Lumber Inc. (Idle Lumber Empire) Guide: Tips, Tricks & Strategies to Build a Lumber Empire

How much wood could a lumberjack jack if a lumberjack would jack wood?

When it comes to turning trees into fine lumber, there is no other profession that comes close to doing this than the mighty lumberjack. With their mighty axes or chainsaws, they fell trees for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. But a lumberjack is one person; they need a team of other workers behind them to de-bark their trees and clean the logs, saw them up and turn them into cants, re-saw them and turn them into rough lumber, and so on. 

It takes an entire crew of dedicated woodworkers to provide the world with the finest wood products. That’s how things work in Game Veterans’ new mobile title called Idle Lumber Empire, or Lumber Inc. for short.

From the makers of Dragon Champions and Idle Light City, Lumber Inc. takes you to the front lines of a busy and powerful lumber factory. The game involves resource management, upgrading, completing orders and requests, and more. 

The challenge is keeping up with demands and making sure that your factory produces all the lumber needed by your clients. Will you rise like a tall pine and reach for this monumental task or will you be cut down by the chainsaws of inefficiency? 

… On second thought, we could’ve used a better metaphor.

If you’ve just picked Lumber Inc., and you’re looking to earn enough cash to keep up with the production of your luxurious lumber, read our guide below and your factory will be running like a well-oiled machine!

1. Watch Those Ads For Freebies

Ads — they’re a modern-day way for developers to earn from their free-to-play games, if not from player-made transactions. Some love them, some hate them, but in some cases, these ads are quite necessary. The reason behind this is because ads in Lumber Inc. reward the player greatly with all kinds of freebies.

Firstly, your lumber mill can benefit from temporary boosts: your workers will work faster, you’ll order a truckload of freshly cut logs, or even earn a large sum of money from the VIPs that visit your mill. Watching these ads will be for the good of your workers.

Secondly, you can gain a boost in earnings. At the very bottom of the screen, Lisa (your secretary) will occasionally flash a sign offering you twice the earnings. Don’t miss out on this and take that offer. 

For every ad you watch, you will boost your earnings twofold for an hour (capping at a maximum of 6 hours). The best part about this is that your earnings stay doubled even if you’ve put the game down.

Thirdly, watching ads in the shop will allow you to claim free boxes that contain Manager Cards. These cards will help you get or upgrade managers, further increasing the income and speed at which your machines operate. You can receive at least 5 boxes in total everyday.

Lastly, if you like Lumber Inc., this is the best way you can support the developers if you aren’t buying any of their premium shop items. In this case, it’s a win-win situation, so give those ads a shot.

We’ve tackled one of the arguably hard parts of the game (because not everyone likes ads), now where do we start? We start with the workers, of course.

2. More Workers, More Logs

Any good sawmill merits itself not on the quality of its machinery but the dedication of its workers. It all starts with the people who fell the trees rather than the ones who prep them for shipping.

Your workers are the very impetus of your operation. The more workers you have, lumberjacks especially, the more logs you will yield. This includes training them and hiring more of them. 

Starting off with three lumberjacks is good, but it’s better for you to spend your money on their training. They will be able to fell trees faster and, in turn, yield more logs. As your machines get more and more advanced and sophisticated, you will need to get more lumberjacks to pick up the pace.

But the lumberjacks aren’t the only ones involved in this basic operation, you’ll need tree planters, too. Planters ensure that you don’t kill off the environment. They’ll keep planting trees and let them grow back so the lumberjacks can harvest more wood from them. 

Starting out with one planter per every three lumberjacks is ideal and training planters will certainly aid in funding the rest of your operations.

Once you’ve settled on your workforce, it’s time to focus on the next crucial step of your operations: the equipment.

3. Maintain Your Machinery

As time passes by in your little lumber mill, you’ll begin to notice that manual labor just won’t cut it. This is where your machines come in.

Your machines are the very tools in which the logs your workers have harvested are perfected into good lumber products. Without the equipment needed, your mill will be inefficient and slow. 

A great way to approach this is to first increase your machines’ productivity before speed. Thus, you will earn just enough to keep upgrading or buying more pieces of machinery or even better the lumber mill entirely.

Be aware that each piece of machinery will earn more than the last. For example, Debarker 2 will always earn more than Debarker 1, Canting Machine 3 will earn more than Canting Machines 1 and 2, and so on. 

Do not worry so much about the speed of the machine if you don’t have managers to supervise them (we’ll get to that later), since you’ll eventually earn enough to better them. Instead, upgrade the newer machines but prioritize the upgrades on the one that’s easiest to improve, usually the first one.

But the machines aren’t the only things that make a difference in your mill. You still have your vehicles to account for.

4. Upgrade Your Vehicles

What keeps the wood moving from one location to the other at your lumber mill? Your fleet of service vehicles. Without them, you’ll be left with tired workers full of sore muscles! Your mill has two kinds of vehicles: the trucks and the forklifts.

The trucks are what bring in the logs your lumberjacks harvested. They drive from the forest and at the mill’s main gate with a load of logs at the back. Each truck comes with a specialized mechanical arm that is used to take the harvested logs and put them at the debarking station.

The forklifts are all over your mill. They travel from the debarking station to the canting station, another would travel from the canting station to the resawing station, and so on. This is done until all your wood products are properly processed. 

Lastly, there is one final forklift that travels from any last station you have to the distribution bay where it loads a truck full of your wood products to be consumed by the public.

The speed and number of these vehicles are quite important. Production will slow down if your vehicles aren’t adequate in their timing of delivery or if there are just too few of them. When you have the money, take advantage of upgrading these vehicles, but keep in mind that these are only secondary priorities to the machines of your sawmill.

With all these vehicles moving about, you might even worry about the energy levels of the operators themselves. They could even be asleep right now as you’re reading this guide.

5. Keep An Eye Out For Operators That Are Asleep

Even as you work in real life, you’d take breaks every now and then. But sometimes, these breaks could put your job to a grinding halt. It’s important to keep yourself awake at all times in order to deliver your share of the workload.

The same goes for your vehicle operators here in Lumber Inc. The operators of your trucks and the forklift at the distribution bay tend to fall asleep sometimes. To determine when they will fall asleep, you will have to observe their icons.

While they are in operation, their icons represent a focused driver in a circular picture. The picture also bears a blue line that disappears in a clockwise motion; this is their timer. 

Once their timer is up, they fall asleep and could potentially slow down your mill’s operations. Logs will pile up in the forests, your wood products will sit at the warehouse area, and nothing will move. This will be terrible for your business.

Wake your operators up and keep an eye on them every now and then in order to keep that money flowing smoothly. You wouldn’t want any of your products piling up!

If you’re looking for a way to keep that from happening, there’s always the option of hiring managers.

6. Get More Managers

Managers help you oversee the smoothness of your sawmill’s operational status. In some cases, they will even keep the vehicle drivers from falling asleep at the wheel. But this, of course, requires you to continuously open boxes from the shop, so be prepared to watch those ads!

The main purpose of these talented individuals is to further increase the productivity and speed at which your machines operate. In other words, they help you get bigger earnings and improve the technology of the machines of your mill while some, as we’ve mentioned earlier, oversee vehicular operations.

Managers are powerful assets to your mill and having them by the sides of machines is a must. At one point, you’ll earn enough to buy a bigger lumber mill thanks to them, and this is something you should definitely strive to do.

7. Aim To Start Over

You now purchased a new sawmill and *gasp*OH NO! Where did your machines go?! Is this a bug? Did you press something wrong?

Don’t worry about it. This is actually a feature of the game where purchasing a new sawmill will require you to earn back the machines you had before but at increased profits. 

Each sawmill upgrade you buy won’t just make you earn money faster, you will gain space for even more equipment as well. This is very important since your aim is to produce more and more refined lumber products.

As you progress through the game, you will notice that the orders that you need to complete will require more and more complex machinery.

Speaking of orders that need completion…

8. Complete Your Orders

Every now and then, you will receive orders from clients who need your lumber. They pay good money, so it’d be wise to not ignore them since completing them rewards your sawmill with Biz Points. Biz Points are a special currency needed to upgrade Managers (along with Manager Cards).

While you are browsing the orders, be sure to pick the ones with a VIP telling you that this is the best offer out of the three. You will want to watch an ad to get that boost for it. Once you have accepted the order, it’s time for your plant to get to work. The client may ask for anything at any level of sawmill you have, so it’s good to take advantage of this if you’re looking to farm Biz Points.

After completing an order, you are given the option to watch an ad to get another pool of orders or wait for the timer to count down. There is also the option of getting a Warehouse Manager who performs Auto-Orders. These Auto-Orders do not reward Biz Points, but instead grant your sawmill large amounts of money.

Your money and Biz Points are greatly earned from completing orders alone, but what about the game’s premium currency?

9. Follow Your Missions

Like every other good game out there, Lumber Inc. comes with a list of missions. These missions, like orders, require you to fulfill a few requirements here and there. Sometimes some of them require you to upgrade your sawmill.

But in doing so, completing any of these missions will reward you with diamonds so aiming to complete any of your missions all the time nets you a lot of them all at once. Diamonds are difficult to find in this game and, if you don’t want to buy a pack, doing tasks and saving up is the best way to go.

There’s certainly nothing wrong with buying diamond packs from the developers, however, as this helps further make the game better.

10. Spend Your Diamonds On Worthwhile Purchases

Acquiring diamonds is no easy feat on its own. As stated earlier, you are given these elusive tokens by completing tasks and thus, saving them up for worthwhile things is important.

Instead of spending them on mystery boxes and time travel in the shop, consider spending them on missing Manager Cards or triple idle earnings instead. Our reasoning behind this is that mystery boxes are a game of chance and that missing Manager Cards are specific. 

As for time travel, you’re better off just leaving the game to earn all this offline instead of spending diamonds on instant earnings of an hour from now. Meanwhile, the triple earnings is a one-time offer every login. So if you’ve gained roughly 1 Trillion offline, the 20 diamonds spent on making that 3 Trillion is more worth it.

And that concludes our guide for Lumber Inc.! If you have a more efficient way of running your lumber mill or would like to point something out for us, carve your message in the comment section below!