Every Brush and What It Really Costs

Quick answer

Buy the Household Broom at $25 and skip the Nail Brush and Handbrush unless you are still short of $25. After that, buy the container upgrade before the next brush tier. Move to a vehicle once you are spending more time walking than sweeping — usually somewhere around the Wide Broom.

The six-tool ladder

Every hand tool is a straight upgrade in working width. Nothing is a sidegrade, nothing has a drawback, and there are no tool-specific mechanics. The only question is whether the next tier is worth its price at the moment you can afford it.

Width versus capacity

These two upgrades look interchangeable and are not. Width affects how fast you clean a hex. Capacity affects how often you stop cleaning to deal with what you have collected.

The diagnosis is simple, and you can do it in one session:

• You keep running out of container mid-hex. Capacity is your bottleneck. Buy the container upgrade.
• Your container is rarely full but each hex takes forever. Width is your bottleneck. Buy the next brush.
• Both feel bad. You are probably working too far from the depot. Move closer before spending anything.

Which tiers to skip

The Nail Brush at $5 and the Handbrush at $10 exist to give you something to buy in the first ten minutes. They are not traps, but they are also not destinations.

• Skip both if you are already past $15. The Household Broom at $25 is a much more meaningful jump.
• Buy one if you are stuck at $4 and want to feel progress. At that stage $5 is real money and the extra width is real too.
• Never buy both. Going Nail Brush then Handbrush then Household Broom costs $40 for the $25 broom plus two temporary tools you will never touch again.

The capacity maths

The Household Broom starts with roughly 3 kg of capacity. A $30 container upgrade takes it to about 6 kg — double, for slightly more than the broom itself cost.

Compare that to the next brush. The Wide Broom costs $75 and makes each pass wider, but it will still fill up at roughly the same rate because you are collecting more dust per pass. Capacity upgrades are the only purchases that reduce interruptions per hex.

Upgrades that touch your tool

Three entries in the Upgrade Matrix change how your hand tool behaves. They are easy to mistake for generic improvements.

Wide Head

Roughly an 8% width increase for $40. That is a fair deal if you plan to keep hand-sweeping for another hour, and a poor one if a vehicle is next on your list. It also stacks conceptually with brush tiers — the effect is proportional, so it gets more valuable the wider your base tool is.

Dust Compactor

A 15% capacity bump for $150, and it requires a container upgrade first. That price is hard to justify early. It becomes reasonable once you own a wide brush and are routinely carrying large loads, where 15% is a real amount of dust rather than a rounding error.

Auto Packer

When your container fills during cleaning, the tool packs a capsule automatically at your feet. It does not deposit anything, and it does not move the capsule. What it removes is the most annoying interruption in manual play: stopping, opening the inventory, packing, continuing.

When to stop buying brushes

The honest answer is: when the next brush costs more than a third of a Garage. The Garage is $200 and the Push Sweeper is $300, so the $500 total is the real vehicle entry price.

That puts the break-even around the Wide Broom. If you have $75 for a broom and $200 in the bank, saving for the Garage instead usually wins, because a vehicle changes how much of the map you can reach — not just how fast you clean one hex.

Common mistakes

1. Upgrading capacity on a tool you will replace. The upgrade does not transfer.
2. Buying a brush to solve a distance problem. If the depot is far, the fix is a Packager or a closer depot, not a wider brush.
3. Ignoring the Household Broom's capacity. It is the cheapest meaningful upgrade in the game and many players skip it.
4. Buying the Extra Wide Broom before the Garage. It feels great for ten minutes and then you realise you still cannot reach the interesting parts of the map.
5. Assuming a bigger brush means more money. It means more dust per minute, which only becomes money if your deposit route keeps up.

Next: how those dust numbers turn into an actual income, in the money guide. Or, if you are already eyeing the Garage, go straight to vehicles.