How to play Idle Donkeys

What is Idle Donkeys?

Idle Donkeys is a business empire idle game where dodgy donkeys run suspiciously profitable farms. You start with a single Hay Farm and work your way up through 14 businesses, earning Hay, Crystals, and eventually real DKV tokens on the Solana blockchain.

The core loop is simple: buy businesses, hire managers to automate them, earn currencies, and level up. Progress continues even when you’re not actively playing — managed businesses run 24/7.

Play in your browser, or on a Solana Seeker / Android phone. Your progress is saved to the cloud per save slot.

The Goal

Grow your idle donkey business empire as large as possible. Higher-level businesses produce faster and unlock new opportunities. The big milestones:

Currencies

There are three currencies in Idle Donkeys. Each one unlocks the next tier of the game.

Businesses

You start by buying your first business. Each production cycle generates income. Level up businesses to increase production speed, increase profit per cycle, and unlock the next business in the chain.

Managers & Skimming

Managers keep businesses running automatically around the clock. Without a manager, a business runs one production cycle and stops. With a manager, it runs continuously.

The catch: managers skim a percentage of your profits. The lower the tier, the more they take.

Prestige System

After unlocking Business 12, you can sell your entire empire. This is called Prestige. It resets your businesses but makes you permanently stronger.

7-Axis Pick System

Each prestige you choose one free pick from the seven upgrade axes below. Each axis can be picked up to 15 times across your prestiges — no DKV or any other currency cost, it's a reward for resetting.

What you keep after prestige

Business Events — Donkey Chaos

After your first prestige, random chaos events can strike individual businesses. These are per-farm events — each one targets a single business and applies a temporary debuff to it. Up to 3 events can be active at the same time across all your businesses.

Business Event List

Good News Events

It isn’t all chaos. Positive events can also strike your businesses, and the world at large. A Good News event boosts production and/or speed for a while (you’ll see a news flash when one lands). They are rarer than the bad kind, and there’s nothing to repair — just enjoy them.

• Your Luck bonus raises the chance of Good News events. Luck comes from the Luck Booster prestige pick, the Luck shop upgrades, and Luck traits on your NFT managers.
• Resistance, Repair and Insurance only help against the bad events — they never reduce your Good News.

Repairing Events

You can end a business event early by paying a repair cost. Two options are available:

• Hay repair — halves the remaining event duration. Costs scale with the business’s current buy cost.
• Crystal repair — instantly clears the event. Costs Crystals based on the same scale.

NFT managers assigned to the affected business reduce repair costs. The Resistance Booster prestige pick reduces how often events roll, and the Repair Booster pick reduces event duration and repair costs.

Global Events

Global events are per-player disasters that hit all 14 of your businesses simultaneously. Only 1 global event can be active at a time. They begin rolling roughly every 4 hours and become more frequent the more prestige resets you have (up to a cap at 10 resets).

Global Event List

Repairing Global Events

Like business events, you can repair a global event early:

• Hay repair — costs ~10% of your total empire buy cost in Hay. Halves remaining duration.
• Crystal repair — costs 25 × your prestige count in Crystals. Instantly clears the event.

Insurance

Insurance lets you protect individual businesses from chaos events. It becomes available after your first prestige reset and is purchased per-business from the business panel.

Insurance Tiers

• Costs scale dynamically with the business’s current buy cost — early farms are cheap, the DKV Token Mint is expensive.
• There is a 1-hour cooldown between insurance purchases for the same business.
• An NFT manager assigned to a business amplifies its insurance reduction beyond the base tier value.
• All insurance is cleared when you prestige. Re-purchase after each reset if needed.

DKV Earning Cap

To prevent bulk DKV farming, the game enforces a per-hour earning cap on DKV Token production. The cap resets at the top of every UTC hour.

How to Grow Your Cap

Your effective daily cap is calculated as:

• Each NFT manager assigned to any business adds +2 DKV/hr (+48 DKV/day) to your cap.
• Each prestige reset permanently adds +10 DKV/day to your cap.
• The DKV cap carries over through prestige resets — it is never wiped.

DKV Exchange

When you’re ready to withdraw, tap the DKV Exchange button in-game. Enter the amount you want to send — only that amount is deducted from your balance. Your Phantom wallet must be connected to receive the transfer.

Achievements

There are 40 achievements to unlock by hitting gameplay milestones. Once an achievement is triggered, tap the achievement in the Stats panel to claim your one-time reward. Rewards range from Hay for early milestones up to real DKV for the hardest ones.

Access achievements via the Stats button in-game → Achievements tab.

Daily Login Rewards

Log in each day to claim a reward. The cycle runs over 7 days then repeats. Miss a day and the streak resets back to Day 1.

Level Milestone Rewards

Earn XP from buying and levelling up businesses. Hit the milestones below for one-time Crystal and DKV rewards.

Stats Panel & Global Leaderboard

Tap the Stats button in-game to open the Stats panel. It has three tabs:

Leaderboard Sort Modes

The leaderboard has 6 sort modes — tap the column headers to switch:

Mini-Games

Mini-games can be played once every 24 hours for a small Hay cost. The Fishing mini-game rewards Crystals — useful for earning premium currency without waiting to reach the Crystal Mine.

Fishing Upgrades

Spend Crystals to upgrade your fishing in four ways, each with three tiers:

• Crystal Reward — bigger catches.
• Reel Speed — reel fish in faster.
• Rarity Boost — better odds of the rare catches.
• Cooldown — play more often.

Your fishing upgrades and claimed achievements are saved with your game, so they come with you to a new device or after a restore.

The Shop

The shop lets you spend Crystals on upgrades and boosts:

• Permanent boosts — speed and production multipliers that stack with prestige upgrades.
• Temporary production boosts — short-term multipliers for when you’re actively grinding.
• Time warps — skip ahead 5 minutes, 1 hour, or 24 hours. Useful when you’re short on patience.
• Luck upgrades — a ladder of upgrades that raises your chance of Good News events.

Tiered Upgrades

Five of the big one-time speed and production upgrades (Better Tools, Donkey Drivers, Night Shift, Reinforced Equipment and Work Flow) are now three-tier ladders. Each tier costs ten times the last, and each tier replaces the bonus rather than adding to it, climbing to a final tier that beats the old single upgrade. If you owned one of these before the change, you keep your original bonus until you choose to buy into a higher tier.

Crystal Packs

Short of Crystals? You can buy Crystal packs with a card in the shop. They’re optional, never required, and credited to the save slot you bought them on.

Skins

Give your ranch a new look. Skins (Classic and Steampunk, with more to come) swap the game’s artwork without changing how it plays. You can preview a skin before you buy it, and switch freely between the skins you own. Skins belong to the save slot you bought them in.

Offline Earnings

Managed businesses run continuously whether the game is open or not. When you come back, your offline earnings are waiting to be collected.

Unmanaged businesses run one cycle and stop. To maximise offline earnings, make sure every business has a manager assigned before you close the game.

Saves & Restoring

Sign in and your game saves to the cloud automatically, in up to several save slots. Currencies, shop items and skins are kept per slot.

• New device? Sign in with the same account and your slots are there.
• Something went wrong? Use Restore My Save in the game to roll a slot back to an earlier cloud save, no support ticket needed.
• Seeker / Android: the same account and saves work on a Solana Seeker or Android phone.

NFT Tools & the Donkeyverse

Your DKV NFTs aren’t just collectibles: they are your managers in the game, and the tools below all live on idledonkeys.com. You never need a wallet to play, but with one you unlock everything here.

The seven bonus axes

Every trait on a donkey can carry a bonus on one of seven axes. They add up (each axis is capped at +60%) and apply to whichever business the donkey manages.

Bonus Score

The Recruitment Office values a donkey by its Bonus Score: its bonuses across all seven axes added together. A higher score means a more useful donkey and a higher price. The five ultra-rare 1-of-1s max out every axis and top the chart at 420.

Buying & selling in the Recruitment Office

• Your donkey stays in your wallet until it sells. Listing it just authorises the sale.
• One transaction. The seller is paid, the small marketplace fee and the creator royalty are taken, and the donkey lands in the buyer’s wallet, all at once.
• SOL or DKV. Pay in DKV for a small discount.
• Offers. Donkey not for sale? Send the owner an offer in SOL (from 0.1 SOL). It’s a request, not a payment. If they accept, they list the donkey privately for you at that price. Offers expire after 7 days.
• A donkey that is listed can’t be staked or upgraded until it’s taken off sale.

Tips & Strategy

• Prioritise unlocking the next business over maxing your current one early on. More businesses = more income streams.
• Upgrade managers over time. The skim reduction from Tier 1 to Tier 5 compounds significantly at higher production levels.
• Get your first prestige as soon as possible. Prestiging unlocks insurance and makes business events rarer on subsequent runs.
• Play the daily mini-game every single day. Crystal income adds up faster than you think.
• Claim your daily login reward every day. Day 7 gives 50 free Crystals — the best freebie in the game.
• Don’t prestige too early. Wait until you have Business 12 unlocked and have maximised your Crystal earnings before selling.
• Choose Resistance or Repair prestige picks if events are constantly slowing your runs down. A few picks in either dramatically reduces the pain.
• Stack prestige upgrades strategically. Speed upgrades compound well in early runs; Cost Reduction becomes more valuable as your empire grows.
• Assign more NFTs to raise your DKV daily cap. Each assigned NFT adds 48 DKV/day to your earning cap.
• Buy Elite insurance on your DKV Token Mint — 100% event immunity protects your highest-value business.
• If you have a DKV NFT, assign it to your highest-earning business for maximum benefit from trait bonuses and insurance amplification.
• Look at the Bonus Checker before you buy. Two donkeys can look alike and carry very different bonuses. The Bonus Score tells you which is worth more.
• Match the donkey to the job. Speed and Production donkeys on your biggest earner; Luck donkeys where Good News events help most.
• Check in every day. Offline earnings build up for days, but DKV only collects the last 4 hours.
• There is no single correct strategy. Automation allows progress while offline. The bigger your empire, the more you earn. Now get back to farming.