Pet Rescue Empire Tycoon Guide: Tips, Tricks & Strategies to Improve Your Veterinary Clinic and Maximize Your Profits

Remember all those Saturday morning cartoons where a pet pound was featured? They were usually dark, miserable places. Luckily, you now have a chance to rectify those awful shelters.

Pet Rescue Empire Tycoon is an almost-idle business game where you need to create a successful business empire out of pet healthcare and adoption services. You’ll hire vets, cure sick dogs and cats, and find sad strays a new forever home with a loving pet parent. Pet Rescue Empire Tycoon is developed by Codigames, the folks behind several popular tycoon simulation games such as Hospital Empire Tycoon and University Empire Tycoon to name a few.

This kind of idle game is generally very intuitive. If, however, you’d like some pointers on what you should be doing, be sure to stay with us and read on! Our Pet Rescue Empire Tycoon guide comes with tips, tricks and strategies to improve your clinic and maximize your profits!

Upgrading Your Clinic for Better Service And Profit

…although it’s mostly profit. Even a charity dedicated to one of the noblest causes still needs greenbacks to make the gears turn. If you want to help pets get better and find stray animals a new forever home, you’ll need to secure a stable financial base, and ensure that you stay on top of the latest technology and room upgrades to keep customers coming in, keep pets happy, and keep raking in cash.

Set Up Your Facilities

To make money, you need to spend money – that’s an old adage, and it’s pretty much true. In Pet Rescue Empire Tycoon, you’ll need to spend cash not only on building new infrastructure for your clinic slash pet wellness center, but also upgrade them to provide the best possible service to both pets and pet owners.

At the beginning, your pet center won’t even have anything aside from a reception desk. And yes, no vet either. To remedy this, you can build new rooms by tapping empty spaces with a plus sign above them. You can also tap on clutter – junk, papers, pallets – you see these, and you’ll more likely than not be able to make better use of the space than what’s currently eating it.

Upgrading Your Facilities

Once your facilities have been set up, it’s time to upgrade them.

Virtually all rooms can be upgraded in Pet Rescue Empire Tycoon. These upgrades improve almost all aspects of a room: the amount of money it generates over time, how quickly people can use it, how many of your staff can man it, and even how long people are willing to wait until they get fed up and go home. Be sure to tap the icons at the bottom of the upgrade panel to switch what you’ll upgrade.

As you upgrade a room’s facilities, you’ll notice the star bar beside the room’s rank increasing. And as the bar might give away, you get bonuses by reaching certain upgrade milestones. Note that it doesn’t matter what you’ve been upgrading in the room: each upgrade level gives 1 point to the bar, no matter how expensive or cheap that upgrade was. The star bar is especially important as it not only gives valuable resources like gems, but also serves as a way to unlock reputation ranks.

Once the star bar has been completely filled, you’ll be given the opportunity to increase the room’s rank. This is a major (and costly) renovation that unfortunately doesn’t give any bonuses on its own, but unlocks the next tier of upgrades for the room’s facilities. And hey, it also resets the star bar to account for the new rank, meaning you’ll be able to nab sweet bonuses like tokens again!

Note that while upgrading a room’s facilities is instant, increasing its rank is not. And because of terribly restrictive labor laws, you can only rank up one room at a time…that is, unless you hire more workers by shelling out real money or a large pile of gems.

If you’d like a quick preview of a room’s current capabilities, you can use the numbers below the room name to get a simplified readout of that room’s stats. In this menu, you’ll be able to find money generation per minute (the dollars symbol), work speed (the clock), number of seats (the green chairs), and other symbols I can’t make heads or tails of, but I’m sure are important.

Do note that upgrading a room takes a lot of time – the first few ranks are tolerable, but expect hours and even days’ worth of waiting as you reach higher ranks. With that in mind, you may want to set aside your gems for key room upgrades.

Hiring Staff

Having a veterinary clinic is important, sure, but have you been hiring vets to staff these clinics?

Each of your clinics must have a vet assigned to them before customers will come in for treatment. To hire new vets, just tap on the clinic, then tap on the empty space that appears above the room name. This will bring you to the vet selection screen, where you can see all the applicants available.

Do note that not all applicants are created alike. Each vet has different traits which yield different bonuses. To see what a vet’s bonuses are, simply tap on each of the icons. On top these different traits are different rarities, with rarer vets having better traits than common ones. The three different rarities are blue commons, purple rares, and gold exceptionals. If you get fed up with your vet selection, you can watch an ad to reroll your current applicants and pray to the random number gods that your next batch has an exceptional vet.

While rarer vets boast better performance, they’re also more expensive. When you hire a vet, you will need to make them an offer, which takes itself out of your income per minute. The higher a vet’s rarity and abilities, the higher the amount you’ll need to offer them to even convince them to stay. Of course, you can go whole hog here and offer a ridiculously large salary which is very likely to convince them to take the job. Alternately, you can offer your prospective vets an insultingly low sum that’s likely to make them leave.

Once you’ve hired a vet, they’re yours forever, and you can reassign them or even unassign them to rooms. Do note that you’ll be constantly paying their salary unless you decide to fire them. To do that, unassign the vet, then tap on their portrait in the staff menu.

Establish A Logistics Network

After all your planning and placing, you may be surprised to find out that items don’t magically teleport themselves into rooms that need them. So uh, surprise, I guess?

That’s where your hospital’s logistics network comes into play. You’ll need to use distributors as well as allot storage space for all the medicine, food, and other supplies you’ll have to have on hand to run a successful clinic slash animal welfare center.

Luckily, almost everything associated with logistics can be found on the left side of the hospital (from your perspective). The room with the cardboard boxes can be converted into distributor space, while the hallway that precedes this room (and is conveniently filled with conveyor belts) is used to store items.

A good logistics network is essential since workers with better equipment can move food, medicine, and other supplies faster, which results in faster turnaround times for vet consultations and happier, well-fed strays. As such, upgrading your logistics network is an indirect upgrade for every other facility in your clinic.

One last thing: do note that workers must physically reach their destinations when moving items around: remember – no teleportation magic here.

Investigations

Tucked away in a little corner on the side menu is the investigations panel. This panel is very important as it often contains the requisite unlock tech that you’ll need to research first before you can bring a room up to a certain level. To access the investigation menu, tap on the house icon on the lower right, then tap on the microscope.

Investigations provide powerful passive bonuses that you’ll definitely want under your belt. Because of this, make sure you’re always researching something. Do note that like ranking up buildings, you can only conduct one investigation at a time unless you shell out real life money or gems to hire a second team.

Objectives

Feeling a little lost on what to upgrade next? That’s what the objectives menu is for.

Objectives are, contrary to their name, purely optional. However, if you’re not yet used to the game’s flow, completing your objectives is a good way to get accustomed to what you’re supposed to be doing. The fact that objectives also give you small bonuses for completing them helps, too!

The Vault

Keep in mind that there’s an upper limit to how much money you can hold at once. Don’t ask me why – it doesn’t make sense to me either. To increase this limit, you’ll need to upgrade your vault, because a cashless society is so dull.

Upgrading your vault is one of the very first things you should do, apart from setting up new facilities as not having enough money is a massive bottleneck in your operations. Not only will you be wasting money that could be added to your income, but you’ll also be denying yourself the ability to double your income via ads.

I would actually recommend just going AFK then using ads to double your cash, then using that cash solely to upgrade your vault. Remember: the more money you have to work with, the more you can do. The vault is located to the right side (from your perspective) of the reception area, and near the entrance.

Watch Ads

The last, and quite possibly the most crucial step in the money making process is to watch ads to double your income.

Do take note that since doubling your income can potentially give you a very large amount of money, this feature is heavily affected by your vault size, which is why I strongly, strongly suggest you upgrade your vault whenever you can. Note that you can’t just choose to discard the difference – if your doubled amount would exceed your vault’s capacity by even 1 dollar, you can’t double your income at all.

One last thing about ads – if you take too long closing an ad, you’ll be forcefully logged out of the game, and you won’t get any benefits. You’ll likely have to actually sit through the ad.

Making An Adoption Match

The name of the game is Pet Rescue Empire Tycoon, and while you can do the whole tycoon thing without rescuing pets, you’ll be doing yourself a disservice by not attending to the needs of the many strays that need a new home.

Rescuing Strays

The city you’re in is never out of animals that are in need. That’s why your stray rescue team is on 24-hour standby, just waiting for your instructions to go out and bring back some animals in need of new caretakers.

Over time, random strays will spawn in, and it’s your rescue team’s job to round them up and bring them to your clinic where they’ll stay – at least until you find these pets a new home. To rescue strays, you just need to dispatch your rescue team by either tapping the garage, or tapping the paw icon on the lower right and selecting Rescue.

This will bring up a list of rescuable animals, at which point you can select which one to go for. The rescue operation will take longer or shorter depending on how high up on the tier an animal is. If you haven’t rescued a certain kind of dog or cat yet, it’ll appear on your rescue menu as an unknown species, and the only way to unlock that is to actually get a group out and bring the animal back to your shelter.

You can’t just grab every animal in the city and stuff them into your clinic though. You’ll have to ensure that you have enough shelters for the animal type you’re trying to rescue – and yes, that means that there are separate shelter spaces for dogs and cats. If you don’t have enough space to house an animal, you won’t be able to do perform the rescue operation at all, so keep that in mind.

Keeping Strays Happy

Each stray that enters your clinic has certain needs that must be fulfilled if you want to make the best adoption matches for them.

For starters, you can feed strays at your feeding troughs, located just above the rescue garade. Note that strays will not automatically be fed – you need to tap the plus icon and assign a pet to a feeding bowl to get them to eat.

Later on, you’ll gain other facilities to make strays happier, such as bathing sites and and playgrounds – to unlock those, you’ll need to raise your reputation rank. Don’t worry as the feeding trough is generally good enough to get you through early adoption requirements.

Pet Personalities and Adoption

Each pet has its own personality – my (real life) cat, for instance, is super gentle and loves belly rubs, but makes his displeasure known very loudly if something isn’t to his liking. In Pet Rescue Empire Tycoon, this is reflected by traits on stray pets that you rescue.

Each stray can come with a random amount of traits, which will initially be veiled. To unveil these traits, you’ll need to provide these pets with excellent care facilities which will then draw out their original personalities. Each happiness level that you fill will reveal one of a pet’s traits.

Pet personalities are very important because they affect how good a match with a prospective pet parent will be. Each adopter has certain traits that they’re looking for, as well as certain traits they want to avoid. By matching a pet parent with their perfect pet, you can not only give the pet a better life, but also earn a lot more tokens with each adoption!

Do note that adoptions aren’t instant – they come from a pool that slowly replenishes over time. Use that time to rescue and reveal the personalities of your current shelter animals so that you can get perfect matches when the time comes!

Spending Your Tokens

Whenever you give a stray away for adoption, you earn tokens which can be spent to redeem powerful passive abilities in the reputation screen. These abilities offer huge upgrades, such as +25% consultation speed per rank. The downside? They’re very expensive, and the only way to earn tokens is to give pets away for adoption.

Reputation Is Power

By providing pet owners and pets with excellent healthcare and continuously developing your facilities, your reputation will increase, eventually culminating in a reputation level!

Each reputation level requires a certain number of stars, which you’ve been (hopefully) getting by upgrading facilities and nabbing the bonuses on the star bar. You can take a look at the upper left of the screen to see how many stars you need to reach the next reputation rank.

Climbing reputation ranks unlocks new buildings and more areas where you can build more stuff. More stuff means more money, and more money means better facilities. With that said, upgrading your reputation should always be your end goal in Pet Rescue Empire Tycoon.

Doing Well by Doing Good

There’s lots of animals out there that need new caretakers and new homes, as well as sick pets that need help. By investing time and resources into your clinic, you’ll not only help keep the animal populace of the city happy and healthy, but you’ll also make bank!

That concludes my guide to Pet Rescue Empire Tycoon, and I hope I was able to lay out the basics for you! If there’s anything I missed or anything you’d like to add, make yourself heard in the comments below!