This is a little personal project of mine to publish information I've gathered regarding the game, as I've personally run into a lot of frustration with the flood of "guides" that are ad revenue generating clickbait with no real substance or information. My goal is to provide information on mechanics that is thorough enough to be useful and does not skip over seemingly "obvious" answers.
This post will be edited regularly as a master post to make finding guides on this page easier.
Please feel free to send asks about anything in the game you would like more information on :) If I do not have an answer by George I will try to find one.
Job Guide explains the starting and highest wage of any job, explains how job wages are actually calculated currently in the game, covers base mechancs for job applications, but not job performance
you know, I made a cute little arrangement of fun cursed objects for my icon but then I remembered what was, by no means the most game breaking bug I've experienced, but undeniably the worst one.
Personality Leveling Bug When Editing Age and Solution
I encountered a somewhat stressful glitch with my paras personality levels and age stages after editing their age with the console cheats, but also figured out how to more or less fix it and wanted to share if anyone has had a similar issue.
The glitch at surface was just seeing my paras core stats drop when they aged into adults.
The cause of this glitch was that I had previously edited their age immediately after they grew from the young adult to adult life stage. I used setage to put them back to young adult.
When a para enters a new life stage they get some free personality points to spend independent of the level. They game is bad at handling this.
The 3 bonus points I got for being an adult did not go away when I set them back to young adults. I did not want to spend them yet, since it felt "extra cheaty" since they hadn't actually earned them. For a while I just let them sit there, but then their personalities leveled up naturally. The "real" point was not separated from the age up bonus points, so rather than the new perk I should have earned it prompted me to spend a point on a core stat. I thought that was fair enough of a trade off and spent only one of the points. Sometime later, the extra points disappeared and they were able to level up normally. I stopped thinking about it, as I had twins to frantically raise.
However, the next time they aged into adults (which I wanted to let happen this time, I only didn't before so they would be young enough to raise their kids) their stats dropped. They also did not get any bonus points at all, making me wonder if when they did the first time was also some kind of glitch or bug.
Entering the paramaker informed me they in fact had -1 points to spend, and entering then exiting it forcibly subtracted the points in the same way aging up did even when I reloaded my save to before they aged up. Aging them up in the paramaker also forcibly subtracted points.
Notably the glitch did not subtract the point from where I actually spent them, but simply lowered the highest stat each of them had. It took me a while to figure out and fighting with various work arounds, and I only found the solution after giving up and deciding they would just have to be perpetually 20 for until their kids grew up.
When I set their ages literally to 20 so they could start fresh in the ya life stage timer I thought I would be dealing with, 3 personality points suddenly appeared to be spent! It was then I realized that extra point I had spent before was being subtracted, but incorrectly because the game had no way or reason to track the order I spent my points in.
The solution was to let them age into adults, immediately set their ages back to 20, set the age to 40 again, and then spend the points.
I do not imagine I am the only person to tweak my paras ages around, so I hope this helps anyone else having a similar issue.
Official sources for how jobs work are messy and have been hard for me to navigate, they seem to have information that is either scrapped or not yet implemented, so I took some time to figure out how jobs currently function. I have seen precisely 0 guides explain some of this information at all, so I'm going to assume no one else has figured it out and give myself a high five.
To summarize:
All jobs have rank based pay. The higher the rank the more money you make. Jobs are also categorized into levels that determine how much more money you make per rank, but this stat is not directly displayed in game. Higher level jobs do not appear at entry level (never available at rank 1) and have much higher potential maximum earnings.
What jobs are available is randomized every day! What you see on day one is not a list of all options. (So many guides I have seen do not understand or realize this >>)
this guide covers the math behind wage calculation, how application points work and other general job mechanics. It does not explore work performance, which will have its own guide at a time.
To start I will link to the official wiki and do my best to denote what information is or isn't usable here. I may make a separate post to list all available in game jobs, but this guide is more focused on the mechanics of how they work.
If you want to see what jobs exist check out the job list here.
What information you CAN TRUST
Job name/theming
required skills listed
what industry/domain the job is tagged as
what "level" the job is
the job's company/employer and lot location
What is a LIE (said with love, they're doing their best)
skill based bonus pay (your skill level has 0 affect on your wage in game currently outside of tangential work performance effects)
"rank based" and "base pay" listings (these are meaningless, all jobs are rank based, and the jobs that are arbitrarily listed as otherwise are not necissarily more lucrative than other jobs)
company vibes? (admittedly not quite a lie, but not fully implemented and have a difficult to track effect if they are)
"special entry level jobs"
Job Pay and How Its Calculated
All Jobs rate of pay are calculated based on their Rank, Level, and any bonuses you have obtained through job perks. This section will focus on explaining Rank and Level
You can see a jobs rank in game displayed clearly both when you have the job in the job tab and listed next to a job when you direct your para to "look for job". Jobs have a technically invisible level stat as well, which can be reverse engineered by looking at the jobs starting rank when it is being offered as an open position.
All jobs have pay based on their Rank and Level. These terms are a bit confusing, as level is more like a "tier" and rank is more like the colloquial use of level as in leveling up a character in a video game.
You rank up your job over time with perk points by performing well at your job (this is its own system to be described in depth later). Increasing your rank will increase your daily pay by a fixed amount determined by the jobs level. This means that a higher level job of the same rank will pay more than a lower level job, and that is the bit of key info the game isn't good about telling you directly. The job's starting pay when it is listed is determined by the level and the rank it is being listed at.
There are 49 ranks in game, but only 5 level. You can easily tell what level a job is by what rank it is posted as when looking for a new job.
level 1
rank 1 entry level jobs when first posted as an opening. Hypothetically any job posted rank 9 and under, but currently all lvl 1 jobs post at rank 1
starts at 250₽
each rank adds 10₽ to pay
has 3 perk slots
level 2
rank 10-19 when first posted as an opening
starts at 435₽
each rank adds 15₽ to pay
has 4 perk slots
level 3
rank 20-29 when first posted as an opening
starts at 730₽
each rank adds 20₽ to pay
has 4 perk slots
level 4
rank 30-39 when first posted as an opening
starts at 1320₽
each rank adds 30₽ to pay
??? perk slots
level 5
rank 40-49 when first posted as an opening
starts at 2550₽
each rank adds 50₽ to pay
??? perk slots
Note that any job can reach rank 49, but it will only increase each rank by the amount associated with its level. There is no way to increase a job's level. You can become a rank 49 store clerk, but because each rank only increases your pay by 10₽ you will only be making 730₽ after your long slog of dedication, which is what the lowest rank level 3 job starts at.
There is now way to acquire a high level job at a rank lower than the ranks listed above. You can never have a rank 1 level 3 or 5 job. These jobs only become available at the ranks show.
There is an obvious degree of "higher level jobs are just better" but they require a lot of prerequisites to be met thanks to the way applying to jobs works in the game. Without going into too much detail on those systems yet, it is safe to say higher level jobs simply require time and dedication to acquire and are proportionally more difficult to obtain in accordance with the level. If you want your para to be a level 5 CEO, the easiest way to get there is to start at a level 1 job with the same skills required or at the same company and work your way up.
Note that the starting pay of a given job is the same as if you earned that rank manually. A rank 14 job will pay the same starting at rank 14 as if you started at rank 10 and ranked it up over time. It is only when you "pass" the starting offer range for a job level that it becomes lesser to jobs being offered at the same rank, because those jobs are a higher level. Eg, a rank 10-19 job will pay the same base as a new rank 10-19 job of the same rank, but once you hit rank 20 any new job posting will be a level 3 job, and therefore a large improvement.
Application System
To get a job in paralives, you click on your para or a computer, select "find a job", and browse through the menu that pops up showing the various jobs available.
Once again, which jobs show up is inconsistent and randomized, every day different jobs will be available. The job list is static for the day and does not change between paras, it refreshes presumably at midnight like the collectables do. A given Job's level is fixed, but on different days you may see it being offered at different ranks. For example the level 2 audio engineer job might be posted as a rank 10 opening one day but rank 14 on another. Its pay will be scaled accordingly the same as if you had ranked the job up by working it and spending points.
When you click on a job and choose a schedule it will ask you if you want to apply. This erroneously implies (especially in a game with a lot of rng elements) there is a chance that, once you click on the job, you can be rejected. Rest assured this is not the case.
The game will not let you "apply" to a job you are not qualified for, these jobs will be greyed out.
When you mouse over a job it will show you your Application Points. The system is fairly simple and straight forward (huzzah!) if your Application Points total higher than the jobs Rank, you can apply. It even does you the favor of breaking down what factors into the application points for that jobs, so if you see a job you want but cannot apply to, you can set about improving the areas needed to be able to when it shows up again.
Application points are calculated by:
Skill: whatever skills the job requires it will count your current level in those skills.
Job Experience: whatever rank you have had in the same industries. eg, if you were a rank 7 waiter, you will get 7 points when applying to other jobs in the food or service industries, as that job has both of these tags.
Charisma Bonus: your charisma stat is added to the application total
Internal Bonus: applying to a job in the same company give a flat bonus of 3 points per your current jobs level.* Applying from a level 2 job awarded 6 points. I assume the pattern continues but have not observed it personally.
Vibe Bonuses: more information needed. serious vibe seems to always adds a flat bonus of 2, I think some jobs may give bonuses for other vibes. (but this isn't something you can change or improve in normal gameplay, and it will show up if it is a factor)
Career Improvement Gameplay Loop
For me, the lack of information made the way jobs worked initially look kind of depressing and realistic in ways that were unsettling. There is a degree of modern realism opposed to the sims 90s based "you move up in your same job forever" approach that no longer really exists, but it is far less dystopic or existential than I initially feared. I say this because most of us are coming from the sims and the jarringness of the difference in approach can be a bit hard to understand.
You are expected to change jobs in this game. It is normal and encouraged, and generally a net benefit. But like in the real world it does come with some drawbacks and growing pains.
The gameplay loop expects you to get a level 1 job, rank it up a few times while also improving relevant skills, and then move on to a level 2 job probably within a week or so depending on the position. And then repeat up to higher jobs.
Over the course of an in game day, you can hypothetically drastically increase your application point total, especially earlier in the game when skills level up faster. If you have other application bonuses from charisma, internal application, or vibe, you can reach 10 points for a tier two job quickly, thought it may take some in game days or luck for a rank 10 position in the relevant field to open. But in the time you are waiting for that to happen, you will probably get enough points to apply to a rank 12 or 14 position anyway.
While you have a (not guaranteed) chance of increasing your jobs rank every day at work, you can jump up several ranks and even a level by getting a new job. Generally, moving to a new job/position is a faster and larger pay increase than ranking up a job. Even if you are moving between level 3 jobs, if you have the application points but a higher rank job just wasn't available before, it is faster to move to a new rank 29 job than level up to rank 29 from rank 20. However other factors like the jobs schedule or theming may play a factor.
"Jobs" in this game also refers to individual positions, so you can be "promoted" within a company by applying internally, which is a bit closer to how that works in the real world today. While you currently have to quit your current job to do this, the spirit of the mechanic is more meant to represent you moving up in your company, which is why you get that 3 point internal application bonus.
The point and beauty of this system is its flexibility. The intent is to work your way up through increasingly better jobs, but you can have a para grind out a skill and jump straight into a higher paying career if they have the application points. You can tell stories of a rock star who started out frying chicken or a shut in who was abruptly discovered and jumped right into a high paying career.
Perks
The only downside switching jobs is it wipes your perks. When you have a job, you engage with the performance system (which has its own guide coming soon) to earn perk points. You use these points to rank up your job or give it a perk card. Perks can range from monetary wage increases to passive skill gains to shorter work hours to social benefits with coworkers.
Every time you get a perk point, you will get a random pool of perks to pick from, like with other card based systems in the game. You do not have any control over what kind of perks show up.
Technically speaking, with perks, you can have the "equivalent" of a much higher level job at a lower level by choosing perks that increase your pay. You would obviously still have a chance to earn much more at a higher level job, but it is a helpful option if say, you really want your para to be a principle for story reasons. This also increases the difficulty of switching jobs, as you may technically have to take a temporary pay cut for the "potential" of a higher wage later. Depending on how old your para is that potential could mean a lot more money with patience or never be met before they retire.
There are only a handful of level 4 and 5 jobs in the game currently. Some industries/domains do not have any. This is clearly an early access ism. For the time being rest assured thank level 3 pay, even without perks, from 1 para is more than enough to accomplish in game wealth based life goals.
For those curious, there are 2 level 5 jobs, both titled CEO one purely management and one tagged management and science. There are 7 other assorted level 4 management jobs (one of which is a chef and also tagged for food), and 2 level 4 music industry jobs, one in medicine and one in science. There are no jobs above rank 3 in service, art, handy, teaching, software development, or fitness.
Other Notes and Mechanics
☙ There is a big gap between level 1 and 2 jobs. Both level 2 and 3 jobs it is easy to earn a very comfortable amount and achieve wealth based life goals with a perk or two or higher rank.
☙ Some jobs do not have required skills. I do not believe they are "incomplete" because of early access, but an intentional variant. These jobs may be harder to apply to but they are much easier to maintain, as they do have increasing skill requirements relating to performance when you rank them up. It is a trade off.
☙ The science industry is currently a bit on fire. It has no entry level positions (which is not inherently problematic on its own) and require in game skills that are broken and have no way to be learned outside of job perks. It is possible to break into, but it would involve having to "tag" in from the art or teaching industries (there are a few art/science jobs and teaching/science jobs you can use to gain industry experience points)
☙ jobs under the same company can be in entirely unrelated fields and will not grant relevant experience. Eg, being a janitor at the space agency will give you 3 points of internal bonus, but will not count as science industry experience.
☙ There are no job related cheats useful for easy "storytelling purposes" eg way to forcibly set a para to have a higher rank job off the bat, edit their application point values, etc. If you would like to cheat your para to a better job, you still have to give them start at rank 1 and use the cheat to grant perk points to rank it up to get industry experience, and then are still beholdened to the in game job posting rng.
☙ The highest possible salary in the game at rank 49 in a level 5 job is 3k per day. Rank 49 in a level 4 job is 1890, and in a level 3 is 1310.
☙ Schedules vary, and some jobs may offer an option of shifts. Jobs have between 5-7 hours of work in a day and between 3-5 days a week. since you are being paid per day, be weary of jobs with only 3 work days a week unless you are looking to work multiple jobs
☙ consequently, you can work multiple jobs so long as the schedules do not conflict
☙ as far as I can tell, quitting a job currently has no negative impact other than "resetting" perks/rank. There is nothing stopping you from reapplying to the job later.
☙ you can earn vacation days via various perk cards. These are different from your days off, these are paid vacation days that let you skip a day you would normally work and still get paid. Most perk cards I have seen grant them based on some kind of chance or trigger, like "33% if x condition is met" or "gain one once a week on Monday"
☙Job performance will get its own guide at a time, as there are aspects I am still struggling to beat the math out of.
if you have any information missing in this guide please feel free to send me an ask. I am looking for more sell price data for different items.
This guide covers basics, pricing, spawning behaviors, and profit tactics relating to collectibles in paralives.
Basics
You can collect and forage for 3 types of collectables in paralives currently. Mushrooms, gemstones and ores, and artifacts. These items exist primarily to be donated to the Museum or Community Center in exchange for various rewards, but can also be sold for profit or placed as decorations. They cannot be accessed in the build menu even with cheats currently.
Collectables appear on the ground around town, and have the white highlight overlay when you mouse over them indicating they are interactable. Clicking on one will give you the option to collect it.
Artifacts work slightly differently than other collectables, appearing as a generic dig spot and yielding a random item from a loot table rather than showing up on the map as what it is.
Mushrooms can also be eaten, however, be warned that it can instantly kill a para. I will update this guide with a link when I have more information on exact behaviours of various mushrooms.
Crates also sometimes wash up on the beach. These will have random furniture items inside them- usually very expensive ones! They are not a traditional collectable and do not count towards the community center or museum but obviously worth a pretty penny. Every item I have gotten from a crate thus far I can also purchase in build mode.
Pricing
The game currently does not tell you how much any collectable is worth until after you sell it, but having a list of prices seems handy even if this is later patched.
Collectables fall into 4 price patterns, ones for mushrooms, gemstones and ores, paintings, and other artifacts. Both paintings and other artifacts are collected from the "dig site" collectable on the map, but have unique price scales.
Based on the statistical data gathered, how expensive an collectable is is proportional to how rare it is. Rarer items sell for much more.
Common - 80₽
girl with red hat, bird with whatever, three pears,
Uncommon - 150₽
Woman w parasol, self portrait, the swing
Rare - ?₽
Other Artifacts
Common - 30₽
axe head, tin can, cannon balls, leather scraps, pipe, leather working pliers, anchor, anvil, medal,
Uncommon - 70₽
viking sword, Industrial mold, key
Rare - ?₽
I have not observed any high selling paintings or artifacts, but I have not sold every item I have collected in favor of progressing the museum. I suspect there is a rare category for paintings at the vary least, but I have simply chosen to donate any one I might have found.
Spawning
All collectables follow certain spawning behaviors in my observations.
They do not spawn on residential or commercial lots. Only on park or gaveyard lots or "common areas" not zoned as part of a lot.
This conclusion was drawn based on the fact nothing ever spawns on residential properties, and notibly nothing spawns in the large garden area in front of the hospital or in "yard" areas in front of other lots.
this means that the entire lighthouse lot does not spawn collectables and you do not have to bother checking it. (but the there is a small "common" area by the bus stop between it and the beach that can spawn things, but it is much less out of the way.)
They only spawn on dirt ground and never anything paved, seem to heavily favor or "technically" only spawn on green grass, with the exception of dig sites that also spawn on sand.
you can safely skip large paved areas when checking for collectables, like the castle plaza or middle of roads.
I have seen maybe a total of 3 exceptions across all files to the "green grass" rule, and my guess is that they are not real exceptions, but an issue of there being grass "under" the other painted texture to a degree, or the visual line of what we see not matching what the game is counting as grass.
you can pretty safely skip over dirt pathing and large areas of dark dirt or the tree underbrush textured ground in the forest on the mountain
Roughly 30-45 collectables spawn on the map per day. It seems to legitimately be a random number and not a matter of human error. The highest number I have recorded is 45.
They are fairly evenly distributed through the town. with 10-15 collectables appearing in the "upper" "middle" and "lower" portions of the map on average each day.
Mushrooms
Mushrooms appear with individual unique models for each specific type of mushroom. You know exactly what you are collecting just by looking at it, and mouseing over it will tell you the name of the mushroom.
Mushrooms follow the above spawning rules. They do not appear on sand and are the only collectable to appear in the graveyard.
They are found most often next to paths and roads. Several will often spawn in the green field between castle plaza and community center at once.
More mushrooms spawn per day than any other type of collectable.
I have only seen the black trumpet once on one file. It spawned next to the dumpster at the foot of the mountain path.
Gemstones and Ores
Gemstones and ores appear with individual unique models for each specific type of stone. You know exactly what you are collecting just by looking at it, and mouseing over it will tell you the name of the stone. Each stone has a standard shape, which is a small grey stone topped with the relevant ore or crystal growing out of it.
Stone collectables always appear at the foot of sheer cliff faces.
Any time the terrain in game has a vertical face with a rock texture meeting the ground where it is green it is a potential stone spawn location. this includes very short "cliff" walls, such as the small raised areas on either side of the tunnel the train goes through across from the beach. There are some areas where there is underbrush painted texture next to grass touching a cliff where they appear in the valley and on the mountain trail.
I have observed a far more limited number of spawn locations for stones, indicating they may have fixed spawners. These locations are:
along the cliff on the far right side of the map where there is a train tunnel wrapping around across from the suburban houses. upwards of 6 can spawn here at once.
one specific spot along the cliff to the left of the general store
on the winding descent/ascent on both sides of the valley path
a single spot near the middle of the valley path, where it branches around some foliage
one specific section of the mountain path, on the right side on a switchback between the top and the fork in the path on that side.
along the railroad tracks that go through the enterable tunnel by the beach on both sides, both below and above the tracks (note that the tracks are tall enough a para cannot climb up to them without having to go up and around several flight of stairs in old town)
along the long cliff that touches the ocean with the road and train tunnel trough it, but only on the side facing the empty lot in a small divot of area not apart of that lot.
*Note all relative directions are assuming the beach is at the bottom of the screen/to the south.
Artifacts
Artifacts appear as a standard dig site asset on the ground, which is a large half buried chest surrounded by upturned piles of dirt. Clicking on it will give the option to "dig up" rather than "collect", but it will put the item in your inventory all the same.
Artifacts follow the above general rules. While rare, artifacts can spawn on the beach. because they are designed to blend in with dirt they are very obvious and easy to see when this happens.
Artifacts sometimes spawn very close to trees making them harder to see.
Artifacts are physically larger of an asset than mushrooms or stones, which does seem to limit some of the places they can spawn.
Fewer artifacts spawn per day than other collectibles. I have not experienced there being 0 on the map on any given day. I have less data for this, but there are probably about at least 3.
Deadzones
Some area I have never seen spawn a collectible and can be safely ignored when looking for them to save irl time:
The park looking area where the zipline lands (it is part of the schools lot and not a real park)
the strip of empty land between the community center and the empty residential lot behind it (I suspect eventually the community center will become renovatable like in stardew vallley and there will be other assets taking up that space.)
the dead end street the light house is on (all land is part of a residential lot)
The dead end street between the large empty rural on the center right of the map and the train tracks. (though the small common land between that lot and the very tiny corner lot does spawn things, you just don't need to go all the way down the road)
the bottom left most dead end street in the industrial distict.
Making Money with Collectables
I did a lot of science to try to find how viable being a Mushroom Hermit (as I like to call it) was as an alternative to a standard in game job.
The short answer: on average a para makes 10-1500₽ on collectable sales per day depending on the number of items kept for decoration/donation/etc, and it takes 7 hours to collect everything.
The highest selling individual collectables are 400₽ and can easily be spotted while the game is paused and grabbed in a much shorter period of time for smaller, less time consuming supplemental income.
As I have been also dutifully completing my museum and community center donations, it is possible the upper end is closer to 2k₽ per day. My lowest recorded profit was 540₽ early in a file with a lot of donations, my highest was 17k₽, still with 5 donations. this depends heavily on the rng of what spawns, so I feel the 1.5k₽ average is probably the most accurate even if you are selling everything.
These numbers also do not count for the large bonuses granted by completing the museum and community center bundles, which include one off monetary rewards as high as 10000₽ and items that are valued at over 20k₽.
Is It Better Than A Job?
Given this requires no skills and no work experience or application point grind, this is an extremely lucrative option you can invest in off the bat. However, the full answer is realistically a "depends on what your trying to do"
But if your question is if it is viable as a job alternative, than the answer is a resounding and unquestionable yet.
For comparison, entry level jobs are 250₽/day. A job paying close to 1500₽/day would be "level 4" and rank 30-39 without some really lucky perks, which means you would need to than many application points to land the job in the first place (see the job guide for more info). Basically you need to have a job in a related field with a high enough rank to give you the relevant "job experience" or grind out relevent skills to total that number among other bonuses, which all amounts to: there is basically no way you can land a job like that on day one without cheats. Basically a jobs ranks averages out to the number of days you have actively worked, so you would need to work 30 days (thats not counting your days off!) before you could get one of those high rank positions.
THAT BEING SAID
Jobs give perks. Higher level jobs have more perk slots. And these perks are not always directly tied to increasing your paycheck. They can save time by passively increasing your skills or strengthening relationships. And the ones that do increase pay can be dramatic if your lucky. I have a para at a lowly "level 2" job making around 14k₽ a day because of the perks he has. The higher "level" (not rank) the job is the more perk slots it has also, so.
It all boils down to a more subjective freedom of schedule vs total time spent question, which won't have a clean answer. Being able to wander around town and stop and talk to other paras, interact with things in the the town, etc, are all obvious benefits of hermiting off of collectables. You might save time by collecting some things, doing some stuff in town, collecting some things, and so on. You can also save time by having a skill just get free exp during the fixed 5-7hrs your para is in a rabbit hole.
Time and Profit Management
Collecting every collectible that spawns every day is time consuming for your para. Your para's personality might also make this more complicated (for example, a jester will need to take fun breaks.) and need management along the route can stretch things out as well (taking bathroom breaks that and so on.) Optimizing can help save some time while still making a lot of money.
If the only collectable out of the way is common or even uncommon, its probably better to skip it. Entire trails with no rare items can be easily skipped as well. I find myself skipping the mountain trail often since it takes a long time and it will have only common mushrooms, maybe an uncommon. This is losing 1-150₽ to gain back over an hour, since its such a long path isolated path.
However, I still always check it while my para is pathing elsewhere because the expensive 400₽ turkey tail tends to spawn there often. One turkey tail on the path plus the other mushrooms suddenly means I'm making 500₽~ for that time.
As a rule of thumb I favor anything new (for improving this guide and the museum naturally), dig sites, uncommon or higher stones, and rare mushrooms. if a path doesn't have one of these I tend to skip it, with the exception of if there is a particularly high density of something. In my experience, going along the right most vertical road and the lower most road the beach is on is always worth it. It is the only area I have never had a reason to skip.
