Why your new farm accounts never leave castle level 1

The symptom

You create a batch of new accounts, point your automation at them, and come back days later to find them exactly where you left them. Castle level 1 or 2. No buildings queued. No quests completed. Meanwhile an older account on identical settings, run by the same software with the same configuration, is progressing normally — which is the detail that rules out a settings problem before you go looking for one. The usual response is to blame the settings, then the proxy, then the emulator, roughly in that order, because those are the things a support thread usually asks about first. It is none of those. The actual cause sits underneath all of them, in how the game itself decides a fresh account is even allowed to start doing anything at all, and no amount of re-checking a proxy or reinstalling an emulator touches it.

How to tell this is what you're looking at

Three signs together, not one on its own, distinguish this from an ordinary slow start:

• The account is new — created in the last session, never manually played before automation touched it.
• Castle level hasn't moved at all since creation, not just slowly — no buildings queued, no completed quests, no resources spent.
• An older account on the identical build and settings is running normally at the same time. If every account is stuck, including established ones, that's a different problem — most likely a game update the automation hasn't caught up with yet, not this one.

What is actually happening

Lords Mobile drives early progression through a tutorial system: a table that maps each tutorial step to the routine that performs it. Building a defence tower, discovering the first PvE stage, the first rename — each is an entry in that table.

On a fresh account, that table comes up empty. Not incomplete — empty. The routines themselves all exist and all work correctly the moment something calls them. Nothing calls them, because the lookup that would dispatch them has no entries.

The result is an account whose task loop sits idle indefinitely. It isn't crashed and it isn't erroring. It is waiting for instructions that never arrive.

Why most bots never fixed it

Because it doesn't show up until you run accounts at volume. One or two accounts get tapped through onboarding by hand in a few minutes and nobody notices there was a problem. At fifty accounts, manual onboarding is the entire job, and the failure becomes the single thing standing between you and a working fleet.

How Apex handles it

Apex rebuilds the dispatch table the first time it sees an account — all 83 bindable steps, wired to the routines that were there the whole time. It runs once per account, automatically, with no configuration.

Verified on accounts that had been sitting idle indefinitely: they resumed on their own and progressed to real castle levels with zero manual taps.

The related failure worth knowing about

The same class of problem shows up on established accounts as a step that retries forever — a build ordered onto a blocked tile, for instance, where the routine has no fallback. Apex watches for a step that hasn't moved while castle level also hasn't changed, and restarts that one account. The recovery behaviour is described here.