How does the museum work in Dig & Clean?

It is a wooden pier with display stands. Walk a cleaned item up to an empty stand to place it, and it starts generating income per second — the card shows a rate with a green dollar sign and /s. A sign at the entrance explains the theme: tourists pay while you are away hunting.

What should I display in the Dig & Clean museum?

The rarest items you own, since income per second tracks rarity closely. Because stands are limited, the practical rule is to replace your weakest display whenever you clean something rarer, and sell only what cannot beat anything already on a stand.

Do I have to be online for the Dig & Clean museum to earn?

The in-game sign says tourists come while you are out hunting for treasure, which describes earning while you play elsewhere in the map. We have not seen footage confirming whether income continues after you leave the game entirely, so we are not going to claim it does.

How much does a museum item earn in Dig & Clean?

It scales with rarity. Observed rates ranged from 391 per second for a 1-in-22 Duck up to 3.9K per second for a 1-in-500 Bear. Late-game displays showed income pop-ups in the hundreds of thousands for items rarer than 1 in 9 million.

Dig & Clean Museum Guide: How Passive Income Actually Works

The museum is not a side activity. It is where the money is.

How placing works

The museum is an outdoor wooden pier lined with display stands. After you clean an item, walk it to an empty stand and it goes on display. The card then shows an income rate — a green dollar figure followed by /s.

The sign at the entrance states the idea plainly:

"Tourists come while you're HUNTING for treasure!"

So the museum earns while you're out working the sand.

What a display is worth

Rates observed on screen:

Display	Rarity	Income
Duck [2KG], OK	1 in 22	391/s
Bear [4.2KG], Great	1 in 80	965/s
Bear [3.3KG], Good	1 in 244	1.1K/s
Sunglasses [0.1KG], Mint	1 in 147	1.4K/s
Bear [11.1KG], Perfect	1 in 500	3.9K/s

Late-game footage showed a museum holding a Frozen Mammoth (1 in 17,579,022) and an Old Tank (1 in 9,574,469) producing income pop-ups of +493.7K and +458.1K.

Notice that weight barely matters: the 0.1KG Sunglasses out-earns the 4.2KG Bear, because it is rarer.

The number that changes how you play

Comparing museum rates against sale values, the per-second income comes out at roughly the item's sale price — per second.

Our full working is on the item values page, but the practical version is short:

A displayed item earns back its entire sale value every second.

Which means selling something you could display is close to always wrong. The scarce resource in this game is display slots, not items.

How to manage limited stands

That reframing gives three rules, and they're exactly what experienced players do:

Never sell before cleaning. Rarity and condition are only revealed after cleaning, so selling a dirty block is selling blind. Footage showed a dirty block cleaning into a Dino Skull, Perfect, 1 in 2,937,020, valued 1.5M.
Sell surplus, not your best finds. A 1-in-30 Duck worth 486 is what the sell merchant is for.
Replace your weakest display. Every time you clean something rarer than your worst stand, swap it. Your museum should be a running top-N of everything you've ever found.

Fill every slot

An empty stand earns nothing, and even a poor item beats zero. Early on, put whatever you have on every stand and upgrade the contents over time rather than holding slots open for something better.

Selling still exists

The Sell booth is staffed by an NPC and gives instant cash. Its role is liquidity: you need cash now for a shovel or an island unlock, and the museum pays over time. Use it for surplus and for hitting a purchase threshold, not as your main income.

Item values and the rarity formula
Gear upgrades — what to spend it on
Islands — luck multipliers on what you dig