Sort Them Ducks Best Upgrade Order
Five ducks is the tutorial. Twenty ducks is the game. Spend in that direction.
Sort Them Ducks hides its difficulty in commuting. The shop is one room that feels like four because you recross it with tiny handfuls. The best upgrade order is the one that makes each crossing carry more work. This page is the shopping list. The planner tool is the same list with ticks. Skills and movement explain the toys once you can afford them.
S — Carry capacity
You start with five slots. Reviewers ended near twenty. That multiplier is not flavor. It is four times fewer return trips for the same family. Buy carry whenever the menu offers it until walking with a full hand feels normal. Do not skip a carry rank to unlock a glowing skill. The skill will still fire on a five-duck budget and you will wonder why the shop is huge.
Carry also makes high shelves less annoying. One hop with a matching handful fills a top row. One hop with a single duck is a cutscene.
A — Movement speed
Once handfuls are respectable, the bottleneck is the walk. Speed upgrades, sprint, and the general “get there” cluster belong here. Turning can feel sluggish even after you raise sensitivity on Controls; speed does not replace that slider, but it shortens the hallway.
A — Reveal correct shelf (first timed skill)
Buy this when HUD names still leave you staring. Reveal is the “I cannot parse this costume” button. It is wasted on pirates you already know. One preview described it as showing where to place what you hold. Use it on outliers, then go back to walking.
B — Highlight matching ducks
Lights up copies of the held duck. This is how you convert a neighborhood into a single sweep. It assumes you already picked a family on purpose. If your hand is mixed, highlighting just shows you how mixed you are.
B — Fill inventory from the duck in hand
Auto-collect nearby copies. Steam’s “automatically collect nearby ducks” line lives here. It is a vacuum, not a brain. Point it at a pile of one theme after you can already carry ten-plus. On five slots it fills you with the wrong family just as fast.
C — Comfort extras
Crouch comfort, jump reliability, zoom behavior, extra QoL. Buy when the loop already sings. Patch 1 made jump and look-pitch trustworthy; you should not need to pay extra just to look up, but if a later rank makes landing prompts kinder, it is worth a leftover stack.
What not to do
Do not rotate the order because a skill looks cinematic in a trailer. Do not spend the Patch 1 refund on a meme loadout unless you have already finished the shop once. Do not ignore Getting Started habits — upgrades multiply a good route and also multiply a bad one.
If FPS tanks when you vacuum a thousand ducks into view, cap frames on performance rather than selling speed back. The upgrade order still holds on a handheld. You just take shorter sessions.
When every rank you care about is bought, the remaining content is sorting skill: aisle discipline, Tower names, eggs if you want them. Money cannot teach those. The walkthrough can.
Frequently Asked Questions
Quick answers to the questions players ask after a long sorting session.
What is the first upgrade to buy?
Carry capacity. Five slots is the opening tax. Raise it before timed skills.
When do I buy reveal shelf?
After carry and basic speed, when costumes still confuse you. It is a timed pointer, not a walk speed.
Can I finish without this order?
Yes, slower. The order is for fewer trips, not a gated ending.
My upgrades reset. What now?
The official hotfix refunds the spend once. Buy carry first again. See patch notes.