Market Expansion Baskets

Since an update at the start of April 2016, Expansion Baskets became much easier to come across. This guide will show you the ways you can collect them and the cost to upgrade each ingredient. It’s not immediately obvious how this system works and you might assume you should be able to buy double the items after an upgrade, but that’s not exactly right. Read on to learn the finer details of Market Expansions!

Obtaining Expansion Baskets

There are 2 ways in which you can obtain Upgrade Baskets in the game. Firstly you will be awarded one when you achieve certain levels. These are: 14, 17, 18, 20, 21, 23, 25, 27, 31, 36, 40. So that’s 11 earned from levelling up. That’s not enough, and until the update I mentioned at the start of this guide it was woefully short.

That led to the addition of a second way to find baskets which is in special delivery creates. But don’t be tempted to spend them right away! Take a look at the guide below which shows you just how many baskets are required for each of the 3 levels you can upgrade the ingredients to. You will want to upgrade the things you find yourself running out of, rather than the temptingly quick to upgrade common items like Flour which actually you can resupply pretty quickly as it is.

Using Expansion Baskets

Ingredients are categorised into three classes of availability. They are the same as the Recipe Cards that you find in the Academy for upgrading dishes, which are Common, Advanced and Gourmet. All ingredients start with one slot and have 3 optional expansion slots (4 total). The cost of upgrading each is as follows:

	1st Upgrade	2nd Upgrade	3rd Upgrade
Common Ingredients	1x	2x	3x
Advanced Ingredients	2x	4x	6x
Gourmet Ingredients	3x	6x	9x

So to fully upgrade a Common ingredient it will cost just 6 baskets. Advanced ingredients will cost 12 and Gourmet will cost 18. Not easy to achieve! So what’s the benefit? Lets take a look…

How Expansion Baskets Work

Each ingredient has a quantity that you receive every time you buy it, and a refill time. For example, when you buy beef you get 6 items but then have to wait 3 minutes to buy them again. Lettuce gives you just 4 items and you have to wait 10 minutes to buy again. Upgrade Baskets don’t change these values but they do give you an extra ‘storage slot’ each time you upgrade. This means that while you are not playing the game, more stock is accumulated in the market for you to purchase when you need it.

It’s often assumed that after an upgrade, you can buy 2 lots of lettuce after 10 minutes instead of 1, but that’s not the case. Each slot needs it’s own time to replenish, so if you are busy playing and you have all 3 extra slots unlocked for lettuce, you can still only buy 4 items every 10 minutes, no more!

For example, after buying lettuce and then leaving the game for 1 hour, when you return you can only buy 4 lettuce again, then you need to wait another 10 minutes to get more. In other words, it will restock every 10 minutes. However, if you had bought an extra slot with Expansion Baskets, after replenishing the first slot after 10 minutes it will continue to replenish the second slot as well. So after returning 20 minutes later you can now buy 2 lots of lettuce. If you had all 4 slots, after returning to the game after 40 minutes you would be able to buy 4x 4 lettuce.

Ingredients continue to replenish while playing the game too, so you will notice that the dots which resemble the storage slots you have will appear to fill up. Each of these full dots is available to buy so even if you buy 1 batch of items it will immediately start to replenish that slot while you carry on playing the game (you don’t have top buy them all at once).

Using the image above as an example, ham is about 1/3 of the second batch replenished, rice is very nearly done and onions is about 3/4 ready, but you could still buy the first two batches of 4 onions now and the next batch is just a few minutes away.

Below is a list of ingredients along with the type and number of baskets needed for each upgrade.

	Dish	Type	Quantity	Refill Time	1st Upgrade	2nd Upgrade	3rd Upgrade
	Beef	Common	6	3 mins	1x	2x	3x
	Flour	Common	6	2 mins	1x	2x	3x
	Tomato	Common	6	5 mins	1x	2x	3x
	Milk	Common	4	6 mins 40 secs	1x	2x	3x
	Lettuce	Common	4	10 mins	1x	2x	3x
	Eggs	Common	4	8 mins 20 secs	1x	2x	3x
	Peppers	Common	6	11 mins 35 secs	1x	2x	3x
	Salmon	Advanced	4	33 mins 20 secs	2x	4x	6x
	Coffee Beans	Advanced	4	1 hour	2x	4x	6x
	Ham	Advanced	4	30 mins	2x	4x	6x
	Rice	Common	4	13 mins 20 secs	1x	2x	3x
	Onions	Common	4	15 mins	1x	2x	3x
	Avacado	Advanced	4	1 hour	2x	4x	6x
	Chicken	Advanced	4	20 mins	2x	4x	6x
	Potato	Common	4	16 mins 40 secs	1x	2x	3x
	Sugar	Advanced	4	1 hour	2x	4x	6x
	Strawberries	Gourmet	4	2 hours	3x	6x	9x
	Saffron	Gourmet	4	3 hours	3x	6x	9x
	Chickpeas	Common	4	20 mins	1x	2x	3x
	Chocolate	Gourmet	2	4 hours	3x	6x	9x
	Shrimp	Gourmet	2	5 hours	3x	6x	9x
	Truffle	Gourmet	2	6 hours	3x	6x	9x
	Greens	Common	4	20 mins	1x	2x	3x
	Squash	Common	4	20 mins	1x	2x	3x
	Lemons	Common	4	20 mins	1x	2x	3x
	Pork	Advanced	4	2 hours	2x	4x	6x
	Tofu	Advanced	4	2 hours	2x	4x	6x
	Lobster	Gourmet	4	7 hours	3x	6x	9x
	Vanilla	Gourmet	2	12 hours	3x	6x	9x
	Coconut	Advanced	4	2 hours	2x	4x	6x
	Mushrooms	Common	4	1 hour	1x	2x	3x
	Pineapple	Advanced	4	2 hours	2x	4x	6x
	Berries	Advanced	4	1 hour	2x	4x	6x
	Caviar	Gourmet	4	2 hours 30 mins	3x	6x	9x