Arboretum & Museum are They Really Worth It?

That is the question I have today.

All 4 are billed as super items to have (Menagerie, Manufactory, Arboretum and now Museum).

The Menagerie and Manufactory easily make sense. These buildings are 2x2 but even the basic models (not unlocked) will each hold 4 stables or workshops each. Since each of these are a 2x2 structure, it means that you can place 4 of this type in the amount of space of just one. If you can unlock both levels of improvement then this number doubles, 8 stables or 8 workshops in the space of just one would take.

But I'm asking about the other 2.

The arboretum is another 2x2 building? It allows you to put 6 trees in it at basic level. There is just 1 level of upgrade which will increase this to 8 trees. But all of our trees are 1x1s except of course for the Jumbo trees (thought I heard they are 2x2s) but according to the FAQ about the Arboretum it WILL NOT allow jumbo trees inside so that is not relevant. So your space savings is MAXED at 2x. 8 trees (fully upgraded) in the space of a 2x2 building. This is only HALF of the space savings of a BASIC Menagerie or Manufactory.

Then we compare the cost of the building. A Manufactory or Menagerie rune can be opened for 500 stars. With the space savings for one of these buildings this expensive but okay. The Arboretum with its less space holding capacity, is offered at a discounted rate of 415 Stars.

To me this does not make ... "Star Sense"(?). To put this on equal footing with a Menagerie or Manufactory, the building would have to have a 1x1 footprint or hold 4 times as many trees (thats 32 trees). The FAQ said you can't have more slots inside due to some game mechanics.

The second building is the brand new Museum. This is another 2x2 building? The basic holds 4 givers, and there are 2 upgrades available which will max it out at 8 givers. Okay this sounds great on the surface. But let's look at this a little deeper. Givers come in 4 sizes. 1x1, 1x2, 2x2 & 2x3. But when I look at all of the event givers and such 1x2s are the most common with 1x1s behind them. I only have 2 2x2s, but I'm still relatively new (just made level 97). This time they want 600 stars so this is expensive from a star sense. The FAQ says you can put in what ever size ones you want. Just like the Arboretum 1x1s don't make sense. 4 1x1s is the same as 1 2x2. So you would need to do both upgrades just to get 4 extra 1x1s onto the field. 1x2s, the most common EP giver, allows you to get out 2 more givers with the basic Museum and 6 more if you do both upgrades. If you use 2x2 givers then the Museum matches the space savings of the Menagerie and Manufactory. I listed the 2x3 givers, but I have only seen 2 of them. Both in the CC shop for multimillion CC each and poor EP gives. So I would think that anybody that could afford the 600 Stars would have much better quality givers to put inside than those.

I also had a couple of questions after reading the FAQ on the Museum that could be important to the decision making process.

The first was this comment: "The Museum can only be harvested with the Pet Helpers"

Does this mean we need to pay a premium to harvest the givers inside? I would not mind having the FAQ edited to explain this part in better detail.

The second comment "You can only upgrade an item once when placed in the Museum. For further upgrades if an item has them, you need to upgrade the item on your field. You can then add the fully upgraded item to the Museum."

This sounds simple enough until I compare this to the game mechanics used everywhere else in the game. If I take an XL or XXL tree off the field it separates into a base tree and the upgrade. The same happens with a colored stable and a colored workshop. The farmer and crop statutes from those 2 quests with 15 tasks apiece, separate into the base statue and 14 upgrades each. I know this, because you had to donate them to the living legend rune on the tree one at a time. I also had to reassemble them when I decided to change the field they were on too. It seems strange that they would change the mechanic for the givers. I admit I haven't had any cause to try that with one of my few givers that have upgrades. I have only just managed to fill my park you see.

I would love to hear the opinions of both the people that have them and the ones that don't.

Sorry this post is so long.

 

Museum is worth it, if you have excess of givers and no room to place them- I do not place them to farming fields. I placed eight 2x2 bonus-decos in Museum on my pet playground, so I got room for fourteen 1x2 decos (all my Galaxy Shakers are now there and I had room for some Specter Trackers as well).
How often you upgrade your decos? Right now there is Eerie Hellhound Mansion, which will get several upgrades. If you place it in Museum, you'll have extra work upgrading it. Upgraded deco stays upgraded, it has no XLs or XXLs or separate pieces, even when you remove it to your storage.
I hope that Museum will be harvested also by hand. I'll try it, when it is ready. I believe the comment is just to tell, it won't be harvested normal "button" of harvester, you'll need to use "button" for Pets and Puff givers. It is handy to use machinery to harvest parks, but you can save buffs to use them later in right moment (I do that often with +1 pets).

You can harvest it without harvester.

 

I can confirm, as Päärynä11 has already said, that the FAQ is certainly just a bit awkwardly worded and you can harvest your museum either by hand or with the pet helper button on the harvester, even if the museum has only normal givers inside it which would individually be harvested with the normal harvester function. I've only bothered to set up the museums this morning, so I've not tested, but I'm still 99% certain that's how it works.

As for the upgraded deco items, I can definitely confirm that upgrades to deco items do not come off when you return your deco item to inventory. I believe the thinking there was that you may have reason to seperate plants/stables upgrades from their bases, for example to use the base for a more advanced upgrade or use the base by itself to get a shorter harvest time, but you would never need to take upgrades off deco items since they all stack.

I have both museums myself, plus 3 arboretums (arboreta?) and various other buildings. I don't think it's a simple case of worth it/not worth it, but I'm definitely an older player with a chronic shortage of space and 10,000 stars and 3,000BB lying around doing nothing. It's obviously worth it for me, it's obviously not worth it for someone who has only just filled their park and probably has a bunch of other runes they'd like to open first. Somewhere in between they become worth it.

The space saving isn't the only benefit of the arboreta, by the way. You also harvest 8 trees with one motion, which is a bonus for me as I often don't have the harvester running.

 

I agree with Shimmer: it's not a simple case of worth it / not worth it.

Store houses were designed with older players in mind who have been playing for a while and have built up a surplus of stars. They were also meant to be long-term challenges for older players who had already done all the important work required to get their farms up and running at full capacity.

For new players like yourself who are just starting out, the cost-benefit ratio is going to be very skewed and it's probably not a good investment for you at the moment. The store houses are more of a luxury than a necessity. There are far better ways to spend your stars (and golden bananas) in the early stages of this game.

The store houses were first introduced when my farm was less than 2 years old in 2016. I had more important things to worry about at the time so I waited until I had nothing better to do to buy/upgrade them. Now I have all the store houses currently available (7+7 menageries, 6+6 manufactories, 7+7 arboretums, 2 museums) and every one of them is fully upgraded.

Arboretums, in particular, aren't much of a space saver but they're nice to have during the rare event where certain drops only come from trees.

If you find yourself needing power drills to upgrade your menagerie and manufactory, having an arboretum out on your field can help with that too.

The museum is definitely worth it for a player like me because at my level, I need tens of billions of EP to level up and my 2 fully upgraded museums will bring in tens of millions of extra EP daily with the help of EP bonuses. I bought and upgraded both museums the day it went live and they are now sitting in my park filled with 8 high-EP 2x2 givers each.

And yes, I harvested them by hand. The reason these museums can only be harvested with the pet & buff giver harvester when using machinery is because they also accept buff-yielding givers.

I've never had to reassemble trophies when changing fields on any of my farms. When trading in your trophies to the Living Legend rune, you can either donate the base first and then any upgrades you have one at a time, or you can upgrade your trophy first on any field and donate the upgraded trophy in one piece.

As -Päärynä11 and Shimmer have said, any upgrade applied to a deco item stays permanently fused to that item, and this has always been the case. If memory serves, this was a real problem for some players in a couple of events because there was no way to undo any accidental upgrades. It's a problem during G&T as well, since upgraded items cannot be traded even though it's possible to trade the base item.

 

At least once there were two bases and if you had them both in same area, the Builder upgraded both, while it would have been better to have upgrades just in one to reach best level.

It also would have been nice to get them apart, when I was desperately looking for 1x2 items to cloud rows. I have in my storage Jumbo strawberry stand (giving 80EP/10 h), Lovesick Romeo (25EP/5h), Love-grazed Juliet (30EP/5h) and many other upgraded givers, which I cannot place to cloud rows.

 

"Upgraded items cannot be placed on cloud rows" was the rule when I started playing. But I was able to place a couple of upgraded givers from 2019 on a not-themed CR, and I have a couple of more recent upgraded givers that seem to go on those CRs just fine. So I don't know what to make of that "rule" anymore.