The first step is to get a guest house deed from Fletch, place it where you want, place the building materials inside the green construction box and then wait until Fletch's construction crew finishes.

You can use the blue customization kits sold by John at his shop to either customize the outside or upgrade the house to its largest size. Guests houses can only be upgraded once in size. Upgrades cost 250,000 dink and require additional material.

You can decorate the guest house the same way you decorate your house, by placing furniture you get as rewards, buy from Melvin, or find in the recycling bin. You can also use the interior walls and archways from Melvin's shop to create custom rooms. Don't forget to swap out the carpet and wallpaper.

To start renting, you'll need to get the rent sign from John's shop for 50,000 dink apiece. These are on rotation, so it may take a while for them to show up in his shop. Place these at the front of the house and then interact with them. You'll want to click the option to start renting and one of the new four NPCs will show up the next day. Collect the rent from the little table every Wednesday.



Repeat this up to four times to get all four guest houses rented. You don't have to rent all of them or any of them. It's up to you how to use the guest houses, but this is a very passive way of making money.

To stop renting and evict the tenant, interact with the sign and chose the stop renting option. You can still enter the guest house when it's rented without asking the tenant. That's illegal in most countries, but not in your town!

Rents appear to be based on the value price of the decorations you put in the guest house before Wednesday. Meaning you can add items on Tuesday night, collect the rent on Wednesday, then remove the items for use elsewhere, only to replace them in the rental on the following Tuesday night. The percentage of value varies based on the item. Gemstones have a 10.8% value applied to the rent, where cassettes have a 7.4%, and night market jewelry is at 5%.

Expect the developer to continue to tweak and hotfix the rent calculation. So don't get too attached to any decoration system.

The October release of the animal tracks will greatly reduce rents again.

The base rent of a non-upgraded, empty rental is 1,750 dinks a week.

You can consult the value of the various pieces of furniture, clothing, and decorations on the wiki:

https://dinkum.fandom.com/wiki/Furniture
https://dinkum.fandom.com/wiki/Clothing

Minimalist furniture tends to be the most valuable overall, so if you're trying to maintain a theme or continuity of decorations, that set is your best bet. However, if you want truly insane rents, furniture will add very little, so don't worry about that.

It also appears that the game only counts one of each decoration, so you can't double, triple, or just fill the guest house with Nordic beds. I tried two gold fish trophies and the rent was the same as one gold fish trophy.

After fairly extensive testing the following items are included in the calculation:

• Furniture such as placed decorations like plushies, trophies, cassettes, and the boombox.
  
• Perfect gemstones can be placed as a decoration
  
• Equipment
  
• Placed clothing as decorations
  
• Mannequins themselves add to the rent, but not the clothing that's on the mannequin

Items that do not count in the rent calculation:

• Food in storage (includes foods in the fridge)
  
• Items in display cases
  
• Weapons/Tools/Furniture/Clothing in storage, such as crates, dressers, or toolracks
  
• Carryables not in display cases
  
• Placed Bugs and Fish

Food items that have been turned into decoration do not retain their original selling values, but instead adopt new, much lower values. Placed apparel, particularly hats can add considerable value to your rent.

Certain equipment like key cutters, chargers, solar panel, and gacha machines, along with the statues cannot be placed indoors.

To get rents that would make even billionaires blush, you'll need to to place down furniture that can have decorations placed on them, perfect gemstones, the Night market TVs and jewelry, cassettes, contest trophies, high value equipment, and high value apparel on display. Furniture itself will add very little, so don't worry too much about that if you're trying to get astronomical rents.

Be aware that you need to leave walkable tiles or the rent will decrease.



Here's the interior of that rental house. It's definitely not pretty inside, but it generates 634,751 a week in rent:



The rent amount will update upon sleeping or if you don't want to wait, you can change the items inside the guest house, kick the renter out via ending renting on the sign and then going back to the rental sign to restart renting and the rent will update for the new items. As long as you have the guest house rented at the end of the day, the renter will stay.

It does not seem to matter what's on the outside of the guest house. I built a hot tub, BBQ area, and pool for my rentals and the game didn't take it into account when calculating the rent.



So if you want to ignore the exterior, feel free. But if you want to go all out creating a luxury villa, also feel free. It's your game, play it how you like.

Other players have noted small (less than 1,000 dink) boosts to the rent if the rental is near certain other NPC buildings. I have not tested this but they seem quite immaterial compared to adding better furniture or apparel.

There are four new NPCs that can rent.

Forest, Mason, River, and Doug. Each of them will rent a specific color deeded house. Which is going to be a problem for people who have turned one or more of their guests houses into something else, like a workshop or gemstone storage space. You could just rent that out, with low earnings to get the NPC tied to that color deed to show up. But this may pose a problem for players expecting NPCs to randomly be selected to rent.

Note that the NPCs do not interact with the furniture inside the house, so you can use them for your multiplayer friends.

Well, that's the real question.

Early game, it is definitely not worth the investment. The cost of the guest house, space upgrade and items to get a decent rent is a huge drain on your early game resources. There's also no benefit to having 1-4 more non specialist NPCs on island other than quests.

Mid game, there is some benefit in that you only need 11 NPCs moved it to get access to the airport deed in year 2. Which then lets you explore the Island Reef. There's a lot of valuable resources there and a lot of money to be made. Furthermore, Sheila and Sally can be difficult to move in, so replacing them with two renters can overcome those obstacles. If you have lots of extra cassettes and perfect gemstones, those can produce decent rents for no cost.

Late game when you're diving into a pool of dink like Scrooge McDuck (Man, I am old with that reference, DUCK TALES FTW!), then renting is more of a status symbol and the cost of getting rents into the 300,000s and more not a real concern. The payback period of getting into this level of rents is measured in decades in the game. The halo, which costs 50 million dink is necessary to boost rents, as in the various crowns, which also cost 3 million apiece. The autosorter is a million dink as well. All of these expensive pieces of decorations and equipment push the payback period into well over a hundred weeks. You will not see a profit for so long that these rents are more about bragging rights than actually making money.

Renting in the end game is more about completing your town by having all of the NPCs and far less about increasing your bank account.

Here's what's next for testing to see what changes rent:

• New percentage values under the animal tracks update

https://psteamcommunity.yuanyoumao.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3410776286
https://psteamcommunity.yuanyoumao.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3350451381
https://psteamcommunity.yuanyoumao.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3087556135
https://psteamcommunity.yuanyoumao.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3090461331
https://psteamcommunity.yuanyoumao.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2953802977
https://psteamcommunity.yuanyoumao.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3094604586
https://psteamcommunity.yuanyoumao.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3206867604
https://psteamcommunity.yuanyoumao.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3132627357
https://psteamcommunity.yuanyoumao.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3225363997
https://psteamcommunity.yuanyoumao.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3184047440