Dinkum
29 ratings
Tips, Tricks, & Easter Eggs
By 100% Recycled Awesome
Whether you're new to the game, or have quadruple digits of hours in playtime, there's always something to discover.

In this guide, we'll go over tips, tricks, Easter eggs, cheesy and cheeking ideas, and more than a few secrets. There will also some cautionary tales of what to avoid that I learned the hard way so you don't have to.
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Farming, Orchards, and Farm Animals
Tired of roos eating your crops but can't get a scarecrow because you can't successfully harvest a pumpkin or watermelon, or rayne is charging too much for one in her shop?

Don't worry, just fence your crops. Completely fenced areas do not spawn any animals. However, birds will fly now fly over fences. Fencing seems to stop animals from spawning inside of a fenced area. Birds can fly through a wall of regular trees, so that won't stop them either. Birds can also fly through giant trees, so don't bother.

You can alternatively trap a few dingos and let them loose in your crop area to chase the birds away.

Looking for a planting pattern for watermelon and pumpkin? Remember that they can up to four vines from the main plant in a cross/plus pattern. However, the third and fourth vines are relatively rare, thus it's a balance of space verse probability of a third or fourth vine. I use the following planting pattern for a balance of spacing along with utilizing of both types of sprinklers to reduce resource costs:



Place a flower bed over bones to get the desert rose. Place a flower bed over a dead crop to get various flowers and plants, dependent on which crop died and how long it has been dead.



Fruit trees can be packed as tightly as you want as there is no extra space requirements for trees to grow. However, you may wish to consider creating several orchards, one where you do leave 1 or 2 tiles around each fruit tree to facilitate mushrooms during Autumn.

After you obtain the tree pincher from the hot hot hot mine and the har-vac from Franklyn, use the tree pincher to reorganize the fruit trees across the map into mini orchards to allow for efficient harvesting by the har-vac. Rather then trying to harvest individual lone trees, harvest half a dozen or more in one quick pass with the har-vac.



Name a farm animal James and when they grow up, they'll rock a pair of sunglasses. This is also an achievement.



The guitar found in first level of the mines and the Island Reef can pet farm animals in large groups at the same time. It will also cause them to follow you similar to the whistles, but will effect all farm animal types at the same time.


Trapping, Fishing, & Bug Collecting
Trapping is a great source of money, however, it can be dangerous as the wildlife in Dinkum often gets spicy and hostile very fast.

There's a trick though in that basic traps will automatically deliver themselves if they're situated on the top right hand corner of the animal collection point where the arrow points. You can use up to five traps this way.



Advanced traps will deliver in all locations touching the collection point. They even work underwater, making croc infested rivers and lakes great locations for money making. You will need a dive helmet to set this up and replace the traps. Note that you cannot trap sharks.



So you made a mistake and destroyed your bush devil and Dingo nests? Well that is a problem, but only a temporary one as long as you remember where those were. The rock wand, a loot item from the Undergrove creates two tier rocks. Dingos and bush devils can be restored by using the rock wand on their former nesting areas. You can't create new nesting areas, but you can restore the original ones this way. Once you do that, get to work trapping and making those sweet dinks.

But what about wary mu? The Night Market update has brought a new mechanicism where in winter, a destroyed mu nest may respawn the next Saturday, but this is entirely up to the game.

The bulletin board request for trapping will accept as many animals as you can send during the time frame. So if you can send 10 blooming fillies from the Undergrove when blooming frillies are requested, you can earn over half a million dink. Same for every other animal as the bulletin board request for animal trapping is double their normal price.

Fish and sharks will have their struggle portion disrupted by obstacles such as rocks. We can harness the wisdom of native peoples and recreate their fishponds to help us tackle the biggest of fish. Use the dirt printer or the rock wand to create a fish ponds in high traffic areas and then place lily pads to for fishing platforms that fish can still swim under. When you hook a fish, the various walls will disrupt their struggle making it easy to catch them. This is also a very easy way to get the battle fish weapon[dinkum.fandom.com] as there is a 1 in 75 chance that when reeled in, a shark will drop a battle fish. Notice the two battle fish it already dropped.



If you have a sparkle fish on your fishing line and you release it,it will lose its sparkle. So make sure the area is safe before fishing. There's also a bug that if one fish quickly bites after the first fish, you'll have two fish on the line, but if you reel them in, you only get one fish. If the first fish to bite is a sparkle, you'll still get the sparkle reward, even if the sparkle fish is replaced with the second fish.

Beehives drop from cut pine, blackwood and gum nut trees. Breaking them gives you honey and releases either bees or queen bees. However, the trick is to fence in the beehives before you break them as fences stop insects from leaving the fenced area. Making their capture a leisurely affair.



This is for the new players: You don't have to store all of the fish and bugs you caught in your inventory, nor do you have to sell them or release them when you run out of inventory space. Just move them to your toolbar and then place them down to store them on the ground, or stack them two high. Do not drop them as that will release them into the wild. It's useful to create a storage facility to maintain a small inventory of bugs and fish the NPCs regularly request.



Fish Ponds & Terrariums
Each fish pond and each terrarium require a competition trophy to craft. As Max and Julia only visit twice a year, this may put a damper on your dreams of extensive ponds and bug houses. But wait, there's a solution:

Here's where friends come in handy. If you can get five friends to compete and everyone ties, six trophies can be awarded to you and your friends as Max and Julia will award multiple gold, silver and bronze trophies. Assuming your friends are nice (aren't they supposed to be your friends?) and give you their trophies, you can achieve 12 trophies every in game year per contest. But wait, there's even more. If you are willing to utilize the manual save back up, you can get even more without having to go through the whole year.

Backup your save file for the day of the contest. Place that save file somewhere safe. Load up multiplayer, have your friends join, compete, win the awards, but you give your friend your award. Everyone sleeps to save. Quit multiplayer, take the backed up save file, copy it into your C:\Users\whatever your account name is\AppData\LocalLow\James Bendon\Dinkum folder and overwrite the save you want to load, then load multiplayer again. You'll have another contest day just like that. Have your friends load in again, win six more trophies. Repeat this as many time as you want or as many times until everyone has as many trophies as they need or gets bored of catching barracuda/bugs. You could get 36 trophies in a little over three hours of cooperative play.

Now that you have enough trophies to craft as many fish ponds and terrariums as you need, here are some extra tips to make them work:

I'm not sure if this is a bug or intended, but you can feed fish or bugs with dink by dragging dink from your wallet into the fish pond or terrarium. Be aware that the fish pond or terrarium will take all of the dink in your wallet, so be sure to leave only a single dink at a time when doing this. Fish will generate roe the next day and bugs will generate cocoons. So rather than use a critter or honey, you can sell that to John and then get enough dink for years of fish and bug food. Does not work if the dink is in your inventory. It has to come from your wallet.



Common fish like barcoo grunters generate more roe than rare fish such as tuna. 5 grunters can regularly generate 15 roe a day where 5 tuna may give you two roe a day. Terrariums prioritize rare bugs with butterflies, moths, and spiders giving the most cocoons. Huntsman spiders appear to be the most consistent large producers of cocoons.

Fish ponds will generate a new fish if there are less than five fish and and 15 roe left overnight. Bugs will generate a new bug the same way in a terrarium, but with 10 cocoons left overnight. You can use this to your advantage by using common fish to get to 15 roe in the pond, fish out all of the common fish, and drop in a rare fish like a tuna, deepfish, or even better, a lungfish worth 50,000 dink. Leave the roe but feed the fish a critter. The next day, you'll have two rare fish. Now fish out the rare fish, place back the five common fish, and repeat the cycle.

This is less effective for terrariums, but you can use 5 huntsman to generate 10 cocoons, catch them all, replace them with a birdwing butterfly, and come back to two birdwings the next day.



Equipment, Development & Decorations
It is always faster to load equipment from the top than from the side. You can run while loading where side loading often misses equipment. To facilitate this, you can either place your processing equipment one tile down, or add stairs up to the equipment:



Pergolas can be used as bridges that also let wildlife such as fish, sharks and crocs to swim underneath them. Currently normal bridges block wildlife from moving under them. You can walk and drive over the top, but NPCs will not use the pergola as a bridge. Notice the fish under the pergola



Pergolas can also be used to quickly craft piers after preparing the ocean floor. This is absolutely faster then dirt printing a pier. Be aware that the ocean floor under each pergola leg has to be the same height, but the heights of the other tiles under the pergola can vary. You can do this by either wearing the dive helmet and working underwater, or standing on a boat (or pontoon tile).



Need more dirt? The game only lets you dig down five tiles, after that, any dirt you dig from that pit will be infinite. Need to get rid of dirt? Make a tower 15 tall and then pile dirt on that tile, everything above 15 tiles tall disappears.

You can drive on giant lily pads and wildlife will pass under them. Utes and tractors will need two lanes of pads. Their use as a natural bridge gives players more decorating options where traditional bridges form barriers to wildlife.



Giant lilypads also make great foot bridges that also allow wildlife to move under them. You'll need a dive helmet to place these, but they can maintain a more natural style bridge.



Burying fertilizer will impact certain plants and trees in a 5x5 radius. Ferns will grow into the large ferns seen in the Undergrove and certain trees will hurt into giant trees that when harvested produce much more wood and leave a stump that can be used as furniture.



Grass will grow when watered by sprinklers. If there is a spot without a grass tuft, that will contain buried relics. Take your shovel and dig it out to get some sweet, sweet technology. Also, vombats eat grass tufts, so you can use this grass farming mechanism to replace their animal feed.



Paint can be more useful than signs in telling you what's in a chest. Should you choose to organize your clothing and furniture by color, utilizing the various paints can quickly let you know where to go for what. You don't have to organize by the rainbow (ROYGBIV) but it makes it more fun.



Want to change beach sand to dirt but not wanting to place dirt one shovel at a time? Use the tractor to plow the beach sand and then wait for the plowing to disappear. The beach sand should turn into dirt. You can also use the tractor's plowing to remove grass so you can replace it with another type of grass. This does require a few days, but it is far less effort than placing then removing tiles or shoveling up every tile with grass. This appears to be inconsistent on previously submerged reclaimed ocean sand tiles that were built up with a dirt printer, but it should work on beach tiles that were originally created when you started the map.

Blast furnaces do not have the ability to make resin from Spinifex shrubs. Probably because a blast furnace is too hot and would vaporize a Spinifex shrub. Improved sawmills do not have the ability to cut tin bars into tin sheets, probably because they take 10 items at time and you can't feed an improved 10 tin bars at this time. You'll need to maintain a few of the non-berkonium enhanced equipment pieces for those jobs.
Light Source
There are a few mobile light sources you can wear. From the candle hat, miner's hat, jelly hood, halo and snow hood. The snow hood is by far the weakest and not advised to be used as a light source. See the comparison for light sources, but the brightest is the miner's helmet with the halo.

Mining
If you see an X in the mine and wondering how you can dig it up since you can't use a shovel, a bomb will do it.

However, you are unlikely to unearth any tech that's worth more than the bomb, which you'll need to blow through mine walls quickly. I've blown up many Xs in the mines and it was never worth the bomb.



Basic and copper pickaxes are tedious at mining. Hammers, even the basic hammer is faster at breaking up rocks and ore. Plus hammers do decent damage with a chance to stun enemies, so they can double as self defense weapons when mining.

Hammers do have a slow animation. You can skip this by immediately switching to another toolbar item after the hit and then back to the hammer to hit it again. This will rapidly speed up how fast you can use your hammer.

Do not dig up rough soil, that textured soil that ore nodes spawn on. If you accidentally do, do not put the shovel of soil back. That will destroy the rough soil and you'll never have ore down there again. You'll need to dirt print into that hole.
Alpha Enemies & Combat
Alpha enemies are the toughest baddies of the game. However, there are some cheeky ways to dealing with them.

They'll fight each other if they accidently damage each other. This is easy to do as they'll chase you and their area of attacks will trigger an alpha on alpha fight.



The naturally hostile animals will attack alphas on their own. Use this to your advantage by having them fight for you. Lead the alpha into a cluster of crocs or bush devils and then channel your inner Lord Farquaad when you say, "Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make." Avoid using wary mu this way as the fighting may destroy their nests and once the nest is gone, fewer wary mu will spawn.



So you got beaten up pretty bad in combat and you don't have a bottle brew to heal faster. That's okay. You can now use the sitting emoji or a chair to rapidly heal. Just find a safe space first.



Fish can be your friend in combat. Bring two of the medium fish and place down their tanks. Then bait a hostile animal you're trying to hunt. Jump on the first fish tank and then proceed to spear the hostile from relatively safety. Stacking the fish tanks gives you another level to retreat should the enemy have an area of effect attack. You can also use fish tanks as shields to block fireballs. Fences will also work as fireball shields.

Other
NPCs will often ask for photos of stuff. This can range from carryables like gemstones, or animals.

Making a photo zoo or museum can be a useful way of displaying your decorations as well as meeting these demands by having animals and items of interest ready to photo. Also, NPCs often request multiple animals in the same photo. Being able to fit various animals into the same photo without having to hunt them down saves you time and gives you a fancy display for your town.



If you're in Melvin or Clover's shops and you're unsure if you have an item that's currently being offered for sale, ask to see their catalogues, as you're only allowed to buy from the catalogues what you already have acquired. So if the item in the shop isn't in the catalogues, then you currently do not or have never owned one.

The boombox from Jimmy now takes cassettes that can be found in the game. But there's an Easter egg in that it will take a non-cassette to play a special type of music. Look for an item that might fit the boombox.

Are you hunting for some rare drops from a meteor or snowman? Drops like those are randomly calculated, so you can gather a large number of meteors or snowmen outside your house, wake up, break them and if you don't get the rare drop you want, reset the day and try again. Keep resetting until you finally get what you want. For snowmen, be aware that they will melt unless the next morning is a snow day as well. Check the weather station for this:



And if you're so lucky, build yourself a giant snowman army by merging big snowballs and moving them to just outside your house. It took me about 25 restarting of the days to get a snowhood from breaking this massive army of snowmen.


Check Out My Other Guides!
New To the Game and looking for First Year Tips?
https://sp.zhabite.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3350451381
New to landlording in Dinkum? Learn more here!
https://sp.zhabite.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3470701734
Are you interested in a tropical getaway?
https://sp.zhabite.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3087556135
Interested in mining mountains of metal ores?
https://sp.zhabite.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3090461331
Are you confused about brewing?
https://sp.zhabite.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2953802977
Short on keys and looking for more?
https://sp.zhabite.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3094604586
Want to farm other stuff beyond what Rayne lets you?
https://sp.zhabite.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3206867604
Want a flying buddy or a silly hat?
https://sp.zhabite.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3132627357
What’s the deal with all the Autumn mushrooms?
https://sp.zhabite.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3225363997
Interested in manipulating NPCs for your own gain?
https://sp.zhabite.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3184047440
2 Comments
100% Recycled Awesome  [author] 5 May @ 7:58pm 
Yeah that doesn't work. I tried it with double stacked fish and the magpie just took off from the 2x2 space surrounded by fish tanks
W󰀍超神小熊猫󰀍W 4 May @ 9:16pm 
Stack insects or fish in two layers to form a closed space. Place the flying birds caught by traps in it, and they will not be able to fly out of this space. It might be caused by the setting of the flight altitude of the birds. This is a mechanism discovered a long time ago. I'm not sure if it still exists now, and I haven't tried using plots. It should be noted that this can only exist in the current game. If you don't catch the bird when logging off, it will disappear when you log back in.