Boosts in Honey, Inc.
Boosts are temporary multipliers you apply to the farm — Hive Frenzy, Money Printer, the Beacon and Prism families and more, bought with Honeycombs or won from crates and ads.
What a boost is
Everything else you buy in Honey, Inc. is permanent within its scope. A building level stays bought for the run; an epic research node stays bought forever. Boosts are the exception. A boost is a temporary multiplier: you activate it, the farm runs harder for a while, and then it expires and the farm goes back to its baseline.
That single property drives every decision about them. Boosts do not build anything. They compress time. A boost applied to a weak farm returns a multiple of very little; the same boost applied to a farm with good buildings, a full set of hives and a deep research stack behind it returns a multiple of a lot. The boost is the same either way — what changes is the number it is multiplying.
On numbers. This page names every boost in the game and explains what each family affects, but it does not publish durations or multiplier values. Those are balance figures that shift between updates, and a stale number on a wiki is worse than no number. The boost list inside the game is the authority on exactly what a boost does and how long it lasts — read it there before you spend.
The full boost list
The grouping below follows what each boost's name points at, which is the honest level of detail for a wiki page — the game itself shows the exact effect when you open the boost.
| Boost | Family | What the name points at |
|---|---|---|
| Hive Frenzy | Hive | Hive activity and spawning |
| Auto-Hive Spawn | Hive | Automating hive spawning |
| Hive Prism | Prism | Hive output |
| Legendary Hive Prism | Prism (Legendary) | Hive output, stronger |
| Buzz Beacon | Beacon | Bee behavior |
| Legendary Buzz Beacon | Beacon (Legendary) | Bee behavior, stronger |
| Jelly Beacon | Beacon | Bee behavior |
| Legendary Jelly Beacon | Beacon (Legendary) | Bee behavior, stronger |
| Cash Injection | Cash | Your cash balance |
| Money Printer | Cash | Cash income |
| Free 2× Booster | Cash | A doubling boost offered at no cost |
Eleven boosts, in three loose groups. The rest of this page walks through those groups.
Hive and spawning boosts
Hive Frenzy and Auto-Hive Spawn both act on the front of the production chain — the hives that put bees into the air. A farm has four hive slots at most, and hives run to nine tiers, from the Base Hive through the Improved Hive and Advanced Hive to the later tiers. Whatever is sitting in those slots is what these boosts are amplifying.
The Hive Frenzy name describes the effect well enough: a burst of hive activity for a limited window. Auto-Hive Spawn, as its name suggests, is the one that changes how you interact with the game rather than only how fast it runs — hive spawning is handled for you while it is active. If you tend to play in short bursts and leave, that distinction matters — one makes the minutes you are watching more productive, the other reduces how much watching the minutes need.
These boosts are worth the most when your hive slots are already full and upgraded. Filling the slots and raising the tier is cash work, covered on the hives page, and it should come first.
Bee-behavior boosts: the Beacon and Prism families
The middle group is the largest, and it comes in matched pairs — a standard version and a Legendary one.
- Hive Prism and Legendary Hive Prism
- Buzz Beacon and Legendary Buzz Beacon
- Jelly Beacon and Legendary Jelly Beacon
These sit over the part of the farm where bees do their work: flying out from the hive, collecting, and returning. It is the busiest loop in the game and the one with the most moving parts — bee capacity runs 50 → 100 → 200 → 350 → 500 across its upgrade levels, and refill rate runs from 1 up to 5.4 bees per second, so a mature farm has a great many bees in flight at once for a boost to act on.
Because the effect scales with how many bees you have and how good your Bee Colony is, this family rewards patience more than any other. The Bee Colony's efficiency multiplier reaches 133.4× at maximum level, and honey per bee climbs from 0.5 through 0.8, 1.2, 1.8, 2.7, 4 and onward across its twelve levels. A beacon burned at colony level 2 and a beacon burned at colony level 12 are not remotely the same purchase.
Cash boosts
Cash Injection, Money Printer and the Free 2× Booster act on the money end of the chain rather than the production end. Honey has to be stored, processed and shipped before it becomes cash — the Storage building's processing speed climbs 1, 1.5, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144 across its levels, and the Shipping Depot's multiplier reaches 243.8× — so anything acting on cash is acting on the output of that whole pipeline.
The Money Printer boost is the one players ask about most, and the reason is structural: cash is the currency that buys nearly every upgrade in a run, so a boost to cash income is indirectly a boost to how fast the entire farm grows. Cash Injection reads as the more immediate of the two, a payment rather than a rate. The Free 2× Booster is exactly what its name says — a doubling boost the game offers at no cost, which makes it the one every player should take when it appears.
Time a cash boost against a purchase you already want. The value of extra cash is whatever you spend it on. Lining a cash boost up with the moment you are saving for a hive slot, a depot level or the next vehicle turns a vague multiplier into a concrete jump in farm capability.
Legendary variants
Three boosts on the list carry the Legendary prefix: Legendary Hive Prism, Legendary Buzz Beacon and Legendary Jelly Beacon. These are the stronger form of the boost they are named after, not separate mechanics. If you know what a Buzz Beacon does, you know what a Legendary Buzz Beacon does — more of it.
Because they are the premium end of the pool, they are the ones worth holding rather than firing off casually. A Legendary boost spent on a farm you are about to reset returns far less than the same boost spent at the start of a fresh push. Anyone running the prestige loop should read the reincarnation page before deciding when to burn one.
Where boosts come from
| Source | How it works | Costs you |
|---|---|---|
| Honeycombs | Bought outright with the hard currency | HC you could have spent on epic research |
| Crates | Opened for a random reward — a boost, Honeycombs or cash | Nothing directly; the reward is random |
| Ads | A rewarded ad grants the boost | Your time |
Two of the three routes are free, which is the important thing to notice. A player who never spends a single Honeycomb on boosts can still run them regularly through crates and ad rewards. Honeycombs themselves come from several sources — wasps, crates, mail, daily rewards, ads and referrals — and the Honeycombs page covers each one, including the fact that the balance is server-authoritative rather than stored only on your device.
Boosts versus epic research
Since both sinks take Honeycombs, this is the decision that actually costs you something. Epic research is permanent and survives reincarnation; there are 18 upgrades in that set, and every one you own improves every future run. A boost improves one window of one run and is then gone.
For most players the sequencing follows from that. Early on, when Honeycombs are scarce and the farm is small, put HC into epic research and take boosts only from the free routes. Later, with a solid epic stack and HC arriving steadily, buying boosts to accelerate a push becomes reasonable. Note too that boosts are an active-play tool: they run on a clock, so they suit a session you are watching rather than a stretch of offline progress, where bees work away at 80% efficiency regardless.
If you are still getting your bearings, the how to play guide covers the production chain the boosts are acting on, and beginner tips covers what to buy first.