Score runs are fun. Hitting max lux means buying those house upgrades faster, leveling up your characters quickly, and showing off on the daily leaderboards. But how do other people get those multi-million scores, anyway?

The secret... is Breakfast Towels.
Read on to learn more.

Unit Price = Base Price × Price Mult × Total Mult
Initial Base Tip = Unit Price × 0.2
Final Tip = Base Tip × Tip Mult × Total Mult
Base Tip as a result of Unit Price is not multiplied by Total Mult. Only extra Base Tip from gifts is affected by Total Mult. Both sources of Base Tip are affected by Tip Mult.

You can think of tip calculations this way:
Final Tip = Base Tip from gifts × Tip Mult × Total Mult + Base Price × Price Mult × Tip Mult × Total Mult × 0.2

So how do you score high?
The trick is to focus on either Unit Price or Final Tip, but not both (unless you're getting 12+ gifts). Maximize all three components of your build, ideally with gifts that scale with the number of customers. As a general rule of thumb, expect 30 customers on the final day with Breakfast Towels and Endless Stream traffic. You want the bulk of your income to come from the last five customers or so.

Most levels have an artificial gift cap of 8, 9, or 10; the next gift takes over 20,000 reputation to unlock. While this soft cap is surmountable in multiplayer with enough reputation items, in solo score runs, surpassing the gift cap is unreasonable.

Here's an example of a decent build:

• Donation Box
  
• Swaying Clover
  
• Toppings Sampler
  
• Quick Steel Brush
  
• Flower Crown
  
• Happy Mood
  
• High-speed Reward
  
• Involution Bowl

The fifteenth customer gives (15 + 20 + 30) × 3.5 × 2.5 ≈ 569 Final Tip; the thirtieth customer gives (15 + 20 + 60) × 3.5 × 4 ≈ 1330 Final Tip.
Why is this a good build?

The build has high Base Tip, Tip Mult, and Total Mult. Donation Box and Involution Bowl are useful for general utility: you're unlikely to game over to stress or bankruptcy. Even though Involution Bowl doesn't contribute to Final Tip, it is strong utility that keeps Happy Mood and Quick Steel Brush active.

Here's an example of a bad build:

• Perfect Jasper
  
• Line Up Pay Up
  
• Refuse to Give Change
  
• Best-seller Drinks
  
• Brainwashing
  
• Shift Schedule
  
• Violent Marketing
  
• Flower Crown

The thirtieth customer gives [(0.15 + 2 + 2) × 30 + 55] × 2 = 359 Final Tip.
Do you see why this build is weak?

Without an increase in Crit Rate, Refuse to Give Change is an average of 0.15 Base Tip per customer. Best-seller Drinks is an average of 1.3 Base Tip per customer, though we can be generous and assume 2 Base Tip per customer if students or thugs are present. Brainwashing, Line Up Pay Up, and Perfect Jasper all contribute nothing to Final Tip at all (although Brainwashing is good for general utility). Violent Marketing averages about 55 Base Tip. Any source of Tip Mult would drastically improve this build, but cyan and purple have no source of Tip Mult at all!

Breakfast Towels is essential for score runs. As a result, Quick Sale builds are common, since you're going to be swamped with green gifts anyway. Here's what makes Breakfast Towels so good:

• More customers. Many of the strongest gifts depend on the total number of customers served, so any way to make more customers show up is useful. The "Efficient Fuel" display case trophy is standard for score runs. Combined with the Extend level perk and the Transit Card+ book man item, the Open Early period lasts over 3.5 hours!
  
• More reputation. More customers means more reputation, simple as that. But each additional customer essentially benefits from max combo reputation: every additional customer is 50 reputation on top of their customer star rating, drink star rating, and special customer type reputation bonus. This can mean the difference between a six-gift run and an eight-gift run!
  
• Early-game income. Days 2 and 3 are the make-or-break moments of a score run. If a promising run can't make enough money to afford equipment upgrades and gift redraws, it dies there. Breakfast Towels is a stunning 300% Total Mult for the first ten customers or so. It's rare to get Total Mult early in a run, so Breakfast Towels multiplies the effects of any Base Tip, Base Price, and Price Mult basic gifts you've picked up!
  
• Access to powerful green cards. Disorderly Interweaving (green/pink), Quick Steel Brush (green/blue), Parallel Time (green/red), Every Minute Counts (green/purple), Prompt Delivery (green/orange), Quick-sale King (green/yellow), High-speed reward (green/lime), Super Speed, and Speed Up Cup Brush are among the strongest cards in the game.

Of course, not every run needs Breakfast Towels. The drizzle (3-3) and taro (4-3) levels give you plenty of reputation through special customer types, so Breakfast Towels isn't needed to hit the gift cap or to hit max lux.

This is an optional section. It explains the thought process behind builds.

A core is something you want to get rewarded for. If you do a lot of Quick Sales, you have a green core; if you're consistently in the high stress bracket, then you have a purple core; and so on.

An engine is how you get rewarded for fulfilling the requirements of a core. The most common engines are pink, blue, and purple. Few cores have access to Total Mult on their own, so engines provide that essential multiplier.

The concepts of "core" and "engine" are fluid. Any color can fulfill either role.

This is the highest-scoring core in the game. Few 8-gift builds can surpass Parallel Time in a score run.

This is the big one. Every 8-gift level can hit max lux with this specific build.

• Breakfast Towels
  
• Explosion of Orders or Overtime Tip
  
• Business License or Toppings Sampler
  
• Forced to Skip
  
• Parallel Time
  
• Serving Out of Sequence
  
• Extreme Extraction
  
• Disorderly Interweaving or Time Management

• Breakfast Towels
  
• Explosion of Orders or Overtime Tip
  
• Business License or Toppings Sampler
  
• Donation Box
  
• Parallel Time
  
• Flower Crown
  
• Extreme Extraction
  
• Quick Steel Brush

• Breakfast Towels
  
• Explosion of Orders or Overtime Tip
  
• Business License or Toppings Sampler
  
• Lucky Cat
  
• Parallel Time
  
• Violent Marketing
  
• Extreme Extraction
  
• Every Minute Counts

• Breakfast Towels
  
• Try Your Patience
  
• All-you-can-eat or Free-flowing Drinks or Icy Boost
  
• Forced to Skip
  
• Parallel Time
  
• Quick-sale King
  
• Slow Work or Serial Skip
  
• Disorderly Interweaving or Time Management

• Breakfast Towels
  
• Try Your Patience
  
• All-you-can-eat or Free-flowing Drinks or Icy Boost
  
• Companion Doll or Donation Box
  
• Parallel Time
  
• Stable ECG
  
• Slow Work
  
• Quick Steel Brush

• Breakfast Towels
  
• Try Your Patience
  
• All-you-can-eat or Free-flowing Drinks or Icy Boost
  
• Lucky Cat
  
• Parallel Time
  
• Quick-sale King
  
• Slow Work
  
• Every Minute Counts

The green half of the Parallel Time core is strong enough to hit max lux on its own, thanks to the power of Breakfast Towels.

• Breakfast Towels
  
• Business License or Toppings Sampler
  
• Forced to Skip
  
• Serving Out of Sequence
  
• High-speed Reward
  
• Disorderly Interweaving
  
• any
  
• any

• Breakfast Towels
  
• Business License or Toppings Sampler
  
• Donation Box
  
• Flower Crown
  
• High-speed Reward
  
• Happy Mood
  
• Quick Steel Brush
  
• any

• Breakfast Towels
  
• Business License or Toppings Sampler
  
• Lucky Cat
  
• Violent Marketing
  
• High-speed Reward
  
• Every Minute Counts
  
• any
  
• any

• Breakfast Towels
  
• All-you-can-eat or Free-flowing Drinks or Icy Boost
  
• Quick-sale King
  
• Speed Up Cup Brush
  
• Forced to Skip
  
• Serial Skip
  
• Disorderly Interweaving
  
• any

• Breakfast Towels
  
• All-you-can-eat or Free-flowing Drinks or Icy Boost
  
• Quick-sale King
  
• Speed Up Cup Brush+
  
• Companion Doll or Donation Box
  
• Stable ECG
  
• any (Involution Bowl recommended)

• Breakfast Towels
  
• All-you-can-eat or Free-flowing Drinks or Icy Boost
  
• Quick-sale King
  
• Speed Up Cup Brush
  
• Lucky Cat
  
• Every Minute Counts
  
• Mosquito Killer Lamp or Reluctant Smile
  
• any

The red half of the Parallel Time core is incredibly lucrative... and incredibly risky.

• Explosion of Orders or Overtime Tip
  
• Business License or Toppings Sampler
  
• Extreme Extraction
  
• Forced to Skip
  
• Serving Out of Sequence
  
• Time Management
  
• Absolute Limit or All-inclusive
  
• any

• Explosion of Orders or Overtime Tip
  
• Business License or Toppings Sampler
  
• Extreme Extraction
  
• Donation Box
  
• Happy Mood
  
• Flower Crown
  
• Pressure Relief Rescue
  
• Absolute Limit

• Explosion of Orders or Overtime Tip
  
• Business License or Toppings Sampler
  
• Extreme Extraction
  
• Lucky Cat
  
• Violent Marketing
  
• Flower Crown
  
• Absolute Limit
  
• Shift Schedule

• Try Your Patience
  
• All-you-can-eat or Free-flowing Drinks or Icy Boost
  
• Forced to Skip
  
• Slow Work or Serial Skip
  
• Time Management
  
• Blessings Come
  
• Lucky Koi
  
• Pick Up Good Luck

• Try Your Patience
  
• All-you-can-eat or Free-flowing Drinks or Icy Boost
  
• Slow Work
  
• Companion Doll or Donation Box
  
• Stable ECG
  
• Pressure Relief Rescue
  
• Absolute Limit
  
• any

• Try Your Patience
  
• All-you-can-eat or Free-flowing Drinks or Icy Boost
  
• Slow Work
  
• Lucky Cat
  
• All Welcome
  
• Outside Comfort Zone
  
• Absolute Limit
  
• Shift Schedule

Pink with blue is an interesting combination. With only three colors, they nevertheless have the potential to hit max lux easily with only seven gifts.

• Forced to Skip
  
• Donation Box
  
• Business License or Toppings Sampler
  
• Serving Out of Sequence
  
• Queue Jump Waiver
  
• Happy Mood
  
• All-inclusive
  
• any

If Breakfast Towels is the eighth gift, then Disorderly Interweaving can replace All-inclusive.

There's a variant if Forced to Skip isn't available, since Queue Jump Waiver isn't dependent on consecutive Prioritize Sales.

• Comfort Cake or VIP Passage
  
• Donation Box
  
• Business License or Toppings Sampler
  
• Queue Jump Waiver
  
• Flower Crown
  
• Happy Mood
  
• All-inclusive
  
• any

Note that Serving Out of Sequence and Disorderly Interweaving both aren't viable scaling options without Comfort Cake+ or Forced to Skip. If Breakfast Towels is taken, Quick Steel Brush is a decent Total Mult source; if Lucky Cat is taken, Emotional Anchor and Sweat Wipe Tissue can replace All-inclusive.

If Forced to Skip and Queue Jump Waiver don't show up, pink builds have an alternative method to
scale Base Tip.

• Comfort Cake
  
• Swaying Clover
  
• Professional Agent+
  
• Business License or Toppings Sampler
  
• High-speed Reward
  
• All-inclusive
  
• any

Comfort Cake and Swaying Clover combined provide a 25% patience bonus to skipped customers. This brings any customer whose patience is still in the green zone (at least 80%) to maximum patience. Generally, any level with either Endless Stream traffic or students present has enough customer traffic to sustain the first customer indefinitely, provided every customer is a Quick Sale.

For extra safety, bring Comfort Cake+ or Swaying Clover+. With Clover+, customers with 74% patience are brought up to max patience; with Cake+ instead, it's 72%. Breakfast Towels can replace Swaying Clover if Comfort Cake+ is drafted; Cake+ alone brings customers from 77% patience to max.

Here, we dabble with crit builds. Generally, cyan gifts love yellow gifts: crits gets stronger if Unit Price is higher. The scaling Base Price gift Pick Up Good Luck is the lynchpin of crit builds, as each crit makes every subsequent crit stronger. The trick with cyan cores is to hit 100% Crit Rate to make Pick Up Good Luck provide a massive Base Price increase.

Cyan builds benefit heavily from Crit Earnings from Paper Fan. While Coin Cascade provides a scaling Crit Earnings boost, it has shortcomings that Paper Fan doesn't have.

• For a pink engine, Crit Rate scales fast with Lucky Koi. Paper Fan provides 20% Crit Earnings per customer, which is superior to Coin Cascade's 15% per customer.
  
• For a purple engine, you'll need 14 consecutive crits before it matches Paper Fan's 210% Crit Earnings. Because purple cards tend to lack scaling options, the first thirteen customers suffer from lower Crit Earnings on average, which hurts your overall score.
  
• For a red engine, the maximum Crit Rate is 90%, so Coin Cascade is risky and its bonus can reset at any time.

• Forced to Skip
  
• Blessings Come
  
• All-you-can-eat or Free-flowing Drinks or Icy Boost
  
• Lucky Koi
  
• Pick Up Good Luck
  
• Serial Skip
  
• All-inclusive
  
• Paper Fan

Paper Fan's Crit Earnings scale with Crit Rate, which is what Lucky Koi provides. Eventually, Lucky Koi will guarantee crits on every customer.

• Brainwashing or Lucky Cat
  
• Blessings Come
  
• All-you-can-eat or Free-flowing Drinks or Icy Boost
  
• Adrenaline
  
• Pick Up Good Luck
  
• Mosquito Killer Lamp or Reluctant Smile
  
• Breakfast Towels or Paper Fan
  
• Shift Schedule or Every Minute Counts

Adrenaline builds benefit from having ten or more gifts; having access to multiple sources of static Price Mult and Total Mult helps, since purple struggles with scaling in general.

Note that red builds cannot guarantee crits, but the 80% Crit Rate is high enough that Pick Up Good Luck still provides reasonable scaling Base Price. The Golden Piggy display case item can bump it up to 90%, but crits are still not guaranteed.

• Try Your Patience
  
• Blessings Come+
  
• All-you-can-eat or Free-flowing Drinks or Icy Boost
  
• Window of Wealth
  
• Pick Up Good Luck
  
• Slow Work
  
• Absolute Limit

Overload Nest+ provides an incredible 2160% to 3240% Price Mult, but requires a heavy 4-gift investment to start up. Any stress gain at all, especially the Deadly Ringtone cost, demolishes the entire build.

• Sub-stress Umbrella+
  
• Overload Nest+
  
• All-you-can-eat or Free-flowing Drinks or Icy Boost
  
• Stable ECG
  
• any green or red gift
  
• Quick Steel Brush or Absolute Limit

The build is heavily dependent on some combination of Earmuffs, Anti-fogging Mask, Flip-flops, Donation Box, Fate Willing, and Pressure Relief Rescue to get the player character to negative stress. With such a massive Price Mult, even small increases in Base Price and Total Mult have huge effects.

This build works specifically for the sago (2-4), oolong (4-2), taro (4-3), boba (4-4), and juicer (6-1) levels. They take advantage of the toppings capacity of large cups to wildly jack up Base Price.

• All-you-can-eat+
  
• All Welcome
  
• Grand Slam
  
• Forced to Skip
  
• Serial Skip
  
• All-inclusive
  
• any

The goal is to fill a large cup with as many toppings as possible with All Welcome. 6-1 is the biggest offender here, with a whopping four toppings per customer! Garnishes — lemon slices, cheese slices, and calamansi slices — count as toppings too.

Note that All-you-can-eat cannot show up on day 1 on 6-1.

Pure orange builds struggle in low-gift levels. Either you can't build combo fast enough; or you don't have a high combo limit; or you have no way to take advantage of a high combo. Orange isn't a high-scoring option in levels with a soft cap of 8 or 9 gifts. The levels with a soft cap of 10 gifts are sago (2-4), cheese milk (3-4), and boba (4-4). The levels without a soft cap are 1-2, oranges (1-4), and everything in chapter 5. All of these levels accept an orange build readily.

There are two variants of the pure orange build: Windfall engine and Yellow engine.

• Windfall+
  
• Eternal Flower+
  
• Breakfast Towels
  
• Prompt Delivery
  
• any color besides green or orange (e.g. Donation Box)
  
• the orange combo with the above color (e.g. Freezing Point Combo)
  
• any (usually Ticket Dispenser+)

• any orange (usually Opening Balloon)
  
• Eternal Flower+
  
• any yellow
  
• COMBO Master
  
• Breakfast Towels
  
• Prompt Delivery
  
• any pink (if you have Branded Cup) or red/blue (if you don't)
  
• Jumping Combo or Extreme Measures or Freezing Point Combo
  
• All-inclusive or Absolute Limit or Breakfast Towels+ or Lucky Cat (for Total Mult)

If you've discovered any cool builds of your own, feel free to comment! I'd love to see what creative builds you've invented!