Tomodachi Life: Living The Dream - How To Farm Every Treasure, Minigame, And Dream
Babysitting sleeping clones and playing rigged carnival games is the only reliable way to fill out your massive item catalog.
If you spend all your time strictly feeding your residents and resolving their petty arguments, you are going to end up completely broke. Tomodachi Life: Living The Dream features an absurdly massive catalog of 247 different treasures, and the game does not just hand them to you for being a good mayor. You have to actively hunt them down by participating in the weirdest side activities the island has to offer. Now before you waste your time buying expensive clothes with an empty wallet, you need to understand how the item economy actually functions. I am going to show you exactly how to manipulate the minigames and monitor their sleep cycles to farm every single valuable item on the board.
If you are just starting out and need to understand the basic mechanics before hoarding gold bars, make sure to check out my beginner's guide and daily routine.
Exploiting The Minigame Hustle
As you scroll through your apartment building, you will frequently see green lines radiating from a Mii's window. This means they are bored and want to challenge you to a minigame. You should never ignore these, as they are your primary source of income.
When you click the bubble, they will drag you into one of over a dozen random challenges. Sometimes you are playing a standard game of Bowling or a simple Coin Spin. Other times, you are forced into highly stressful memory tests like the Zoom Quiz or the Double Shadow Quiz, where you have to frantically guess what heavily pixelated object is sitting on the screen before a timer expires.
The Prize Box System
If you actually manage to beat them at their own game, they offer you three mystery boxes: Small, Medium, and Large.
The box you pick directly determines the tier of the treasure you receive. If you pick the Large box, you are pulling high value items like a Gold Bar, a Safe, or a ridiculously expensive Pet Horse. The Small boxes usually contain cheaper junk like a Pebble, a Slime, or a generic Book. Do not try to memorize which box holds the best item, because the contents are completely randomized every single time you play.
Losing On Purpose
Here is the most cynical mechanic in the entire game. You actually need to fail these minigames intentionally if you want to complete your treasure catalog.
When you lose a game of Moving Cups or fail to stop the Ferris Wheel at the right time, the Mii takes pity on you. Instead of a shiny prize box, they hand you a Box of Tissues or a single roll of Toilet Paper. You literally get rewarded with garbage for being terrible at the game. These items count towards your overall treasure collection, so you have to throw at least a few matches just to grab the toilet paper for your inventory.
The Dream State Economy
The second method for farming items is significantly weirder. When you check your apartments at night or during a random afternoon nap, you will see purple ZZZ bubbles floating over your sleeping residents.
Clicking these bubbles allows you to peer directly into their subconscious. You are forced to watch a completely unhinged fever dream play out on your screen. You might see your Mii chatting with a lamppost, getting abducted by aliens, or starring in a retro 2D platformer.
You cannot skip these sequences if you want the reward. You have to sit there and watch the madness unfold. Once the Mii wakes up, they are so disturbed or inspired by the dream that they physically manifest an item from it and hand it to you. This is the only way to get some of the rarest objects in the game.
What To Actually Do With Your Hoard
Once you have a massive inventory of Hand Mirrors, Toilet Paper, and Gold Bars, you have to decide what to do with them. You have a few tactical options.
Gifting And Equipping
You can hand any treasure directly to a Mii. If they actually like the item, it gives a slight boost to their happiness gauge. But honestly, giving them a treasure is mostly for the visual comedy.
When you give a Mii an object, they equip it. They will actively play with it in their apartment. If you hand them a pet, like a Cat or a Ghost, it just hangs out in their room. But the absolute best part of this mechanic happens when relationships break down. If two Miis get into a massive argument, they will physically throw their equipped items at each other. Watching two clones hurl a Bamboo Box and a Gold Bar across the room is entirely worth the effort of farming them. If you need to stop them from destroying their apartments, you can reference my walkthrough on how to fix friendship fights and depression.
Liquidating Assets
If you do not care about the visual gags, you should be selling every single treasure you find. The Pawn Shop is the only place these items hold real mechanical value.
The economy in this game is brutal, and you need cash to buy expensive room interiors and specialized clothing. The Gold Bars, the Pearls, and the Souvenirs you bring back from Travel Ticket tours are basically just massive checks waiting to be cashed. I highly recommend reading my guide on making money and expanding your island to understand exactly how much you need to hoard to unlock everything.
