If you have just started apepatrick’s chaotic idle game, you are probably asking: what is gum used for Garbage Growth? The short answer is that gum is your primary progression currency, used exclusively to purchase permanent upgrades in the Skill Tree. While raw money buys your base pollution generators, gum is what allows you to hire Jerry the rat, summon trash-blasting angels, and scale your garbage empire into the millions.
In the crowded landscape of incremental games on Steam, Itch.io, and Newgrounds, Garbage Growth stands out for its darkly comedic premise. You begin with a seemingly selfless goal—cleaning up the environment by picking up trash bags and bananas. However, the gameplay loop quickly devolves into an environmental nightmare where you actively pollute the world to maximize your profits. The game's pixel art style, crafted in Aseprite and Unity, presents this bizarre economy in bright, cheerful colors that contrast sharply with the grim reality of what you are doing. Following a massive localization update, the game now supports 15 languages, ensuring that players worldwide can figure out exactly how to spend their hard-earned resources. Understanding the dual-currency economy is the only way to transition from manual clicking to a fully automated trash empire.
Exactly What Is Gum Used For Garbage Growth?
To master Garbage Growth, you must first understand the divide between Money and Gum. Every incremental game relies on a primary resource and a secondary prestige or upgrade resource. In this game, Money is the primary resource, while Gum serves as the crucial secondary currency.
Money is generated immediately whenever you or your workers pick up a piece of trash. You spend Money to buy "Pollutions"—the game's ironic term for trash generators. When you buy a Pollution, you are essentially purchasing an entity that litters, thereby increasing the amount of garbage on your screen.
Gum, on the other hand, is the key to permanent progression. If you are wondering what is gum used for Garbage Growth, look no further than the Skill Tree. Introduced and refined in the "Bubblegum skills" update, the Skill Tree is where you spend your accumulated gum to unlock game-changing multipliers and automation. Without spending gum, you are doomed to manually click every piece of dog poop and banana peel that spawns on the Grassy Field.
According to developer apepatrick, "all trash gives gum by default." This means that every single item you collect contributes to your gum stockpile. The more you pollute, the more trash spawns, and the faster your gum reserves grow.
How to Farm Gum Fast: Trash Types and Base Values
Farming gum efficiently requires you to expand your "trash portfolio" as rapidly as possible. In the early stages of the game, you will be manually hovering your mouse over basic trash bags to recycle them. However, as you purchase more Pollutions, the variety and volume of trash increase exponentially.
You will soon encounter bizarre trash types, including dog poop (which bafflingly rewards you with $300 per pickup) and even babies dropped by reckless bikers. A common question among new players on the Galaxy.click forums is why putting babies in a trash can yields gum. The developer's response was simple: there were some visual bugs in early builds, but fundamentally, every item functions as trash, and therefore, every item drops gum.
To maximize your gum farming, you must aggressively purchase higher-tier Pollutions. The game allows you to ship "gorillas into parks" and deploy "dying dog tanks" to generate massive amounts of clutter. The patch notes explicitly state that "Pollutions gives more gum and money." By filling the Sea Area with floating trash bags and the Grassy Field with bizarre littering entities, you create a dense field of resources that your automated workers can harvest.
Furthermore, a recent "Demo Hotfix + QoL" update significantly buffed the early-game gum economy. The developer noted that the "Trash gum value sklls from 10 to 5 but gives +2 instead of +1." This change makes the early game faster and easier, allowing you to unlock your first Skill Tree nodes much sooner.
Skill Tree Upgrades: What Is Gum Used For Garbage Growth Mid-Game?
Once you have a steady stream of gum, navigating the Skill Tree becomes your primary focus. The upgrades you choose will dictate how efficiently your empire runs. When you purchase a node in the Skill Tree, the visual feedback is immediate. A network of connected trash icons lights up, and your currency counter depletes. Here are the most critical "Bubblegum skills" you should prioritize:
The Slimy Rat Skill Rats are the backbone of your automated workforce. The game instructs you to "Mind Jerry the rat and his family, they're my faithful workers." Initially, they are slow, but they save you from carpal tunnel syndrome. The "Slimy Rat" skill is arguably the most important mid-game upgrade. Replacing the obsolete "recycle car speed" skill, the Slimy Rat upgrade ensures that rats multiply the gum value of collected items by 2. This creates a massive compounding effect: more rats collecting double gum allows you to buy even more upgrades at breakneck speed.
Trash-Blasting Angels If rats are your ground troops, Angels are your air support. Spending gum to unlock Angels summons celestial beings that automatically shoot lasers to bless and recycle trash. In older versions, players had to use a Left Mouse Button (LMB) autofire skill, but recent updates removed the autofire requirement. Now, Angels shoot automatically, with their count and lasers capped at 10. They are incredibly efficient at clearing the screen when your trash portfolio becomes too overwhelming for Jerry and his family.
Currency Formatting and Scaling As you invest gum into your Skill Tree, your income will skyrocket. The game features built-in currency formatting that shifts to letters (M for millions, B for billions) once you hit the 1 million mark. The ultimate goal is to reach a state where your Pollutions are generating trash faster than your Angels and Rats can clear it, resulting in a constant, unyielding flow of Money and Gum.
How Pollution Levels Impact Your Gum Drop Rate
A common mistake new players make is hoarding money instead of reinvesting it into Pollutions. Because "Pollutions gives more gum and money," stalling your purchases actively harms your gum acquisition rate.
Think of Garbage Growth as a factory simulator where the product is environmental devastation. You start with a pretty selfless concept, but to scale, you must embrace the filth. When you unlock the Sea Area, you are introduced to boat docks and purple pipes that pump sludge directly into the water, creating floating trash bags. Every new pipe, tank, or gorilla you add to the ecosystem increases the baseline spawn rate of trash.
Because the Slimy Rat skill doubles the gum value of whatever the rats pick up, your priority is to ensure there is never a moment where a rat is idle. If Jerry the rat is standing still, your pollution levels are too low. You must buy more bikers to throw babies, more buff guys to litter, and more dying dog tanks to pollute the fields. The synergy between high Pollution levels (bought with Money) and high collection multipliers (bought with Gum) is the engine that drives the entire game.
FAQ: What Is Gum Used For Garbage Growth?
To clear up any remaining confusion, here are the answers to the most frequently asked questions about the gum economy in Garbage Growth.
Why do babies give gum when thrown in the trash? Garbage Growth is a dark comedy idle game. When players noticed bikers throwing babies to a bunch of rats, they questioned the mechanics. The developer confirmed that mechanically, babies are treated the same as bananas or trash bags—"all trash gives gum by default."
How do I fix the skill tree zooming bug so I can spend my gum? Some Steam Deck users reported a bug where the game zooms in so much they cannot exit the skill menu to spend their gum. The developer addressed this in the May 16 update, which "Fixed game ui and view resolutions on steamdeck." Ensure your game is updated to the latest version.
Did the developer change how much gum trash gives? Yes. In a recent Quality of Life update, the developer tweaked the scaling so that the "Trash gum value sklls from 10 to 5 but gives +2 instead of +1." This effectively doubled the base gum acquisition rate in the early game, making it much easier to unlock your first rat workers.
Do pollutions directly increase my gum? Absolutely. The patch notes explicitly state: "Pollutions gives more gum and money." Buying more pollution generators increases the sheer volume of trash spawned on your screen, which directly translates to more gum drops.
Final Thoughts on the Garbage Empire
Understanding the intricacies of the Skill Tree is what separates casual clickers from true pollution barons. By answering the core question—what is gum used for Garbage Growth—you unlock the true potential of the game's idle mechanics. Stop hoarding your resources. Spend your money on dying dog tanks, spend your gum on the Slimy Rat skill, and let Jerry the rat build your empire while you sit back and watch the world burn.
Sources
- Garbage Growth on Steam: store.steampowered.com/app/4680930/Garbage_Growth/
- Garbage Growth by apepatrick on Itch.io: apepatrick.itch.io/garbage-growth
- Garbage Growth Community Hub on Galaxy.click
- Garbage Growth Developer Logs on Newgrounds