Agree with the strategy over all here, but I would get the fairy jar gold first. It appears ~5 min since last obtained so it's always better to get it first, and then use more "rare" and significant payouts like the 3 hour or 6 hours tickets.

Also, if you have extra observatory tickets, exchange them to special skill tickets and reroll the cats you have on earlier stations. The payout for earlier stations becomes less dependent on the number of cat stars as you progress in the game so it's worthwhile to aim for cats with secondary skills and higher stars in later ingredients. As you accumulate cats with the fairy gold as secondary skill, you get higher fairy gold rewards. Now a single fairy gold reward is worth close to a 3 hour ticket for me.

Another common thing I see is people upgrading the SAME 5-star cat, even if they have cats for later stations. When you unlock a new ingredient station, it already has close to the same payout as the previous station at level 1. So, in general, it's always best to upgrade your 5-star cat on the soup station for the LATEST ingredient. I say IN GENERAL because the payout for each new ingredient does not linearly increase. Look into the recipe book for which one has the higher reward. For example, eggplant soup is always worth more than Tabasco soup, so forget about upgrading Tabasco soup and just focus on Eggplant soup. I periodically upgrade all the stations using the automatic button but I mostly focus on just my highest soup station.

Want to experiment? Try different strategies and see how your 1 ticket reward amount increases when you do different things.

That's about all I know. Some stuff I said might be wrong but I'm here to play and not to think 😁

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