One Million Coins: Fast Run Strategy

1. Take every chute upgrade on the left side.
2. Take the chute upgrades on the right side (overdrive).
3. Take every Goldrush node in the deposit tree.

How the 1.1 nodes compare

The advice below assumes the current end goal: collect all 1 million coins and deposit them. Nodes fall into three groups.

Gathering. Hands, shovel, and magnet each have strengths and weaknesses, but hands work best overall. In very fast runs, gathering by hand can’t keep up. That makes speed, width, strike, and lightning upgrades less useful than options that give large bursts. The double grab, the active ability in the hand tree, scales partly by percentage. With a very large capacity, each use gets very strong, reaching 25k+ coins by the end.

Capacity. Early on, it lets you skip depositing by hand. Later, it boosts the percentage part of the hand active.

Deposit. Depositing by hand is too slow for top times. The best run with this route took 663 seconds, so even 15–30 seconds spent depositing is too much. Auto collection (chute and portable bank) is the strongest choice early. Late in the run, the auto deposit in the utility tree takes over. The utility pump works by percentage, so it keeps up even when your capacity holds almost the whole vault.

The map has five piles

The coins sit in about five piles close together, not in one big heap. This guide names them:

• Middle
• Top, across from the elevator
• Left and Right, beyond the railings
• Elevator

Gather from the middle for a while, then look around. You’ll see four outer columns of coins. Work them from the top. Hitting them from below or from the side keeps lightning and some active abilities from working at full strength.

As your build grows, bring down all four outer columns instead of staying in the middle.

Early game: rush the portable bank

1. Pick up the first 25 coins. At the start, nothing else is possible.
2. Spend your first point on the first chute upgrade. It only adds 1 coin per second, but that still beats gathering by hand.
3. Deposit what you carry and keep gathering by hand.
4. Work toward the portable bank, which takes 3 points. Put each new point into faster deposits and empty your small capacity each time. You should only need to deposit about twice.
5. When you have your 4th point (1 in chutes, 3 in deposit), place the portable bank. It collects 1,000 coins per second, many times faster than you can by hand.

Mid game: build capacity

You’ll usually place the bank around 3–5 minutes in. It now does most of the work, but you can still help. The aim is to balance gathering speed and capacity so you collect as much as possible without ever depositing.

1. Take the first 3 big cap upgrades on the left side.
2. Take Ghost Hand 1 in the middle of the hand tree.
3. Add a few more capacity upgrades as you need them.
4. Take Flow on the left side of the hand tree.
5. Keep buying capacity until the left side of the tree is complete, then move on to the grab active.

Don’t rush the active before that. It’s still too weak to be worth the points.

Late game: scale the grab active

You’ll usually unlock the grab active around 8–10 minutes in. From there, it’s normally worth taking its whole tree for the biggest percentage boost. The middle capacity tree is also a good pick now, and capacity reaches about 800k by the end.

The hand active appears to scale mostly with:

• Capacity size, which sets the percentage.
• Hand gather size from the other two hand lines.
• Ghost hands, which seem to help a lot. It’s unclear whether that comes from the larger coin amounts or because the ghosts also use the active.

Each use should now bring in 10k–25k coins, often worth several upgrade points at once. Spend them in this order:

1. Finish the capacity upgrades.
2. Fill the middle and left hand lines.
3. Put points into auto deposit (up to 25%) and chutes.

Don’t empty sections too fast

The active can pull in enough coins to clear a whole pile (see the map section). Right now it fails when coins sit above the target. If you empty piles too quickly, you may have to walk back up to reach the others, which wastes time. In the early and mid game, hit each pile from the top so the middle doesn’t turn into an empty bowl.

A note on exploits

In version 1.0, saving and quitting reset some cooldowns. This route doesn’t use that or any other bug on purpose. Some players may still see parts of it as unintended play, so judge for yourself.