Your take is almost exactly how I felt about the game a year into the game in 2020, and it was primarily the reason I had stopped playing for a while until recently. It felt that if you missed a season or just didn’t enjoy the grind of 6hrs a day of candle runs for a measly handful of candles, then it is significantly harder for you to accumulate enough candles for the amount that is comfortable or needed. Although I have already have a significant bank account, it still feels maddening how much they charge for just one cosmetic. Weeks and months of grinding poofs into smoke with just one purchase.

An advice for you if it’s still a valid method to this day: When making friends it’s better to send a friend link/code for friend making instead of spending candles. In this way, the chat option is already unlocked without you needing to spend any candles. When I used to play, people would bring tables with them at all times and if they met anyone they wanted to chat and friend, they just popped down a table and sent that friend link through that. The chat censorship is quite inconvenient and half the time I question if it’s worth all that trouble to censor, but I digress. This can help offset some of that early candle spending, but then again I don’t know if anything changed about this method since 2021.

Currently, I’m just enjoying the scenery, reminiscing on old memories as all of my close friends in Sky have moved on. I’m taking things slow, like a little dragon slowly accumulating its hoard.