What to upgrade first
Every Town Hall drops dozens of new upgrades on you at once, and Builder time — not loot — is your real limiting resource. This guide gives you a repeatable order of operations for every Town Hall so your Builders never sit idle on the wrong thing.
For a personalised checklist against your own village, open the ClashTrack Rusher.
The order of operations
At a fresh Town Hall, spend Builder time in roughly this order:
- Lab & heroes never stop. Your Laboratory and hero altars run on their own timers, separate from Builders. Queue a troop/spell upgrade and a hero upgrade immediately at every Town Hall so those always-busy timers are never wasted.
- Offense that wins wars. New Army Camps (troop capacity), Barracks/Dark Barracks unlocks, and Spell Factory levels raise your attacking ceiling more than any single defense.
- Storages, then key defenses. Upgrade storages enough to bank your biggest purchase, then splash and signature defenses (see the defense guide).
- Everything else. Walls, collectors, traps and remaining point defenses fill the gaps whenever a Builder frees up.
Offense first
Heroes, lab and army capacity decide how many stars you take. War and loot both flow from offense, so keep these timers running around the clock — they pay for everything else.
Defense to hold
Prioritise splash and signature defenses (Wizard Towers, Inferno, Eagle, Scattershots). Defenses also gate your next Town Hall, so you cannot skip them entirely.
Economy to fund it
Storages large enough to hold your priciest upgrade, plus dark drills for heroes. Skip maxing collectors unless you farm passively — they rarely out-earn raiding.
Mandatory prerequisites per Town Hall
Some upgrades aren’t optional: you can’t upgrade your Town Hall until certain buildings hit a minimum level. This table (from the ClashTrack catalog) shows how many prerequisites each Town Hall carries and its gold cost — do these first.
| Town Hall | Required first | Town Hall cost | Guide |
|---|---|---|---|
| TH2 | 5 buildings |  1K | TH2 → |
| TH3 | 5 buildings | 4K | TH3 → |
| TH4 | 9 buildings | 25K | TH4 → |
| TH5 | 6 buildings | 150K | TH5 → |
| TH6 | 10 buildings | 500K | TH6 → |
| TH7 | 9 buildings | 1M | TH7 → |
| TH8 | 14 buildings | 2M | TH8 → |
| TH9 | 17 buildings | 2.5M | TH9 → |
| TH10 | 16 buildings | 3.5M | TH10 → |
| TH11 | 10 buildings | 4M | TH11 → |
| TH12 | 8 buildings | 6M | TH12 → |
| TH13 | 7 buildings | 9M | TH13 → |
| TH14 | 5 buildings | 12M | TH14 → |
| TH15 | 7 buildings | 13M | TH15 → |
| TH16 | 3 buildings | 15M | TH16 → |
| TH17 | 3 buildings | 16M | TH17 → |
| TH18 | 9 buildings | 25M | TH18 → |
Why upgrade order matters more than upgrade speed
Two accounts with identical loot income and identical builder counts can end up a Town Hall apart within a year, purely from the order they did things in. The reason is that Clash upgrades are not interchangeable units of progress: some of them increase how much loot you earn, and the rest only consume it. Every upgrade you do in the first category makes every later upgrade cheaper in real time.
That gives you a simple test to apply to any upgrade you are unsure about. Ask whether finishing it makes your next raid better. Army Camps do — more troops means more loot. The Laboratory does. The Clan Castle does, because donated troops carry attacks. A Cannon does not; it protects loot you already earned, which matters far less than earning more.
The parallel timers most players waste
Builders are the progression track everyone watches, and they are the one least likely to be idle. The tracks that quietly sit empty are the Laboratory, the hero queue and — from Town Hall 14 — the Pet House. None of them consume a builder. All of them run whether or not your builders are busy.
A useful habit is to check those three before you check your builders. If the lab is idle, start something, even something cheap. If a hero is available, start the upgrade even if you would rather attack with them this evening, because a hero upgrading overnight costs you one evening and gains you a permanent level. Players who internalise this finish Town Halls noticeably faster than players with identical loot income who only think in builders.
When to break the rules
The offence-first principle has two genuine exceptions. The first is storage capacity: if your Gold or Elixir storages cannot hold the cost of the upgrade you are saving for, no amount of farming will get you there, and storages jump to the front of the queue until they can. The second is a defence that changes how your base defends rather than adding to it — the Eagle Artillery at TH11, Scattershots at TH13. Those are worth interrupting for; a fourth Archer Tower is not.