Art Inc. Beginner’s Guide: Tips, Cheats & Strategies to Earn Billions and Grow Your Museum Fast

Pixio Ltd. has been around since 2016 and has released 5 games on both Android and iOS, each of which has been successful and has made its way to Top 100 lists around the world. The company’s most successful titles include Summoner’s Greed and Tap Tap Trillionaire. Pixio Ltd. recently released Art Inc. for iOS users and made the same playable through early access on the Google Play Store.

As a unique idle clicker strategy game, Art Inc. hosts a variety of in-game activities for players to engage in with fast progressive gameplay and light visuals. It may seem like a child’s game at first glance, but the game offers plenty of challenges for players of all ages. Like most idle clicker games, you don’t need to spend as much time on the game in one session, but the amount of time you actually spend on it will hasten your progress. The art collection and caretaker recruitment aspects of the game make it addictive, and the art bidding while spotting the genuine from among multiple copies that make for a good “spot the difference” mini game adds to the fun and excitement. If you are looking for games you can play quickly on the go for some amusement like no other, be sure to check the game out.

Art Inc. takes you to live the life of an aspiring art gallery owner who, after losing the first museum he’s caring for because of an arsonist, starts anew and must reclaim a prized item on top of securing even more treasures. It’s all about money, investments, and fame as you work on exponentially growing your assets in a bid to become the top billionaire tycoon. It’s a continuous task to earn money. With money, you can bid for more precious items to put up on display in your growing museum as well as fund explorations for a chance to secure some rare treasures or even more money. It all may seem like an ordinary clicker game at first glance, but the unique challenges you can experience as you bid for treasures as well as the general strategies you need to observe to boost your income and museum’s growth as fast as possible.

The initial minutes you spend at the early stages of the game very well serves as the tutorial you will need for the rest of it as it quickly and effectively takes you through everything you need to know. From putting exhibits on display, to setting up caretakers and recruiting more to keep watch on your treasures, down to bidding up to all you have just to acquire the special item you need. There’s not much to take in initially as far as information is concerned as the game still makes its mechanics simple even for the youngest gamers.

Like many idle games, you will surely make progress in Art Inc. regardless of how much time you spend on the game or how often you play it, but if you want to grow your museum empire fast and complete your collections, then our Art Inc. beginner’s guide, including tips, cheats and strategies, can help you pave the way towards amassing billions and being an ace museum tycoon.

1. The Best Gallery Depends On Your Play Style

You will only start with one artifacts in Art Inc. but tons more can be acquired as you progress through the game. As soon as you acquire your first four treasures, you will naturally want to put it on display. To do so, simply click on the “Frame” icon at the bottom of the screen and tap on vacant slots in your gallery. Once you do, the artifacts will begin to earn you money. Later on, though, as you earn more and more artifacts and have less than enough space to put them on display, you will have to be very selective as to which from among your growing collection ought to be put on this play and while it may seem like a daunting task to do so at first, keep in mind that you can choose the best ones to work for you as far as income generation goes, depending on your play style.

Each artifact you obtain has unique features that extend well beyond its physical features. Its’ easy to notice how much money one earns but to ensure that you are gaining the most you can, always pay attention to much time is needed for the artifact to earn the maximum amount of coins.

Some artifacts reach the maximum amount in as quickly as five minutes, while some can keep earning up to three hours. If you do the math, you can easily notice that in most cases, artifacts with fast cash turnover will naturally earn you more money given the same amount of time. For example, “The Persistence of Memory” may yield 40.80K every 5 minutes while “A Sunday Afternoon” can earn 144K every 30 minutes. In some cases, some artifacts that take the same amount of time to yield maximum profits have varying amounts of income and that is where choosing becomes obvious.

As a basic strategy, always consider to choose artifacts for display based on your time actually playing the game. For example if you will continuously play for at least 5 minutes, then you should choose to display artifacts that reach maximum earnings at 5 minutes. Even if you do play way beyond that, if you can more or less be able to click on the displayed artifacts once their earnings are full, you will be able to generate more income.

On the other hand, if you are going to log out and be away from the game for hours, you may want to switch the 5-minute earners and put on display the items that have maximum earning capacity stretching to 3 hours. Always remember that once the maximum earnings are reached, all artifacts will cease to earn more income. More so, in the event that an artefact is stolen before you collect the accumulated revenue, you will no longer be able to collect those earnings when you get the artifact back.

2. Recruit Caretakers Whenever You Can

Aside from earning loads of money and collecting artifacts, recruiting and collecting caretakers to watch over your displayed treasures at the gallery brings some more fun to the game. You will start off with good old Wilfred once you start the game but you will be able to recruit more over time.

Once every 3 hours, you should click on the “Caretaker” icon just below the screen. You will be able to recruit a 1-3 star caretaker for absolutely free and they can go to work immediately after that. Additionally, if you can afford the premium recruitment which costs 75 diamonds each, you can nab yourself a 4-6 star caretaker with more potent skills.

Once you have enough caretakers, make sure to read through each of their skills as these skills revolve around earning more coins, securing the artifact from theft, decreasing exploration time, or a combination of these skills. For starters, it would be best to choose between the first two skills but then even a protection from theft of 40% isn’t going to be much help so you might as well go for extra earnings.

3. Upgrade The Museum And Your Best Artifacts

Earning coins in Art Inc. is very easy and you will often find yourself with so much of it than what you were previously saving for. However, there are tons of upgrades that you will also need to invest in, on top of saving some to have more than enough to outbid anyone for any treasure at the auctions. While you should consider to partake in auctions as often as you can, having a large collection with not enough space to display it from leaves little value for you. Instead, you should consider spending some of your earnings on upgrades as these, in time, will give you back what you have spent on it exponentially. You can tap on the “Red Arrow” icon at the bottom left corner of the screen to view available museum upgrades.

First and foremost comes the museum upgrades. Upgrading the museum size takes time and once you have successfully reached a new level, the price of the next one will take that much longer to earn. Just the same, you should always aim to do so whenever you can afford to as an extra slot in your gallery can help boost your income greatly.

For both the Ticket Boost and Gift Shop Boost, these upgrades relate to your play style much like how things work when you decide among the collected artifacts as to which ones should go on display. Increasing coins collected from both the entrance booth and the gift shop simply makes them generate higher revenue over time. If you invest much in these upgrades, then you should be ready to log in on the game every 2 hours to claim the maximum claimable revenue from the gift shop and consecutively be back every 3 hours for the ticket booth. If you won’t be logging in on the game that often in short spans of time, then you might as well limit how you upgrade either one and invest your money somewhere else.

Related: Art Inc. Ultimate Guide: 13 Tips & Tricks to Earn More Gems and Become an Art Tycoon

Lastly, and perhaps the most difficult one to invest in, is the fountain which generates 10 gems every 4 hours (or 1 every 24 minutes). Investing gems to upgrade the fountain will enable it to generate more gems so if you really love the game and feel that you will be playing it very often and for a long time, then prioritize spending your gems here.

Be sure to also spend a bit of your earnings into upgrading some artifacts that you usually put on display. This would again depend on your play style as you would have to upgrade some more than the others. If you spend a good amount of time actually playing the game, then you should invest in on the artifacts that yield income within 5 minutes. On the other hand, invest it in those that take hours to reach an income cap. While you may be tempted to focus on one or fewer pieces of art, keep in mind that one item on display may likely be stolen randomly at some point, which is why it would be safer to distribute upgrades across a wider selection of artifacts on display.

4. Prepare Well Before You Bid At Auctions

Bidding for a prized artifact in Art Inc. involves 2 main challenges. The first involves money to ensure that you will win and outbid everyone else and the second involves skill as you need to identify which from among the selection of loosely similar artifacts is the genuine one. For either one, some amount of preparation is needed to ensure that each one goes well as failure would mean waiting for another auction to happen and the random element of items presented may not work in favor of the artifact you need to acquire a little ahead of the others.

Once you click on the “Auctions” icon at the bottom of the screen, you will notice that each available auction house indicates a constant market value of the item they will put up for bid. Taking Sodabee’s Auction House for example, you will constantly see 800K as the value of the item you will bid for once you choose to join in. This means that what you should be ready for is at least 150% of that amount or 1.2 million coins. There is a certain randomness in effect as to how often and aggressive the NPC bidders participate in the activity, but just the same if you have more than enough money somewhere around the 150% mark of the market value, you can win the bid.

For the next challenge involved in bidding, you have to ready yourself for a spot the difference mini-game. It may seem simple at first, especially at the first auction house where there are only 3 choices. As you progress further in the game and unlock the more expensive auction locations, more and more copies will be presented to you prior to the actual bidding and you will have the same amount of time to choose which one to bid for. Keenness to details will be your friend here and keeping your composure instead of paying close attention to the time limit will be better for you as well.

If you fail to outbid your opponents due to lack of funds, you get to keep your money and will simply have to wait for the auction to cool down and be available again to retry. The same goes if you to choose to discontinue bidding for uncertainty as to whether you picked the genuine artifact over the fake ones. If you chose the fake copy all the way through bidding and wound up with it, there is a mild threat that you could lose the money you spent to acquire that item. There are hardly any worries though as simply watching a short video ad can help you recover all the money you spent.

5. Watch Video Ads For Extra Income Boosts And More

If you agree that being able to recover the money you spent for erroneously bidding on a counterfeit artifact is a lot help, then you can definitely appreciate the other benefits you can get by watching a few short video ads in the game to help you out. It is understandable to find the presence of these ads in games as annoying at times, but keep in mind that this is a free game that you can absolutely play for free and video ads help keep it available for the longest possible time for everyone. Additionally, none of the video ads in Art Inc. is force-fed and each video ad you choose to play will certainly be out of your own choice.

To start off, you can earn bonus income by clicking on the “T.V.” icon at the upper right side of your screen. Each video ad you play adds 1 hour to the duration of time that the income your museum generates becomes twice as much. You can watch 5 to 30-second video ads consecutively and stack up a double income bonus for a total of 8 hours.

At some random point when you are offline, thieves will walk into your museum and steal an item on display even if a caretaker is watching over it. It takes about an hour to recover the artifact back but you can watch a short ad to instantly repossess the stolen item. This also applies to explorations that take about an hour to finish. Simply choosing to play a video ad instantly finishes the exploration.

6. Accomplish Quests And Challenges For Unique Rewards

One set of random quests will appear at the left side of your screen and accomplishing each will reward you with either more coins, gems, or unique artifacts. In some cases, the objective could simply be putting the required artifacts on display at the same time. As simple as it is, acquiring artifacts has a random element in the game which makes this a little difficult, just the same pay attention to the objectives from time to time as you may not always see an indicator when you have acquired the necessary items for display.

Explorations also appear here especially when you have additional caretakers who have an exploration skill. It will cost you money to launch an exploration and it won’t be a guaranteed success. Be sure to engage in it only if you have excess funds you can very much do away with. Keep in mind that some artifacts can only be exclusively acquired through exploration which is why at some points in the game, you will have no choice but to subscribe to it to complete your collection.

At the upper right side of your screen, you can tap on the book icon to see the Silver Fox’ Challenge. This is hard to accomplish and will probably take several days or weeks to complete depending on how much time you spend on the game. Your goal here is to obtain 9 different artifacts to earn gems as well as acquire Silverfox as a caretaker (which is weird because he will steal from your museum several times). In any case, pay attention to his hints as to where you can obtain the artifacts that you are missing.

Lastly, you can invite some friends on Facebook to earn a variety of rewards to help you progress in the game. Successfully inviting 20 friends will earn you 2 caretakers which are hard to acquire through recruitment.

7. Remember To Tap On Visitors For Extra Coins

It is easy to notice that coin bubbles appear above the heads of the visitors in your museum. Although the amount of coins you can earn by clicking on them won’t be that much, it still helps with boosting your earnings considering the frequency they pop up. If you are playing the game and have lined up your 5-minute artifacts up for display, you might as well scroll around the museum and click on the visitors for the extra income. It also helps kill time while you are waiting for each artifact to max out on the revenue they generate while making your time in the game stay as productive as it can be.

As far as tips, cheats and strategies are concerned, that is all we have for our Art Inc. beginner’s guide. Not everything will be necessary to do and accomplish if you simply plan on playing the game very casually but each one will be helpful to you especially if you aim to grow your museum empire as fast as you can. Like any other idle clicker game, remember that time and dedication is essential to the pace at which you progress in the game and with that in mind, we hope you enjoyed reading through our guide as much as you learned from the tips and strategies we shared. If we missed something you think is essential for other players, don’t hesitate to share your thoughts with us through the comment section below!