CRK Bonds Guide — All 30 Bonds and Which to Max First

A Bond pays out at the level of its weakest member. That single line, buried in the Cookie Run: Kingdom wiki's Bonds page, is the whole system: a Bond's buff level is determined based on the lowest promotion level among all Cookies in the Bond. Take four of the five Ancients in Peace Beyond the Sunset to 5-star and leave White Lily Cookie at 1-star, and the Bond pays 1-star buffs. No averaging, no partial credit.

Which means Bonds are not a lore menu you tick off. They are a shopping list with a strict pricing rule, and once you sort the 30 of them by what they actually cost, the order to do them in becomes obvious — and it has almost nothing to do with how strong the cookies inside them are.

The rule that decides everything

Bonds are bonus effects unlocked by obtaining a specific set of Cookies who share a story. The buffs apply automatically to every Cookie you own, not just the ones in the Bond, and they stack across Bond levels — the 1-star buff does not replace the "meet all Cookies" buff, it adds to it.

There are six rungs on each Bond: meet all the Cookies, then 1-star through 5-star promotion. Every rung pays stats and a small pile of Crystals. And every rung is gated on the minimum promotion across the whole roster, which is why a two-cookie Bond is worth more of your attention than a five-cookie Bond carrying the same buff table.

What a Bond actually pays

The wiki lists three separate buff schedules. The Regular one covers the bulk of the list:

The Ancient schedule deals in round hundreds: +200 HP for meeting the Cookies, then +250 HP/+100 ATK at 1-star, +300 HP/+100 DEF at 2-star, +100 ATK/+100 DEF at 3-star, +500 HP/+100 ATK at 4-star and +100 ATK/+100 DEF at 5-star. Add the six rungs up and it lands on +1,250 HP, +400 ATK, +300 DEF. Note that the wiki's own Total row on that table reads +1,250 HP, +300 ATK, +115 DEF — but those last two figures are character-for-character the Regular schedule's totals, and they do not match the Ancient rungs printed directly above them, so trust the rungs rather than the row. The wiki does not spell out which Bonds are graded on this schedule; Peace Beyond the Sunset is the only one of the 30 whose entire roster is Ancient.

The third schedule is labelled Post-6.7, and it is a different animal: +2% CRIT DMG for meeting the Cookies, then +1,000 HP at 1-star, +100 ATK at 2-star, and smaller steps after, totalling +2,000 HP, +200 ATK, +2% CRIT DMG. Nearly twice the HP of the Regular schedule, a third less ATK, and the only Bond schedule that touches a percentage stat rather than a flat one.

Only one Bond in the game was released in 6.7 or later — Citrus Squad's Summer Sniffles, which shipped alongside Lime Cookie in the Farers of the Faraway Seas update. Every other Bond on the list predates it, and 19 of the 30 have been in the game since launch.

The Crystal side of the ledger

Every rung of every Bond pays the same Crystal amounts regardless of which stat schedule it uses: 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100. That is 450 Crystals per fully-promoted Bond, and across all 30 Bonds, 13,500 Crystals.

Set that against the price list before you get excited. A Cookie Gacha draw costs 300 Crystals and a tenfold draw costs 3,000, so the entire Bonds system, completed to the last star, is 45 draws — four and a half ten-pulls. It is a good long-tail return on soulstones you were going to accumulate anyway. It is not a gacha strategy, and anyone budgeting Crystals should read the F2P Crystal decision tree rather than treating Bonds as a funding source.

The stats are the real prize. They are permanent, they are account-wide, and unlike toppings they cost you no build slot.

All 30 Bonds, sorted by what they cost

Soulstone cost here is the full bill to take every member from nothing to 5-star: 290 soulstones per Cookie, or 190 for a Special Cookie. "Soulstone source" is the part that actually decides your order of operations — whether the members appear on a World Exploration Dark Mode stage, or have to come from the other channels the wiki lists for Soulstones: the gacha, shops, event rewards and Landmarks.

Add the unique cookies up — 70 of them, since several sit in two or three Bonds — and clearing every Bond in the game costs 20,200 soulstones and about 11.6 million Coins.

Why 25 of them are effectively free

Twenty-five of the thirty Bonds in that table are staffed entirely by cookies that appear on a Dark Mode soulstone stage. That is the difference between a project and a grind.

Dark Mode unlocks after you clear Episode 3 in Story Mode, and each episode's Dark Mode opens once you have collected every star in its Story variant — the World Exploration guide covers that gate in detail. Soulstone stages then run on a fixed budget: three free clears per day, with up to four more purchasable with Crystals, and the game guarantees at least one Soulstone for every three clears. Miss on the first two attempts and the third pays out anyway.

So a cookie with two soulstone stages banks a guaranteed floor of two stones a day, and one with three stages banks three. That converts directly into a schedule.

The four fastest Bonds in the game

Of the 30 Bonds above, four are made entirely of cookies that each appear on three Dark Mode soulstone stages. Assuming you already own the cookie — so 270 soulstones remain after the 20 that unlock it — and you clear all three attempts on each stage daily, three guaranteed stones a day close out a cookie inside 90 days, and the members run in parallel:

Treat 90 days as a ceiling on the time, not a prediction. The guarantee only covers the third clear; the first two each carry their own drop chance, so the real number is lower and varies.

Read the top of that table twice, because it contains the fastest two-Bond move on the list. Ghost of the Tower and At the Mansion share Blackberry Cookie. Three cookies — Blackberry, Onion, Adventurer — close two entire Bonds and pay 900 Crystals. Angel, Madeleine and Pancake do the same trick for the same 870 soulstones, closing Celestials, Guide Me! and I Want to Fly between them, but Angel and Madeleine sit on two Dark Mode stages each instead of three, so that trio runs on a longer clock.

The cookies that count more than once

Three cookies sit in three Bonds each, and all three are Dark Mode farmable:

Fifteen more cookies sit in exactly two: Hollyberry, Snow Sugar, Kumiho, Cherry, Tiger Lily, Vampire, Herb, Knight, Chili Pepper, Alchemist, Wizard, Blackberry, GingerBrave, Princess and Custard Cookie III.

This is where Bonds cut across our own rarity guide, which tells you to stop pouring resources into Commons and Rares once the early game is over. For combat that still holds. Bonds are a different budget: Angel Cookie is a Common, but her soulstones drop on two Dark Mode stages you are already re-clearing, and promoting her moves three separate Bonds one rung each. Benching a cookie and promoting a cookie are not the same decision.

What one cookie costs to take to 5 stars

The promotion bill is identical for every rarity except Special Cookies, which have been cheaper since v3.8:

Two things fall out of that. First, the two bills are not comparable in effort: the 165,500 Coins is a flat one-time charge against kingdom production you are not actively managing, while the 290 soulstones have to be farmed a few a day. Plan the stones. Second, an Ancient Cookie and a Common Cookie cost the same 290 stones. The entire difficulty gap is sourcing, which is exactly why the table above sorts on source rather than rarity.

The five Bonds you cannot farm

Five Bonds have at least one member who does not appear on any Dark Mode soulstone stage, and they behave completely differently:

• Peace Beyond the Sunset — all five Ancients, at 5-star each. This is the one Bond you do not open as a project; it closes as a by-product of promoting Ancients you were building for their own sake, and Awakening an Ancient requires owning the base form regardless.
• Siding with a Dragon — Royal Margarine and Tarte Tatin are Dark Mode cookies, but Hollyberry, Pitaya Dragon and Snapdragon are not. Snapdragon is a Special Cookie, so it is the one 5-cookie Bond that costs under 1,450 stones, at 1,350.
• Sea Breeze Flowing Through the Stars — two Legendaries, Moonlight and Sea Fairy. The smallest soulstone bill of the five at 580, and no cheaper in practice for it, because no Dark Mode stage supplies a Legendary's stones.
• Citrus Squad's Summer Sniffles — four Epics who are not on the Dark Mode list. This is the Bond running the Post-6.7 buff schedule.
• On a Graduation Day — Latte and Almond both farm; Cream Puff does not. One off-stage member is enough to stall the whole Bond, which is the lowest-member rule doing its job.

Bonds are also not the only passive, account-wide buff stack in the game — Costume Sets work on a similar own-the-set principle, and their bonuses do not scale with promotion at all, which makes them a genuinely separate project rather than a competing one.

Quick Action Checklist

• Open Cookies > Bonds and sort your work by the lowest-promoted member, because that member alone sets the payout
• Start with Blackberry, Onion and Adventurer — three cookies, two complete Bonds, 900 Crystals, all on three Dark Mode stages each
• Promote Angel, Pancake and Madeleine next; each one moves three Bonds at once
• Budget 290 soulstones and 165,500 Coins per cookie (190 stones for a Special Cookie) — the Coins never gate you, the stones always do
• Clear all three free Dark Mode attempts on a soulstone stage daily; the third clear is a guaranteed stone even if the first two miss
• Do not open Peace Beyond the Sunset, Sea Breeze or Citrus Squad as projects — none of their members drop from stages
• Expect 450 Crystals per completed Bond and 13,500 across all 30, which is 45 Cookie Gacha draws — treat the permanent account-wide stats as the real payout