Palia Developers Don't Want You to Make Money

Palia is a game where everything is expensive. And I truly mean expensive. The recent Maji Market event added plushies that cost 65k! To unlock the gazebo, you need to spend 300k to unlock all houseplots and then pay an additional 10k to buy the blueprint. The gold cap is also 300k. You can't have more than 300k gold. Therefore Palia players are forced to find effective money making methods to keep up with these insane prices.

Shortly after open beta started some good gold farming methods were discovered. The first one was hunting. The spawn rate of animals was quite short so you could hunt without breaks with new animals spawning left and right right after you keep killing them. But hunting is a very involved activity. You can't just shut your brain and do it on autopilot. Basic animals can be killed in one shot with standard arrows but there is a more uncommon type of animal that takes 2-3 shots to kill and you need to chase it cause there is no way to one shot it. If you decide to hunt the rare animal, it becomes even harder since they have magical abilities such as spawning multiple copies or teleporting. First nerf to gold farming came shortly after open beta started. Singularity 6 nerfed the spawn rate of animals so now it takes a lot longer for them to spawn which seriously damaged those hunted to make money.

Another good way to farm gold was with gardening. People started mass producing tomatoes which give multiple harvests and placing tomatoes in a seed collector and selling all the seeds, preferably star quality seeds. This tactic remained for a few weeks until last week, when the developers nerfed this too. Before the nerf 2 tomatoes were required to make a seed. Now we need 3 tomatoes but they buffed the time it takes to process tomatoes into seeds. Previously it was 42 minutes, now it is 30 minutes.

But the real best way to make money in Palia has always been cake parties. You can make a whopping 50-60k in an hour but you need to gather 15 people. A lot of people including myself have been waiting for a nerf to cakes. I was expecting them to nerf it with the Maji Market update but luckily the developers gave us a little more time. However, in a recent AMA on Reddit, Palia developers confirmed that the cake parties will be nerfed. This is what they had to say about cake party nerfs:

Cake parties on the other hand are awesome and an activity we very much want to preserve, but they are generating too much income right now. We intentionally designed cooking around being a multiplayer activity, and wanted to encourage players to play in ways like this. Given the high cost of organising a cake party, we think it’s ok for this to be one of the best, if not the best value generating activity in the game. We’re discussing options to bring the income earned down while preserving the overall benefit of this activity and will share when we have a path forward. Long term, the better solution is adding more dishes of this complexity to ensure players aren’t just making celebration cakes at these parties, but other dishes and multiplayer activities as well.

For some reason Singularity 6 really doesn't want players to make money, they don't want you to hoard money either. There are limits on everything. I've seen the developers saying that they don't want players to focus on money. Yet they keep adding insanely expensive items into the game which forces people to look for ways earn decent gold.

Normally money grinding is a very long process in this game. The only quick solution so far was the cake parties but to even join one, unless you are on oven, you need endgame materials such as blueberries or apples which can be obtained by either reaching level 10 in gardening and buying the seeds with gardening coins. Or reaching friendship level 3 (max is level 4) with two NPCs and doing their friendship quests. These fruits aren't available in early game. So the cake party isn't "free" money (unless you are on oven), it takes a lot of effort to prepare for it depending on which role you take. It's also the only MMO aspect of the game. So it feels justified to be rewarded for it because 1: you put in the effort to prepare the ingredients and 2: you are willing to socialise which is what the developers want you to do.

I don't know what will be the best way to make money next. Maybe the cake parties will still be worth it but we don't know for sure. I just hope that when they nerf the cake parties, they won't end up killing them entirely. This game really does need this activity to feel like the MMO the developers advertise Palia to be.