Crates is a duck market. You collect rubber ducks, trade them against other players on a live order book, and try to grow what you're worth. This page is the whole game in one place — what everything does, how to actually make money, and how the social side fits together. Fifteen minutes here will save you your starting stake.
There are two currencies. Credits are the free one — you start with 25,000 and earn more every day just by turning up. Crate Coin is the paid one; you never need it, and nothing in this guide assumes you have any.
There are 39 ducks in the game, sorted into tiers. The tier is everything: it sets the guaranteed floor price, how often a duck drops, and whether it carries a perk.
Each tier is worth four times the one below it. That matters more than anything else in the game: one Rare is worth sixteen Commons, and one Legendary is worth 256 of them.
You can always sell any duck straight back to the house for the floor above — instantly, no buyer needed. That's your safety net, and it's why you can never be truly broke while holding ducks.
Only Common ducks have no perk. Everything Uncommon and up carries an effect (chapter 6), and some ducks are limited editions with a hard supply cap — once they're minted out, the only way to get one is off another player. Browse the lot in the Duckdex.
The market is a real order book, the same shape as a stock exchange. Every duck type has buyers stacked on one side and sellers on the other. A trade happens when the two meet.
The gap between the best buy and the best sell is the spread, and it is the single most reliable source of profit in this game. Cross it and you pay it. Post inside it and you get paid it.
Five market-maker bots quote both sides all day and keep the book alive, and they follow trends — a sustained move keeps building. The rest of the book is real players. Prices genuinely move, so buying a dip and selling a rally works exactly the way you'd expect.
Trading fee is 0.1% on a sale — deliberately tiny, and reducible to zero with the right equipped duck. Buying costs nothing extra. There is no reason not to trade often.
This is the chapter nobody writes honestly, so here it is. Crates and Duck Rush both pay back about 90% of what you put in, on average, measured at the guaranteed floor price of what comes out. They are not investments. They're how you turn credits into a collection, and the fun is the pull, not the profit.
| Crate | Cost | Pays | Average back |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scrap Crate | 750 cr | 1 duck | 653 cr (87%) |
| Basic Crate | 1,000 cr | 1 duck | 908 cr (91%) |
| Standard Crate | 3,000 cr | 1 duck | 2,712 cr (90%) |
| Gilded Crate | 15,000 cr | 1 duck | 13,364 cr (89%) |
Note that the average back doesn't change much between crates. A dearer crate isn't better value — it's higher variance, with a real shot at the tiers that carry the good perks. Pick the one that matches what you're hunting, not the one you think pays best.
Duck Rush is the always-on one: pay to enter a pond, a swarm of ducks floods the screen, and every duck you click is yours to keep. No daily limit — play it as often as you can afford.
| Pond | Entry | Net | Golden | Time | Best case |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Shallows | 8,000 cr | 6 | 2 | 35s | 90% |
| The Reef | 27,500 cr | 12 | 4 | 50s | 89% |
| The Abyss | 97,500 cr | 20 | 6 | 65s | 89% |
Every ordinary duck in the water is drawn identically, so you can't tell what you've got until you land it — that's deliberate, and it's why the game can't be cheated. The golden ducks are the exception: they sparkle, they roll on a much better table, and there are only a handful per round.
Five income streams, roughly in the order you should build them. The first two are free and risk-free, and most players ignore them.
Turning up costs nothing and pays every day:
That's up to 11,400 credits a day from the games on a very good day, on top of the daily claim — and all three also hand out free crates, which are the cheapest ducks you will ever get. Ten minutes a day, no risk, no spending. Over a week that's comfortably more than the stake you started with.
Two ducks pay you every single day, forever, just for being equipped:
That percentage is of your entire duck collection's value, paid daily. It compounds: the more you hold, the more it pays, and it pays while you're asleep. Getting one of these equipped is the single highest-value thing you can do in this game. If you pull one, do not sell it.
Post limit orders instead of crossing. Buy the dips the bots overshoot into, sell the rallies they chase. The fee is 0.1% and can be reduced to zero, so there's no drag on doing this a lot. This is the stream with no ceiling — it scales with your attention and your capital, not with a daily timer.
The house floor is a guaranteed exit, not a fair price. For anything Rare or above — and especially limited editions — list it on the auction house and let people bid. The house takes 5% of the winning bid, each new bid must beat the last by 5%, and you can run 8 listings at once over 1 hour / 6 hours / 24 hours. A wanted duck routinely clears well above its floor.
Combining feeds ducks in and rolls for one of the next tier up. Your chance is your input value against the target's, times 90% — so like everything else, the house holds an edge, and combining is a slow way to lose value unless you're doing it deliberately.
You can equip up to 5 ducks at once on the My Ducks page. An equipped duck's effect is live everywhere in the game — and it's free to change your deck whenever you like.
| Effect | What it does | Best in game |
|---|---|---|
| Midas Touch | Pays you credits daily, as a % of everything you hold. The only true passive income. | Gold Duck (Legendary) Earns 1%/day of your held duck value |
| Flawless | Cuts the trading fee you pay when someone buys your duck. | Diamond Duck (Legendary) Zero trading fees |
| Cooks the Books | Raises the guaranteed floor price on every sell-to-house. | Chef Duck (Rare) +4% on every sell-to-house |
| Black Hole | Money back when you buy a duck off another player. | Void Duck (Legendary) 3% off buying ducks off players |
| Viral | A bonus on top when another player buys yours. | Neon Duck (Legendary) +4% when a player buys your duck |
| Cosmic Luck | Shifts crate odds toward the rarer tiers. | Galaxy Duck (Legendary) +10% better crate odds (shifts to rarer) |
| Blessing | Raises your combine success chance. | Halo Duck (Epic) +15% combine success chance |
| Rebirth | A failed combine gives your ducks back instead of eating them. | Phoenix Duck (Legendary) A failed combine refunds your ducks |
Nothing above Legendary ever drops from a crate, a game or a pond — the tiers beyond it exist only through combining and events.
Crates is multiplayer in a way that isn't obvious from the market screen. Here's the whole social layer and what each bit is actually for.
Add anyone from Find players or straight from the friends hub. Friends give you:
Trading groups are clans. Join an open one instantly, or found your own for 25,000 credits. A group gets you:
Every profile has a referral link. When someone you brought in reaches level 5, you get 50,000 credits and they get 25,000. It only pays on a player who actually sticks around, so it's worth helping them get started rather than just dropping the link.
| Starting credits | 25,000 |
| Daily reward, day 1 → day 7 | 1,500 → 9,000 (27,500/week) |
| Free daily games | 3, up to 11,400 cr/day + free crates |
| Trading fee (on sales) | 0.1% — can reach 0% |
| Auction house fee | 5% of the winning bid |
| Crates return, on average | ~90% of what you spend |
| Duck Rush return, played perfectly | ~89% of the entry fee |
| Combine edge | 90% of fair odds |
| Equipped duck slots | 5 (no stacking) |
| Best passive income perk | 1%/day of your held duck value |
| Gift cap per day | 250,000 cr of value |
| Founding a group | 25,000 cr |
| Referral reward | 50,000 to you, 25,000 to them |
| Ducks in the game | 39 |
Every figure on this page is read straight from the live game config when the page loads — if something gets rebalanced, this guide changes with it.