It doesn’t take much time playing Harry Potter: Wizards Unite (Free) to reach one inescapable conclusion: The Spell Energy situation can be worse than any Defence Against the Dark Arts lecture.
Even though it seems like the denizens of the Wizarding World can conjure up spells until the cows come home once they’ve learned enough magic in the books and movies, you definitely can’t say the same in Wizards Unite. Your supply of Spell Energy (indicated in-game by blue lightning bolts) governs most of the important ongoing tasks in the game, including casting spells to defeat Confoundables and participating in Wizarding Challenges in Fortresses. In short, any time you cast a spell, it costs Spell Energy.
This is true even when the spell is unsuccessful, a realization you may already have had when confronting more difficult Confoundables. It’s all well and good that it might take three casts to triumph, because all it means is tracing the glyph again, and perhaps downing a potion to make the likelihood of success greater. But when you also consider that you’re spending a point of Spell Energy every time, that makes the calculus of what it “costs" to win an encounter somewhat different.
(Insert your favorite Young Gamora meme here.)
Even this wouldn’t be so bad except that Spell Energy doesn’t regenerate by itself over time, which is a common expectation for lots of mobile games. Nor, unfortunately, do you even get a courtesy refill when you level up. Once you’ve hit the following screen, you’re in for some sadness until you do something about it:
So let’s do that something now. Yes, it’s possible to buy Spell Energy for Gold, but that Gold is best saved for other purposes, especially since there are ways to get Spell Energy for free, and we’re going to lay them all out for you here.
Let’s start with the most obvious one …
Visit Inns
Inns exist in Harry Potter: Wizards Unite for multiple purposes, but mainly to serve as sites to replenish your Spell Energy. To do so, simply walk (or hop on your broomstick, if applicable) and get close enough to the Inn in the real world for it to grow larger on your map. Then just tap on it to enter.
The Inn will then demand that you trace a very simply glyph to “feed" you, which beats paying for food.
It’s a good deal, but the problem is that Inns give you a random amount of Spell Energy on each visit, which can be as low as three points. As far as we can tell, tracing the glyph more accurately doesn’t seem to make a difference here like it does in spellcasting either.
So you’ve got to be happy with what you get, though getting 3 points of Spell Energy when you are running completely on ‘E’ isn’t a lot of fun. The semi-good news is that you can visit Inns every five minutes to get more Spell Energy.
Bonus tip: See smoke coming from the Inn nearest you on the map? That means you’ve visited it recently and its cooldown timer hasn’t expired yet, Patience, my wizard or witch.
Visit Greenhouses
Greenhouses are the small blue buildings on your map, useful primarily for the communal growing of potion ingredients. They also fill in as a secondary source of Spell Energy, and we say that because what you get from one is even more random that at Inns.
You enter a Greenhouse the same way you do an Inn, by moving close to it IRL and tapping on it. Instead of a glyph, you’ll be asked to choose one of three plants by tapping on it and dragging your finger up on the screen to uproot it. Once you do, you’ll be rewarded with a random ingredient, and also some Spell Energy … sometimes. Other times you’ll get no Spell Energy from your Greenhouse visit, so don’t expect to receive some and you’ll never be disappointed. Think of it as a pleasant bonus if you do.
Greenhouses have the same five-minute cooldown timer as Inns, but you should already be able to see here that if you have a series of Inns and Greenhouses near you, it’s possible to just hit them all in quick succession, wait five minutes, then return and visit them all again. Right now, this is probably the best way to go from zero Spell Energy to completely full for free, though more rural players might be SOL — though that was kind of true for Pokemon GO as well in many ways.
Bonus tip: Even if your ingredient inventory is full, you can and still should drop in a nearby Greenhouse, because you’ll still receive the Spell Energy from a plant even if you can’t keep the ingredient with it. I’ve tested this myself and it does work.
Complete Your Daily Assignments
The Ministry of Magic might seem like its nagging you a bit in Wizards Unite, but it also comes through at times with some helpful loot. Case in point: There’s always one Daily Assignment that will give you some Spell Energy. As I type this, it’s “Pick up 1 ingredient or Portmanteau on the map," which is about as easy as it gets. Alas, only one of the seven Daily Assignments gives you Spell Energy each day.
But wait! Depending on which day of the month it is, your Daily Treasure, which pops up automatically the first time you log in on a given day and is also accessible from the bottom nav in the Daily Assignments screen, may also be Spell Energy.
Man, just typing that out made me a little sad about how scarce Spell Energy is in this game, since the top Daily Treasure is 11 Spell Energy — not even in the ballpark of a full refill.
Buy More Spell Energy With Gold
Wait, wait. Before you accuse me of a bait and switch here, I did already say that this wouldn’t be my preference. Also, you can buy Gold for real money in Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, so this might sound like I’m advocating for you to spend your hard-earned dough.
Not so. See, while Gold is available via in-app purchases, there are also a number of ways to earn it for free while playing. I’d be remiss if I didn’t recommend our full guide to find out more, but here’s a quick list of a few:
- Daily Rewards
- Leveling up
- Completing Assignments
(The game also “helpfully" pops up a chance to buy more Spell Energy if you try to cast a spell when you’re completely out, which is kind of like kicking you when you’re already down.)
See? Free Gold = free Spell Energy, at least in a roundabout way. To purchase more Spell Energy, you’ll want to enter Diagon Alley by tapping on the shopping basket icon in the upper-right corner of most screens. Then tap on the ‘Wiseacres’ icon (second from the left) and you’ll find you can buy 50 Spell Energy for 100 Gold. Again, there are better ways to spend your Gold than this, but as a last resort, and particularly if you’ve earned the Gold you’re about to part with for free, it’s an option.
It’s also possible to buy more Spell Energy Capacity for 150 Gold. Should you, though? It’s an interesting question; if there were ways to get full refills of Spell Energy, the answer would almost certainly be “yes" so you could take advantage of getting more bang for your proverbial buck. Since there aren’t, there’s a compelling case to be made that this is a bit of a waste, since you’re going to be filling your newly larger tank 3 to 10 points at a time anyway, same as before.
Here’s hoping that as Harry Potter: Wizards Unite moves further away from launch, Niantic decides to throw everyone playing a bone and make Spell Energy a little less restrictive. Until then, you at least know everything we know about how to get more for free, and that’ll have to do.
