INTRODUCTION

Currently, there are 66 achievements in the game and there's one achievement in Boom Beach you physically cannot earn any faster than the game allows - no matter how much money, skill, or free time you throw at it. It's called Strategist III - Defend base from 800 attacks, and only 0.63% of Boom Beach players have it. That's fewer than one in a hundred and fifty.

It isn't about how hard the defense itself is - a base that can hold its own can come together in your first month of playing. It's about the number 800. To have your base successfully attacked (and then successfully defended) eight hundred separate times, you need to stay in the game, as a visible target for other people's fleets, for years - and on average, Boom Beach doesn't throw that many attacks at even an active, well-defended player more than once every few days at best. By the most generous estimate, that's more than ten years of continuous, living presence in the game - and given that Boom Beach itself launched back in 2014, the theoretical window for earning this achievement really only exists for the handful of people who've been playing since launch and never truly stopped.

That's the real secret behind Boom Beach's achievement system, and it's what we found once we laid out all 66 achievements in the game side by side: the rarest trophies here are almost never about skill. They're about time - a brutal, non-scalable resource that can't be bought, farmed over a weekend, or unlocked with a wallet. "Strategist III" is simply the most honest example of how that mechanic plays out.

Important note: The figures and data presented below apply exclusively to players whose accounts are linked to Google Play and the App Store. The data does not include players whose accounts are not linked to these app stores, nor does it include PC players. Special thanks to Chinatale for assistance with data from iOS devices.

HOW WE CALCULATED THIS

Supercell shows achievement-ownership percentages separately by platform - one number for Google Play, another for the App Store - and the gap between them is sometimes a story in itself. Take "Chain of Command I" (upgrade HQ to level 3): 67% on Android versus 74.7% on iOS, an almost 8-point gap on the single most common achievement in the game. For "Iron Will I" (collect 20,000 iron), the gap is nearly double: 20% versus 32.5%.

The reason lies in how different the two audiences actually are. According to our report for July 2026, Boom Beach has around 100M+ downloads on Google Play & 35.6M+ on the App Store - meaning the Android install base is roughly 2.8 times larger. But at the same time, iOS generates roughly twice the revenue on roughly half the downloads: a smaller, but far more "loyal" and paying audience that tends to stick around longer on average - and so has more time to rack up rare achievements before eventually moving on.

To turn two separate numbers into one honest figure for "what percentage of players actually has this achievement," we weighted each platform's percentage by its real share of the game's total install base: Android ≈ 73.75%, iOS ≈ 26.25%. That way, the larger but less-engaged Android audience doesn't artificially dilute the result - and, conversely, the smaller but more dedicated iOS audience doesn't inflate the numbers more than it should. The formula:

Average % = (Google Play % × 0.7375) + (App Store % × 0.2625)

TIME AS THE ONE CURRENCY YOU CAN'T CHEAT

If you look at how fast the audience "dies off" between an achievement's first tier and its third, you get something like an X-ray of the game. We calculated, for every three-tier line (I → II → III), how many times the ownership percentage drops off - and the spread turned out to be enormous.

For "Strategist" (base defense), the drop is 66.9x: from 42.25% at tier one down to that same 0.63% at tier three. That's the steepest cliff in the entire game, and it's exactly why "Strategist III" isn't just the rarest achievement by raw percentage - it's rare by a wide margin over its closest competitors. For comparison: "Perfectionist" (salvaging statues, pure manual grinding) drops off 17.2x, and "Chain of Command" (HQ upgrades, the backbone of all progression) drops 18x. In other words, even maturing your HQ all the way from level 3 to level 20 "kills off" the audience less aggressively than the wait for eight hundred enemy attacks.

At the opposite end sit the event-boss achievements - "Gear Up" (Colonel Gearheart) and "Hammer Down" (Lt. Hammerman). Their tier I-to-III drop is only 2.1-2.5x, the gentlest in the whole game. That's not because they're easy - quite the opposite: even the first tier is already rare here (4.5% and 6.02% respectively, versus 30-60% for "ordinary" tier-one achievements). Event bosses aren't content for newcomers or casual players - to even meet Colonel Gearheart at all, you need to catch the right season and not quit before it ends. That's already a self-selected group of dedicated fans, and once you're inside it, going from 150 points to 2100 turns out to be almost as likely as getting in was in the first place. Event content doesn't filter much by skill - it filters out everyone except the truly committed right at the door.

THE ECONOMY OF THE GAME, TOLD THROUGH THREE IDENTICAL NUMBERS

Boom Beach's designers set the exact same bar - 40,000,000 units - for four separate resource lines: gold, wood, stone, and iron. On paper, that's symmetrical. In practice, it tells four very different stories.

Gold and wood behave almost like twins: 8.42% and 7.10% of players respectively reach tier three. Stone lags a bit behind at 5.95%. Iron, though, is the real outlier - only 4.74% of players ever reach 40 million, and even at tier one (20,000 units), iron is already the rarest of the four: 23.28% versus gold's 55.97%. The mechanics explain why: iron unlocks later than the other resources, is needed by a narrower set of buildings, and is simply slower to farm - almost as if it were deliberately engineered as the bottleneck of the game's late-stage economy. Put another way, if you want to know exactly where an experienced Boom Beach player's progress stalls out, it isn't gold or wood - it's an iron shortage.

THE HQ FUNNEL - THE MOST HONEST PORTRAIT OF RETENTION IN MOBILE STRATEGY GAMES

If there's one metric in the game that shows audience attrition more honestly than any marketing report ever could, it's HQ progression. "Chain of Command I" (level 3) is held by 69.02% of everyone who's ever launched Boom Beach - essentially the threshold for "installed it and played at least a little." By level 10, only 22.44% remain - less than a third of that starting group. And by level 20, almost nobody's left: 3.84%.

This isn't a story about difficulty. Level 20 isn't some unreachable peak of skill - it just requires walking the whole path: building out the economy, sitting through dozens of hours of upgrades, and never losing interest somewhere along the way. The collapse across the three tiers of "Chain of Command" is, in effect, the retention curve of any live-service mobile game, just dressed up as an achievement: almost everyone tries it, roughly a third stick around for real, and only a handful ever reach the end of the progression.

THE RESOURCE CLUB: 20-35%

There's a fairly wide band of achievements that can no longer be called rare, but aren't exactly common either - these belong to players who've genuinely put weeks or months into Boom Beach, without yet turning into the decade-long veterans of the one-percent club. This is where most tier-two resource and combat lines land: "Chain of Command II" (22.44%), "Spoils of War II" - stockpile a million gold (24.10%), "War Production I" - control three resource bases (32.68%), "Explorer I" - uncover 25 map regions (33.02%), "Payback I" - beat a first blackguard boss (33.44%).

Interestingly, this is roughly where "economy" players and "combat" players start to diverge. Some invest at this stage in territory and resource control, others in attacking and defending bases - and the tier-two versions of the combat-focused lines ("War Hero II" at 13.02%, "Strategist II" at 11.23%) end up noticeably rarer than their economy-side counterparts at the same tier number. PvP in Boom Beach filters players out faster than base management does - fighting is simply riskier and harder than stockpiling gold.

THE "BASIC" TIER - AND EVEN THAT ISN'T FOR EVERYONE

It's worth remembering that even the "common" achievements on this list are only common relative to the other 65. The single most widely held achievement in the game - "Chain of Command I" - belongs to just 69% of everyone who's ever launched Boom Beach, meaning roughly one in three people who install the game never even reach HQ level 3. "War Hero I" (score 50 PvP victory points) is held by 38.20% - meaning more than half the entire audience has never once taken part in a full-fledged PvP fight. Even "Harness Nature I" - clearing just five trees or rocks off an island, a single tap of an action - is only held by 58.78%. The barrier to entry in Boom Beach is higher than it looks at first glance: this is a game where a significant chunk of the audience drops off on the very first few screens.

THE ONE-PERCENT CLUB: THREE RAREST ACHIEVEMENTS IN THE GAME

Coming back to the rarest circle in the game - the three achievements sitting below 1.5% - it's worth noting that each one describes a completely different flavor of obsession.

Strategist III (0.63%) - the already-discussed case of patience without action: you simply need to remain a living, regularly-attacked target for a decade straight.

Perfectionist III - Salvage 3000 Statues (0.78%) - the opposite kind of obsession: not waiting, but manually and monotonously salvaging three thousand statues, one after another. This is pure mechanical persistence with zero risk or adrenaline - grinding purely for the sake of grinding.

Conqueror III - destroy 1000 enemy bases (1.42%) - this one is about aggression: a thousand fully completed attacks on enemy bases, where sheer volume matters regardless of outcome - years of active PvE/PvP with no pauses.

Three achievements, three ways of pushing yourself to the limit for a single line in a profile: waiting, repeating, and attacking. And only 0.63-1.42% of players ever see any one of these paths through to the end.

Google Play & App Store also include the achievement “Submariner III” as one of the rarest achievements - only 2.26% of players have it.

THE FULL TABLE: ALL 66 BOOM BEACH ACHIEVEMENTS

Below is a reference table with every achievement in the game, sorted from most common to rarest.

REWARDS: WHERE THE NUMBERS STOP MATCHING THE RARITY

So far we've only talked about how many players hold each achievement. But if you look at what Boom Beach actually hands out in exchange for that rarity, the picture gets a lot less logical - and in places, frankly absurd.

The only currency achievements pay out in is diamonds, and across all 66 achievements the game is willing to hand out a total of 3,240 diamonds. By default, a three-tier line (I–II–III) is worth 60–90 diamonds combined - regardless of whether it's about defending a base, gathering resources, or exploring the map. But five lines break sharply from that pattern:

The War Hero line alone - the achievements for earning PvP victory points - claims 1,325 out of the 3,240 diamonds available in the entire game. That's 40.9% of the whole achievement prize pool, packed into just three achievements. Add up all five "generous" lines together and you get 2,160 diamonds - 66.7% of every gem the game gives out for achievements, claimed by lines that make up only 23% of all achievement groups. The remaining 17 lines - three-quarters of all achievement content - have to split what's left of that one-third.

And now for the contrast that makes this whole section worth raising in the first place. The Strategist line, home to the single rarest achievement in the entire game - that same "Strategist III," held by just 0.63% of players and, by our estimate, requiring a decade of play to reach - pays out a total of 30 diamonds across all three tiers. That's not just less than War Hero (44 times less, in fact) - it's less than the "ordinary," unremarkable 60–90 gem baseline that players get for far more mundane achievements, like clearing branches off an island. That's the paradox: the longer and harder the road to an achievement, the less likely the game is to actually notice it with a reward. If you calculate "diamonds per percentage point of rarity," War Hero III comes out to roughly 600 diamonds per point - while Strategist III scrapes by with a measly 47. In other words, the developers seem to have rewarded arbitrarily chosen mechanics they personally considered more important, rather than actual dedication to the game.

How this could be fixed

The problem isn't that the game is short on diamonds - 3,240 is plenty to distribute fairly. The problem is that the distribution isn't tied to rarity or to the time investment required at all. Here are a few directions that could make the reward system more honest:

• Tie the reward to actual rarity, not to some arbitrary sense of a mechanic's "importance." If Strategist III is the single hardest achievement to earn in the game, it has no logical business paying out 44 times fewer diamonds than War Hero III. Simply redistributing the existing pool of 3,240 diamonds proportionally to ownership percentage would fix this without adding a single new piece of content.
• Add a visual, non-consumable status instead. diamonds are a resource that gets spent and disappears, so a week later nobody - including the player themselves - remembers they earned them for something extraordinary. It would make far more sense to reward the owner of "Strategist III" with something permanent and visible: a unique flag over their base, a special profile frame, a glowing statue by the HQ, or an animated attack banner/decoration that other players immediately recognize when viewing that base or scrolling through a clan roster.
• Introduce titles tied to the rarest achievements. Something like a displayed rank next to the player's name - "Unbreakable" for Strategist III, "Annihilator" for Conqueror III, "Statue Keeper" for Perfectionist III. Games like Brawl Stars, Path of Exile have long shown that players often value a title more than any currency - precisely because it can't be bought, only earned.
• Make the reward scale non-linearly instead of following the flat "60–90 per line" template. A multiplier could work: if an achievement sits in the "one-percent club" (like Strategist III, Perfectionist III, and Conqueror III), the line's total reward automatically gets multiplied - say, 3–5x over the baseline - regardless of which mechanic it belongs to. That would spare the game its current situation, where the generosity of a reward seems to be dictated more by the development history of a given piece of content than by any actual logic behind the achievement system.

Put simply: if Boom Beach already knows how to measure which players have given it a decade of their lives, the least it could do is act like it appreciates that - instead of brushing those players off with thirty diamonds, which isn't even enough to rush a single building upgrade.

CONCLUSION

Sixty-six achievements, one weighted percentage for each, and a single pattern running underneath all of it: in Boom Beach, rarity is almost never a measure of skill. It's a measure of how long you were willing to stay.

The steepest drop-offs in the game don't belong to the hardest combat challenges - they belong to the achievements that simply require you to keep showing up, year after year, while the game slowly happens to you. "Strategist III" sits at the bottom of the list not because defending a base is uniquely difficult, but because the only way to rack up 800 successful defenses is to remain a target for a decade. And the reward system, as it stands, doesn't even seem to know that's what it's measuring - handing out 44 times fewer diamonds for the rarest achievement in the game than for one built on a few good PvP seasons.

That gap is really the whole story in miniature. Boom Beach has spent over a decade quietly building one of the more honest attrition curves in mobile gaming - a system that can tell you, with real precision, who tried the game once, who stuck around for a season, and who never really left at all. It just hasn't figured out how to reward that last group the way it deserves. Fixing that wouldn't take new mechanics or new content - just a system smart enough to notice what it's already tracking, and generous enough to treat ten years of loyalty as worth more than thirty diamonds.