This guide will walk you through all the levels of the mansion cleaning minigame, providing strategies and tips to get the most score and money possible by the end of the minigame.
Introduction
The mansion cleaning mini-game can be a bit overwhelming for new players. When I saw it for the first time, I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing, especially when I was looking at all the numbers I was supposed to set.
Some questions a new player might have could be the following:
- Do I focus on the room cleaning or the money-making?
- How many people do I assign to one room?
- What jobs do I take? My people only qualify for the $1 ones. How do I make more money?
- Do I assign people to the empty 0/0/0 rooms or to the half-complete rooms first?
- Even after assigning people, not all the skill requirements are met – one of them is showing less than 100%. What now?
- I always fall short for the $4 jobs – the requirements are just too high. What do I do?
- I qualified for a $3 job last turn, but I don’t anymore. Why?
Throughout this guide, I will explain my way of completing the minigame as quickly and efficiently as possible while meeting the primary target of $65, and also to make as much money and get a high score while doing it as possible.
Getting Started
This guide has been designed to be followed alongwith playing the actual minigame (much like how the official guide is designed). So I will be providing screenshots to walk you through the progress in each of the turns the mini-game consists of.
However, if a later section ends up needing information from earlier sections (e.g. when moving from turn 6 to turn 7), I have referenced it. You don’t need to go back to look for info. In that sense, the sections are self-contained. Though of course, latter turns depend on earlier ones’ progress.
I’ve not covered sections that the game’s tutorial has covered already – Dr Pink Cake has done an excellent job of illustrating basic concepts. Rather, I’ll be starting from the first turn in Episode 6 – after Derek says he got the tarp.
Turn 1
We start with $21 in funds.
First, we start with buying all the Dumpster levels for $5.
Keep in mind that we’re going to end up spending money for all these upgrades anyway, so why not do it now? Yes, it’s going to impact the end goal of getting $65 for the windows, but that’s far off. We can afford to spend money on upgrades.
We’re going to tune ourselves for work. The percentages for each person add up for the mansion tasks so it doesn’t make a difference there, but if you are short on requirements for a job, you are not going to be able to buy it until you load up on XP in the next turn. To me that sounds like a waste of turn.
Personally, I also like to round percentages up to the nearest 5%. We can, so why not? It makes the math easier.
Now, we are looking okay on the cleaning percentages(white), so let’s focus on boosting the others. Easiest way to get started is to buy upgrades, so let’s do the Pink Rose visit, Power tools, and Super-glue.
After that’s done, this is how it looks:
Okay, that’s done. We boosted everyone’s percentage to 20% or more for all types, plus used the rest of the points for rounding up to the nearest 5%.
We still have $2 left over which we can use to buy 10% points if we need to(single 10%, not for everyone!).
This is not a good habit – because while upgrades give you 45% points for $5 (5% each for 9 people, so 9% per dollar), you get only 5% per dollar for this. Let’s save the $2 for the last upgrade.
Work
Let’s go to the Work tab first.
The percentages required and pay for each job are as follows(left to right, top to bottom):
1. 20%, 20%, 20%, 20%; $2 per person
2. 50%, 20%, 90%, 80%; $4 per person
3. 20%, 40%, 50%, 25%; $3 per person
4. 0%, 0%, 50%, 40%; $2 per person
5. 20%, 30%, 10%, 0%; $1 per person
6. 75%, 0%, 30%, 20%; $3 per person
Keep an eye on the red value: the work skill. That’s what differentiates the low paying jobs from the high ones. Even if say, the rest are the same, the work skill required will be higher for a higher-paying job.
Ideally, we want to assign each and everyone to the most valuable jobs: the ones that pay $4 per worker. That’s up to $12 per job! But, they require upwards of 70% work skill per person, which we don’t have right now. So the best fit for our positions is $3 and lower.
Another thing to note is that jobs 1 and 5 are generic; anyone can be assigned to these. Job 2 is heavy on Cleaning and so is 6. Very much, in fact. Job 2 is heavy on Cleaning and very heavy on Salvage.
Also, 4 requires only Salvage skill(apart from moderately high Work).
We’ll be having people later on who specialize in each skill so as to take advantage of these jobs.
For now, we can only do $2 jobs, so we’ll take job 1.
We can assign any of our DIKs to job 1(boosting the percentages to 20% came in handy) and only myself and Derek to job 5.
Let’s take a look at the skill percentages of all our guys in the previous section.
Leon (20, 20, 22, 25) is the weakest overall. So he’s assigned to Job 1. Tommy is the same (20, 20, 20, 25), so in he goes. So does Rusty (21, 21, 25, 26). The rest of the DIKs are either already in the 30s and 40s, or close.
In the beginning, it’s best to work in groups – so we’d rather assign yourself and Derek to assignments than more $2 work.
Assignments
We’ll call each part of the mansion that we can assign our DIKs to a “task”. These are the parts indicated by the “!” in the below images.
The Floors
These are the three floors and the starting progress:
Ground Floor(1F)
Dining room: 0%, 0%, 0%
Kitchen: 10%, 20%, 30%
Porch: 0%, 0%, 0%
Jamie’s room: 30%, 40%, 30%
Rusty’s room: 20%, 10%, 20%
Right hallway: 0%, 0%, 0%
Home theater: 5%, 20%, 20%
Bathroom: 0%, 0%, 50%
Left hallway: 40%, 40%, 40%
Main party room: 55%, 50%, 60%
Front hallway: 20%, 40%, 20%
Stairway: 50%, 60%, 70%
Basement(BF)
Tommy’s room: 0%, 0%, 0%
Laundry room: 60%, 20%, 30%
First floor(2F)
Stairway: 50%, 10%, 50%
Jacob’s room: 20%, 30%, 0%
Terrace: 10%, 10%, 10%
WC: 30%, 50%, 60%
Closet: 40%, 50%, 60%
John Boy’s room: 20%, 30%, 60%
Upper area #2: 0%, 10%, 10%
Passageway: 0%, 0%, 60%
Leon’s room: 20%, 20%, 20%
The great thing about this system is that size doesn’t matter! 😉 You can just add the efficiencies and progresses together; no matter the size of the room.
Some of these are already looking mostly done. Let’s focus on those.
We assign the rest of the DIKs as follows:
Main Party Room------------------ Starting percentages: 55 50 60 Derek 21 36 36 John Boy 24 20 30 Total 100 106 126 ---------------------------------
1F Stairway---------------------- Starting percentages: 50 60 70 Jamie 20 29 29 Jacob 30 20 25 Total 100 109 124 ---------------------------------
Jamie's Room--------------------- Starting percentages: 30 40 30 Me 36 41 41 Nick 34 20 30 Total 100 101 101 ---------------------------------
We want to get each of those totals as close to 100 as possible. A 100 means we’ve allocated guys perfectly!
Went a bit overboard on salvage on some of those, but never mind. Three completed tasks plus $6, in the very first turn!
Turn 2
These are the results from last turn:
The people we assigned to jobs got a 6% boost in their work skill each, and everyone else got 4%. Not bad at all.
This is where we stand at the start of the second turn.
We have 115 points to play with at the start. Plus, with $8 available, we can go ahead and buy the “Cleaning Supplies” XP bonus. With that, everyone gets 5% cleaning boost!
In addition to this, the 115 points can be used to round up everyone’s skill percentages to the nearest 5%.
After doing that, it looks like this:
The remaining 77% isn’t enough to be able to land any major $3 or $4 jobs because they require high Work skill. Rather, we can see that some of our characters – especially the ones on the right – are looking a bit low in some percentages as compared to others. Let’s balance that a bit.
To be more specific, I’m boosting all the sub-20 non-Work skills to the 30s and mine and Derek’s skills to cross the 40s (since they’re high already, I want to get them so that we can use 2 rather than 3 people to complete an individual task).
It’s now looking like this:
Assignments
Since we’ve levelled up to assign more people to tasks this time, let’s go there first.
A lot of DIKs have 30% Cleaning skill, and the kitchen is 10% done. Sounds like a good place to start!
My assignments:
Kitchen-------------------------- Starting percentages: 10 20 30 Rusty 30 30 30 Tommy 30 30 30 Leon 30 30 30 Total 100 110 120 ---------------------------------
1F Left Hallway------------------ Starting percentages: 40 40 40 John Boy 35 30 35 Jacob 40 30 30 Total 105 110 105 ---------------------------------
Laundry Room--------------------- Starting percentages: 60 20 30 Jamie 30 35 35 Me 45 45 45 Total 135 100 110 ---------------------------------
1F Front Hallway----------------- Starting percentages: 20 40 20 Derek 42 40 45 Nick 45 30 35 Total 107 110 100 ---------------------------------
Work
Okay, onward to the Work tab.
Percentages for required skills are like so:
1. 20%, 20%, 20%, 20%; $2 per person
2. 20%, 0%, 10%, 0%; $1 per person
3. 75%, 0%, 30%, 0%; $3 per person
4. 0%, 0%, 50%, 40%; $2 per person
5. 30%, 0%, 40%, 0%; $2 per person
6. 0%, 0%, 0%, 20%; $1 per person
The one $3 job we want requires 75% cleaning skills, so we’ll just take whichever $2 job we can do instead. Again, not worth it to consider $1 jobs since we’re early on in the cleaning job and can allocate resources there better.
As for me, I’ve already assigned all DIKs to mansion cleaning, so no work this turn.
Turn 3
Another 4 tasks done! We have about 10 turns total, and at a total of 23 tasks, we’re getting there fast!
Apart from the money you get from jobs, we got $15 more this turn – $2 from the library free-roam event(it’s a pain, but it’s worth it) and $3 from the seniors. Also $10 from the grand prize of the DIKs’ evaluation competition. If you’re feeling underconfident(or you’re going for an achievement), I recommend forfeiting the prize and putting the extra $10 to savings. If Derek wins, he automatically forfeits the prize.
Okay, let’s see where we’re at.
Last turn we didn’t make any money and we’re ahead on the cleanup, so it’s a good chance to try and make some money this turn. For that, we’ll have to invest some points into the Work skill.
Let’s revisit the percentages of skills required for the last two turns’ listings.
1. 20%, 20%, 20%, 20%; $2 per person
2. 50%, 20%, 90%, 80%; $4 per person
3. 20%, 40%, 50%, 25%; $3 per person
4. 0%, 0%, 50%, 40%; $2 per person
5. 20%, 30%, 10%, 0%; $1 per person
6. 75%, 0%, 30%, 20%; $3 per person
1. 20%, 20%, 20%, 20%; $2 per person
2. 20%, 0%, 10%, 0%; $1 per person
3. 75%, 0%, 30%, 0%; $3 per person
4. 0%, 0%, 50%, 40%; $2 per person
5. 30%, 0%, 40%, 0%; $2 per person
6. 0%, 0%, 0%, 20%; $1 per person
Apart from the standard 0/0/0/0 and 20/20/20/20 jobs, we’ll either have to go to the 50s in multiple skills, or into the 80s and 90s in a couple skills per person.
After rounding up the percentages to the nearest 5 like we did before, we have about 90% experience points left and I have already reached 50 in all three skills and 35 in Work. Derek has a similar story at (50, 45, 25, 50). The rest of the guys are 40 or below, with the exception of Jacob (45, 35, 20, 35) and Nick (50, 35, 20, 40).
Obviously myself, Derek, Jacob and Nick can be boosted to the 60s for one or more skills and assigned to jobs. Note, that this time our express goal is to boost stats so as to apply for $3 or $4 positions, depending on XP. $4 is more desirable, because one person on an $4 job is equivalent to two people in an $2 job. For $3 jobs, we’d like a 50% or 60% Work skill.
I’ve boosted myself, Derek and Nick to 50% work skill, and boosted Rusty’s percentages closer to the 50s(since he has otherwise the highest Work skill at 35).
After all that, the points look like this:
On to the Work panel.
Work
Skills required are as follows:
1. 20%, 20%, 20%, 20%; $2 per person
2. 10%, 10%, 5%, 10%; $1 per person
3. N/A
4. N/A
5. 20%, 20%, 20%, 20%; $2 per person
6. 20%, 30%, 10%, 20%; $1 per person
Unfortunately there are no $3 jobs this time around. But then, we can assign any ♥♥♥ we want to any listing, because the requirements are pretty low. To take advantage of this, we’ll assign three DIKs to the mansion and six to the two $2 jobs. We’ll still end up making $12 in this turn!
I’m assigning Rusty, Tommy and Jacob to job 1 and John Boy, Nick and Leon to job 5.
Assignments
Another thing in our favor is we have a lot of flexibility to choose which DIKs to assign to the mansion.
At this point in time, painting has been unlocked, so I want to assign people to Jacob’s room so that he can get started.
Jacob's Room--------------------- Starting percentages: 20 30 0 Me 50 50 50 Derek 50 45 50 Total 120 125 100 ---------------------------------
Good thing we boosted myself and Derek to 50%!
We only have Jamie left, but there’s no single task that he can complete. So I assign him to any task which he is a match for.
2F Passageway-------------------- Starting percentages: 0 0 60 Jamie 35 40 40 Total 35 40 100 ---------------------------------
Turn 4
Look at that! We’re already nearly halfway there in terms of money! $35 more and we’re done!
We don’t have a lot of points to spend this time around. After rounding all percentages up to the nearest 5, we only have 39 points left over.
I know we can buy more using the shop, but that’s not a good habit to keep, as I’ve explained earlier – it doesn’t provide that many points for the money. Rather, it’s best to up low percentages e.g. everyone’s Build percentages can be upped to 40 or alternatively mine, Derek, Rusty, Jacob and/or Nick could receive a boost in their percentages so as to be able to earn more money doing jobs.
Jamie has low Work skill, but that’s a compromise you have to make – if you try to boost everyone’s work skills to the 70s and above, you’ll find you run out of points pretty fast. Instead you have to limit the high-paying jobs to a select few.
In this case, I choose to boost the Work skills of me, Derek and Rusty to 60 to match those of Nick.
The final percentages look like this:
Okay, on to the Work panel.
Work
Skills required are as follows:
1. 20%, 20%, 20%, 20%; $2 per person
2. 20%, 30%, 20%, 10%; $2 per person
3. 0%, 0%, 50%, 0%; $2 per person
4. 30%, 10%, 10%, 15%; $1 per person
5. 20%, 40%, 50%, 25%; $3 per person
6. 10%, 90%, 40%, 20%; $3 per person
Job no. 5 is just the kind of opportunity we’re looking for. $3 per person, and we can assign 3 people! Who am I to say no to something like that?
As for $2 jobs, we can assign any of the rest to jobs 1 and 2, and Nick to 3. But for now, I think $9 is quite enough, so let’s assign Nick to mansion work instead.
So I’ve assigned myself, Derek and Rusty to job 5.
Assignments
15 out of the 23 tasks we started with remain. Some of them are even more than halfway done!
Leon's Room---------------------- Starting percentages: 20 20 20 Tommy 40 40 40 Leon 40 40 40 Total 100 100 100 ---------------------------------
I can’t help but chuckle a bit at that ^^^^^ 😉
John Boy's Room------------------ Starting percentages: 20 30 60 John Boy 40 35 40 Jamie 40 45 45 Total 100 110 145 ---------------------------------
2F WC---------------------------- Starting percentages: 30 50 60 Jacob 45 35 39 Nick 50 35 40 Total 125 120 129 ---------------------------------
People are limiting on the Build skill here, that’s why that last one seems odd. Next turn we have to focus on boosting that, because most tasks are lacking in work on building. We have to have at least 45-50% of that skill on 5-6 people at least.
Turn 5
Four turns down, and we’re only $20 short of the target!
That’s the $9 we did last turn, plus $6 for extra work, including the seniors and the library.
Also, out of the 23 tasks, we’re down 3 more! Now, only 12 remain.
130 points is great. We have 111 left after rounding up everyone to the nearest 5%, and now we can choose to either boost up the low Build skills I had talked about earlier, or push our specialists to the 70+ level to be able to take up $4 jobs.
Boosting the Build skill seems like the safer path to take IMO, because if the jobs end up needing 90% skill, then it’d be a 35% increase for 3 people, which we can’t do for more than one skill per person. No, we’ll go with getting Build up to par with other skills.
Also, Derek, Rusty and I have 66% Work skill already, plus Nick has 60%. I see no harm in upping it to 70-75% if there are enough points for it.
Okay, I was able to boost all skills to 50%! Now we can be sure we won’t need more than 2 DIKs to any one task, even if that task starts from zero progress.
On top of this, I was able to boost myself, Derek and Rusty to 70% Work skill.
Also, this time I decided to spend $2 on buying 10 experience points, because while everyone is golden on the skill levels, poor Nick is stuck 6% short of 70 on his Work skill! I spend 6 points on getting him there and the rest on Rusty’s Cleaning skill.
This is what it looks like now:
Okay, that’s that done. Let’s move on to the Work tab.
Work
Skills required are as follows:
1. 20%, 20%, 20%, 20%; $2 per person
2. 0%, 0%, 50%, 0%; $2 per person
3. N/A
4. 0%, 0%, 50%, 40%; $2 per person
5. 75%, 0%, 30%, 0%; $3 per person
6. 0%, 0%, 0%, 20%; $1 per person
We can assign any ♥♥♥ to job 1, and any of our specialist DIKs(myself, Derek, Rusty or Nick) to job 2 and 4. Obviously we won’t consider job 6. I’d have liked to assign guys to job 5, but 75% is out of reach for us until next turn at least.
We have 9 guys total, so it won’t be possible to get to the $65 target in this turn alone. Plus there’s a chance of getting a $3 or $4 job next time, so it’ll be a waste in any case. Rather, this is a great time to get started with those zero-progress tasks first.
Assignments
Dining Room---------------------- Starting percentages: 0 0 0 Jamie 50 50 50 Jacob 50 50 50 Total 100 100 100 ---------------------------------
Now, isn’t that just beautiful?
Also, it’s about time Tommy gets to cleaning his room. Let’s have Leon help him, since they cleaned Leon’s room together before.
Tommy's Room--------------------- Starting percentages: 0 0 0 Tommy 50 50 50 Leon 50 50 50 Total 100 100 100 ---------------------------------
1F Right Hallway----------------- Starting percentages: 0 0 0 John Boy 50 50 50 Nick 55 50 50 Total 105 100 100 ---------------------------------
As for the jobs, I assign myself, Derek and Rusty to job 1 for $6.
Turn 6
Now we’re consistently getting more points per turn completed. That’s good – we have 140 experience points to assign this time around.
We have $17 left to make. If we’re able to get skills of our specialists high enough, we can assign them to higher-paying $4 job listings and assign the rest of the guys to more tasks. With individual skills 50% or more, we don’t have to worry very much about tasks being left incomplete.
We’re already at 76% Work skill for myself, Derek and Rusty, and 70% for Nick. At 14% per, it should be easy enough to boost those percentages to 90. But before that, let’s round the percentages up.
After rounding off percentages to the nearest 5, we’re left with 109 points. Next, let’s get the specialists to 90% Work skill and boost people’s Build skill to slightly more than the other skills; because in the tasks, the bottleneck is mostly there.
Okay, now I have everyone at 60% Build skill and myself, Derek, Rusty and Nick at 90% Work skill. I had to steal 1 cleaning point from Jamie to fulfill that target – sorry Jamie!
This is what it looks like now:
Now, to Work.
Work
Skills required are as follows:
1. 20%, 20%, 20%, 20%; $2 per person
2. 30%, 0%, 40%, 0%; $2 per person
3. 10%, 0%, 5%, 10%; $1 per person
4. 0%, 0%, 50%, 40%; $2 per person
5. 15%, 0%, 15%, 5%; $1 per person
6. 20%, 30%, 10%, 20%; $1 per person
No decent jobs this time around. We do have some leeway in terms of tasks, so you could assign a few guys to these jobs if they don’t fit in any task that we want to do, but personally I’d wait for the next turn.
Assignments
We have 9 tasks left now. They’re as follows:
Ground Floor
Porch: 0%, 0%, 0%
Rusty’s Room: 20%, 10%, 20%
Home Theater: 5%, 20%, 20%
Bathroom: 0%, 0%, 50%
First Floor
Terrace: 10%, 10%, 10%
Closet: 40%, 50%, 60%
Stairway: 50%, 10%, 50%
Upper Area #2: 0%, 10%, 10%
Passageway: 35%, 40%, 100%
We can assign 2 DIKs each to the porch, Rusty’s room, home theater, bathroom, terrace and/or upper area #2 to get it done in this turn. But some of these you shouldn’t take this turn, because it’d lead to a waste of manpower next turn. For example:
- Passageway: at 35% Clean, 40% Build and 100% Salvage progress, it might seem like a natural choice to assign one guy here. But then it’ll be at 90%, 100%, 100% progress, leading to a waste of one man next turn regardless of what you do. Instead, wait till one guy gets to 65% and assign him here.
- Stairway: Same thing, but a bit less bad I guess with a gap of 30% build progress. We can upgrade one guy to 90% Build skill next turn and assign him here. It could come in handy for jobs too, because we’ve looked at jobs that required 90% build skill in the listings.
My assignments would be as follows. Let’s fill out the half-done ones first this turn, shall we?
Rusty's Room--------------------- Starting percentages: 20 10 20 Me 55 60 55 Derek 55 60 55 Total 130 130 130 ---------------------------------
Home theater--------------------- Starting percentages: 5 20 20 Rusty 55 60 55 Tommy 55 60 55 Total 130 130 130 ---------------------------------
1F Bathroom---------------------- Starting percentages: 0 0 50 Jacob 55 60 55 John Boy 55 60 55 Total 110 120 160 ---------------------------------
Porch---------------------------- Starting percentages: 0 0 0 Jamie 54 60 55 Leon 55 60 55 Total 109 120 110 ---------------------------------
Closet--------------------------- Starting percentages: 40 50 60 Nick 60 60 55 Total 100 110 115 ---------------------------------
No jobs taken this round. That’s fine – that means we have more points for next turn. And two priorities:
- Assign at least 65% Cleaning skill to one person next turn.
- Assign at least 90% Build skill to one person next turn – ideally one of the specialists.
Turn 7
A hundred and ninety five percent! Now that I like to see.
This is where we stand right now. After rounding up, we are left with 161% experience points.
Now, we’ve got to honor our priorities before everything else. Here they are:
- Assign at least 65% Cleaning skill to one person next turn.
- Assign at least 90% Build skill to one person next turn – ideally one of the specialists.
After rounding up, Nick is already at 65% in both Cleaning and Build skills.
As for the 90%, why not me? I’ve not given myself any special treatment for the sake of this guide – a thing that I’ve always been guilty of in my earlier playthroughs, by the way – so why not do it now?
You know what? I’m doing it. I’ll assign myself 90% Build skill.
We’re now left with 136% experience points to spend. I’ll also do something else with these points – upgrade the specialists with 90% two different skills each. For example, myself in Build and Cleaning, Derek in Build and Salvage, and Rusty in Salvage and Cleaning. So no matter what kind of $4 job appears on the board, we have at least one guy capable of it.
It doesn’t hurt either that I’m already at 90% Build skill!
Wouldn’t you know it, I ran out of points and have to buy 10 of them. Well, whatever. I have the rest of the guys covered, so why not.
This is what it looks like right now:
Okay. Onward to the Work panel.
Work
Skill requirements are as follows:
1. 20%, 20%, 20%, 20%; $2 per person
2. 10%, 90%, 90%, 15%; $4 per person
3. 0%, 0%, 50%, 40%; $2 per person
4. N/A
5. 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%; $1 per person
6. 0%, 0%, 0%, 20%; $1 per person
Well, look at that! Our first $4 listing! Didn’t I say upgrading to 90% for two different skills might come in handy? Myself and Derek have 90% Build skill, so we qualify for this listing. Unfortunately that means that we have to either skip the task with 10% Build progress(i.e. the 2F stairway), or assign two guys to it. We’ll see that when we’re done with the listing. It all depends on how we can squeeze the maximum value out of this turn.
For now, I’ll assign myself and Derek to job 2.
Assignments
Only 4 tasks left! And we know for a fact we need only one guy each for two of them, so we can be done with the tasks with only 6 guys! With a bit of luck, we will be pretty close to achieving our cash goal as well.
This is how I’ll assign the four remaining tasks:
Terrace-------------------------- Starting percentages: 10 10 10 Tommy 60 65 60 Jacob 60 65 60 Total 130 140 130 ---------------------------------
Upper Area #2-------------------- Starting percentages: 0 10 10 Jamie 60 65 60 Leon 60 65 60 Total 120 140 140 ---------------------------------
Passageway----------------------- Starting percentages: 35 40 100 Nick 65 65 60 Total 100 105 160 ---------------------------------
Now we’re left with a choice. We have Rusty and John Boy left with us, and we can make $4 using them and any of jobs 1 or 3.
But in my opinion, we should assign them to the stairway. That’ll complete all tasks in the mansion and then we can boost their stats to earn $3 or even $4 each! Not to mention Rusty is already $4 material. It’s such a waste to have to assign him to a $2 job.
So:
Stairway------------------------- Starting percentages: 50 10 50 Rusty 90 65 90 John Boy 60 65 60 Total 200 140 200 ---------------------------------
Wow, 200? That’s like two whole tasks!
There! Now we can focus on printing money in the coming turns!
Turn 8
We know it now – only two turns remain. That means a total of 9 turns.
That’s it. We’re done with all the tasks! Plus we only have $10 left to make!
We’re well on our way to the goal. We wouldn’t want Rusty to have to sell his beloved car now, would we? Nope Rusty, we have you covered!
This is where we stand right now. Since we don’t have to worry about tasks anymore and we can already have almost everyone be able to do $1 and $2 jobs, it’s time to focus on the more lucrative $3 and $4 jobs. And I’m going to overcompensate a bit on the specialists – since Dr Pink Cake has indicated in the guide that $5 jobs also do exist.
These are the $2, $3 and $4 job requirements we’ve seen so far:
$2 jobs
20%, 20%, 20%, 20%
0%, 0%, 50%, 40%
30%, 0%, 40%, 0%
20%, 30%, 20%, 10%
0%, 0%, 50%, 0%
$3 jobs
20%, 40%, 50%, 25%
75%, 0%, 30%, 20%
75%, 0%, 30%, 0%
20%, 40%, 50%, 25%
10%, 90%, 40%, 20%
75%, 0%, 30%, 0%
$4 jobs
50%, 20%, 90%, 80%
10%, 90%, 90%, 15%
From these requirements it’s clear that we require up to 75% other skill and up to 50% Work skill to be able to do $3 jobs and 90% other as well as 90% Work skill to be able to do $4 jobs. We also need up to 50% Work skill(if no other skill is up to par) in order to do some $2 jobs.
Well, we better be able to let everyone do $2 jobs at this stage, and if possible also $3 jobs. And all of our specialists should be able to take up $4 jobs if they are available.
Let’s start from the bottom and work our way up. We’ll save on the rounding up this time, because since we’re done with the tasks, we don’t care about adding the percentages together anymore. We only care about crossing a minimum threshold.
Step 1: Everyone should have 50% Work skill at least.
Step 2: The non-specialists should have 75% in one or more of their non-Work skills.
Step 3: Depending on how many points remain, either assign 75% to non-specialists, or boost the specialists to 90% on other skills.
Step 1
We’d started with 180 experience points. Getting everyone to 50% Work skill cost us half of that. So we’re at 91% at the end of Step 1.
Step 2
Some of the guys are already at 69% Build skill, so getting that to 75% is not a big issue. We have 5 non-specialist guys, so alternate 75% skills for each of them.
Step 3
Nick was left short last time, so we assign 90% to him on one skill. Plus the 75% requirement seems to be mostly required on cleaning(based on observation, so I could be wrong), so getting everyone close to 75% on Cleaning shouldn’t hurt.
There. All guys are at 75% now. And yes, I did spend $2 on points, but I guess we can afford to do that now.
Onward to the Work panel.
Work
Skill requirements are as follows:
1. 20%, 20%, 20%, 20%; $2 per person
2. 40%, 0%, 40%, 0%; $2 per person
3. 10%, 10%, 5%, 10%; $1 per person
4. 30%, 0%, 40%, 0%; $2 per person
5. 0%, 0%, 50%, 0%; $2 per person
6. 0%, 0%, 40%, 20%; $2 per person
Ah, no $3 OR $4 jobs! We’re a bit unlucky this time around, but on the flip side, we’re spoilt for choice: every single ♥♥♥ is able to take up every single job on that board. How cool is that?!
Obviously, we should be taking $2 jobs only here, and in groups as much as possible; because points stack: 2 guys in a group means +4% for every person in that group and 3 guys in a group means +6% for every person in that group.
So we assign myself, Derek and Rusty to job 2, Tommy, Jacob and John Boy to job 4, and Nick, Leon and Jamie to job 5.
Assignments
Nothing to do here, but that clean board does look satisfying, doesn’t it?
And with that, we’ve achieved our goal! At the end of this turn, we should have $71 in the DIKs’ mansion account, and every single task completed!
We need at least $85 and 250,000 points to meet both achievements, so that’s what will be coming next turn.
Turn 9
Here we are – the last turn. We’ve achieved our target of $65, and now, we’re only $14 short of our cash achievement.
This turn, we have 60 points to play with.
If you want to make the most money this turn, you’ll want to go for three $4 jobs, netting you $36. That doesn’t happen though, because mostly there are only two $4 jobs in any one turn. So you’ll have to go for two $4 jobs and one $3 job.
For that, you’ll need two more guys to have at least 90% Work skill. Everyone has 50%+ Work skill already, so I’m not too worried about the $3 jobs.
So I’m going to use the 60 points to up two more people’s Work skills to 90%. As for other skills, everyone has pretty good points there, so I’m not worried. If points remain, I’ll use them to up Salvage skills.
I increased work skill for Jacob and John Boy, since they have 75% in other skills too, if needed. I got up to 82% for John Boy, so I bought 10 more points, and I put in the remaining 2 points to Salvage, like I said before.
Oh, and I bought the windows.
This is how it’s looking after allotment:
I’d recommend that you buy the windows now, too, since you can afford to. You’ll get another chance to do that later, but if you have the cash, why wait?
Work
Skill requirements are as follows:
1. 20%, 20%, 20%, 20%; $2 per person
2. 70%, 30%, 90%, 30%; $4 per person
3. 0%, 0%, 50%, 0%; $2 per person
4. 10%, 10%, 40%, 10%; $2 per person
5. 20%, 30%, 20%, 10%; $2 per person
6. 0%, 0%, 40%, 20%; $2 per person
Sadly, we only have one $4 listing this turn. That’s a shame – we have five DIKs that qualify for that one! We also don’t have any $3 listings. But we do have $2 listings, and we can assign all the remaining 5 guys to those.
I’ll assign myself, Rusty and Jacob to job 2 and the rest to jobs 3 and 4.
We net $24 this turn. Not bad! I’ve tried many combinations of this turn, and in the worst case I netted $21 and the best case I netted $27. So in any case, you should be able to reach the achievement with between $25 and $31 of cash left.
You can always reload from the start of the minigame if you want to get lucky and net two $4 jobs, but in whatever case, you don’t have to worry too much.
And there, that’s done! We’ve reached the cash achievement, now it’s time to see if we crack the score achievement as well!
Evaluation
Unfortunately, we fell 16000 points short of the 250,000 points achievement. That could be attributed to going all-in on cleaning from turn 1 – the points you get from tasks are directly tied to experience points, so you’d get less points in the beginning. For next time it could help to attribute the first turn to jobs and then start with cleaning (To be honest, you’ll need to experiment a bit on this one – I totally winged it last time and thought that I’d not be able to do all tasks by the evaluation; but I actually went above 250k points and won the achievement!).
We have 65% experience points available, but I won’t be showing how to spend them this time – we literally have no use for those anymore. Personally, I’d boost everyone’s Salvage skill to 75% and spend the rest of the points on Build, but that’s about it.
As for the cash, we have $34 to spare after adding the $6 that Rusty gives us. If we hadn’t spent the $2 last turn, we’d have $36. That’s the most money remaining I’ve ever had – even in my last playthrough where I met both the cash goal and the score goal, I only had $21 in spare cash!
Epilogue
I hope you enjoyed this guide. It isn’t perfect by any means – I’m sure there are people out there – myself included – who could get a better score or have more cash to spare by the end of turn 9. Its only intention is to make sense of all the numbers and jobs and tasks, plus how you can effectively allocate people so as to have the mansion clean plus have enough cash left over to fulfil the primary goal – to buy the windows.
Takeaways
To wrap the guide up, let’s consider a few points for your next playthrough:
- When the percentages on each of the rooms add up to 100 or more, you have completed that room. However, having them go up too high above 100 means you’re wasting manpower – you should assign another person to that task who has a lower skill level, or reduce one person from the group and substitute another with a higher skill percentage.
- In the beginning, get your people’s skills up to 20. That’ll ensure that you can always apply to the first job listing that pays $2.
- Be on the lookout for making extra cash whenever you can – e.g. asking Bella about work in the library that pays you the odd dollar or two. If you find that you are behind on cash in the end, it could become the difference between making it or not.
- Buy all the Dumpster levels in the first turn itself. If you do that, it’ll get you more bonus points in later turns.
- Keep an eye on the progress of the rooms and make it so that you can complete a room using only one person. That’ll free up more people for working on other rooms or jobs.
- Consider old job listings for allocating points in the current turn, because listings often have repeating requirements.
- If you are falling short on a particular skill, try to boost it in the next turn’s allocation.
- Spread out your points so that at least a couple of your people qualify for a listing.
- Assign more people to a given room or listing – that way each person earns more points in the next turn.
That’s all I have to share with you. Let me know in the comments if you find any problems with the guide – I’ll be happy to receive your feedback!
Other thoughts
- Yes, I have heard that you can click certain areas of the mansion to receive a boost when starting out. Maybe I already did that or missed it, but I wasn’t able to tell where these areas are and how to get a boost. So I have not considered this boost in the guide.
- I have included the screenshot of assigning the DIKs to tasks in turn 1, but haven’t for subsequent turns as it was obvious from the names of the tasks. If you want me to add those for the latter turns, let me know in the comments.
This is all about Being a D*K – Strategy & Basic Mechanics + Mansion Mini Game; I hope you enjoy reading the Guide! If you feel like we should add more information or we forget/mistake, please let us know via commenting below, and thanks! See you soon!
- All Being a DIK Posts List
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