Pearls

Pearls are the prestige currency of Squid Ink. They give a passive bonus when unspent and can be used to purchase and upgrade Monuments.

## Obtaining Pearls

*Note: For a detailed strategy, check "How to get pearls" bellow.*

Pearls can be obtained on Sell Out, from the Oyster Monument or as secondary rewards from Chests.

### Sell Out

*Main article: Sell Out*

Pearls obtained from Selling Out are gathered during the play of Squid Ink.

Every business level gift obtained after Business Level 100 has a chance of containing Pearls that will be rewarded on Sell Out.

Gifts obtained on 100th levels (200, 300 400 etc) are guaranteed to contain Pearls and contain three times the amount of Pearls compared to a normal gift box. Gifts obtained on other Business Levels, after Business Level 101, have a base chance of 35% (increasable with the Shooting Stars Monument) of containing Pearls.

Every 100 combined squid weight reward the player with an extra one Pearl on Sell Out.

The number of Pearls obtained on Sell Out can be increased by the Imagination monument.

The number of Pearls obtained on Sell Out can be doubled by spending 200 Doubloons when selecting to Sell Out.

#### Salvaged Pearls

The Pearl Jewelry Artifact set rewards the player a percent of Pearls that Gift boxes could have given the player but did not. Salvaged Pearls are only awarded on every 50th Business Level and includes the salvaged Pearls from the 50 business levels previous.

### Oyster

The Oyster monument awards the player Pearls directly into the unspent Pearls pool. The Oyster produces Pearls every hour and can store up to the current level of the Oyster before it stops producing Pearls.

The amount of Pearls the Oyster produces each hour is based off of the player's highest Pearls from a single Sell Out and the player's Highest Pearls per Hour from a single Sell Out.

For strategies regarding maximizing Oyster production see: Strategies

### Chests

*Main article: Chests*

Chests, other than the normal chest, have a chance to contain Pearls as a secondary reward. The amount of Pearls the chest contains is based off the player's Highest Pearls per Hour from a single Sell Out.

## Unspent Bonus

Pearls that remain in the Pearl pool unspent give the player a passive bonus.

Each Pearl increased Ink produced by squids by 10%, ink produced on stroke by 5% and the value of mixed inks by 25%.

The bonus from unspent Pearls can be increased by the Stars monument.

## How to get pearls

Below is a list of all sources of pearls, sorted by when they become available. Before we get to the list though, you need to know about two important statistics, Highest Pearls From Sellout (HPFS) and Highest Pearls Per Hour (HPPH). Both of these are loosely correlated to your highest BL, so pushing BL will tend to improve both. But they only count pearls you get from sellout, thus you need to sellout for your new higher BL to be reflected in higher values and thus higher pearl income. Almost all sources of pearls base their output on one or both of these values.

* Sell Out at Business Level 100

This is where you turn gift box pearls real. You also get a small bonus based on total squid weight, which can be helpful for the first 1 or 2 sellouts, but rapidly becomes irrelevent compared to gift boxes. This is what sets HPFS and HPPS, so anything that boosts gift box pearls is a good thing. In particular, you are given the option to double pearls on sellout for 200 silver doubloons. This is almost always worth it once you've bought all the super fuels, and possibly before then too. See also Imagination below.

* Oyster at Business Level 100 (after first sellout)

This is the first monument you should buy. It provides a steady and reasonably large supply of pearls. Upgrading it is a priority. (You can get some "free" upgrades by upgrading right before the oyster payoff time. Pay attention to how much each upgrade increases the payoff, and buy upgrades that cost less than that.) Once fully upgraded, the oyster payout equals 20% of HPFS plus 30% of HPPH. If you keep those stats current, this will be a fairly large early game source of pearls.

* Wheel of Fortune at Business Level 100

Getting lucky here can give you an early boost, but rewards come rarely and don't scale well. It's not worth including it in any active strategy. New challenges fill any of the empty slots at midnight UTC.

* Investor at Business Level 100

Based on HPFS, while technically available fairly early, it should only be used as a late game way to get rid of excess silver doubloons. Prioritize using silver doubloons to buy Lumens, so don't use Investor until Lumens were maxed.

```
 Note: it is *not* a direct substitute for Selling Out, as this does not increase the HPFS and HPPH stats.

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* Imagination at Business Level 200

This Monument should be bought as soon as it is available (see caveat in a bit). It is a direct and significant boost to sellout pearls and thus also to HPFS and HPPH. One strategy with Imagination is to buy it, then right before Sell Out upgrade it until upgrade cost is half of base Sell Out gain. This gives most of the benefit of the Imagination Trick with less hassle.
However, because Imagination only affects Sell Out and not play at other time, many people suggest the Imagination Trick, which is basically to buy Imagination right before Sell Out, upgrade it with \*all\* remaining pearls, Sell Out with doubling, then refund the Imagination monument for 100 silver doubloons to get all the invested pearls back.

* Chests at Business Level 300

Higher tier chests can contain pearls, amount based on HPPH. It doesn't scale well, don't count on it.

* Ink Orders at Business Level 500

Ink orders can be a signicant source of shells, pearls, and silver doubloons.

* Missions at Business Level 2000 and Exploring at 3000

Another potentially significant source of pearls, especially if you give pearl missions to Moon, Krystal, His Majesty, or Dazzle, who all get personal bonuses once their story missions are completed. Pearls are based on HPPS, mission time, and a bonus that seems to be squid level\*50%

* Black Market post traverse

While Black Market should primarily be used for shells and Aquamatter, it can give pearls (and gold doubloons) at a rate comparable to missions if you want to use it for that. While Black Market inks are capped at 1 year, pearls (and all other non-shell offers) use an internal cap of 1 week, so any time invested in the ink over that is wasted if used for a non-shell offer. Pearls offers are scaled in some fashion with HPPS.

## How to use pearls

* Sit unspent in your account earning a bonus.

This sounds boring, but it is the most important use of your pearls. You want that bonus. In the very early game, you want to keep at least 75% of the pearls you acquire. Once you have 5 or 6 monuments, you'll want to boost your savings to about 90% of all acquired pearls. That is a fairly good ratio while there are still monuments to buy. Once you've bought them all, boost your savings to 95% or more of acquired pearls. Generally, buy at most one monument per Sell Out. It is often better to upgrade the monuments you have than to buy new ones.

* Spent on monuments and their artifacts.

Monuments are important. Their bonuses are good. That said, don't spend all your pearls. This is a bit conservative, but the strategy once pat the very early game is to upgrade all monuments to 1/1000 of the current pearl balance, then go through and upgrade anything that affects chest value to 1/100 of the current pearl balance. You probably need to be a bit more agressive when buying the first few monuments, but not too much more. As to what order to buy monuments, it doesn't matter that much, as long as you get Oyster first and Imagination when it becomes available. Clarinet, Trophy, Volcano and Garlich all are big boosts when they become available. Clarinet in particular is easy to push for when you are in the Business Level 250-300 range by systematically boosting ink quality/production. Ship in a bottle and Sunken ship both boost shells via treasure chests, so are good investments. Avoid Tower, Obelisk and Helicopter until you are limited by speed of Business Level progression. Save the Ink Stall for last.

* Spent worshipping Neptune.

"How much should I spend on Neptune?". It's helpful to think not in number of pearls, but in time. If you are doing a 12 hour run, spending an hours worth of pearls might make sense. If you are doing a 1 hour speed run, you might want to spend only a few minutes worth of pearls. The Oyster is a decent base clock for how fast you earn pearls early on, though once you get extended ink orders and above it might be a serious underetimate.
"Where should I spend it?". There are three baskets you can invest in with Neptune: black ink (Talent/Prosperity), ink orders/black market(Wealth) and colored ink/chest value(Opulence). You want to do one basket at a time, though early on you can combine baskets to save silver doubloons at the cost of somewhat poorer results. For the black ink basket, divide pearls between Talent/Prosperity, Prosperity 2 levels more than Talent.

## When to Sell Out

Probably more often than you think. Even if the raw number of pearls you get doesn't seem like much, if you are significantly raising either HPFS or HPPH, it is probably worth selling out. The rule of thumb is to start thinking about Sell Out if you can double either of those stats, definitely Sell Out if you can get a 10x improvement. Note also that it is pretty easy to keep HPPH at about the same level as HPFS, so if HPPH is lagging then it is time to start thinking about a speed run.