Dark Elixir Quest: Summer Jam Week 3 Guide (2026)

The Summer Jam has rolled into its Dark Elixir phase, and honestly, this is the one I've been waiting all month for. Gold and regular Elixir are easy to stockpile — Dark Elixir is the resource that actually holds your account back. It drips in slowly, it's the fuel for every Hero, and there never seems to be enough of it.

So when Supercell hands you a phase built around it, you take the discount and run. During the Dark Elixir Quest, every upgrade paid for with Dark Elixir finishes 25% faster, and your Dark Elixir storage capacity is doubled so you can bank a real war chest before the timer runs out. If you only sweat one week of the Summer Jam, make it this one. If you want the official version, Supercell keeps the full season schedule on the Clash of Clans site, but the short version is that the Dark Elixir window is the part worth clearing your calendar for.

Here's the quick answer if you're short on time: pile every Dark Elixir upgrade you can into this window, because a 25% time cut on Dark Elixir builds is worth far more than the same cut on Gold or Elixir. Gold walls and Elixir collectors are cheap and fast anyway. Hero upgrades are the ones that eat weeks of your life.

The doubled storage matters just as much. Normally your Dark Elixir storage caps out and you're forced to spend or waste the overflow. With double capacity, I can let my drills and league bonuses run for a couple of days, hoard a big pile, and then start a chunky Hero level the moment I've got enough. Combine the two perks and you're effectively getting more Hero progress per day than at any other point in the season.

Heroes are the single biggest Dark Elixir sink in the game, so they're the obvious first target this week. But there's a bonus stacked on top: the Unlimited Hero Event is running at the same time, which strips out Hero downtime and lets you keep attacking even while a Hero is in the middle of an upgrade.

That combination is the real trick. In a normal week, upgrading your King means your King sits in the barracks and you attack a hero short. This week you can push a big upgrade AND still bring your full roster into every raid. Start with whichever Hero moves your attacks the most — for most players that's the one carrying your main army. If you're not sure of the order, my hero upgrade priority guide breaks down which Hero to touch first at each Town Hall.

Everyone remembers Heroes. Almost nobody remembers pets. That's a mistake, because Pet House upgrades run on Dark Elixir too, and a maxed pet quietly adds a huge amount of value to the Hero it's attached to.

A higher-level Poison Lizard or Spirit Fox can be the difference between a two-star and a triple, and those levels are painful to afford outside a discount phase. So once my priority Hero is cooking, I point the next Dark Elixir pile at the Pet House. If you're unsure which pet belongs on which Hero, I ranked them all in the pets tier list — pair that with this week's discount and you can knock out two or three pet levels you've been putting off for months.

Your Laboratory only upgrades one thing at a time, so pick something that pulls its weight. Dark Elixir troops and spells are the smart call this phase because, again, the discount is on the resource that's normally the bottleneck.

The Druid is the standout right now after its July healing buff — if it's not maxed, this is the week. Beyond that, Minions feed a lot of air armies, the Ruin Witch has become a real threat, and classics like the Headhunter and the Ice Golem still show up in top attacks. On the spell side, Poison and the Overgrowth spell are cheap wins. Just make sure the Lab is never sitting idle while the discount is live — an empty Lab this week is wasted money. One more tip: check what your clan actually runs in war before you commit a long Lab job. There's no point maxing a troop you never deploy — upgrade the Dark Elixir units that show up in your own attacks first.

A discount does nothing if your storage is empty, so let's talk farming. The fastest source at any Town Hall is a Sneaky Goblin or Super Sneaky Goblin army aimed straight at Dark Elixir storages — Goblins do double damage to resources and blitz through a base in seconds. Keep your Dark Elixir Drills collected on a schedule too; they run dry if you ignore them.

Don't sleep on your Star Bonus and league bonus either. A single win a day, claimed consistently, adds up to a surprising amount of Dark Elixir over the phase. And because storage is doubled this week, you're not losing overflow when a good raid drops a fat pile on you. Farm a bit, bank it, spend it on Heroes — repeat until the phase ends.

At Town Hall 13 and up, don't overlook the humble Dark Elixir Drill upgrade either — a higher-level drill passively generates more of the resource every single hour, so a level you finish early in the phase pays you back for the rest of it. And if you're pushing trophies at all, remember that the league bonus scales with your league: the higher you climb, the fatter the Dark Elixir payout on every win. A few laddering attacks a day, aimed at bases with full storages, quietly outperforms mindless farming hits on empty collectors.

The flip side of a farming week is that everyone else is hunting Dark Elixir too, and your storage is a target. There's nothing worse than banking a huge pile overnight and waking up to find a Goblin army walked off with it.

So run a base that buries your Dark Elixir storage dead center, behind your best defenses, rather than a war layout that's built to stop three stars and leaves loot exposed. If you're still on an old anti-three-star base while farming, swap it — grab a proper resource-protecting layout from our base finder and copy it straight into your game. A few minutes of setup saves you a night's worth of farming.

The Dark Elixir Quest wraps up in the back half of July, and it hands straight off to Clan Games. So the plan is simple: sprint on Dark Elixir now while the discount is live, empty your storages into Heroes and pets before the timer ends, then pivot your attention to Clan Games challenges for a second wave of rewards.

That's the rhythm of a good Summer Jam — you don't try to do everything at once, you ride each phase for exactly what it's best at. This week, that's Dark Elixir. Bank it, burn it on your Heroes, and come out the other side with an account that's noticeably stronger than it was on Monday.