There are several rooms in the game which drop stacks that need to be picked up; the Mine, the Farm and the Vault, for instance. Each of these have pieces of furniture that increase the stack size, but take up one of the tiles a stack can form on. So as you keep adding stack expanders, the stack size (and thus the maximum capacity of the room) grows, but there will be fewer and fewer possible stacks. At one point there will be so little space the maximum capacity starts shrinking again.
The following table lists, for the given number of tilesavailable in the room and the given furniture bonus, the optimal amount of stack expanders. Mind that the number of tiles only counts those tiles upon which furniture can be placed (or stacks can form).
| Empty Tiles | Furniture bonus | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| +25% | +50% | +100% | +200% | +400% | |
| 4 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 2 | n/a |
| 8 | 2 | 3 | 3 | 4 | 4 |
| 9 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 4 | n/a |
| 16 | 6 | 7 | 7 | 8 | 8 |
| 20 | 8 | 9 | 9 | 10 | n/a |
| 25 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 12 | n/a |
| 30 | 13 | 14 | 14 | 15 | n/a |
| 35 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 17 | n/a |
| 40 | 18 | 19 | 19 | 20 | n/a |
| 45 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 22 | n/a |
| 50 | 23 | 24 | 24 | 25 | n/a |
For rooms with other numbers of tiles, and easy way is to use the above table and simply use the first number below your actual number of free tiles.
If you don't mind basic maths, a more advanced way to count the optimal amount is:
| +25% | +50% | +100% or better | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Even amount of free tiles | Tiles / 2 - 2 | Tiles / 2 - 1 | Tiles / 2 |
| Odd amount of free tiles | (Tiles + 1) / 2 - 2 | (Tiles + 1) / 2 - 1 | (Tiles - 1) / 2 |
For mathematicians, the more advanced formula below gives an exact number of stack expanders:
where s is the number of free tiles, and b is the bonus from the stack expander (0.25, 0.5, 1, 2, or 4).
The greatest integer value for n will be the optimal amount of stack expanders.
