Yoinked! My Freaky Factory Experience

My first trip to the Freaky Factory was a disaster. Liquid Kreludite everywhere, and the Grundo laughing at me as he snatched plushie after plushie! After a lot of time and experimentation, I figured out how to stop the Grundo Thief, and, more importantly, get the Avatar for my collection!

The Basics:

Your job is simple – keep enough liquid red, yellow and blue Kreludite in each vat to be able to produce enough plushies to fill your quota. That quota starts at 10 per level and quickly escalates to ridiculous demands of 25 or more. There are 10 levels in the game. To get a score that qualifies for the avatar, you will have to make it at least to Level 8 – that will take practice!

Your score in each level is determined by three things: 1) how much you got for each plushie you completed 2) how quickly you complete each level (you get bonus points for completing each level) 3) how many consecutive plushies you complete – each plushie that you complete without having either an empty bucket or having the Grundo Thief steal your

At all times, focus on keeping the buckets as full as you can. Even if you aren’t making ‘red’ right now, you will have to make red soon – if a red ball comes along, don’t ignore it – fill that red bucket! Beyond that – you just have to keep whacking that Grundo!

The Skills and Strategies:

It’s easy to get distracted in this game – there are lots of moving pieces! Here are what you need to do:

Levels 1, 2, 3: These levels are pretty easy. You generally are being to asked to make 1 or 2 plushies – you will have lots of excess time. So how do you use that excess time?

My first reaction was – complete the levels as quickly as possible. Get the max score for ‘time remaining’ and get that bonus. Reality, though, is the consecutive completion bonus is REALLY IMPORTANT. If you can get the pots full and run through 8, 10 or 12 plushies – that adds as many as 100 bonus points or more – points that you will need when you are looking for that avi. In the same spirit, you have to whack the Grundo every single time he pops up – you can pass the early levels without worrying about him, but each time he breaks your consecutive streak he costs you lots of score points – you just have to keep him from doing that!

I ended up taking this strategy: if the first plushie to make was ‘blue’, then before making that plushie I would fill my red and yellow bowls. I might put the first ‘half ball’ in blue, but would not start making blue plushies until the other bowls were full. That way, once I started making plushies, I would be ready to make the other colors, and could often get a long run, particularly if my ‘fill’ of the final bowl was a large ball, or, even better, a white ‘angel ball’ that filled the entire bowl.

Beyond the angel ball, I found the other balls are largely distractions that rarely changed my overall score. Just focus on keeping the bowls full, and take advantage of the angel ball when it comes up, and you should do fine.

If you focus on getting these consecutive runs, you should be able to get 130+ points in Round 1, 275+ points by Round 2 and 400+ points through Round 3. On a really good round I could get over 500 points through Round 3 – those are the critical points you will need in later rounds to qualify for the avi.

Levels 4, 5, and 6: These levels get progressively harder. It increasingly becomes a tradeoff between filling bowls to set up the consecutive streak and just knocking out enough plushies to stay alive in the game. It’s a gradual shift you need to make, but by the time I am in Level 6 it’s all about ‘what plushie color is next, and how do I fill that bowl’. Of course, the game gets harder in other ways – you increasingly are asked for multi-color or rainbow plushies – these give more points, but require you to have 2 or all 3 bowls full, taking more of your valuable Kreludite. Also, you are increasingly asked to make 3 plushies at a time, meaning the bowls have to be nearly full before you can make any plushies. To be on track for the avi you should be adding 180-200 points per round, or getting to 950-1000+ by the time you finish Level 6.

You do get one important new friend – the orange ‘time reset’ will start to appear, giving you a few more seconds to complete the round, seconds that will help you get through the level, and add bonus points for time remaining. Make it your priority to click these orange clocks each time they appear.

Levels 7 and 8: Wow! Those dots are moving very fast! Click, click, click. But, just in time, you get a new friend – the ‘atom ball’. It shows up as a mysterious dark blue molecule, and it is the best thing the world to see – just click on it (you don’t even have to aim into a bucket), and VOILA all buckets are immediately filled to max. No better way to knock out those three rainbow plushies!

Two last bits of advice. The game is random – you may fail just because that yellow ball that you need just doesn’t come up when you need it. That’s just bad luck – it will be offset someday when you get the atom ball just at the right time to let you crack Level 8 (that’s what happened for me!). Last bit of advice – don’t get discouraged. It took me several weeks to master the above and finally get the avi. Just focus on getting a little better each day, and you will soon be the proud possessor of Yoinked!