This game needs a lot of patience unless you are ready to spend real money and buy diamonds to cut it short.
For Free-to-Play, if you haven’t already I would suggest getting a Seed Vault and Chateau Frontenac to lvl 80+
This will provide a reasonably steady diamond income if you’re Aiding and doing Quests. That way if you are short during an event, but close enough that spending 1-2k diamonds will reach the item you want, you’ll have the diamonds without needing cash providing you haven’t spent it elsewhere of course
Also means if a popup offer for Buy X Upgrade shows up you can choose whether to buy it for diamonds. Think the Gold Upgrade was on offer during the black friday deals
If it helps at all, for the
summer / winter event
minigame, best way to maximize
grand prize progress is to spend as much as practical in a single sitting on one Daily Special. Then save the rest for the end and spend it on the last day. This is due to the Shuffle providing 10 stars each time you hit them, and the calendar key also providing 10 stars if you’ve already found the key for that day.
With it being a 32 day long event, anyone who spent whenever there was a key on the board would probably be losing at least 2+ Grand Prizes worth of progress.
Having enough patience for the whole year to get needed fragments is too much. And real money is no help with that. Think about it!
Agreed, I wouldn’t want to be waiting a full year to complete it the first time round.
If you’re not wanting to wait (for gold upgrades in general), the only real solution is find ways to min-max event currency expenditure each event and increase diamond income free-to-play where possible so you can spend diamonds on a few things if you’re short on progress