How to Earn Real Money in TBH: Taskbar Hero (Updated)

TBH: Task Bar Hero is a free idle-RPG that sits in your taskbar and plays itself while you get on with your day. Your heroes fight, level up and pick up loot in the background, and what's useful to know is that some of that loot can be sold on the Steam Community Market for real Steam Wallet funds.

Since 1 June 2026, however, the developers overhauled the whole trading system to keep their servers stable, and a lot of the advice floating around from launch week is now out of date. So before you start listing everything you own, here’s how the economy actually works today.

For some general tips and tricks in TBH: Taskbar Hero, click here!

The short version: trading got a lot stricter. Here's what to know:

First, there’s a hard gate. You can’t use the Steam Market at all until your in-game Cube reaches Level 10. This stops new players (and most importantly, bots) from flooding the marketplace. It also changes what's in demand as there are no buyers for early game gear anymore.

Second, equipment trading is now Legendary grade and above only. Every Common, Uncommon and Rare piece of gear has been pulled from the market entirely. If it isn’t Legendary or better, you can’t sell it.

Third, and this is the good news: crafting materials are exempt. Decorations, engravings, inscriptions and materials can still be traded at any rarity, even Common. This makes crafting materials a good staple form of income.

Fourth, some gear is banned outright regardless of rarity. Equipment at certain level milestones (Lv. 25, 35, 45, 55, 60, 70, 75, 85 and 90) can’t be traded, and neither can anything tagged as a “Type B” variant. Always check the item level and the suffix before you bother pushing it across.

To read the full patch notes, check it here.

Because materials dodge the Legendary-only rule, they’ve quietly become the backbone of the whole economy. High-level players burn through them constantly, so the daily trading volume is huge and the demand is steady.

The things worth farming in bulk are Soulstones and catalysts (late-game players need absurd quantities to upgrade their gear), engravings and inscriptions (players buy these out in blocks to reroll their item stats), basic crafting materials like leather and iron ingots, and taskbar decorations. Don’t sleep on the cosmetics, by the way - taskbar skins and UI decorations hold their value better than progression gear because they don’t get power-crept every patch.

It works both ways, too. Alongside selling them, you can buy materials as well. Sometimes you’ll offload a stack of one material purely to fund a stack of another you actually need to unlock something. This is handy when you’re chasing a specific upgrade.

One tip that genuinely matters: don’t list materials one at a time. Check the Buy Orders on Steam and match your stack size to what buyers are already waiting to purchase. Clean bulk walls sell fast when they’re priced near the rolling daily average.

More hours running equals more loot, so the goal is a team that clears stages quickly and survives overnight without dying. The most popular setup and the one we recommend is Knight, Ranger and Priest.

The Knight stands at the front and soaks up damage, which is what keeps the team alive deep into the harder acts where the good drops live. The Ranger is your damage as fast kills mean more chests per hour. With the Priest, max out her Blessing of Strength skill for a party-wide 50% damage boost, and keep her healing so the run doesn’t collapse while you’re away.

Push your team until it can repeatedly farm Act 2, where Immortal items start appearing alongside Legendaries. Act 3 is the real prize, with the best rewards in the game, but you’ll need solid gear to hold it.

And grab the Bat pet early. You unlock it for free by defeating 5,000 bats — park your party on an early stage and let it grind. The Bat gives +10% common chest drop chance and +15% EXP gain permanently, which means more loot and faster levelling for zero cost. If you’d rather not spend anything on DLC heroes, free pets like this are where the value is.

The best difficulty for farming is unsurprisingly Torment. The best stages to farm are those that you can clear reliably without issues. Having said that, in an ideal world, the best stages are the following:

1. Core of the Abyss | 3-9
2. Citadel of Ruin | 3-8
3. Plains of Torment | 3-7
4. Burning Ravine | 3-6
5. Pharaoh's Crypt | 2-9

Someting very important to note is that when you list an item on the Steam Market, the game wipes all of its Cube stats. Every decoration, engraving and inscription you slotted in vanishes.

So never invest crafting materials into gear you plan to sell. Strip an item with the Cube removal tool before listing it, and only ever Cube the pieces you’re keeping for your own team. Upgrading something you’re about to flip is just pouring resources down the drain.

Loot doesn’t go straight from your heroes to the Steam Marketplace. Look for the little boat icon, which opens your trading menu, and drag the items you want to sell onto it. Once you refresh the inventory or market view, those items move into your actual Steam inventory, and you list them from there.

From there, check comparable listings and recent sales history to gauge real demand. Want a fast sale? List a little under the current lowest price. In no rush? List it closer to market value. Bear in mind, however, that as TBH gets older and supply increases, prices will fall. So it's better to sell high while you can!

Remember Steam takes a 15% cut on every sale, so factor that into your pricing.

If you cancel a listing or buy an item from another player, it does not reappear in the trade ship. Cancelled listings and freshly bought gear are routed straight to your in-game mailbox instead. Open the mailbox from your menu and claim them from there.

To summarise, here's some advice for earning Steam Wallet funds in TBH:

• Materials sell low but are consistent and move fast
• Holding on to items, unless they are incredibly unique, is generally a bad idea as overall prices are likely to depreciate over time
• Don't bother upgrading anything in the Cube before selling
• Focus on building a team that can AFK clear first and foremost, then stick them in the highest farmable stage
• Get the Bat pet for extra drops!

Good luck, and happy hunting!