls are the key to this growth, fueling Outsiders who make progression sustainable even at astronomical zone numbers.
Late-game priorities shift toward maximizing Primal Boss rewards with Ponyboy and reducing zone grind with Borb. Support Outsiders can be fine-tuned depending on playstyle, with some builds leaning more on idle efficiency while others exploit hybrid flexibility.
After hundreds of hours, the rhythm of the game changes: plateaus that once blocked progress turn into stepping stones, and Ancient Souls guide players through an endless cycle of resets, each one stronger than the last.
Conclusion
Clicker Heroes Ancient Souls are the uppermost currency in this idle game. They unlock Outsiders, fuel Transcendent Power, and enable exponential zone progression.
To master them, understand how to earn them via Hero Soul sacrifice, distribute them wisely using calculators and community guidance, and transcend at the right time.
Use the strategies in this guide, from Outsider allocation to transcension timing, to refine your late-game path. Experiment, adapt, and may your clicks lead you ever deeper.
