ACT League and the weekly Online Ranking
ACT League is the boss ladder: beat rival bosses and the bonuses stay with you even after a Prestige reset, which makes it the one system that compounds across runs. The Online Ranking resets weekly, pays a weekly reward, and shows each player's total play time beside their name.
Task Bar Cube has two competitive layers, and they behave completely differently. One is a boss ladder that pays you in bonuses which survive a reset. The other is a weekly board with a countdown clock and a reward at the end of it. Confusing the two is the most common way players waste a week.
ACT League: the part that compounds
ACT League is the boss layer. The store page describes it in one sentence: beat rival bosses for bonuses that stay even after Prestige.
That sentence is doing a lot of work. Every other progression system in the game is either a run resource (gold, node levels) or a permanent-in-save resource (gear, collection). ACT League is the one that is explicitly permanent through a Prestige reset — which makes it the only system whose value cannot be spent by accident.
The panel reads as a ladder of rival bosses with their own levels. In the official screenshots the league shows entries at wildly different levels, which is the tell that it is a difficulty ladder rather than a single encounter: you clear where you can, and the next rival sits above you until your numbers catch up.
It is worth being precise about what the league is, because the name invites the wrong reading. It is a ladder of rival bosses, not a PvP mode: nobody is fighting you, and there is no matchmaking. It pays permanent bonuses, not a weekly reset, so nothing about it expires. It survives Prestige, unlike your run's gold and node levels. And it is clearable at your own pace rather than being time-limited to a week, which is exactly what makes it the safe thing to do before a reset.
Why it deserves to be done first
Because of the interaction with Prestige. If you are going to reset a run, everything tied to that run goes with it — and the ACT League bonuses do not. So the order of operations before any Prestige is:
- Push ACT League as far as your current power allows.
- Bank anything that is permanent: collection copies, shelf upgrades, talent points.
- Then Prestige, and rebuild knowing the permanent layer is bigger than it was.
Doing it in the other order is the mistake: Prestige first, then discover you can no longer reach the rival you were about to beat, because the power you needed was in the run you just gave up.
Online Ranking: the weekly board
The second layer is the leaderboard, and the panel is explicit about its rhythm:
| Element | What the panel shows |
|---|---|
| Board | An Online Ranking of players, ranked by their progress |
| Each row | Player name, play time, and a level figure |
| Reward | A weekly reward, with a countdown: "climb higher — weekly reward in 6d 22h" |
| Reset | Weekly, driven by that countdown |
The countdown is the whole mechanic. Whatever rank you hold when it hits zero is what you are paid for, so the only decision the board creates is when to make your push. Pushing on day one and coasting is worse than pushing on day six, because everyone else is also moving.
The play-time column is the honest part of the design. It tells you that the top of the board is not a strategy contest; it is an hours contest. If you are playing two hours a day, there is a ceiling on your rank that no amount of optimisation removes, and that is worth knowing before you spend a week chasing it.
Daily reward, and the other timers
Beside the ranking sits a daily reward track — a Day counter with a claim — which is the game's way of asking you to open it once a day. It is small, it is free, and it is the cheapest thing in the game per click.
The three clocks in Task Bar Cube, together:
| Clock | Length | What it gates |
|---|---|---|
| Chest timer | 5 minutes of play | Steam chests |
| Daily reward | One day | A free claim |
| Online Ranking | One week | The weekly reward |
None of them is punishing, and all three are worth keeping an eye on, because they are the only places where time is worth more than gold.
How to read the board without chasing it
A few honest observations about a weekly board in a game with endless levels:
- Level figures on the board are not comparable to yours. The players near the top have hundreds of days of play time — the screenshots show rows with play times measured in dozens of days. You are not behind; you started on 25 October 2026.
- The reward is a weekly payout, not a permanent rank. Whatever you earn, you earn once.
- The board rewards consistency more than talent, because the underlying progression is exponential — a few days of compounding dwarfs any clever play.
So the sensible way to use it: claim the daily, check your rank once a day, and make one deliberate push late in the week if a threshold is close. Anything more is time spent on a leaderboard instead of on the game.
What the ACT League bonuses are worth
They are percentages, and percentages stack. Everything additive in this game adds up:
| Source | Permanent? | Stacks with |
|---|---|---|
| ACT League bonuses | Yes, through Prestige | Everything |
| Steam Collection | Yes | Cube Upgrade, Talent Tree |
| Library / Animal Shelter shelves | Yes | Characters or pets respectively |
| Talent Tree | Yes, but respecable | Cube Upgrade, Collection |
| Cube Upgrade nodes | No — reset by Prestige | All of the above |
| Gold and gear | Run-bound or worn | — |
Read the table top to bottom and the strategy writes itself: the permanent rows are the ones you should never leave on the table, and the ACT League row sits at the top because it is the only one the game describes as surviving the reset.
A weekly routine
- Daily: claim the daily reward, glance at the board.
- Daily: run the ACT League at the highest rival you can beat. It is the only progress that survives everything.
- Mid-week: check the ranking countdown; if a threshold is two fights away, push.
- End of week: claim the weekly reward, then reassess whether a Prestige makes sense.
- Never: Prestige while an ACT League rival is one push away.
That order keeps the two layers doing their jobs: the league builds the permanent floor, the board pays for showing up. Neither one is worth losing a night's sleep over, and both are worth ten minutes a day.
