Last few months, while waiting for the post covid travel crush to end; it’s been amusing to watch it from my couch; hundreds of cancellation, over sold planes, Athens and Venice packed so that they look like Disney during a school vacation period, etc. It’s what happens when the travel industry takes government dollars intended to keep them from laying off workers during a pandemic and instead they pocket the cash and do it anyway… and then find once the pandemic ends they find they’re understaffed when a populous of millions of customers that spent 2 years on house arrest, doing little but dreaming about where they’ll go once it’s over, suddenly all up and decide to travel? Yah that…
So I spent all that time playing the game Cozy Grove (while simultaneously watching TV): here’s what I learned
- Early on you’ll get a quest for fishing and a very cheap rod to do the task. From that point, prioritize fishing, collecting stuff off the ground, AND (once you’ve gotten enough cash to buy the tool which costs 7,500) collecting bugs in order to make the money you’ll need to buy the other things that are more profitable; at the start, save ONE of each (fish or bug) in storage until the guy standing on the beach near the sand castle (on about day 3 of play) opens up the ability to to give him ONE of each for which you are richly rewarded with money and gems, DO NOT sells gems, or the stuff you pick up off the ground or dug for… hoard those as you’ll need them … otherwise, (for all but the first one) burn the fish for their bones, and sell the bones for more cash than the fish themselves sell for (hold on to about 50 bones in storage as they are necessary for certain tasks, like repairing tools, but sell the rest — your rod and bug catcher NEVER break, you’re digging and hacking tools will… there’s even achievements for breaking them).
- Mushrooms and veggies of various types can also be burnt to create other ingredients for cooking, but make sure to keep about 10 of each (so like there are 4 kinds of mushrooms, etc.) in storage as you’ll need them to feed imps — who are very specific about what they want to be fed and you might not find any of it that day if you didn’t already have it hoarded… or to fulfill quests which will sometimes want 20 mushrooms. The rarer the ingredient the more of the product it produces, so like mushrooms create grilled mushroom sticks… brown mushrooms only make one, Shiitake mushrooms make like 6…. but quests that want mushrooms will be happy with either so save up 20 brown mushrooms which are really easy to find for the quests… but keep like 3 shiitake for the imps in storage.
- Once you start getting money, you need to prioritize buying animals to then feed with with whichever food they’re in the mood for; keep buying some every day at until you’ve maxed the achievements for each type … pay attention to their likes and dislikes (some like birds don’t like being near other birds for instance, but have no issue with deer) and strategically create environments that ensure they are 3 hearts full. If you can’t make the animal happy, right away, stick it in storage for later, and to fulfill some upcoming quests that will want fresh animals to complete it (3 of each type should be enough). It usually requires 5 common items of the type they like to make them happy, unless they don’t like common items in which case either don’t buy them or keep them in your storage to use for quests.
- Every day you get about 3 new recipes in the game, some as quest rewards some found by digging or what have you… but it’s only about 3 recipes per day. At some point the chef ghost kitchen will open up and you’ll start collecting recipes to make different kinds of food. Until such time as you have collected ALL the food recipes, to your frustration most of the recipes that drop in quests or collecting will be for food, NOT for making items like lamps and chairs. If you produce a new food item and turn it in to the guy on the beach who hands out rewards, he’ll give you between 2 and 4 more recipes, along with money and gems. If you do NOT prioritize doing maxing out his collection (even above feeding animals), you’ll find yourself playing the game for 3 weeks sold and never picking up a recipe to build items to put in the rooms to make the animals happy enough to drop 3 tokens rather than none when fed. So you HAVE to prioritize getting new recipes to the guy on the beach
- Fence posts are the CHEAPEST items to make… you get 20 of them for very little in the way of collected resources, and 5 of them placed together will make an outdoor animal happy. You’ll always get rustic posts as a first recipe, and the first animals for sale on the first day will always include ones that like common rustic things. If you’re lucky you’ll get recipes for other types of posts early on, but you’ll always start out with rustic.
- you wouldn’t think it, but fence posts can also be used INSIDE the house to make cats happy. Only cats will want like 30 of them to be happy. When making cats happy prioritize items that take up very little floor space. Some indoor items take up FOUR squares of space, block your ability to see the cats making them hard to click on, and you won’t be able to put in enough of them (common) to make the cats happy because there’s insufficient floor space. Happily fence posts only take one square of space.
- the same rule for animals applies to trees, you want to make them fully happy BEFORE you harvest them, or they won’t drop much of anything… and wild fruit trees like 5 common rustic things, and you can use fence posts. But here’s a trick, do NOT leave the posts there, pick them up after harvesting. As you put them down one at a time you’ll notice the tree starts spitting out stuff … if you go through the effort of placing 5 common items every time, you’ll double the fruit they drop, and turning fruit into Fruit Tincture is one of the most profitable ways to make money…
- Berries from bushes are far less profitable than fruit from trees… so while you’ll need some to make animals happy (some animals like being placed next to them, and it usually requires around 5 or 6 bushes to make them happy) … don’t waste your money on buying a lot of bushes. Fruit from trees produce TWICE what fruit from berries do, although both can be burned to create roasted fruit. Quests that want raw food will be as happy with berries as they are with fruit from trees, so save your berries for that purpose till you have a stack of 50 in storage and then burn the rest for roasted fruit.
- Once you’ve gotten your house to level 2 or 3 you’ll be able to go in, and there’s a Japanese lucky cat (like in Japanese restaurants) in the corner. Every day make sure to save 3 brown mushrooms or 3 berries from berry bushes to “Lure” a cat another into the house for the next day… cats, like other animals MUST be happy … Rustic ones are the easiest to make happy from the start with the fence posts. If you don’t have any items in the room to make them happy don’t bother feeding them because there’s no return on investment, they don’t starve to death (I guess they hunt mice or something). Once they start dropping tokens you can then in the lucky cat exchange those tokens for other sorts of tokens you’ll need… wait till you need something you don’t have and exchange them strategically for that.
- ALL cats other than the low maintenance one given as rewards for quests hate other cats. As such, to maximize what they drop once you have more than 1 in a room, you have to pick them all up and only put one down at a time, feed it (making sure it’s fully happy first to maximize output), then pick it up and feed the next one.
- For people who care, there are recipes on line for luring different sorts of cats, but their differences are entirely aesthetic. NONE of the ones you can lure are the sort that are low maintenance (don’t dislike other cats) or produce any other sort of benefit other than appearance, if you’re into that sort of thing.
- Keep an eye on the recipes you collect for making stuff, at some point you’ll get one that requires 4 fishbones to make an item or other (doesn’t matter which it is). The 4 fishbone items all sell for 2,000 gold each … so once you get that (it’s a question of luck how early it is in the game) use your fishbones to first make those items and sell them and generate a lot of cash which you then use to create an orchard of trees, and those trees will then make you a lot of easy cash
- Previously I mentioned you’ll get gems. Gem stones should NEVER be sold… hold on to them till you open up the guy that “recycles” things… in the start, hold on to about 100 of the most basic gems (you’ll need them for basic repairs or purchasing basic items) but recycle the rest for a bunch of cash.
- Priorities for that cash…
A) upgrading your tent at least until you have 3 rooms inside the structure — this provides room for all the types of cats (so like you can put ones that like cozy in the same room as ones that like rustic, but NOT with cats that like spooky), extends your storage space enough to have room for what you start out needing to store, and
B) at the end of the day — once you do this the store will not sell you anything until the following day — there’s an exorbitant fee that upgrades the store so that he sells a greater variety of goods the next day… you do this twice to get him to fullest range.
C) Once his stock is fully extended, he’ll start selling you bag upgrades that extend the size of your backpack by 4 storage places each. There are about 6 of these for sale. They cost about 200K each but if you have enough cash you can buy them ALL on the same day if you want. Buy one which will be at the top of the list of items for sale, close the store, reopen the store and it will seem gone, but if you scroll down, you’ll find it has reappeared at the very end of what he has for sale. - Once you’ve maxed out the size of your backpack, continue extending your home till it maxes at (level 11) which results in 5 rooms and about as much storage space as you need.
- If you’re the sort who REALLY likes holding stuff, storage trunks are for sale in the store at the price of 35K each. (You WILL want to hoard some rare/legendary/epic shells, fish and bugs as they will be needed for quests, and can be a bitch if not impossible to find when you need them if you don’t hoard them in preparation)
- Shells in particularly are a bitch, you ONLY pick up 20 shells a day. Fish and bugs regenerate non stop, but shells are limited to about 20 a day and MOST are going to be common. For this same reason, it’s almost impossible to collect every single type of shell unless you’re obsessive about doing nothing with your life other than playing the game… so don’t even try… and even if you play every day 5 times a day doing nothing but beach combing because you’ve essentially maxed out the game you could play it for a full year and STILL not manage it unless you extremely lucky