Income Farming (BTD6) (2024)

For a more general discussion of farming, see Farm (disambiguation).

Income farming, often shortened to farming, refers to active methods used to generate income in Bloons TD. As opposed to active income which is generated by popping naturally spawning bloons, income farming usually involves using Banana Farms (where the term comes from), Merchantmen Boats, or other income generation options to build up a large amount of income. This allows the player to purchase otherwise unaffordable upgrades (such as Paragons or a Vengeful Temple).

Why Income Farm?[]

Excluding freeplay and Deflation, the player has a limited amount of cash they can use in each game and they don't get it all at once. This means that the player has to strategically allocate the limited amount of cash on towers and upgrades over the course of game so that they don't lose. This is where the challenge of BTD6 arises from. On a side note, there are a few upgrades that are difficult to purchase without dying and without farming, such as True Sun God, Legend of the Night, Super Mines, and Paragons (especially a high degree one).

Income farming, regardless of the method used, allows the player to do two things:

1. The ability to purchase 1 or more towers that are otherwise impossible to get through natural pops without leaking or dying in an average game. This is useful for Late-Game and Freeplay.
2. The ability to purchase towers earlier than usual. This is useful for Boss-events.

This page serves as an index of different farming related strategies. In any case, the player can maximize income by using spare cash to reinvest in money-generating towers, thus creating a compounding effect. As a result, most farming strategies should begin early in the game to allow this exponential growth more time to take place. While doing this, the player needs to make sure to spend enough money on an adequate defense.

The following shows a list of links to different income farming related pages. In general, Banana Farms are the most cost efficient and effective form of income farming. However, Supply Drop Snipers and especially Merchantmen can defend bloons and create income, which can massively help in allowing the player's defense to keep up with farming as Merchantmen are both the defense and the farm.

• Banana Farm and all of its upgrades.
  • BRFs
  • Monkey Bank and IMF Loans
  • Marketplaces
• Overclock (BTD6) and Ultraboost on high tier Banana Farms.
• Merchantman and its subsequent upgrades.
• Regrow Farming (BTD6)
• Ability Farming (Druid, Sniper, Middle Path Farm, Chinook)
  • Supply Drop Spam and Elite Sniper.
  • Jungle's Bounty spam as 0-4-1 near lots of farms.
  • Support Chinook spam
  • Rejuv Potion and/or Energizer in combination with the above
• Lead/Rubber to Gold
• Bloon Trap/XXXL Trap
• Monkey Town or Monkey City
• Monkeyopolis
• Rare Quincy Action Figure
• (Usually) Max Support Sacrifices (Temple, TSG/VTSG)

What makes a Good Income Strategy?[]

Many things determine the viability of a Farming Strategy:

• How much money it makes - A no-brainer. If it can't make money, then it's not a farming strategy. Obviously, the best farming strategies make the most amount of money possible per round.

• Efficiency - This means how fast (on a per round basis) they can pay themselves off. The player spent "X" amount of cash on a farming method, which means that cash can't be used on defense, putting the player at risk of leaking bloons. The best farming strategies minimize this window of vulnerability as much as possible, if it appears at all.

• How much it helps on defense - Piggybacking off of the last point, it helps if that income method has some viable way of defending bloons at each stage of the game, saving space and money on only one tower to do both roles effectively. The best farming strategies can at least keep up with a good defense.

• Space - Each tower has a footprint, which determines how much space is taken up and how well a tower can be squeezed in since 2 0-0-0 Banana Farms make more money than 1 0-0-0 Banana Farm. Also, consider the map that is being played on. This is because the track and other towers block placements of new towers. How the track is arranged determines what kind of towers can fit in any gaps the track leaves. The best farming strategies can be spammed in any place no matter what map is chosen.

• Sellback - Primarily in early boss tiers for ranked, farming strategies that have more sellback value% can be significant in selling off income sources to afford key towers to kill the boss the fastest. This also usually benefits towers that award income faster, with the exception of IMF Loan. The best Farming strategies refund the largest amount of cash possible per farming tower.

• Ease of Use - This is more of preference than anything, but still worth considering. Since most income methods require player input for max efficiency, this can cause bloons to leak because the player was focusing on managing the farm rather than the defense, even more so for defenses that rely on abilities. And if they focus on the defense more than they focus on the farm, then the farm will lose out on cash since they are not being collected. For players less experienced, opting for a less micro intensive farming strategy can be better for letting them focus on defense without losing income directly.

Farming Strategies[]

This page will discuss all the possible farming strategies that can be done in BTD6, discussing the strengths and weakness of each single farming method, from the standard Banana Farm and its upgrades to the more niche, like Rubber to Gold:

Merchantmen spam with Trade Empire - One of the biggest downsides to Banana Farms is that it doesn't directly help in the players defense, Merchantmen solves this by allowing this tower to create $200 at the end of each round with camo detection and massive range. It can also get Hot Shot to pop camo leads AND make money. Spamming 20 Merchantmen and getting a Trade Empire can rival 4-2-0 Banana Farm Spam. Of course, Merchantmen's biggest downside is that it can only be placed on water and that it is inefficient before a Trade Empire is purchased.

Supply Drop Farming - This income Farming method relies on using the tier 4 and 5 of the middle path of the Sniper Monkey. The advantage of this is similar in principle to Merchantmen spam with Trade Empire, but with the added benefit of being more effective on defense due to synergies with other sniper paths and because of how well groups of Supply Drop with Elite Sniper handle groups of bloons. The disadvantage of this method comes in starting the actual farm. Not only is it REALLY expensive to start the farm, the ability has to go on a full initial cooldown of 90 seconds before it can be used, making the player extremely vulnerable to leaking bloons or losing game while they get the farm going. The player also must make sure to press the ability right when it is off on cooldown to not miss out any income that could have been made.

Regen/Regrow Farming - As the name would suggest, this type of farming allows the player to earn ludicrous amounts of money in a single round using regrow bloons. This type of farm takes advantage of the fact that Ceramic bloons create 2 regrow bloons, and by allowing them to grow back into ceramic bloons and repeating the process. To prevent them from being destroyed by the player's defense or leaking, the player would use blowback towers (typically a 0-3-0 Heli pilot) to push back the towers out of range, allowing the bloon time to regrow back. However, there are downsides to this. Compared to previous games, regrow farming is significantly worse and harder due to nerfs to abilities that create cash, limiting them to a specific amount of uses before the game requires the round to be fully beaten before they can be used again (though this can be bypassed by selling the tower and buying it back). Also, any bloons that have regrown no longer give cash on pop. And there is always the risk of accidentally letting too many bloons regrow back into ceramic bloons, causing the player's defense to get overwhelmed due to the sheer amount of bloons eating up the pierce of the defense. On Ranked Bosses, this provides a massive time penalty, so it is generally only worth doing for specific challenges or achievements.

Ability farming - Despite huge nerfs to regrow farming, it's still possible to regrow farm. However, this specific method relies not on the regrow farm to make cash, but the buying and selling of that tower's abilities to reset the amount of times that ability to make cash. The regrow farm is only useful to stall for time for this method. After it's no longer possible to use that ability, sell the tower and buy it back, using that ability for the amount of times that it can be used, and repeat. This method require a lot of micromanaging due the player needing to focus on buying and selling the tower that makes money and the need to keep the regrow situation under control by moving the Heli Pilot to where it needs to go. However, in Version 28.0 and onwarards, this method too has been nerfed to only 3 minutes before income abilities are disabled per round.

IMF farming - A subset of Ability farming. This involves using the IMF Loan ability to build more IMF loans, while dumping excess cash into one singular IMF loan to cash out later on, to repeat until one accrues an abnormally high amount of cash early on. Mostly used in Ranked Boss, and is especially effective in co-op. After 35.0, it is extremely difficult to make this worthwhile without Benjamin.

Lead/Rubber to Gold - This is a much cheaper form of farming that relies on the (mainly) Rubber to Gold affecting a ton of bloons with its potions, allowing more cash per pop. Because of lower invest required to be optimized, Rubber to Gold can just as efficient or more efficient then Banana Farms in some cases. However, it isn't as effective as Banana Farm but requires a lot less space. There is also a Synergy with Rubber to Gold and Pirate Lord, doubling the cash Pirate Lord gives to every MOAB-Class-Bloon it pulls. It also sees notable usage in Dreadbloon: Armored Behemoth Events, since there are a ton of lead and ceramic bloons, which are perfect candidates for these upgrades.

Monkeyopolis - Another problem with traditional Banana Farms is the amount of space it requires to be viable for late-game packing all Banana Farms consumed into a single Village, allowing the village to produce so much money with so little space. It also inherits the Monkey City buff that provides all Banana Farms in range to produce more cash, which even helps more with making a ton of cash.

Rare Quincy Action Figure - This income method sacrifices future income gain for a massive boost of cash in the short term, preferably to buy other income methods sooner. It's cheap and doesn't take much space (the player can only place one down) but it doesn't attack bloons by itself and the cost, if left alone for too long, will increase to the point that it is literally unobtainable before it can make a sizeable profit if the player didn't buy it already.

Max Support Sacrifices - This income method is only realistically achievable through the use of any of the previously mentioned income methods, due to the cost of obtaining a True Sun God with $100,000+ and/or multiple Sun Temples with $50,000+ in support sacrifices. It doesn't do a great job in terms of raw income gain V.S. cost. However, at that point, efficiency doesn't really matter since the player would have a lot of money leftover with the previous methods used still supply the bulk of the income. Also, it's unlikely that the player would only use the Temple, TSG, or VTSG for only income gain and will probably use it for Main or Support DPS outside of buffing a specific tower see how far it can go.

Of course, the player isn't limited to only using 1 income farming method, barring restrictions for towers for any reason. If the situation calls for it, one can use a farming method to transition to another method of income farming with different strengths and weaknesses.

Boss Farming Strategies[]

In Boss Bloon Events, where income farming to the maximum potential is best, an extremely efficient method of income generation is vital for the optimal survival.

Tier 1 Boss Income Farming[]

Start with a cheap starting defense, usually the Free Dart Monkey.

Two distinct farming strategies in the early rounds, specifically Rounds 1-39, are determined, assuming all Heroes are enabled:

• Benjamin - Get him as soon as possible, end-of-round cash snowballs to more cash that can be used later on.Time his Biohack to deal more damage to bloons and minimizing the detriments of the downtime, to avoid time penalty without overspending on defense.
• Geraldo - Assuming Empowered Heroes is enabled, get him with enough money to get him and his Rare Quincy Action Figure, typically on the same round, or a few rounds afterwards. If the player cannot afford the figure within 6 rounds of buying Geraldo, it is better to delay placing him. The figure doesn't directly make money, and instead is like a Bank with an arbitrarily high maximum value. Use some of his other items to make early rounds easier.
  • Sell figure at Rounds 31 to set up a further extrapolated farming in the preparation prior to the boss, giving about $9,000-$11,000 depending on placement of Geraldo and the game difficulty (changing cost of figurine and subsequently income generation).
  • Useful items for those early rounds include: See Invisibility Potion (cheap camo detection), Tube of Amaz-o-Glue (bloon slowdown), Jar of Pickles (damage buff at the cost of attack speed), Shooty Turret (cheap permanent popping power), Creepy Idol (blowback effect, primarily on r35 Dreadbloon), Stack of Old Nails (Round 24 camo), and Bottle of 'Gerry's Fire' Hot Sauce (with pickles, solos up to r39).

The general farming trend is to get a 0-0-0 Farm, upgrade to 1-0-0 into 2-0-0, get another Farm with similar processes, and then split off to another farming method. An example of a follow-up is the Bank. After getting 2-3-0 Bank after the double 2-0-0 strategy, with 2-2-0 for the first and 2-0-2 for the second to get the Bank later. Make sure to make the second farm 2-0-2 for more sellback instead of the first, and sell the 2-0-2 Farm once the player gets around $900 (Easy) or $1100 (Medium). If Monkey Knowledge is disabled, 2-0-0 Farm spam into discounted 2-0-3 marketplace spam is better, since the loss of Bigger Banks, Bank Deposits, and Backroom Deals is a significant disadvantage for IMF Loan strategies.

In the setup to Round 30, prepare to go for a transition setup to a stronger set of farming.

• Some strategies rely on pure Farms to make the most of the income generation. After a Bank or Rare Quincy Action Figure is cashed out, build a 0-0-2 village and get multiple single-discounted Marketplaces around the village.
• Bloon Trap can be used in conjunction with Marketplaces to get a significant cash gain from pops, more significant from Round 34 onwards.
• Lead to Gold is significant in Dreadbloon because natural rounds spawn more lead bloons than usual.
• IMF Loan farming is an effective but difficult farming method for Ranked Bosses. See video on IMF farming for more details. Generally it opens out with a standard bank start, but after that it results in building IMF loans, collecting the abilities, and then constantly building more IMFs while depositing spare cash into one IMF. For more details, see IMF Farming.
• Preparing a Favored Trades near farms on later rounds before the boss spawns can be useful to save cash when selling farms for more defense.

IMF Farming[]

IMF Farming is a high risk, high reward farming method used for Ranked Bosses or for the Student Loans achievement involving the IMF Loan. It can accrue up to 70-75k cash with no penalty (assuming no special modifiers, can be more on generous weeks), but also accumulates hefty amounts of debt that will slow down farming for the next boss tier. This strategy is not recommended for new players, or when Monkey Knowledge is disabled, and should only be attempted if there is a significantly lower cooldown modifier, or if the player is looking for a very fast ranked time. Typically Benjamin is stronger at income generation with this strategy at the expense of worse utility past tier 1, so many ranked players opt for Geraldo instead.

After the 35.0 update, IMF Loan got a significant nerf. It is recommended to use Benjamin instead, although it is possible to get value out of IMF farming even with Geraldo. It is also not recommended to use this on harder maps, as the more money spent on defense, the harder it is to get good value out of IMF farming. IMF Farming is most effective when buying a very expensive tower with the cash to bypass as much debt as possible early, such as Plasma Monkey Fan Club.

Mandatory MK:

• Backroom Deals (Significantly improves efficiency of IMF loan)
• Bank Deposits (Lets players make a larger profit off of excess cash by depositing it into an IMF Loan)
• Bigger Banks (Higher upper limit on banks gives more room to make a massive profit)

Farming basis:
IMF Farming proceeds like usual for the first 28-31 rounds, using a few banana farms and either building an early bank or building more farms. Against Dreadbloon, Lead to Gold is an extremely useful option to handle leads from 26-31.

This farming method is harder to do without Benjamin, but this guide will also include Geraldo.

Once you cash out from your first bank, the bank is upgraded to an IMF Loan. If no bank was built, a new farm is built into 0-4-0, with an existing farm turned into x-0-2 to sell for enough cash for an IMF if necessary. From there on, all cash is deposited into the IMF Loan. If farms are still around by the time the IMF Loan is built, selling some of them as x-0-2 and depositing the cash into the IMF is typically better than leaving the farms around. When the bank is near capacity, take out the deposit and build two discounted banks without crosspaths, sell the discount village, then use the IMF Loan Ability to get more IMF Loans, two if possible, which requires 5k cash and two fully built banks before cashing out the IMF ability. With Benjamin, this will usually occur at r33-34, while with Geraldo, this now typically occurs at r35. At this point, a good defense with Benjamin is Wall of Fire, a good defense with Geraldo is Jar of Pickles Bottle of 'Gerry's Fire' Hot Sauce + . Deposit into another bank and repeat this process to build another IMF loan at or before r37, as any later and IMF loan abilities will not come off cooldown in time. Once Round 39 arrives, prepare any ability-based towers such as First Strike, Glue Strike, and/or Overclock. When selling IMFs, crosspath them with Banana Salvage (0-4-2).

IMF Farming Nuances[]

IMF Farming has a few nuances that should be understood to best take advantage of this strong farming strategy.

• Debt management: IMF Loan debt come in $10,000 amounts. It is possible to sell a singular high-value tower (such as an IMF Loan, or a tier 5 tower) when one of the IMFs only have about 2k debt, to avoid paying most of the debt from that high-value tower. Similarly, one can delay collecting from an IMF until the debt amount in one IMF is low, to avoid paying off too much debt too fast.
• Bank Deposits: Bank Deposits will only accrue interest after the next round ends following the round involving the deposit, instead of after the current round ends which governs income that naturally generates inside the bank. Thus, it is best to only deposit cash when there is not a plan to cash out from IMF loans during the same round.
• Interest: Even if an IMF ability might be available, sometimes it is better to wait a round before cashing out an IMF, so that more interest can accumulate in an IMF. This can potentially lead to more cash in the long run if that ability would not see an extra use for activating it on cooldown.
• Individual Debt: In co-op, IMF debt is only applied to one player. Thus, in co-op, it is best to send cash to another player after the IMF farming player has finished farming, so that they can avoid the consequences of debt.

Early Miniopolis[]

Since v37.0 buffed Monkeyopolis to give a flat cash bonus ($2500 pre-38, now $1250), the Miniopolis is the dominant choice for extrapolating income. With an early 2-3-0 Bank and transitioning to some other Farms, the Miniopolis setup can commence. Specifically, a triple-discount Village buffing a single 0-0-0 Farm with one village into City, then selling the villages for the Monkeyopolis upgrade for maximum saving. The Miniopolis can then be used for both extra income and its Monkey City benefit.

Tier 2 Boss Income Farming[]

Beating the boss quickly is generally best if needing to maximize farming. Sell only as many Farms or other income generators as needed to beat the boss quickly. Assuming the boss is beaten quickly and efficiently, sell all unneeded defense for more farming.

After Monkeyopolis got nerfed in Version 32.0, the best farming option has shifted. Instead of a Miniopolis, the best option is to get Trade Empire + Merchantmen (water maps only), or 4-2-0 BRFs followed by discounted Marketplaces if there is no water. Another more difficult method is to play around with Overclock on Farms; buy Overclock and place ability onto a 0-0-0 Farm, sell Overclock, and upgrade into 4-2-0 BRF. IMF Farming is still rewarding for ranked bosses by tier 2 and the video included in early game boss farming covers how to do post-tier 1 IMF farming as well.

After 37.0, a rebuy of the Miniopolis is still worth the purchase alongside the usual 4-2-0 BRFs strategy, using a similar formula to the pre-R40 Miniopolis strategy.

Tier 3 Boss Income Farming[]

Beating the boss quickly is generally best if needing to maximize farming. Sell only as many Farms or other income generators as needed to beat the boss quickly. Assuming the boss is beaten quickly and efficiently, sell all unneeded defense for more farming.

If using Benjamin, it is better to sell him at this tier unless it is possible to place him where he cannot see at all, as his Bloon Trojan makes the player lose more money from trojaned MOAB-Class bloons, and later on, lose out on potential paragon pops.

Depending on if there is water or not, make maximum potential of income generators based on those circ*mstances. Central Markets greatly assist Boat Farming. Another instance of this is further utilizing 4-2-0 BRFs and putting them under Monkey City buff. The use of Overclock + 0-0-0 Farm into 4-2-0 is another way of maximizing income. Get up a Banana Central with Overclock and Geraldo's Fertilizer if possible under a Monkey City, since these buffs greatly improve the Banana Central's efficiency.

If there is excess cash, one can opt for an Overclocked Monkey City into a Monkeyopolis. If there is even more cash floating around, a support Sun Temple or even a support True Sun God can be purchased to serve a dual purpose of income and buffing towers for tier 3 bosses. Ultraboost can also be used on the Banana Central to boost its income.

On maps with any amount of water, Special Poperations can Door Gunner a Favored Trades around to save money on places not adjacent to water.

Tier 4 Boss Income Farming[]

Similar strategies to Tier 3 are used. By this point the map will generally be filled with BRFs, so buying Overclocks in the remaining space to improve their income should be the next step. If the player has not done so already, they can opt for a large Monkeyopolis to compress space and a Ultraboost to boost the Banana Central's income. Monkey Wall Street can be used to collect crates, Monkey-Nomics is marginally better than an overclocked BRF, but also benefits from Energizer and Rejuv Potion.

Tier 5 Boss Income Farming[]

The map should be filled with BRFs and Overclocks by this point, along with a Banana Central. While Supply Drop and Jungle's Bounty can also add income if Overclock Engineers are banned, or if space is tight, they can also steal pops on towers that will be used for Paragons, and generally are not necessary at all.

Gallery[]

Images[]

Previous Version Farming Videos[]

Trivia[]

• "Greeding" is a commonly used term for aggressive income farming. It is frequently used in contexts where the player invests so much money in farming, that defenses lack sufficient upgrades and risk losing the game. (i.e. "The player was greeding too hard, and died to a Regrow Rainbow rush.")
• BTD5 is the first game to have a tower other than the Banana Farm that generates additional income, that being the Engineer Monkey, Heli Pilot, and Sniper Monkey.
  • Since BTD6, the number of additional farming methods outside has greatly expanded with many towers getting upgrades that grant additional income, most notably the first water-only farm, with the Monkey Buccaneer being granted Merchantmen.

Gallery[]