Should I sell items or put them in the museum in Dig & Clean?

Museum, unless you have no free display slot. Comparing the numbers on screen, an item's museum income per second is roughly equal to its sell price — so a displayed item earns back its entire sale value every second it stays up. Selling only makes sense for surplus items that would not fit on a stand anyway.

What determines an item's value in Dig & Clean?

Rarity, overwhelmingly. Fitting the values we could read off screen gives value roughly equal to 45 times the rarity odds raised to the power 0.7. A 1-in-30 Duck is worth about 486, while a 1-in-17.5 million Frozen Mammoth is worth 5.2 million. Weight is displayed too but did not predict value in our sample.

How many items are there in Dig & Clean?

The collection UI shows a total of 55 items. Our source footage caught a player at 31 of 55 and later 35 of 55, so the counter tracks distinct item types discovered.

What are the item conditions in Dig & Clean?

Conditions seen on cleaned items were OK, Good, Great, Perfect and Mint. Condition is displayed alongside weight and rarity, but in our sample it did not clearly change the value-to-rarity relationship — four of our five museum data points landed on the same curve regardless of condition.

Dig & Clean Item Values: The Rarity Formula, and Why You Should Almost Never Sell

Rarity is what an item is worth. Everything else is decoration.

Every cleaned item shows four things: name, weight, condition and rarity (as "1 in N"). We collected the ones visible in gameplay footage and checked which of them actually predicts value.

The observed data

Item	Rarity	Condition	Value
Duck	1 in 30	OK	486
Dino Skull	1 in 2,937,020	Perfect	1.5M
Old Tank	1 in 9,574,469	Perfect	3.4M
Frozen Mammoth	1 in 17,579,022	Great	5.2M

Note the range: the rarest item on this list is half a million times rarer than the Duck, but only about 10,700 times more valuable. Value grows much more slowly than rarity.

The relationship

Fitting those points gives:

value ≈ 45 × (rarity odds)^0.7

Item	Actual value	Formula predicts	Error
Duck	486	482	−0.9%
Dino Skull	1,500,000	1,488,011	−0.8%
Old Tank	3,400,000	3,400,000	0.0%
Frozen Mammoth	5,200,000	5,200,000	0.0%

How much to trust this: the exponent was derived from the two rarest items only. The Duck — five orders of magnitude less rare — then landed within 1% of prediction without being used to build the fit. That's an out-of-sample check, not a curve drawn through every point.

It is still four data points from one game version during an event. Treat it as a strong rule of thumb, not a datamined constant.

What it means in practice

Because the exponent is below 1, value has diminishing returns on rarity. Doubling how rare an item is only raises its value by about 62%. So a lucky streak of moderately rare finds can out-earn one jackpot — which is why throughput upgrades (detector, shovel speed) compete seriously with pure luck.

The museum finding

Museum display cards show income as a per-second rate. Running the same test on those:

Display item	Rarity	Income/s	÷ rarity^0.7
Duck [2KG], OK	1 in 22	391/s	45.0
Bear [4.2KG], Great	1 in 80	965/s	45.1
Sunglasses [0.1KG], Mint	1 in 147	1.4K/s	42.7
Bear [11.1KG], Perfect	1 in 500	3.9K/s	50.6
Bear [3.3KG], Good	1 in 244	1.1K/s	23.5

Four of five land between 42.7 and 50.6 — the same coefficient as the sell value formula.

Which means the museum pays out roughly one sale price per second.

That reframes the entire economy. An item on a stand isn't earning a trickle; it's earning what you would have got for selling it, again, every second. Under that arithmetic, selling a displayable item is almost never correct. The real constraint is display slots, not items.

This matches what experienced players do without explaining why: sell surplus, replace your weakest display, never sell before cleaning.

The one outlier

The Bear [3.3KG] in Good condition sits at 23.5 — roughly half the others. We don't know why. Condition is the obvious suspect, but the Duck in merely "OK" condition sits at 45.0, so a simple condition ladder doesn't explain it. Possibilities include a misread rarity figure or a mechanic we haven't seen.

We're leaving it visible rather than dropping it to make the table tidy.

Weight appears not to matter

Weight is displayed prominently, which makes it look important. In our sample it wasn't: a 0.1KG pair of Sunglasses out-earned a 4.2KG Bear (1.4K/s vs 965/s), because it was rarer. We found no case where weight predicted value better than rarity did.

The collection

The collection UI counts 55 items in total. Our footage caught a player moving from 31/55 to 35/55, so it tracks distinct item types found rather than quantity.

Museum guide — how displays and slots work
Gear upgrades — what to spend the money on
Money guide — the earning loop