The golden touch: A users guide to GodFinger

Are your citizens collapsing in a heap right, left, and centre? Can’t afford even the smallest of flags to hang your banner upon? Tempted to splash some real world cash to turn things around?

Stop right there, ‘god’, for we here at Pocket Gamer towers have spent the past couple of eons weighing up the options and levelling the lands on our own planet to discover the best ways of maximising your godliness without breaking the bank.

So follow the giant finger in the sky and join us as we guide you through the process of keeping your Godfinger world in tip-top shape.

Please note that this guide is for the current version of Godfinger at the time of publication: 2.1 on iPhone and 1.2 on iPad.

Just from looking at the shop panel, anyone can see that the basic farm you start the game with is the most efficient building to make money from.

But is this really the case?

Remember that while the quicker buildings like Farms or Dragon and Skull caves produce gold every few minutes, they’re only truly faster if you’re around to collect the gold once they’re completed.

There’s also the small matter of mana, which really starts to kick in if you’re spending every waking moment playing. This can be eased slightly by upgrading the totem pole, efficient placement of buildings (see next section), and barely reading adverts (see last section).

For most normal players (those with lives outside of Godfinger) the prospect of checking the game every four minutes to water crops isn’t ideal, so the best tactic is to always go with the largest gold producing buildings available, which are invariably also the slowest.

Doubling-up citizens on the buildings is handy if you have a worker who looks like they may collapse during the harvesting period, but isn’t always necessary for most of the early-to-mid level buildings.

In terms of placement, ensure that all buildings requiring a certain type of miracle are bunched closely together.

The reason for this is to maximise the power of your spells. A simple rain miracle for instance can water one and a half farms if you drag it across when the first one’s bar is filled.

This way you can power up three farms with only two mana, or five barns with four mana – that’s 8-10 minutes of downtime saved right there, affording you an extra mana point that you can use to fire a lightning bolt into one of your follower’s eyes (for giggles).

The different recovery buildings are, like the production buildings, categorised according to how much time you can afford to invest in the game, with all split into two distinct camps depending on playing style.

Tents and Taverns appear to be pretty rubbish, especially when compared to the fountains, but bear in mind that these water-based recovery items require more mana per minute to operate and generally have a lower capacity than the slower equivalents.

If you’re the sort who’s more likely to check every few hours, the best bet is to build the largest capacity buildings for resting your little followers in. Reducing the amount of real estate used by your recovery buildings is vital if you want to maximise your gold production in the long-run as well.

It’s in this regard that I caution against keeping a fishing lake around. While it does add a bit of character to the world, the space it takes up can be better used for either a quicker, higher capacity resting structure, or a production building.

By all means build one to get the two bonus XP missions it awards, but dry the lake up with the sun once you have the experience in the bank.

Also note that you receive a free Tavern when you get 15 followers on your world (after you’ve worshipped the sacred stone that appears with that objective) so don’t do as I did and blow 1,000 gold on the building two hours beforehand.

Eventually even the mightiest of Fingergods have to sleep at some point. But what to do with your followers when you’re not around to reap their gold?

Start by checking the status of all your workers, making sure to dump anyone with low energy into a recovery building. The remaining workers should than be split across all your production buildings at the same time, ideally with just one worker assigned to each building.

Any workers on 50 percent or less energy should either be used on the quick buildings like Farms or classic Barns, or should be placed alongside another worker just in case they collapse during the night.

One of the most, if not the most, important aspect to remember is that you can get a ton of bonus XP and cash merely by ‘enchanting’ a friend’s follower.

Handily, you don’t need to fill out your own galaxy to make usage of this feature, although it certainly helps when it comes to tracking them down again.

Just zoom out from viewing a friends’ planet to see their friends, and send through another couple of hundred enchantment requests in the process.

A simple and quick way of bolstering your cash and mana supplies without really doing anything at all is to ‘look at’ the adverts that ngmoco throws into the game.

If you zoom out into the galaxy view there should be two greyed out planets proclaiming ‘Free Mana’ and ‘Free Gold’ that you can tap on to have some terrible advert for hotels or boxing gloves foisted on you.

You don’t actually need to buy anything or even wait for the advert to load to claim your free stuff though. Just tap the advert box and instantly close the window to gain the desired resource.

New advert planets will appear again every 10 minutes, so you should try and get into the habit of clicking these planets every time you log into the game.

Now go forth and multiply.