Beginner tips and tricks

A few Recommendations

 * 1) In the beginning of the game it is useful to have chain merges on and overlap merges off. This will give you combo bonuses that can help you clear land in the early game. This is not as useful later on as it can cause you to merge some items that you did not want leading to some frustration, and the combo bonus will be minuscule compared to the energy you can make with high level flowers. So it is suggested that these settings are changed once you have enough room to play around with.
 * 2) It is also suggested that you turn on tap to confirm to prevent you from using valuable consumables that you are saving for later.
 * 3) You should also turn on prefer merge 5 as soon as possible. This only applies to your guardians but it will prevent inefficiencies by only merging 3 of a guardian or guardian egg, and any notifications to merge guardians will only appear when you have at least five of them. This will Not prevent you from merging 3 of normal items as it only applies to guardians.
 * 4) Whenever you build a building, that type of building will become more expensive, so plan ahead and buy as many buildings as you can before building them. This will help you level up your buildings faster and cheaper.
 * 5) Sometimes keeping lower level items that produce items (like treasuries or lakes) is better than merging them because you will be producing more of those items than if they were combined.
 * 6) Level 51 is highly recommended for farming as it can easily let you fill up your storage due to the high resource count in the level (It only cost 3 compasses).

Some things you might not know

 * Streams and volcanoes come as a byproduct of merging mountains sometimes (about 25% chance for either a stream or volcano, but you can't get both in the same merge based on current information).
 * Tapping on the Ship located in cloud harbor will generate tips.
 * Placing carts next to mines will fill them with stone and combining them will yield Boulders in this state. Placing them next to treasuries will fill them with coins and merging them will yield coins (not recommended). Placing them next to level 4+ lakes will yield barrels and merging them will yield plashes.
 * Placing a fire near a Dry Thicket will ignite it into a Wildfire that produces small flames and will extinguish into a Firestone.
 * Plashes placed near a level 2+ volcano will turn into sulfuric pools which won't dry out but can not be changed back.

Merging 3 vs. 5
The differences between merging 3 vs 5 of an item should not be ignored because When you reach higher levels of consumables there is a huge difference in the amount of resources gained. You get 20% more if you merge 5 instead of 3, but this compounds as you merge the result: after 5 levels of merge you will have about 2.5 times as much, and after 10 levels of merging 5 instead of three you will have more than 6 times as much.

Below is a list of tables that should help you see the differences between merging 3 vs 5 of an item.