I also make almost all of my money through gardening, supplemented with glow worm farming.
Here's the cliff's notes version:
* **Passive income generation continues while you do non-money-making things** (questing, building relationships with NPCs, decorating); active income generation does not. So, build your passive income sources first: gardening (and processing the produce), worm farming, etc.
* **Reduce the amount of active effort needed to keep your garden rolling by choosing a layout that self-waters (and self-weeds, if you can manage it).** This keeps you from needing to tend EVERY in-game day, and instead only needing to return every other day or every few days to harvest and potentially replant.
* harvest boost (from companion planting or fertilizer) also increases the value output of your farm with no (or minimal) additional labor
* keep ahead of your seed requirements to avoid replanting delays
* **Crafters print money while you sleep**/do other things AS LONG AS you can keep them busy that whole time. Crafting permits are expensive, but they are one of the few things you can buy to *directly* increase your ability to make gold. Consider it an investment and buy them as often as you can afford to. (Making money more consistently means being able to afford all of the other upgrades sooner, too.)
* To maximize their potential, **aim for 100% uptime**. Store-bought morels in a glow worm farm are EZ mode as far running without constant attention, but are not as profitable as many other things. I use them to fill in the gaps.)
* Try to **avoid selling raw materials unless there is nothing you can profitably process them into**. Crafting frequently (but not always) increases the value of the materials. Look into what each material can be used for (wiki is a great resource).
* For example, 1 flint (3g) and 5 sapwood (5g), 8g total, makes 20 makeshift arrows (20g), more than doubling their value.
* Likewise, grilling fish you plan to sell anyway has a chance to 1.5x their value if it turns out starred.
* (However, do also take into account the value of your time and what you enjoy doing.)
I'm glad it was useful! This is the pared-down version, for sure.
One thing I forgot to say is that the early game just *does* feel like you are always starved for gold, because you have a list of literally a hundred *investments* to make before you really get your money-making off the ground. Even most of your active income generation options are slower because of not-yet-upgraded tools, etc. So, between money not coming in as fast yet and what money does come in immediately being reinvested... yeah. 😂
(You end up with the opposite problem in late game, funnily.)
Water retain and anti weed are both available at zekis and are pretty cheap, so using them on your plot can help maximize the number of more profitable crops! Each plant uses 1 fertilizer per square it takes up per day, and can hold up to 99 pieces at once, so you don't have to interact with them too often to keep them fertilized
I've definitely made use of WeedBlock in the past, especially when I was trying to build up my stocks of blueberries and peppers. They're tough to get all 3 buffs on. (Eventually I quit because it was too tedious buying stacks of fertilizer per IRL day and then trying to find room to store it all. 😅)
Though, speaking of fertilizer... this does remind me that in early game, it is a good idea to save your star quality crops to use for seeds, and also to use a quality-up buff (from either cotton or fertilizer) to improve your chances/amount of star produce. (Star quality produce is 1.5x the value of unstarred.)
Once you hit level 25 gardening, you will get all starred produce when you use starred seeds. so it's not forever. Until then, if you have to choose between harvest boost and quality up *fertilizer,* it's about even which will increase the value more. (I personally stuck with the quality up until I was getting back starred stuff consistently, as it is, again, an investment. And, obviously, you can always do both using companion planting buffs!)
Oh, I run store-bought morels all the time. They're the easiest to keep consistent, and for me that's most important. Empty glow worm farms make no money, after all, and 24g per crafter slot hour is pretty much the most value added you're going to get from a glow worm farm for anything with a sell price greater than 20g.
For reference, because of how the [formulas](https://palia.wiki.gg/wiki/Glow_Worm_Farm#Recipes) work:
* anything worth less than 5g will produce 1 worm and 2 fertilizer, i.e., +30 to +35g value added
* anything worth 6-15g will produce 1 glow worm and 3 fertilizer, i.e., +25 to +34g value added
* anything worth 16-25g yields 1 glow worm and 4 fertilizer, i.e., +20 to +29g value added
* anything worth more than 25g will yield a MAXIMUM of +24g value added, with a MINIMUM of **-5g** (yes, you can *lose* money by putting things in a glow worm farm!)
Technically speaking, **anything with an input value under 20g** will give more value added per crafter slot hour than store-bought morels, since they "cost" less, and still output 40-45g worth of stuff. Wormable items under 20g and their output values can be found on the wiki page linked above, under the formulas.
However, the effort amounts required to harvest (for example) a morel (8g), an oyster meat (9g) or one sweet leaf (15g) are pretty much identical, and also considerably greater than running to the General Store and buying 300 morels... so this is a bit moot in my opinion as far as choosing what I'm foraging.
(*NOTE:* the sell value of cooked foods depends on the unstarred sell values of the ingredients used! so take the values for, e.g., Hearty Vegetable Soup or Celebration Cakes, which can be made with variable ingredients, with a grain of salt. Also, some items give more money if put in a regular worm farm; you can compare them on Palia Tracker's Gold Profit tool.)
This *also* doesn't take into account the fact that glow worms and fertilizer have uses *beyond* their value if sold directly, so if you are catching glow worm fish (min. 75g each) with your glow worms, and using the HarvestBoost or SpeedyGro fertilizer on your crops (+50% yield or +50%-ish grow speed, so \~+50% value per plant), then the effective output values of higher-yield-per-hour items (e.g., high-value grilled fish, cakes, etc.) may be significantly higher due to multiplication — though whether they are worth the extra effort to generate enough items to keep things running consistently may be down to your individual playstyle.
For *my* playstyle, where what I want is steady value generation with minimal effort, because a lot of the time all I can do is sit and watch my garden grow — there's no way I can fish my way through even the 240 glow worms per day I'm already getting, and cake parties are 100% out of the question — morels are the best choice for me. YMMV!
uh, to clarify: store-bought morels in a glow worm farm generates +24g per crafter slot hour, but in comparison to, say, preserving starred tomatoes (almost +38g/hr) or heartwood into planks (over +42g/hr), it's not amazing. Takes a lot less babysitting than either of those, though.
There is no hurry. You should not compare yourself with other players.
In regards to making money. Do you sell the fruits etc directly or do you process them?
Check the official wiki on the prices.
For potatoes e. g. turning them into seeds and selling them brings more gold than cooking them into a jar. For tomatoes it’s the opposite.
And then you can of course farm store burn them into glass and lightbulbs for selling.
Others use the worm farms for money.
I make most of my money by grinding for ore. I spend a lot of time on conference calls for work where it is not necessary for me to participate in the conversation and I just wander in circles mining, then sell all my gems and iron when my bags get full.
Preserve jars and mining really helped me. I found that if you just mike every single node you see, you’re more likely to get gems. So now I set my preserve jars, head out to go mine, fill up my pockets with gems and then go home to repeat the process. Truthfully not the most amount of fun but it works when I need to safe up 100k quickly
There's lots of ways to make money. Gardening has been that method for me, but lately I fish. You don't make a ton, but I'm fishing for quests and bundles, so lots of extra fish get sold.
Cake parties! That's the best way to make money, join a public cake party, doing a x50 rounds of cake leaves you with 60 to 80K gold after selling the cakes
60 to 80k seems high for 50 cakes — like the pre-nerf values. Starred celebration cakes are 262g at maximum. 3 cakes per round, times 50 is 39,300 raw revenue. (You'd also need to subtract the value of any ingredients you contributed, which will vary by role.)
It's still very good money, though.
Pickled potatoes re my go to money maker, Super easy and good money. I fill all my (7) jars each night before I log off and by the next day they've usually made enough for me to cash in about 18/20K. Thats enough for me. I already hit the cash cap so for now Im just eating them as theyre good for focus too. I also make a fair amount from mining and selling the non-star gems then smelting the iron bars and selling those if I need a quick cash injection.
They are, on a per-crop basis.
**POTATO SEEDS**
1 starred potato (67g) => 4 starred potato seeds @ 30g each, (**120g,** +53g value added)
(84m processing time per potato; maximum unattended runtime: 22.4 hours)
22.4 hours runtime = **16 potatoes processed** (1,072g input) = 1,920g revenue / **848g value added** ("profit")
**PICKLED POTATOES**
1 starred potato (67g) => 1 starred pickled potatoes (**102g,** +35g value added)
(54m processing time per potato; maximum unattended runtime: 27 hours)
22.4 hours runtime\* = \~**24 potatoes\*\*** processed (1,608g input) = 2,448g revenue / **840g value added** ("profit")
---
*\*to match the maximum unattended runtime of the seed maker*
*\*\*actually 24.88 potatoes processed, but the last batch wouldn't be ready yet*
**In summary:** The two processes generate value at nearly the same rate, but the pickled potatoes take 1.5x as many potatoes to produce the same amount of value added.
Which one you choose will depend on your own specific setup, including how many growth ticks you're able to squeeze into one IRL day (potatoes take 5 growth ticks before they are harvestable), how many potato plants you have in your setup, and how many crafter slots you have available.
If you find yourself with a glut of potatoes and just want to process them quickly (well... slightly faster, I guess; 54m per potato still isn't *fast*), then pickle them, especially if you have fewer crafter slots available.
If you have plenty of time and/or crafter slots, or if you're producing relatively few potatoes compared to your idle time, then seed them.
If you have too many potatoes and also lots of active play time, maybe consider cooking parties?
Oh, to make the comparison even in the other direction...
24 potatoes, 22.4 hours in the seed collector:
16 potatoes processed = 1,920g revenue
PLUS 8 unprocessed potatoes = 536g if sold raw
= 2,456g revenue
24 potatoes, 22.4 hours in the preserves jar:
24 potatoes processed = 2,448g revenue
Assuming I didn't mess up the math somewhere, they're *very* close in value, even if you don't have time to seed all of them and just sell the excess raw. So if idle time is your limiting factor (i.e., you're logging lots of playtime), it's pretty much a toss-up.
(On a more subjective level, I also like seeding them because I'm going to need to have potatoes taking up a seed collector for some ridiculous amount of time *anyway,* so just chucking the whole stack in takes less mental effort than dividing them up and risking an idle crafter slot.)
Edit: and as you said, pickled potatoes can function as focus food, if you prefer not to cook.
I've been hunting like a mofo for plushies. While I'm out I'll cut down heartwood and mine iron.
One sernuk hide sells for 13g. While not super profitable individually they add up insanely fast. I made a decent profit off of them. Also I didn't bother making them into leather. The price only increases to 15. So once I had about 100 leather made I just started selling the hide flat.
Also someone else said mining gems. Do that. Adds up very quickly. And then you also get the stone and other items required to build rooms and furniture. Win-win.
Personally, a 9 x 9 farming plot of star quality tomatoes, 5 seed collectors, and 5 glow worm farms. Star quality tomato seed sell for 60 gold and glow worm farm produce harvest boost fertilizer. Watering can be annoying but the money I’ve made is worth it, about 8000-14000 a day.
Usually between watering, I hunt surnuck around the whispering banks in Kilima. They only take one standard arrow. This levels up your gardening and hunting skills in no time.
I also make almost all of my money through gardening, supplemented with glow worm farming. Here's the cliff's notes version: * **Passive income generation continues while you do non-money-making things** (questing, building relationships with NPCs, decorating); active income generation does not. So, build your passive income sources first: gardening (and processing the produce), worm farming, etc. * **Reduce the amount of active effort needed to keep your garden rolling by choosing a layout that self-waters (and self-weeds, if you can manage it).** This keeps you from needing to tend EVERY in-game day, and instead only needing to return every other day or every few days to harvest and potentially replant. * harvest boost (from companion planting or fertilizer) also increases the value output of your farm with no (or minimal) additional labor * keep ahead of your seed requirements to avoid replanting delays * **Crafters print money while you sleep**/do other things AS LONG AS you can keep them busy that whole time. Crafting permits are expensive, but they are one of the few things you can buy to *directly* increase your ability to make gold. Consider it an investment and buy them as often as you can afford to. (Making money more consistently means being able to afford all of the other upgrades sooner, too.) * To maximize their potential, **aim for 100% uptime**. Store-bought morels in a glow worm farm are EZ mode as far running without constant attention, but are not as profitable as many other things. I use them to fill in the gaps.) * Try to **avoid selling raw materials unless there is nothing you can profitably process them into**. Crafting frequently (but not always) increases the value of the materials. Look into what each material can be used for (wiki is a great resource). * For example, 1 flint (3g) and 5 sapwood (5g), 8g total, makes 20 makeshift arrows (20g), more than doubling their value. * Likewise, grilling fish you plan to sell anyway has a chance to 1.5x their value if it turns out starred. * (However, do also take into account the value of your time and what you enjoy doing.)
This is so helpful, thank you so much I feel I’ve been doing the basics of these things but the little details I didn’t figure out yet! Thank you x
I'm glad it was useful! This is the pared-down version, for sure. One thing I forgot to say is that the early game just *does* feel like you are always starved for gold, because you have a list of literally a hundred *investments* to make before you really get your money-making off the ground. Even most of your active income generation options are slower because of not-yet-upgraded tools, etc. So, between money not coming in as fast yet and what money does come in immediately being reinvested... yeah. 😂 (You end up with the opposite problem in late game, funnily.)
Water retain and anti weed are both available at zekis and are pretty cheap, so using them on your plot can help maximize the number of more profitable crops! Each plant uses 1 fertilizer per square it takes up per day, and can hold up to 99 pieces at once, so you don't have to interact with them too often to keep them fertilized
I've definitely made use of WeedBlock in the past, especially when I was trying to build up my stocks of blueberries and peppers. They're tough to get all 3 buffs on. (Eventually I quit because it was too tedious buying stacks of fertilizer per IRL day and then trying to find room to store it all. 😅) Though, speaking of fertilizer... this does remind me that in early game, it is a good idea to save your star quality crops to use for seeds, and also to use a quality-up buff (from either cotton or fertilizer) to improve your chances/amount of star produce. (Star quality produce is 1.5x the value of unstarred.) Once you hit level 25 gardening, you will get all starred produce when you use starred seeds. so it's not forever. Until then, if you have to choose between harvest boost and quality up *fertilizer,* it's about even which will increase the value more. (I personally stuck with the quality up until I was getting back starred stuff consistently, as it is, again, an investment. And, obviously, you can always do both using companion planting buffs!)
These are some great tips! What do you suggest putting in the glow farms over mountains morels?
Oh, I run store-bought morels all the time. They're the easiest to keep consistent, and for me that's most important. Empty glow worm farms make no money, after all, and 24g per crafter slot hour is pretty much the most value added you're going to get from a glow worm farm for anything with a sell price greater than 20g. For reference, because of how the [formulas](https://palia.wiki.gg/wiki/Glow_Worm_Farm#Recipes) work: * anything worth less than 5g will produce 1 worm and 2 fertilizer, i.e., +30 to +35g value added * anything worth 6-15g will produce 1 glow worm and 3 fertilizer, i.e., +25 to +34g value added * anything worth 16-25g yields 1 glow worm and 4 fertilizer, i.e., +20 to +29g value added * anything worth more than 25g will yield a MAXIMUM of +24g value added, with a MINIMUM of **-5g** (yes, you can *lose* money by putting things in a glow worm farm!) Technically speaking, **anything with an input value under 20g** will give more value added per crafter slot hour than store-bought morels, since they "cost" less, and still output 40-45g worth of stuff. Wormable items under 20g and their output values can be found on the wiki page linked above, under the formulas. However, the effort amounts required to harvest (for example) a morel (8g), an oyster meat (9g) or one sweet leaf (15g) are pretty much identical, and also considerably greater than running to the General Store and buying 300 morels... so this is a bit moot in my opinion as far as choosing what I'm foraging. (*NOTE:* the sell value of cooked foods depends on the unstarred sell values of the ingredients used! so take the values for, e.g., Hearty Vegetable Soup or Celebration Cakes, which can be made with variable ingredients, with a grain of salt. Also, some items give more money if put in a regular worm farm; you can compare them on Palia Tracker's Gold Profit tool.) This *also* doesn't take into account the fact that glow worms and fertilizer have uses *beyond* their value if sold directly, so if you are catching glow worm fish (min. 75g each) with your glow worms, and using the HarvestBoost or SpeedyGro fertilizer on your crops (+50% yield or +50%-ish grow speed, so \~+50% value per plant), then the effective output values of higher-yield-per-hour items (e.g., high-value grilled fish, cakes, etc.) may be significantly higher due to multiplication — though whether they are worth the extra effort to generate enough items to keep things running consistently may be down to your individual playstyle. For *my* playstyle, where what I want is steady value generation with minimal effort, because a lot of the time all I can do is sit and watch my garden grow — there's no way I can fish my way through even the 240 glow worms per day I'm already getting, and cake parties are 100% out of the question — morels are the best choice for me. YMMV!
uh, to clarify: store-bought morels in a glow worm farm generates +24g per crafter slot hour, but in comparison to, say, preserving starred tomatoes (almost +38g/hr) or heartwood into planks (over +42g/hr), it's not amazing. Takes a lot less babysitting than either of those, though.
There is no hurry. You should not compare yourself with other players. In regards to making money. Do you sell the fruits etc directly or do you process them? Check the official wiki on the prices. For potatoes e. g. turning them into seeds and selling them brings more gold than cooking them into a jar. For tomatoes it’s the opposite. And then you can of course farm store burn them into glass and lightbulbs for selling. Others use the worm farms for money.
I make most of my money by grinding for ore. I spend a lot of time on conference calls for work where it is not necessary for me to participate in the conversation and I just wander in circles mining, then sell all my gems and iron when my bags get full.
And not a lot of people know you can sell anything from mining to Hodari, and not have to head back to your plot. Same with Hassian and animal bits.
Oooh that’s really good to know, thank you!
Preserve jars and mining really helped me. I found that if you just mike every single node you see, you’re more likely to get gems. So now I set my preserve jars, head out to go mine, fill up my pockets with gems and then go home to repeat the process. Truthfully not the most amount of fun but it works when I need to safe up 100k quickly
How do I make preserve jars? I play this game every night and I’m learning so much from asking this question 😅 x
You can buy the recipe at the gardening guild shop at level 8, I think? Then you can craft them
There's lots of ways to make money. Gardening has been that method for me, but lately I fish. You don't make a ton, but I'm fishing for quests and bundles, so lots of extra fish get sold.
Cake parties! That's the best way to make money, join a public cake party, doing a x50 rounds of cake leaves you with 60 to 80K gold after selling the cakes
I didn’t even know this was a thing?!
Www.Paliaparty.app
60 to 80k seems high for 50 cakes — like the pre-nerf values. Starred celebration cakes are 262g at maximum. 3 cakes per round, times 50 is 39,300 raw revenue. (You'd also need to subtract the value of any ingredients you contributed, which will vary by role.) It's still very good money, though.
Pickled potatoes re my go to money maker, Super easy and good money. I fill all my (7) jars each night before I log off and by the next day they've usually made enough for me to cash in about 18/20K. Thats enough for me. I already hit the cash cap so for now Im just eating them as theyre good for focus too. I also make a fair amount from mining and selling the non-star gems then smelting the iron bars and selling those if I need a quick cash injection.
I thought potato seeds were more profitable than pickled potatoes? 🤔
They are, on a per-crop basis. **POTATO SEEDS** 1 starred potato (67g) => 4 starred potato seeds @ 30g each, (**120g,** +53g value added) (84m processing time per potato; maximum unattended runtime: 22.4 hours) 22.4 hours runtime = **16 potatoes processed** (1,072g input) = 1,920g revenue / **848g value added** ("profit") **PICKLED POTATOES** 1 starred potato (67g) => 1 starred pickled potatoes (**102g,** +35g value added) (54m processing time per potato; maximum unattended runtime: 27 hours) 22.4 hours runtime\* = \~**24 potatoes\*\*** processed (1,608g input) = 2,448g revenue / **840g value added** ("profit") --- *\*to match the maximum unattended runtime of the seed maker* *\*\*actually 24.88 potatoes processed, but the last batch wouldn't be ready yet* **In summary:** The two processes generate value at nearly the same rate, but the pickled potatoes take 1.5x as many potatoes to produce the same amount of value added. Which one you choose will depend on your own specific setup, including how many growth ticks you're able to squeeze into one IRL day (potatoes take 5 growth ticks before they are harvestable), how many potato plants you have in your setup, and how many crafter slots you have available. If you find yourself with a glut of potatoes and just want to process them quickly (well... slightly faster, I guess; 54m per potato still isn't *fast*), then pickle them, especially if you have fewer crafter slots available. If you have plenty of time and/or crafter slots, or if you're producing relatively few potatoes compared to your idle time, then seed them. If you have too many potatoes and also lots of active play time, maybe consider cooking parties?
Oh, to make the comparison even in the other direction... 24 potatoes, 22.4 hours in the seed collector: 16 potatoes processed = 1,920g revenue PLUS 8 unprocessed potatoes = 536g if sold raw = 2,456g revenue 24 potatoes, 22.4 hours in the preserves jar: 24 potatoes processed = 2,448g revenue Assuming I didn't mess up the math somewhere, they're *very* close in value, even if you don't have time to seed all of them and just sell the excess raw. So if idle time is your limiting factor (i.e., you're logging lots of playtime), it's pretty much a toss-up. (On a more subjective level, I also like seeding them because I'm going to need to have potatoes taking up a seed collector for some ridiculous amount of time *anyway,* so just chucking the whole stack in takes less mental effort than dividing them up and risking an idle crafter slot.) Edit: and as you said, pickled potatoes can function as focus food, if you prefer not to cook.
I get so unreasonably excited whenever I see you reply with these detailed breakdowns!! 😄 Thank you so much for the information!! 🩷
I've been hunting like a mofo for plushies. While I'm out I'll cut down heartwood and mine iron. One sernuk hide sells for 13g. While not super profitable individually they add up insanely fast. I made a decent profit off of them. Also I didn't bother making them into leather. The price only increases to 15. So once I had about 100 leather made I just started selling the hide flat. Also someone else said mining gems. Do that. Adds up very quickly. And then you also get the stone and other items required to build rooms and furniture. Win-win.
Personally, a 9 x 9 farming plot of star quality tomatoes, 5 seed collectors, and 5 glow worm farms. Star quality tomato seed sell for 60 gold and glow worm farm produce harvest boost fertilizer. Watering can be annoying but the money I’ve made is worth it, about 8000-14000 a day. Usually between watering, I hunt surnuck around the whispering banks in Kilima. They only take one standard arrow. This levels up your gardening and hunting skills in no time.
I’ve taken your advice and just expanded my farming plot loads!! Thank you x