Enhancing calculator
How many tries does it take to get a piece of gear to +5, +8 or +10, how many protection items will you burn, and what does it cost? Enter your levels and the price of one attempt's materials. The answer is an average over many runs, not a promise for yours: enhancing is luck, and a bad streak can cost several times the average.
| Attempt to reach | Your success rate | Expected attempts at the level below | Protections used there |
|---|
Material cost per attempt is the coin value of everything one click consumes: the materials listed under the item plus the coins. Use your sell price for materials you made yourself, not zero. Enhancing Success bonus is the stat shown on your enhancer (and +0.2% if you have the Champion achievement tier). Speed and wisdom are the totals from the action's bonus panel.
Without protection a failed attempt drops the item to +0. With "protect from +N", a failure while the item sits at +N or higher drops it one level and uses one protection item. The game warns that a value under +2 does nothing useful, so this calculator treats 0 and 1 as off. It counts a protection item as spent only on a failed protected attempt. The wiki does not spell that rule out, so treat it as this page's assumption and watch one failed attempt in game before trusting the cost on an expensive protection item.
Blessed Tea's small chance to gain two levels on a success is ignored, so averages with that tea running are slightly pessimistic. The Philosopher's Mirror is not modelled. Rare drops while enhancing are not counted. Enhancing has no efficiency, so there is no efficiency box.
The formula
success = base rate × (level modifier + Enhancing Success bonus + over-level bonus), capped at 100%.
- Level modifier: 1 when your Enhancing level is at or above the item level; otherwise (your level ÷ item level + 1) ÷ 2. At level 10 on a level 50 item that is 0.6, so you lose 40% of the base rate.
- Over-level bonus: 0.05% per level you are above the item, so 10 levels over adds 0.005.
- Time per attempt: 12 seconds ÷ (1 + speed bonus).
- XP per success: 1.4 × (1 + the item's current enhancement level) × (10 + item level) × (1 + wisdom). A failure gives 10% of that.
Worked example. A level 50 item, Enhancing 60, a Cheese Enhancer at +0 (0.6% success bonus). The attempt to +1 succeeds 50% × (1 + 0.006 + 0.005) = 50.55% of the time. Going +0 to +5 with no protection averages about 110 attempts and 22 minutes at base speed. Push the same item to +10 without protection and the average jumps to roughly 17,600 attempts, because every failure past +5 throws away all the earlier successes. Protect from +5 and it falls to about 2,520 attempts and 75 protection items. That gap is the whole argument for protection on anything past the mid levels.
Expected attempts are solved exactly as a chain of levels (each level either moves up or falls back), not by simulation, so the same inputs always give the same answer.
Base success rate by level
| Attempt to reach | Base rate | Attempt to reach | Base rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| +1 | 50.0% | +11 | 30.0% |
| +2 | 45.0% | +12 | 30.0% |
| +3 | 45.0% | +13 | 30.0% |
| +4 | 40.0% | +14 | 30.0% |
| +5 | 40.0% | +15 | 30.0% |
| +6 | 40.0% | +16 | 30.0% |
| +7 | 35.0% | +17 | 30.0% |
| +8 | 35.0% | +18 | 30.0% |
| +9 | 35.0% | +19 | 30.0% |
| +10 | 35.0% | +20 | 30.0% |
Sources: the Enhancing page on the Milky Way Idle wiki (table, formulas and worked examples) and the public game client, which multiplies the same per-level table by (1 + Enhancing Success). Checked 2026-10-15. The game sends this table at login, so a patch can change it; if your in-game success rate disagrees with the table above, trust the game.
Leveling Enhancing itself? The time to level calculator takes the XP figure above. New to the game? Start with the beginner guide. Material prices for the cost box are on the item pages.