Getting gold fast in Smash Ultimate

To say that Smash Ultimate is jam-packed with content would be a huge understatement. There’s so very much to do and see from the outset that it’s wild to think after 100%ing World of Light, there’s still tons more for you to unlock. Songs, spirits and mii outfits… if you’re, uh, into that kinda thing.

Many of these can only be found in the game’s shop, and if you’re looking to nab it all, you’ll need plenty of gold to make it happen. But you won’t dig for it alone… consider this article your drill!

#5 - Classic Classic Mode

You know you want to see the rest of this mural.

The above may seem like a mis-type, but that’s not the case. Classic Mode is likely what the devs intended for you use to farm gold, and we’ll be covering two sides of it here. The legit way is, of course, never the correct one, but it’s certainly an option.

Classic Mode sees you go through an arcade style campaign, where you face different opponents on different stages depending on who you choose to play as. Clear it and you can get plenty of rewards, including gold. It’s not the most swift approach, but it’s a reliable and simple one, and one I can’t imagine they’ll be nerfing at any point.

The order can change, but regardless of what character you pick, the mode is always comprised of six single stock matches, a bonus stage and a boss battle.

How-to:

You can find Classic Mode from the Games & More section of the main menu.

Pick your character; whomever you play the best with or atleast feel you take out CPUs the fastest with.

Choose a difficulty - or intensity level - through a sliding number scale. You can get some gold at any difficulty, but the reward increases with the difficulty. Finishing it at around 5.0 should yield 300G.

#4 - Challenges

Like Achievements, except you actually get something for them!

Indeed, challenges are this game’s equivalent to Achievements, having to be built directly into the game since Nintendo’s too good for the usual method. There’s quite a number of them which can be unlocked through various circumstances.

The unlock requirements can be really basic, like playing a certain amount of quickplay matches, or extremely specific, like getting King K. Rool through Classic Mode’s bonus stage in 45 seconds. In addition to unlocking the neat pictures assigned to them, these will also give you various rewards. Spirits, songs, SP, and of course that sweet cha-ching.

All these can only be done once of course, but if you’re new to the game or simply never cared to explore this side of it before, you should be able to net yourself a nice quick profit from this. The gold rewards are pretty nice, ranging from 600 at the lowest to around 3000.

Sadly the game doesn’t tell you what the rewards are before you complete the challenges, and this article would be much too long if we detailed them all. But there are about 18 of them that give you gold and they’re pretty well documented online at this point. Additionally, completing whole pages on the challenge board can also net you big gold paydays.

How-to:

You can find the list of challenges through the Vault, off the main menu.

Hover over a challenge’s assigned picture to see instructions on how to complete it.

Find out which challenges net you what reward, and go for the gold.

Note that after completing certain amounts of tiles, you’ll be given a hammer with which to autocomplete a tile, getting the reward without any of the work. Some tiles are immune to the hammer, however.

#3 - Spirit Board Events

For a limited time only!

Smash Ultimate’s devs are regularly holding events in which you can fight through an onslaught of themed spirit battles. These events go on for a few days at a time, and to encourage players to take part, they will always come with a bonus, giving you more rewards per victory than usual.

Whether they grant you extra gold, snacks or SP depends on the theme. They always specify which they’ll be upping when the theme is officially announced and you can check this through the News section at any time. If you’re hungry for gold, needless to say you should keep an eye out for these, and go for them whenever they’re handing out the coinage.

These are limited time events, so go for ‘em while you can!

How-to:

Press right on the control stick on the menu screen until a submenu pops up, where you can find the News section.

From there, you can see a list of updates, always including the most recent, and ongoing events. Check the events to see if they hand out extra gold.

If so, go back to the main menu, hit the Spirits section and go to the Spirit Board to start fighting for your gold.

#2 - Cheesed Classic Mode

I'm not kidnapping YOUR princess, fools!

Right, so we’ve gone into some regular means of farming gold, grinding for them in the squeeky clean way that Sakurai intended. Buuuut where’s the fun in that? Every game with a type of currency has a couple cheap ways of getting it, and Smash Ultimate is no different.

We went into how Classic Mode is a simple way to get gold, but that’s assuming you feel like doing it the old fashioned way. The funny thing is, you actually don’t have to clear the classic mode to get gold out of it… in fact, you don’t really need to even try to clear it.

If you go in at the highest starting difficulty, win the first match, then lose the second, you can quit and usually claim a cool reward of 300G in less than a minute. Depending on how quickly you can handle the first fight of whatever tree you choose, this is likely the fastest method for getting some solid gold. Mind you however, that not every character will necessarily get gold as a reward; there might be an element of luck at play there but it definitely seems like some get it more often than others.

How-to:

You can, again, find Classic Mode from the Games & More section of the main menu.

Pick your character; it’s your choice, though Ganondorf is the largely recommended one here. He reliably gets gold at the end of his run, and is so ruthlessly powerful that it’s easy to quickly knock out his Stage 1 enemies, the Mario Brothers, especially since they begin right next to a blast zone.

Set the difficulty to 5.0 for max reward and play the first match.

At the start of the second match, jump off the stage and SD immediately, then choose Quit when prompted.

#1 - Teabag Party!

He takes disrespect very seriously.

If you’ve heard virtually anything about competitive online games, you might know about teabagging. If you’ve played Ultimate online at all, you’ve almost definitely seen it before, whether you know what it is or not. Simply put, it’s when you have your character repeatedly crouch, as if they are in fact teabagging a hapless victim beneath them.

Nintendo frowns upon this quite a bit online, as spamming it can be grounds for a forced disconnect. But would you believe the offline game actually rewards you for it?

Y’see, you get small bits of gold for any regular match you play, and how much depends on the action, in theory. But in actuality, it appears to be based on sheer movement, regardless of what that movement entails. In other words… you can teabag your way to huge chunks of change.

It’s bizarre, but it’s true. At one point the rewards for this were absolutely astronomical, with eight-player teabag parties netting people silly results like 30,000 gold for just a few minutes worth of play. This was pre-patch of course, and you won’t see that again, but amazingly it’s still probably the most speedy and reliable means of farming gold.

They didn’t take this out completely, they just nerfed the amount. But you can still get 300 gold for just a minute long match where the only thing you do is tilt the control stick down repeatedly. This is easily the least effort you could ever put forth to earn gold, you don’t even have to be looking at the screen to do this.

This stacks as well; the longer you do it, the more you get out of it. I tested this personally just before writing, and two minutes of teabagging gave me around 600 gold. This can be done solo, but you can also have other players join in and multiply the effects further.

How-to:

From the main menu, hit Smash and then… erm, Smash, again.

Hit ‘Create Ruleset’ to start customizing rules for a match.

Set the style to ‘Time’ and the time limit to however long you feel like farming.

If alone:

The CPU level should be set to 1, and items should be turned off.

Scroll down to Advanced, and press it to show more rules that you can edit. Go down to Launch Rate and set it to 0.5x, the lowest possible setting.

Press + to save and then select a big flat stage, like the Boxing Ring. All this will make it significantly less likely that the CPU messes you up by KO’ing you at any point.

Choose whatever characters you want for this, and when the game starts, simply press down repeatedly and don’t stop doing it for anything. Continue until Sudden Death comes into play, which you can handle however you wish.

If with friends:

Proceed to picking whatever stage you like, so long as it’s not some auto-scroller that would kill you if you just stood there.

You and however many people you have with you can then pick whichever characters you want. When the game starts, each of you should start tilting your control sticks down repeatedly, as if you want to teabag the game itself. Continue until Sudden Death comes into play, which you can handle however you wish.

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