Hey! Let’s talk about Trailer Park Boys: Greasy Money a little more today.
Actually, let’s not talk, per se. This is going to be more of a mini-guide than the usual opinion piece. Greasy Money is a fairly standard idle game, though it does have a number of bells and whistles to differentiate itself from the thousands of other idle games on the iTunes App Store and Kongregate.com. As many of those other games, it deals with several different types of currency.
First, there’s cash. It’s fun, because there’s actually a story conceit as to why you’re making millions upon billions of dollars in the game. Usually that just gets completely ignored. Cash is mainly earned from your businesses. It can also be gained by cracking open trunks, which is kind of waste, because anything else you get from a trunk will be infinitely more valuable. Literally the only thing you can do with cash is invest it back in your businesses to attract more customers, which will increase the business’ cash output. And so the cycle continues.
Next are the hashcoins. These are the premium currency, and while the game does dole out a fair amount in the tutorial seasons, you will typically have to pay real money for more. You can also find one or two in a trunk from time to time, but they’re going to accumulate very slowly. Hashcoins are spent in the in-game store to buy premium trunks, time skips, and liquor.
Speaking of liquor, that’s the final currency type. This is the semi-premium currency, in that you don’t have to buy it with your heard-earned hashcoins, but you’re not going to be earning a useable amount very quickly. Liquor also happens to be the most valuable stuff in the game, as it’s used to upgrade your businesses and characters, and to buy new cards. There are tons of ways to get liquor, but most don’t pay out very well. The purpose of this guide is to tell you all the ways to get your liquor so that you can make the most out of your time with the game.
Side note: I suppose that technically, the character/business cards are also a form of currency, but forget those for now. They are essentially just a specialized form of liquor, anyhow.
That said, let’s take a look at all the ways you can earn liquor:
Julian’s Store – You can trade in hashcoins for liquor here. The going rates are 50:250, 180:1000, and 500:3000. Hashcoins are so rare that you may be tempted to burn them immediately on the small pack, but I’d suggest saving up for at least the 180-coin pack. You’re only getting 100 free liquor, but that’s still a substantial amount. And the 500-coin pack will take you years to save up for unless you’re willing to drop some real-life money on hashcoins.
Trunks – The bronze and silver trunks you win from missions may hold between 1-15 liquor. Usually on the lower end, I find. The gold and legendary trunks that you can buy from Julian for hashcoins promise significantly more, though it’s still not enough to be worth the price. Don’t ever buy trunks unless you really want to unlock new characters early on (it seems that you’ll eventually get them all for free through game progression). I bought a gold trunk once, before I realized how rare free hashcoins are, and I still regret it.
Lahey’s Trunk – This is pound-for-pound the best source of liquor in the game. Probably. I haven’t actually done the math. Regardless, every four hours, you’re allowed to break into Lahey’s trunk, and it’s always full of liquor. The shop icon says “up to 360” but I have only once received 200, and every other time it was between 100 and 130. The four hour wait may seem like a long time at first, but then you remember that it’s an idle game and most of the gameplay is based on waiting anyway. Problem solved!
Customer bonuses – Every time you upgrade a business to a certain milestone of customers (usually the next 50 or 100), you’re given a couple prizes and a cash multiplier. The prizes can include liquor, but it seems to cap out at about 4, even when you’re hitting higher customer numbers. This can be a nice little boost at the beginning of each season when your customer numbers go up very quickly, but don’t count on these bonuses to see you through to your next upgrade.
Camera Dicks – Occasionally, a group of camera dicks will appear on the map. You can’t miss them; they glow bright green. Click on them, and you’ll get the opportunity to watch a 30-second commercial for a cool 15 liquor. It’s not much, and I have no idea how often the camera dicks show up, but it’s a nice little score every once in a while.
Trade With Julian – Sometimes you’ll see a little lunch bag icon pop up at the bottom of the screen. If you click on it, Julian will offer to trade you 5 of your cards for 20 liquor. This is a great deal if you have a surplus of cards (I am drowning in Sarah and DVS cards, personally). The downside is that you can’t choose which cards to trade, so if he wants 5 cards for a character that you’re saving for an upgrade… you should probably tell him to f**k off (that’s literally what the button says). As with the camera dicks, this offer seems to show up completely randomly.
Boss Fights – Do well in the boss fight at the end of a season, and you’ll be able to bust into George Green’s trunk for a number of bonuses equal to how many times you filled the F**k Off Bar (which is done by tapping the screen like a maniac). Sometimes there’s liquor in there! I don’t recall exactly how much one might find, but I think it’s in the 15-30 range. More often than not, though, it’ll just be a big pile of cards and maybe a couple hashcoins if you’re lucky.
Season Deals – It may have been just for the first few days after launch, but the game offered me a couple deals to buy a bundle of liquor, hashcoins, and cards for a pretty generous discount. These only seem to appear every third or fourth season, and they only last 24 hours. Also the last one I saw cost a whopping $21 (apparently Jacob cards are worth a mint), so they aren’t always a great deal. That said, if you’re going to spend real money on this game, you’d definitely be best off waiting for one of these deals. I’m sure they will eventually offer some similar deals that aren’t season-specific, as selling consumable video game resources is 100% profit no matter how much they charge.
Events – One of the recent patch notes lists the addition of events that will earn you liquor, but I haven’t actually seen one yet.
Bugs – There was a glitch in the game where you’re supposed to get Phil Collins in Season 14, but he wouldn’t actually show. I passed that season before the patch to fix it released, so I sent the support team an email asking them to unlock Phil for me. Not only did they have it done in under an hour, they also threw in 100 liquor for free! This obviously isn’t a reliable way to earn liquor, but I feel like the customer support team deserves a little shout-out for being awesome.
And that’s all of the ways to find liquor. At least that I’ve found so far. But the game isn’t especially deep, so I’m fairly confident that there aren’t any secret liquor wells tucked away in there anywhere. If there are… could you let me know? I’m really getting stymied by these high costs for character upgrades!
What’s that? You want to know what to do with all that liquor now? Oh, okay. Might as well.
Buy Cards – Julian’s store will offer three different character cards that refresh every 5 hours. Common cards will cost you 5 liquor for the first and the price increases for each card of the same character that you buy. Rarer cards are more expensive, natch. This isn’t a bad deal if you need one or two more cards for an upgrade. You may need to resort to buying a bunch once you hit season 12 or so, when you need a buttload of cards for an upgrade and waiting on lucky drops could take weeks. Julian never sells cards for businesses though, so maybe don’t ever trade those away.
Renovate Businesses – Once you accumulate enough liquor and cards for a specific business, you can renovate it. This has an effect of either multiplying the business’ cash output, or speeding up the frequency that it pays out. Also it adds a little graphical flourish to the business in question, like flower beds or whatnot. The upgrades that add cash multipliers aren’t really worth the liquor, but investing in timer reduction renovations at least feels more like it’s helping you out.
Upgrade Characters – This is where you want to dump all your liquor. Upgrading characters gives the same permanent upgrades as renovating businesses, but usually with significantly bigger cash multipliers. It also has another, much much much more important function: allowing for automation. At first, you just need Cory to automate cash collection from your businesses. As you get farther through the seasons though, you will need other characters to automate (explained in-game by Cory being too stupid to collect the cash without supervision), and then you’ll eventually need them at higher levels. And while it’s easy going at the beginning, as Cory can collect from every business, any other character is locked to a single establishment, so you need to spread the liquor around for maximum efficiency.
What that all means, for anyone unfamiliar with this kind of game, is that when your businesses are automated, you can turn off your phone and your cash will continually increase while you’re away. If you’re not automated, you’ll have to click on the little money icon each time a business’ payout meter fills. Otherwise, it’ll just sit there and stop earning. Automation is literally what changes Greasy Money from a clicker game to an idle game. And to be quite honest, the idle game is much more fulfilling than sitting there mindlessly tapping money icons for however long you can stand it. Well, as fulfilling as it can be to open an app every four hours to see how much your numbers have gone up.
And so that’s essentially it. While Greasy Money is ostensibly about, well, money, the real game is the hunt for liquor and figuring out the optimal way to spend your rations. Hopefully, my little guide here will help you out in making your way through the seasons. Of course, you can feel free to tell me to f**k off and just play however you like. That’s what Ricky would do.
