Plushie Tycoon Made Easy

Back in the day, say 17 months ago, I was just a two week old Neopian with the Plushie Tycoon avatar. It was my 21st avatar! As I wrote on boards, proudly displaying my spiffy new avatar, I seemed to be accruing many comments along the lines of, "How did you get your avatar?!!? You're only two weeks old!?!" To me, those types of comments were ridiculous, seeing as Plushie Tycoon (PT) is one of the easiest game avatars once you get the hang of it.

The only "skills" that you will need to acquire this avatar are:

1. A small Neopets addiction

2. Free time to get onto Neopets

3. Patience

And now onto the guide!

------The Basics------

In Plushie Tycoon, you have the opportunity to create your own line of plushies. In order to create plushies, you must first have raw goods, then you go through production, then shipping, then selling, and finally, you get to reap the profits and begin again.

Raw Goods:

In PT, to be able to create a plushie, you are required to have stuffing, packing, and cloth. Gems are optional in production, but in terms of this guide, it is not optional -it's required for success. For each type of raw good, there are subdivisions of the good that are broken down by "quality"; thus, there is a different price per level of goods. The amount of quality that your finished goods have will affect the selling price.

Factory:

The factory is where your raw goods will be turned into a product of choice. Here, is also where you will be hiring your workers to work. By upgrading your factory, you allow for more jobs to process.

Warehouse:

Once the jobs are done, they will be sent to the warehouse, where they will loaded to be able to be shipped off to the store. It takes a long time for jobs to be loaded, but once loaded, it takes just a few minutes to ship to your store. Upgrading your warehouse leads to faster loading times.

Store:

Your store is where you will be selling your finished plushies. The value that the plushie sells for is determined within the game's inner workings and is based on the amount of people selling each species of plushie -also known as supply and demand, complexity of the plushie, and amount/quality of raw goods per plushie (e.g. plushies requiring six rolls of cloth will sell for more than plashes requiring four rolls of cloth). Upgrades will help your sales speed.

Workers:

After hiring workers, all can be fired except for one manager (82 NP/hr). Workers are used to make plushies.

Tax Beast:

The Tax Beast will visit you exactly one week after you begin your game and will continue to visit you weekly until the end of the month. More details at: /~Jumjim8975

Time Zones:

Your game will update 8 times per day. So you should select a time zone that you will be on neopets for the updates, NOT the time zone that you live in. More details at: /~GrundyTycoon

-----The Walkthrough-----

1. Look at the calendar and pick a day to start on. The Tax Beast comes on a weekly basis from when you begin, so I suggest starting on the weekday that follows the last day of the month (e.g. say you are playing in December, and December ends on a Wednesday, start your game on a Thursday in the beginning of December) in order to prevent paying taxes just before the game ends.

2. Start the game on your selected day.

3. Select a time zone using /~GrundyTycoon as a reference (and do not choose the time zone you live in, see above for small explanation).

4. Pay the rent on your store, factory and warehouse.

5. Decide what plushie you are planning to make and note the amount of cloth it requires /~GrundyTycoon has a chart with rolls/accessories per species (I strongly recommend a plush requiring accessories).

6. Go to buy raw goods.

- Purchase 8 units of accessories (Recommendation: Rare Gems).

**NOTE: Do not purchase your Rare Gems if they are much higher than 1,500 NP each. Just restart if they are.**

- Purchase 8 units of stuffing (Recommendation: NeoCotton).

- Purchase 8 units of packing (Recommendation: Paper Bags).

- Purchase (8 * [number of cloth required per plushie]) of cloth (Recommendation: Green Cloth).

**NOTE: I recommend 8 units, but anywhere between 6-8 is good**

7. Go to your factory and create 8 jobs of 100 plushies each. Be sure to select the species of the accessories you bought.

**NOTE: you MUST select jobs of 100 plushies each or this guide will not work**

**NOTE: you will have to upgrade your factory to fit all 8 jobs**

8. Click "Personnel" then hire your workers. When hiring, always hire using the golden ratio of 1 manager: 10 workers. I highly, highly suggest hiring 250 trainees and 25 managers.

9. Set that as your default workforce (to save time because you will be using this set of workers quite often).

10. Wait until your next update at :01 of the next hour.

11. FIRE ALL YOUR WORKERS, OR YOU WILL LOSE A LOT MONEY. Do this regardless of whether they finished 8/8 jobs (they won't) or not.

12. Check your Warehouse to see your jobs pending. When they are done being loaded, you can ship them out to your store.

**NOTE: it costs 278 NP per 100 plushies you send out. So do not ship all of your jobs at once because you need at least 10,000 NP remaining for step 13**

13. You should have 10,000 NP or more remaining after you have shipped the jobs to your store. Spend about 9000 NP on upgrades and advertisements at your store. This should be enough for 3 upgrades in carpet, lighting, store security, flyers, gifts, candy, and clothing.

**NOTE: you NEED to have 1000 NP out in order to pay the 1 manager you cannot fire**

14. Once your plushies sell in your store, you should have more cash on hand. Then you can restart the process (steps 6-13), the only difference being that as you get make more profit, you can start to increase the amount of jobs you begin and upgrade your warehouse/store/factory.

-----Hints/Rules of Thumb-----

1. 250 trainees and 25 managers work very well until about 18 jobs of 100 plushies each.

2. Do not post on the boards which plushie is or is not profitable. Supply and Demand is what drives the prices in the game.

3. Be sure to calculate how much money in hand you will need to pay off your weekly rents and your weekly visit from the Tax Beast.

4. Set an alarm to remind you to fire your workers (trust me, it really bites to forget to fire them).

5. Experiment to find the biggest profit!

And that concludes this guide to the world of Plushie Tycoon. I hope to see you all flaunting your new avatar around the Neoboards!