Leveling up cats is HORRIBLY slow

[Dylawa]

In comparison to my cats, me and my staff get more level up points than I know what to do with. I think I'm on the brink of completing my first run, and all of my staff are 15 and above; meanwhile, I've only adopted out one cat, and I was only able to do this with the full reward via basically an exploit with the one perk that increases artist stat by advertising to punks. This makes adopting out cats to forever homes really quite a pain.

Does anyone have tips or tricks to get more level up points for cats specifically? Is it tied to how many toys they have? Does having too many cats impact your cats' ability to level up? It would have been nice to have a page about this in Grandma's book (unless it really is just poorly scaled)

On a side note, I find myself confused about the "no duplicate items" thing. How am I supposed to improve my books stat to what the customers want, if having duplicate items doesn't improve the overall cafe score? There seems to be no feasible way to make it to 15 books when there are only two bookshelves in game whose stats total to 5.

[Lycramosa]

For the duplicate items and stats, once you unlock everything in shrine, you get a lot more items to chose from and the shop's inventory can change so keep checking it.

For the cat levels, I found that I got points faster the farther I was into the game, but then I also had more cats (I wasn't adopting them out and the cat cap was increased). The cats themselves don't level up per say, it's more you gain skill points when the cats interact with customers and then you chose where to put those points. The more cats you have the less it will feel like you are getting enough points because you have so many cats to spread the points across.

It's one way to make the game last longer.

[pyrrophyta]

There's also a cat you can get with the hearty homecoming lure that increases the rate you accumulate cat skill points, Professor. He's a must have for me in all my cafes as soon as I can get him.

I also don't adopt out my cats; I can make it through with the basics to the end of the story and then you automatically unlock all the necessary cat slots to have every cat in the game.