Happy Clinic Beginner’s Guide: Tips, Tricks & Strategies to Run Your Own Hospital

Happy Clinic is a casual management game developed and published by Nordcurrent where you help a newly-founded medical Research Center prosper, as well as treat incoming patients that visit the Center’s related clinics. Treating their illnesses is only the beginning, as your clinics only have so many beds installed; some patients have to be prioritized over others. On top of that, you have to reach the quota of the current level before time runs out.

You expand the Research Center using rewards collected for completing levels, which add more things to contend with in future levels. As you progress, you expand your operations to various cities across the planet, helping more people along the way. Of course, this goal is not going to be an easy one. New services mean new patients, making them wait longer before they can receive proper treatment.

Do not be fooled by its cutesy graphics as Happy Clinic can get very difficult as you progress. Earning money to upgrade your services becomes quite a challenge, so expect to lose patients in later levels. With introductions complete, stay with us to learn the ins and outs of Happy Clinic.

1. Pre-Medical Practices

The gameplay of Happy Clinic is similar to games like Diner Dash, where you tap your screen, commanding the Nurse of the clinic to assist the attending doctors with treating their patients. Patients come in at the lower left corner of the clinic, and display a colored bubble depicting their required doctor and their current level of patience. If their patience runs out, they leave the clinic in a huff.

Most of the time, you can afford to lose patients. However, some levels will challenge you to reach the listed goal without losing any patients. Patients can be placed on any available beds to prepare them for examinations and treatment, and while this prevents their patience from going any lower, you only start with two beds; choose wisely and work quickly.

Patients require doctors, who come in different colors depending on their specialization. At first, you start with one “yellow” doctor and one “green” doctor. Each doctor can only attend to one patient at a time. The upper right corner of the clinic has a display showing which doctors are currently free to attend to a patient. You tap the patient in order to send an available doctor to their bed, with their current progress depicted as a green bar next to the patient’s bed.

In earlier levels, the doctor may treat the patient with ease, but from time to time the attending physicians may request you to get medicine from the dispensary at the lower right corner of the clinic. At first, you only have access to pills, and the pharmacist can only prepare one set of pills at a time. As you upgrade the Research Center with new rooms, you will also unlock more items that you can bring to the doctors.

Once a doctor is done treating their current patient, you earn coins and the doctor returns to his or her office. The Nurse has to clean up the former patient’s bed before a new patient can be placed, and the doctor must return to their offices before they can handle a new patient.

So far, we have encountered two types of goals for players to complete, both with time limits. The first goal involves collecting enough money by treating patients, while the second goal involves treating a set number of patients before time runs out.

Reaching the goal either way will earn you a star that you can use to upgrade the Research Center with. Exceeding the goal will earn you up to two keys. Collecting up to 10 keys will open up a chest to reward more coins and some Gems, the premium currency of Happy Clinic.

There are no replaying earlier levels, so you are constantly going forward. This can be detrimental as levels naturally get harder the further you go. You have five lives to complete any level, and if you lose all of them, you will have to wait for them to regenerate before trying again. However, as a consolation, you earn a small number of coins that you can double with ads, allowing persistent players to earn money that way.

Happy Clinic has branches in five cities, with the player starting in San Francisco then progressing to Oslo, Dubai, London, and Tokyo. After completing 40 levels, you unlock the next city in line and also gain access to Endless Mode for the previous city. Endless Mode primarily serves as a challenge for players, though it can also be used to farm for coins to make later purchases.

Be advised that your overall coin purchases are reset upon unlocking a new city, so you start with an empty clinic with just enough beds and doctors to handle a few patients a day.  New cities will be added as time goes on.

2. Research And Development

Back at the Research Center, you use whatever stars you have collected to purchase new rooms and features. Two options are provided by the director of the Center, who also happens to be the Nurse’s grandfather. These typically cost one star to install. Some of these options are as follows:

• The most obvious are new offices that add new types of doctors, and therefore new groups of patients to treat. Their offices are at the right side of the Center.
  
• Extra doctors of a preexisting office, allowing you to treat more patients of that color at once.
  
• New dispensary items, namely bandages and salves. They can be found in the lower left corner in the Center, and are available from the next level onwards.
  
• MRI Engineering, which installs an MRI scanner in the clinic and patients may require a scan as part of their treatment. As in real life, the scanner can only fit one patient at a time, so be thankful that patients in beds do not get impatient.
  
• New items to bring to doctors, such as cups of water, pairs of scissors, and patient records. These are placed in various places around the clinic and are separate from the dispensary.
  
• Decorations and amenities for your staff members, which are primarily for customization purposes, but also have a greater importance later on.

You can pick two variants of a chosen upgrade before it is installed, though you can switch it to the unused option if you want to, albeit with a coin fee. This also affects the extra doctors and while you cannot swap out the doctors at your choosing, their listed differences are purely aesthetic.

The decorations and amenities add up to a “Happiness” meter you can gather from time to time, and once that meter fills up, you are rewarded a chest of coins and Gems. The exact rate of filling varies greatly; sometimes it only takes a couple of visits to charge it up fully, while other times it may take far more than that.

One particular decoration option is placed outside, and you have the choice between a mailbox or a sculpture. While we first picked the sculpture in our playthrough, the mailbox is a better investment as roughly every 24 hours, a post officer will arrive with a package containing 70 or so coins. You can choose to collect it as is or watch an ad to double it to 140 coins. This makes it much easier to collect coins for directly upgrading the clinic.

Before starting any level, you can use any earned coins to upgrade your facilities. This makes more difficult missions easier to complete, but with so many things to purchase your coins will be spent very quickly. There a lot of upgrades to choose from therefore making it important to prioritize which upgrades to purchase. These upgrades are split into four categories:

Staff: Anything that affects either the Nurse or the doctors directly. These include:

• Tray slots: This allows the Nurse to carry up to three items as she navigates the clinic. This comes in handy as doctors may request multiple items to perform treatment, so instead of wandering back and forth, the Nurse can simply pick up all the required items and head onward.

• Staff Speed: As the description says it increases the movement speed of both the Nurse and the doctors.
  
• Healing Speed: Easily the biggest obstacle when it comes to completing levels, all illnesses have a global Illness Difficulty that determines how slowly or quickly your doctors treat their patients. You can upgrade the healing speed of each type of doctor, but with five colors in total, the costs for keeping each doctor up to date will cut through your earnings.

Devices: Any and all upgrades relating to your clinic’s services. These can include:

• Additional Beds: Exactly what it says. You can add up to four more beds to hold more patients, for a total of six beds.

• Dispensary Slots: This determines how many items per type the dispensary can hold. This will allow you to hold up to three items per type.
  
• Work time: This is how quickly any installed machines can work. These include the scanning time for the MRI scanner or the refreshing time for items outside the dispensary.
  
• Self-Clear: This is an optional upgrade that automatically cleans up beds after a patient leaves. It costs 600 Gems to purchase instead of coins.

Revenue: This section increases the income you make for every device or item a patient uses. Each upgrade increases income generation by 50% and this upgrade can be purchased five times, for a total income increase of 250%.

Patience: This increases how long your patients will wait before they storm out of the clinic. Upgrades here not only increase their level of patience, but also increases the time limit of levels. This will make it easier to achieve the level goal and/or keys in the process. This set of upgrades notably takes longer to unlock compared to everything else listed here.

As for your Gems, you can use them to purchase powerups during missions. These powerups include a time freeze that temporarily stops both patience decay and the level time, and a simple speed boost for the Nurse. These powerups are temporary, so be careful with when you use them.

You can also get these powerups through the Happiness chest from the Center from time to time, but it is not a reliable source. If Gems earned this way are not enough for your needs, you can buy Gems via in-app purchases at the store.

3. Memories, Milestones, And Minigames

As you complete the levels, you unlock Memories of the Nurse, detailing her time in a given clinic and how she interacts with her colleagues at work. These are largely for flavor, but for every three or so memories unlocked, you will be rewarded a chest, giving you some incentive for progressing in the story.

The game also keeps track of what types of patients visit your clinics. Patients are divided into groups of six, and you get a small reward for completing a group. Patients are generally limited to specific cities, with some “generic” patients who will show up regardless of the city.

There are some levels that may let patients from other cities show up before you visit these cities. A nice way to flesh out the game and a small source of goodies, but it is ultimately for flavor.

Happy Clinic also has an achievement system for completing certain tasks, rewarding Gems on completion. These can range from simple requests, like curing a set number of patients or delivering a set number of items to doctors, to more difficult challenges, such as completing levels without losing any waiting patients. These achievements reward Gems on completion, and some of them are repeatable, getting slightly more difficult each time in exchange for increased Gem amounts.

There are some minor events that pop up from time to time to incentivize activities. Aside from bundles and discounts, one event has you collecting “tokens” for performing certain treatments, specifically from yellow, red, and blue doctors. Your tallied tokens are transferred to a centrifuge, and you spend a token to spin it.

Whatever color the centrifuge “picks” will add to a gauge for each of the three colors. Once a gauge reaches the first goal, you gain a prize, and if all gauges reach their goals, you get a gift. Just be careful as the centrifuge will pick a color even after its respective gauge was already filled out, potentially wasting the token in the process.

The other event, which is more of a hindrance, is the piggy bank. The piggy bank stays active for a week and saves any earned Gems while it is active. While this sounds nice, you cannot open it until you reach a certain threshold. Even if you did reach it, you need to spend real money to open up the bank.

In the end, it serves to leech away your hard-earned Gems for what is essentially a Gem sink. If you end up with this “event,” you will have to put any Gem purchases on hold. Furthermore, if you are not keen on spending real money, you can say goodbye to those Gems once the week is out.

4. Guidelines For General Practitioners

With all of Happy Clinic’s details explained, we can start talking about tips to treat as many people as you can.

Recommended clinic upgrades: With how difficult it is to earn coins for your clinic, here are some suggested purchases to smooth things out:

• Staff Speed: Since this affects how quickly the Nurse moves, this allows her to get to her destinations much sooner. Even a couple of purchases here can make a significant difference.

Because you also need coins to upgrade your doctors, you will have to prioritize which doctors get those upgrades. As a rule, if you have multiples of a doctor color, you can leave them a bit behind while you spend upgrades on lone doctors of a given doctor.

That way, you can compensate for the increased difficulty through numbers for the less-upgraded doctors, while lone doctors can finish treating their patients at record speed and freeing themselves and the beds in the process.

• For that matter, knowing which patients to treat first is a must, as you can only purchase up to six beds and sufficiently upgrading your doctors will be a challenge. Be prepared to lose patients unless the level demands otherwise.
  
• Lastly, remember that all your clinic upgrades are reset every time you unlock a city. The game thankfully adjusts the difficulty of levels accordingly, but do not expect to breeze through future levels just because you farmed for coins back at San Francisco.
  
• When upgrading the Research Center, if the option to increase your doctor pool shows up, consider getting additional doctors first over new colors. Less colors makes it a little easier to keep track of incoming patients. After that level is completed however, you will have to get the new color unlocked.
  
• If push comes to shove with coins, you can always wait for the post officer to arrive. 140 coins helps a fair bit in saving up for upgrades, and if you are patient (no pun intended) you can get enough coins for multiple purchases. Remember that the post officer comes to visit every 24 hours or so.
  
• Similarly, the amenities at the Research Center can be used to generate a gift containing coins, Gems, or powerups, but the refill rate can get inconsistent at times. Still, getting a gift just by keeping your employees happy helps quite a bit, and Gems earned through gifts are not siphoned off by the piggy bank; they can be counted on when the bank appears.

Lastly, even if you fail a level, you still get a small number of coins for trying your best. As long as you keep trying, you can gather enough coins to get needed upgrades. Your only real limit to this strategy is the lives system, which can result in down times as you wait for those lives to regenerate. At least you can pair them with amenities and the post officer.

And that concludes our guide to Happy Clinic. Remember that this game is a lot more difficult than it appears and you have five cities worth of patients to manage, making this game a test of your patience as it is a test on your reaction speed. If you have any tips you would like to share with us, please let us know in the comment section below! Good luck, and game on!