Money guide

There are three main ways to make money quickly, a practice also known as gold farming.

Last Stand
There are several ways to gold farm in the Last Stand Mini-game, such as:

Example 1
With the upgrade that allows you to use nine seed packets, select the Marigold, Magnet-shroom, Gold Magnet, Fume-shroom, the Coffee Bean, Gloom-shroom, Garlic, Lily Pad, and the Pumpkin. If you have the ten slot upgrade, use the Tall-nut to stop Dolphin Rider Zombies or the Squash for Football Zombies, although you can bring Spikeweed to plant in the land rows to wear down the zombies.

Plant two Garlics (in the rows next to the pool) in the rightmost column, and two more on the column next to it. Plant two to three Gloom-shrooms behind it (three works best for defense, but you get fewer marigolds), and wake them up with the coffee bean, and pumpkin the one furthest to the right. You don't have to if you don't want toFill in the rest of those rows with marigolds, and plant lily pads in the pool rows, starting with the column of the left-most Gloom-shrooms (if you have three), or the column behind it if there are only two. Next, plant a Magnet-shroom behind each of the left-most Gloom-shrooms, when using three, or the next column to the left when using two. Plant Gold Magnets on them, BUT DO NOT WAKE THE MAGNET-SHROOMS UP FIRST. Plant a Pumpkin five squares back in the top and bottom rows, then plant Pumpkins on the two right-most columns of Lily Pads (but only the first if using Tall-nuts). Fill in the empty Pumpkins and the empty space to the left of your plants with Marigolds.

As the onslaught goes on, replace near-dead Garlics with fresh ones (they are near-dead when they start tearing), and near-dead Pumpkins with fresh ones. To save sun, you may wait until the instant a zombie finishes eating them, but this requires very quick responses to avoid losing plants. Click on any coins that the Gold Magnets miss. You should be able to get 7K-10K this way per game, if you don't die. You get more if you use two Gloom-shrooms on each side of the pool than if you use three, but you have to be much more attentive to your Pumpkins.

Example 2



REQUIRES 10 SLOTS

Using this configuration, a player can plant 32 Marigolds and devote all attention to maintaining the frontline defenses. Save all resources for maintaining the Garlic, Pumpkin shells on the first two Gloom-shrooms, and occasionally a Wall-nut. DO NOT try to expand with more Gloom-shrooms, unless you finish a round with 700+ sun. The Magnet-shrooms remove helmets from the Football Zombies and Buckethead Zombies, both of which are resilient enough to make it back to the Wall-nuts. In their current position, the Magnet-shrooms are close enough to pull helmets just before the zombies reach the Wall-nut, giving them a chomp or two at most.

Example 3
When your goal is gold farming, it is not necessary to use a build which will actually win the the Mini-game. Skimping on offensive plants leaves more sun and space for marigolds, at the cost of ultimately allowing the zombies to reach your house. The basic strategy is to fill most of the yard with marigolds (using Lily Pads as necessary) and use Pumpkins to protect the first three columns to buy time. As with other builds, a Gold Magnet near the middle of the yard is useful to collect most of the coins. When the Pumpkin defenses have been weakened, additional time can be bought by using a Doom-shroom (awoken with a Coffee Bean). This is probably one of the worst choices for Gold Farming, as on average only $1,000 to $3,000 can be collected.

Survival: Endless
If you can survive Survival: Endless for a lot of flags (past the 30th, where more zombies start to come) you can collect money quickly because the zombies come in huge numbers, and therefore the game drops huge amounts of coins and diamonds. This is probably the most efficient way of getting money, although definitely not the easiest: due to the large numbers of zombies there is an average of a diamond every 15 - 30 seconds. See Survival Mode and the links below for good ways to survive.

Zen Garden
Fill the Zen Garden with plants, get Stinky the Snail, and get chocolate. Plants can be bought at Crazy Dave's Twiddydinkies, or picked up randomly during the game in the various modes. Chocolate can be gathered by playing modes randomly, and they will be dropped randomly.

Make sure that all of your plants are full-grown and happy, and your normal Zen Garden greenhouse environment is as full as possible. Note that fully grown and happy mushrooms will stay awake in said environment, and the same applies for aquatic plants (though they don't have to be happy). Give Stinky the Snail chocolate. You can also give chocolate to Zen Garden plants to make them drop more coins.

Stinky will collect coins until the chocolate wears off one hour later. You do not need to stay at the computer to collect any coins manually, but do not minimize the game window or leave the Zen Garden to play other Plants vs. Zombies modes or no coins will be dropped or collected.

If you are not going to leave the window open for Stinky to collect coins, you can make a profit by watering the plants and playing the phonograph for the plants which request it. Do not use the bug spray, however, unless you intend to let the garden run for a while. The price of bug spray is greater than what you'll earn back from the gold coins plants give when first sprayed, so you will lose money on bug spray unless you collect (or let Stinky collect) enough coins from happy plants to offset the loss.

You can also sell your full-grown plants to Crazy Dave for $8000 or $10000, depending on the type of plant. You can then replace them with Marigolds from Crazy Dave's twiddydinkies.