This guide is an attempt to encapsulate some of the "meta" money making strategies in Garden Paws, plus a few ideas from my friends and myself. There are currently loads of guides on getting started out there that cover the basics like paper selling, but nothing really goes beyond that yet.

This only really covers the big money makers though. You can make plenty more scooping up random materials and crafting them into fewer sales, and you absolutely should because you won't be overrunning your shop tables for a long, long time. This guide just goes over what could be the backbone of your fortune.

Lastly, this game has tons to offer! I wrote the main part of this guide as more of a set of goals to have a smooth economic progression while enjoying the rest of the game. If you just want to see the absolute most min-max way to crank out money, check out the Fruit Bowl strategy at the bottom.

The guide has a lot of tips, tricks, and details that'll help smooth out your game, but it basically boils down into this progression:

Paper -> Basic Bouquets -> Frost Lavender Bouquets -> Cakes and Pumpkin Pies -> Fruit Bowls -> Mac and Cheese
(yes I know Mac and Cheese sells for less than Fruit Bowls, but they come online later and phase out Cakes)

Most things can be overlapped in this game, either with some persistence when targeting or using the item shifter. This can save huge amounts of space, saving you time from running around and saving you from having to tame multiple collector animals. It can be considered a small exploit, so use at your own discretion - the general strategy of making money doesn't change if you don't use it, you just spend more time running around to gather everything.

Here are some quirks of each thing, and some things you shouldn't overlap.

Planters - Cannot be overlapped using targeting, only shifting (if you try to set them in the exact same space, some of them won't be interactable). Use grid placement to place the first one, then for each one afterwards place it on top of the first and use the item shifter to sink it using one big move (shift), one normal move, and two small moves (alt). May be able to place them almost exactly in the same place using non-grid placement and jiggling each one before placing. Extra super useful because you only need one sprinkler to cover all the planters in each stack. Who needs garden plots?

In general you'll always want to be gradually increasing your planters to increase the amount of farming you can do. This only ceases to be true when you're so stuffed with money you don't care any more, or when you can dump all your energy into planting and harvesting every day.

Trees - Use planters, shifted into the ground for aesthetics if you want. Once the tree sprouts (about 4 days) the planter becomes available to put another tree in. More useful for fruit trees than Birch, since you have to chop the Birch trees down and targeting is indeterminate.

Habitats - These suffer from the storage container bug, where overlapping them will eventually cause one to override the others. Not a problem if you always place a full one then shift it into place and only use the same colored animal in each slot. Or...something you can take advantage of, if you really want to exploit the game and you're in a gambling mood. Just don't name any creatures in these farms or else they'll either be deleted or take over all your other habitats. Saves a lot on collector animals.

Barns and Coops - The animals in these always spawn in a straight line from NE to SW (if you're looking at them from your house, it starts at the corner nearest to you). Your mini-barn and mini-coop piles should thus be in the NW and SE corners, so the first few you make can still be reached before you get the appropriate collector animals/robots.

Chests - Never ever overlap chests. In fact, make sure they're at most only barely touching, or else you risk losing precious resources. But...since this is a munchkin's guide I feel obligated to mention that it can be exploited like habitats if you're in a gambling mood. If you're in the mood for item duplication though, multiplayer is easier, faster, and safer.

Other gathering stations - Includes things like beehives (not apiaries), seaweed poles, seed makers. Overlap these to infinity and beyond.

Transactions - You only get so many transactions in a day in Garden Paws. Each NPC that spawns to buy something takes time to run to your shop, browses a bit, then buys exactly one item. Not one stack, but one item. You can manage that a little using the two-tables method below, but you're still going to run up against a limit of how many transactions you can squeeze out of a day. Thus crafting items, even if they don't net much profit, is very valuable in reducing the number of transactions it takes to move those items.

Tables - Shop upgrades have a bit of quirkiness to them that's worth bearing in mind. The first upgrade is super important for getting a second table. The ones after are still important for getting more customers to come to your store, and later on to get the Discount Bin. However, if you populate all the tables customers will spend more time browsing before making a purchase. Thus the most min-max-y way of managing your shop is to only populate the closest two tables. Keep a big chest nearby to store everything you want to sell if you go this route.

Queuing - Shoppers can build up over time, to an extent. Given about two hours in-game time, there will be a few at your register and a bunch stacked up around the tables which you can then dequeue quickly. Some good activities to do in between sets of customers: petting the doggo near the ruins, doing a quick quest grab through the town (requires a mount), giving carrots to the bunnies, fishing away some of your bait (with a golden rod), managing your homestead to craft more items to sell.

Waiting - You won't have enough to keep your shop fully populated every day for a very, very long time. It's much better to plan to have 1-2 days off in between sale days so you're not wasting time manning your counter to sell just a couple things.

The dungeon is...something. You can make money here by trading in crystals and it's an amazing place to farm geodes and coal. You can grind the dungeon infinitely to get ahead on money for a particular Paws day, however when money is measured in real-world time I don't find it's much better than doing anything else in game.

The trick to really turning a profit in the dungeon is saving all your Dungeon Dust until you get to floor 90+ to turn Fire Droplets into Fire Crystals. The problem is the deeper you go into the dungeon the fewer Dungeon Dust drops you get, eventually only getting the Treasure Bags netting 10 each boss. This isn't nearly enough to keep up with the Fire Droplet drops, so I find myself starting over at around floor 130 to farm up more dust.

If you do decide to utilize the dungeon, be sure to keep an eye out for the things that don't have any other use but sell for a good amount of money. Amber, Cubice, Mini Meteor, Ice Crystal Wing, and Glowing Earth Fruit fall into this category, just make sure to keep one of each one that's needed for the Museum if you want to complete that.

Once you can grab a Jewelry table hold on to your crystals to bulk purchase Diamond Shards. Turning them into diamonds gets you a slightly better return on crystals than just converting them up until you start running out of table space to sell things.

Lastly, the dungeon is honestly kind of boring. There are only two types of enemies, combat is silly easy (unless you're on switch, rip joystick targeting), and the levels are small so variety is minimal.

So it's good to dip in to some days for geodes and coal, and can be a clutch save if you need to get just that last little bit of money for a rare skin on sale, but I can't recommend it as a serious income source.

Make sure you keep on top of these as much as you can to get their rewards ASAP.

• Elizabeth - bouquets.
  
• Mr. Mooney - barn, robot.
  
• Alberto - glider.
  
• Captain Conrad - robot.
  
• Robert/McCoy/Flo - (starts with On The Net) pumpkin pie.

As you run through the world doing whatever else, here are a few things worth your time and energy to snag.

• Fruit Trees - Always bump these and hoard the fruit for the seedmaker. Turn them into a fruit tree farm at home once you can.
  
• Honey - Available once you have the glider, be sure to swing out to three islands with beehives on them any time you're nearby for a chance at honeycomb. Honeycomb becomes apiaries, which becomes more honey.
  
• White Bush - The best bouquet you can make before Lavenders.
  
• Lavender/Frost Lavender - The best two bouquets you can make, period.
  
• Wheat - Available on black sheep island and from the Miller's backyard. Turns into Dough, which is used in many high-value recipes, so it's worth hoarding.
  
• Wood and Stone - Takes no energy to pick up, and you'll need plenty throughout the game.
  
• Plant Fiber - Also takes no energy to pick up, and you'll need all the paper.
  
• Message in a Bottle - Doesn't have a huge economic impact, but I thought I'd include these here as a free source of pirate decorations and bottles for bees, butterflies, and dyes.

• Blacksmith - unlocks the workbench for planters
  
• Flower shop - unlocks bouquets. You may also need another couple of town upgrades to unlock Purple Cosmos, so read ahead to the Early Game section to find good targets.
  
• Miners - unlock caves. Open up the cave in town, near the pond to get an additional source of plant fiber.
  
• Shop 1 - Getting a second table is super important for customer management.
  
• Blueprint Vendor - Grab the Forest Habitat recipe and go tame yourself an elk for zoomies.

Daily quest board - A slight increase in value from using the flowers for a bouquet. Only once per day, but still nice.

Paper - Head to the camp in the northeast and scoop up all the plant fiber every 1-2 days. Once you open up the town cave add this to your rotation too. Turn this into paper and dump that straight onto your sale table. You'll also pick up some clovers and small bugs that can be sold. Generally I don't find fishing worth it until you get the gold fishing rod much, much later.

Dungeon - There's not a whole lot of profit to be made in the open world right now, so lean on the dungeon a bit. Crystals can be turned into gold at a 2:1 ratio, or if you have a friend or previous game to donate a Jewelry Workbench you can grab diamond shards for a small increase in return. Be sure to craft yourself an ice wand ASAP with an ice shard, 10 dungeon dust, and a stardust (break a fallen star at the blacksmith's anvil) for a 20% DPS boost. Otherwise save your dungeon dust until you get to floor 90+ to turn Fire Droplets into Fire Crystals.

You'll want to at least get through floor 59 so you can pick up a crop of Dungeon Flowers. Hoard these until you can nab a Seed Maker.

If you want to really go all-out look up Elizabeth's questlines ahead of time and stock the items so you can get the bouquet recipes ASAP.

I generally consider this phase of the game to start mid-Spring and last until the end of Fall.

• Glider shop - Gets us access to the outer islands and easier overland travel.
  
• Barn - unlocks cows and the Dough recipe. Also nab a sheep to start saving up wool for ferrets.
  
• Chicken Coop - unlocks chickens which lay eggs for Dough.
  
• Baker - another thing we need for Dough.
  
• Miller - Easy wheat farm...for Dough.
  
• Fisherman - Unlocks the quest chain for the Pumpkin Pie recipe.
  
• Inn - Unlocks Sierra later.
  
• Fruit Tree Shop - Buying the fruit tree seeds is an abysmal investment, but we're here for the Fruit Tree Seedmaker.
  
• Cheap town upgrades - Get more energy and quests for stores under 10k each.
  
• First two backpack upgrades - Inventory space, yay.

Daily quest board - Still worth your time.

Bouquets - Mostly made from Daisies, Pink Flowers, and Tall White Flowers. Once White Flower Bushes start spawning (in the forest), these are going to be your best bouquets all the way up until Lavender. Start the commercial farming operation!

Paper - Still a decent maker until you start really cranking out planters for White Flower Bushes.

Grow enough carrots to start taming all 10 bunnies every day. Carrot seeds grow in 3 days with a yield of 1-2, so 20 plots of carrots should keep you going, or 30 if you want to play it safe. These will be the first part of the poop factory to make fertilizer for your industrial farming machine.

Around late Fall or early Winter, look at grabbing a couple ferrets and dung beetles to help manage your chicken coop and poop factory.

When you have a bit of excess cash, 10 or more honeycombs, and 12 or more bottled bees, grab the Apiary recipe so you can set up your honey farm.

In Fall you'll get a quest from Sadie for some small fish that will net you your first Seedmaker, yay! First order of business is to turn some of those stored Dungeon Flowers into seeds and make a Dungeon Workbench so you can transition to using these as your primary paper source. Be sure to tap the Seedmaker three times a day to get the most out of it until you get the ability to craft more (each seed takes five hours to process, so if you get to it by 7 it'll be done by noon, then again by 5, then once more before you pass out).

Once you purchase the Fruit Tree Shop, keep an eye on Sammy for a new quest. Chase it down to get the Fruit Tree Seedmaker.

If you haven't gotten enough buildings up to spawn pumpkins, make sure to pick up a handful of seeds from Halloween Island.

The Pumpkin Pie quest chain is a bit of a weird one - it starts with Robert after you've purchased the Fisherman, but then you're working with McCoy for half of it, and it doesn't involve pies at all until the last two quests. Just be sure to keep checking in with both of these people (and eventually Flo when she's outside the house).

At some point it may be worth finishing the Paintbrush Collection 1 for the Museum to get the Clothing Workbench for Pillows. I say "may be" because Pillows neither make a huge profit nor sell for high per-item price (only 235). They're just a way to efficiently offload the Delicate Fur you get from your poop farm.

I generally consider this to be the start of Winter Year 1 all the way through Year 2, maybe even a little into Year 3.

• Decoration Station - Lets you bake Cakes.
  
• Shop 4 -> Discount Bin - Lets you offload random things that you don't want to sell on your tables any more, like Clovers and Small Crabs.
  
• Tree Farm - Gets you free daily wood and opens up birch trees.
  
• Sierra's Shop + Upgrade (can't purchase until Spring 25) - Free daily plant fiber!
  
• Upgrade Coop - more chickens for eggs and unlocks the mini-coop for even moar.
  
• Silver and Gold tools - Axe is much more important than Pickaxe since wood is needed in much greater quantities. These are just so expensive it's hard to justify them before about this point in the game.
  
• Living Room Upgrade - +5 energy and +5 inventory for the same price as the last backpack upgrade. Very worth it.
  
• Last Backpack Upgrade - Yup, inventory space.
  
• All other town upgrades - Towards late mid-game you'll probably start swimming in money, so fill out the rest of the town to get the quests and energy.

Fruit Bowl - Once you start getting large sets of fruit trees going, these are the golden egg. They make very little profit over the base ingredients, but they crunch 30 items into one for a net sale price of 1200. With the addition of chipmunks the time investment is very minimal (only uses Cooking Station so more than bouquets but much less than pies and cakes), requires 0 energy, stacks to 50 on the sale tables, and scales extremely well into late game since you can reuse the planters to keep upping your production.

Pumpkin Pie - One of the rare items that actually turns a large profit over the components.

Lavender/Frost Lavender bouquets - Frost lavender beats out Lavender by just a teensy bit. Not a lot of profit, strictly speaking, but planter farming is easily scale-able.

Cake - Probably your first use of Dough, a good way to dump your vast stores of Honey, and takes less energy than Pumpkin Pie. Turns a moderate profit over its ingredients.

Birch - Birch trees always at least turn a profit (1k for each seed, drops 20-26 logs at 50 each), plus they can drop goodies like Golden Leaves, saplings to double your investment, and Beehives which craft into harvestable hives for more honeycomb. Craft them into furniture if you have spare silver bars, otherwise just fill empty slots on your tables with planks. Good short-term-profit cash dump.

Pillows - The easiest way to turn Delicate Fur from that poop farm you set up into something reasonably sell-able. Not a lot of money to be had here, but a good way to fill empty tables or the discount bin.

In Winter you'll receive the recipe for both the Seedmaker and the mini Barn, both of which you should make several of immediately. Stock the mini barns with cows and a couple goats. The barn upgrade technically isn't necessary unless you want to be careful to not overwrite some colored animals, or if you need more barn animals before you get the mini barn.

Stay on top of the Bulk Orders questline from Captain Conrad. This seems to be one of the triggers to kick off the Robot questline, but the folks on the wiki haven't exactly pinned down everything that's required yet. You can definitely start the quest in year 3 if you're on top of it.

When you have time to deforest the Forest or extra wood from the Tree Farm, make foundations to create bridges to connect all the islands and save yourself a ton of travel time.

Once you tame 100 rabbits the Big Bunny can spawn. Check the debug console (teeny tiny gear icon at the bottom-right of the Paws menu) Animals tab each day after 6:20 to see if it's spawned and grab one. Just be sure to click on the Animals tab again to refresh it if you're not opening it for the first time this game session. They have the same run speed as every other fastest mount and they have a crazy jump height that's unavailable on any other mount. Best mount available before Kozita, and arguably still the best mount after because even the gliding mounts can't jump like that.

• Permanent Shop Assistant - Opens your store on-time and sells everything on your tables. Still requires you to put things on the tables, but saves a lot of time especially when you can have large stacks of stuff out.
  
• Robots - For 25k each these bad boys milk all your cows and goats and will pick up just about anything.
  
• Town Cave - Purchased in the Mayor's-house-turned-Town-Hall, this gets you access to the Geode Processor and geode deliveries.
  
• Miner's Contract + Upgrades - Gets you regular deliveries of Geodes for Quartz.
  
• Kozita Island - Save 250k to be able to go here right at the start of year 4.
  
• Big House Upgrades - Extra energy for a big price.

As you get later and later into the game, you'll probably scale up to fancier items, edging out the lowest items on this list as you start running out of table space to get things sold every day.

Feather Light Chest - Credit to SenilBiffen for pointing this one out to me in the comments. 3820 per chest sale, which is a big profit over its 2500 cost of components, and stacks to 10 so table management isn't too bad. Basically impossible to fill your tables with these (see Other Goals below for the breakdown), but at the very least it's a nice way to offload all the feathers you'll collect from the chickens you used to farm Dough.

Fruit Bowl - These really start scaling well into late game since they can be mostly automated with chipmunks and the cheaper and faster Cooking Station.

Mac and Cheese - This one can be a bit hard to balance with Dough demands, but turns a huge profit and sells for 1150 each.

Pumpkin Pie - Same old, just scale up to get more.

Frost Lavender Bouquet - Ditto.

Cake - Ditto.

Birch - Ditto, and probably the last thing you'll still be selling at this point before you start paring down for table space.

If you start cranking out a bunch of Butterfly Farms (and why not, you'll have tons of Poop and Golden Poop if you're making animal farms), then at some point you'll start drowning in seeds. This is a good time to craft a Seed Bundler and start utilizing it. Bundled seeds are strictly less efficient per seed and per poop than planting crops individually, but each one does yield more per planter and per in-game day.

When you're closing in on the 3rd and 4th Miner's Contract upgrades, build a bunch of mini coops and stack them with chickens to farm feathers for Feather Light Chests. You get an average of about seven Quartz each day from the fully upgraded contract, so you'd need about 70 feathers each day to keep pace, which will take 210-ish chickens. At this point you'll have to commit to farming the dungeon regularly to keep up on quartz if you want to scale this strategy further, or you can just fill the rest of your tables with the other items.

The only thing that changes once you get access to Kozita is you can swap out Pumpkin Pies for Pineapple Pies if you're not completely on the Fruit Bowl train yet. Dragon Fruit Pies can replace Cakes and Frost Lavender Bouquets, but you're very likely not even making those any more between Pumpkin Pies and Fruit Bowls saturating your customers. If you're bored and still making either one, the 95% Discount Bin is now available for you to offload extra stock every day.

This section is for dragons looking to get the absolute most money they can, ignoring the rest of the game.

So here's the short version - Fruit Bowls are clearly the best money makers, but they take a really long time to bring online. Bouquets bring the income to start things off, and you can completely ignore the Dough side of tech.

• Blacksmith - Workbench for Planters and Cooking Station.
  
• Flower shop - Bouquets.
  
• Fruit tree shop - fruit tree investments and the seedmaker.
  
• Blueprint vendor - forest habitat to get an elk.

• Elizabeth - Bouquets
  
• Sammy - Fruit Tree Seedmaker

Bouquets - Whatever random stuff you find -> White Flower Bush -> Lavender -> Frost Lavender.

Fruit Bowls - Sell for 1200 per item, stack to 50, no energy cost, can be stacked in the same space, very little time to compile with the Cooking Station.

Fruit Bowls take 10 Cherries, Apples, and Oranges per bowl. At 50 per stack, that's 500 of each fruit, which takes 167 trees to accomplish in one harvest. Multiply by 6 for the number of table slots you want to fill, multiply by 6 again to get harvests 6/7 days of the week, and you're at 6,012 trees of each type. So...yeah, you won't be capping out this strategy any time soon. I'm pretty sure there's nowhere near 300 transactions a day even with a fully upgraded shop, using just two tables, and a Permanent Shop Assistant, so we can finally stop there.

I mean...After that there's a 95% return Discount Bin on Kozita with 10 slots you can saturate with an additional 11,690 trees (of each type) if you really want. At that point the 41,082 trees, 9 chipmunks, and 16 Cooking Stations are probably taking ten minutes to load each day, and your game is probably unstable, so we'll stop before we make another 11,690 trees (29,392 of each tree for 88,176 total) to fill the home Discount Bin because we're totally not crazy, right?

To get to this point though, you're going to need a lot of fruit trees, which means a lot of capital investment. Grab Elizabeth ASAP plus a couple more cheap stores to unlock Purple Cosmos spawns. Expand your Bouquet empire like normal, and just ignore any other intensive activities like Barns and Coops. Cats, Pigs, Hippos, Bunnies, Goats, and Cows (just don't milk them) all make good poop factories, with Bunnies easiest to gather en-masse at 7 days to tame 10 with something you can grow. Grab the axe upgrades early to chop more wood to get more planters. Keep an eye on Sammy's store and snag as many Frost Lavender as you can early, if RNG favors you. Never use the seed bundler, only fertilizer on base seeds.

Starting in Summer, chop down all the fruit trees as soon as they respawn for extra chances at free seeds. Each fruit tree only provides 2 fruit every 6 days, so it would only provide you one chance at the Seedamker if it respawned on the 1st of the month. Chopping them down, however, you get up to 3 chances at a seed each month (one every 8 days). If you want to really go HAM, save before you chop each tree and reload if you don't get a seed for a guaranteed 3 every month.

Once you get the Fruit Tree store, keep dumping your money into seeds because you won't get the Fruit Tree Seedmaker (or even Apples and Oranges) for a while. Each tree bought should pay itself back in about a year, then make 400g every 20 days.

Continue dumping any energy you don't spend chopping down fruit trees on Bouquet farming until your (level 5) store is saturated, then transition into only Fruit Bowls. Swap planters to your Fruit Tree farm as you phase them out of growing Frost Lavender.

Break the game's economy by about Spring Y2, then laugh from atop your dragon hoard as you watch the gold counter never stop.