Welcome to my guide on making money in Junkyard Builder. To begin with I want to make it clear that these are tips more than a definitive guide to the game. I noticed a lot of people saying that they find that the upgrades are too expensive and that they can't make the cash to buy them. This isn't the case though, you just need to be savvy with how you sell things in the beginning.

I have split each tip up so that you can just jump to a tip instead of having to read through all of them (you can do this if you really want to though). You can pick and choose what you want to use whilst playing and most tips only require minimal upgrades or none at all to use.

So without further ado, on with the tips!

So you just loaded up the game and you are faced with the game guide telling you what you should do. Follow this through so that you unlock all the waste bins, the restoration tools (brush, angle grinder, paint gun) and the incinerator. These are essential to making cash in the game. It might seem like a given that you should do this however if you are anything like me, you want to get into selling straight away.

Once you have these unlocked, you can move on to starting to sort out the yard. The first thing to make some quick cash is to get your hammer and smash the pallets up. These give you $20 each and as of yet I have found no real use for them other than fast cash. You can also use the hammer on bricks around the yard for more cash.

This should give you a nice chunk of change to look at unlocking and upgrading your cart, up to 15 capacity is great, but 10 works as well.

With your cart upgraded on capacity, you want to make sure you have unlocked the wholesale upgrade as you can then fill the cart and sell in one go instead of having to sort into each bin.

This was a mistake I made early on as I got lucky a couple of times and found money stacks in a few. I got greedy and went around opening all the bags I could find and then found that I had mostly junk that wasn't worth a lot.

The incinerator is the real gold mine early in the game. Once you have unlocked it, each bag of trash you burn will give you $50 instead of the $15 for throwing them in the skip. If you burn the bags in the Junkyard alone you can make a lot of money, especially if you upgrade the incinerator as you go. Each upgrade will increase the money you receive from burning trash bags, going from $50 then $75 then $100 and finally $150 per bag. Since your luck on getting good items from opening them is low, this is a much better way of using them early on.

Don't worry if you made the same mistake as I did, once you unlock the gate you can travel to the neighbourhood where there is always a good supply of trash bags.

It is very easy just to sell everything in the Junkyard and then realise you struggle to make money once it is all gone. This is because the developers have been very crafty and not given you a heads up for what is coming as you upgrade.

Any paper and plastic you can sell as is (remember to use the cart and wholesale to make this easier). These items currently don't have any processing that can be done on them, so holding on to them is worthless at the moment. What you need to look out for though is scrap metal.

There is a wide range of scrap metal, from pipes to sheet metal through to broken washing machines and stoves. The reason behind this appear to be that to in order to optimise your money making, anything worth $30 or more should just be sold as is. The stuff that is worth less than $30 you should keep to one side until you have the metal compactor unlocked. Once you have this you can start to turn low value scrap into something of value, metal blocks.

The compactor takes 5 pieces of metal to produce 1 metal block worth $100. It does not matter what you put in, the block will always be worth $100. This is why keeping that low value scrap to one side is really worth doing. If you put for example 5 pipes in, you are almost doubling the value. Once you have the metal smelter unlocked, it becomes even more profitable. Three metal blocks in the smelter will produce a metal block worth $500 so it is worth keeping them around but you could also sell them if you need cash in a hurry.

When you have the gate unlocked, you can travel off to 3 other areas to find scrap. These are the forest, the neighbourhood and the old scrap yard. The forest can be good if you are low on cash as there are usually more valuable metal scrap there as well as some trash bags (Don't waste time on plastic and paper as it takes up valuable space). The old scrap yard is good for metal and cars and later on there are some containers here you can open but it is the most expensive location at $500 a visit. The neighbourhood is the Goldilocks location though, at $200 a visit, you can really make money from here.

Ideally when you first start venturing out, I would grab 10 trash bags for the incinerator, then go around and open all the bags that are left for a chance to find cash stacks. These come in single, double and triple from what I have seen so far, worth $100, $200 and $300 respectively. Also in the neighbourhood there is a chance to find cash stacks just on the ground so keep your eyes peeled as sometimes they are in the grass and you can easily miss them.

Profit from the neighbourhood can really get you going in the game. If you max out the incinerator, each trip can net you a minimum of $1300, although I have noticed you can usually find at least $200 in cash stacks on the ground each time. My most profitable trip netted $2000 profit so it really is worth it in the beginning.

Restoring items is a good way to increase their value. There are a few things though that you need to consider. Some items you can just clean up and sell for quick money, but the more valuable items will require time to get all the pieces you need. Cars are probably the best money maker, but to make them worth while, it can take time to get the parts early on.

There are some items though that take no time at all to restore, and then can make you a nice bit of spending money quickly. Here is a list of the quick fix items and what you can expect to get from them.

Metal table - Just a brush off and it is ready to sell. This will double its value although it really isn't much but something is better than nothing.

Wooden table - A little more work is needed on these as you need to brush and paint. Like the metal table, this doubles the value but again, not a lot of money on these.

Small Cabinets - You need two parts for this, the base and the door. Both need to be brushed and painted. You then need to put the base on the assembly area to attach the door. These will net you around $70 a go, and are the easiest of the multiple piece items to make.

Metal Railings - These are a gold mine as they take no time to turn around to sell. A quick pass of the angle grinder and a paint and you have something worth $100. This is where the old scrap yard location pays off as you can normally find a truck load of these making you $500 after the location fee.

Upgrades are probably the thing most people seem to hate. The cost of upgrades can really add up fast, and it can seem like you will never make enough to get them. That said, there are some upgrades that really don't cost a lot but will really help you make money for the more expensive ones.

As I have mentioned already in some of the tips, upgrading the cart is worth doing for capacity and wholesale early on. This will make moving scrap around and selling much quicker and is a real QoL upgrade to get. You don't need to upgrade it fully, getting it to 15 is more than enough in the beginning.

The other upgrade already mentioned is the incinerator. This one you really want to work on maxing out as it will drastically increase your income. It is worth getting the from cart to incinerator upgrade as well so that you can just load up trash bags and put them all in at the same time avoiding the animation down time when doing it individually.

The warehouse upgrades are fairly cheap, so increasing that will help in the beginning.

The last upgrade I would recommend early on is the trash truck capacity. This will bring in some good early money and also help you build up a supply of parts for restoring furniture and cars. Getting it to 15 items per cycle is a good starting point.

Hopefully you are now a little more flush with cash and you can really start moving forward with the game. How you carry on from here is up to you. You could upgrade the compactor and smelter to use less items and so increase your profits even more. You could start upgrading containers to get some really valuable items, they really do have a chance to have gold bars as well as stacks of cash in them!

There is hopefully more to come from the developers that will keep us entertained but for now, you should have a better grasp on how to get the most for your scrap so you are ready for what is to come...