Hatchery/Breeding's Guide

### **Introduction**

Pets could be your powerful assistants. They improve your gameplay in many ways such as speed up progress, increase resource earnings, or simply make you stronger in battle. Raising a proper pet, however, is tricky and could prove to be frustrating. This guide is designed to minimize that frustration. Let’s begin!

### **Basic Mechanics**

There are three components that determine your pet’s final output:

* **Aptitude**: your pet’s “raw power.” The higher, the more powerful. Aptitude can be raised through breeding and feeding the currently active pet with other eggs. Aptitude value caps at 100k.
* Trait’s **Rank** (Roman numbers): basically your pet’s skill level. The only way to increase the trait’s Rank is to breed it with another pet with same trait AND equal Rank.
* **Level**: Pets level up naturally through time given that it is not active. Stats jump between each level are more pronounced in higher aptitude/rank pets.

These three factors multiply to determine your pet’s final output (displayed in percentage below each trait). While aptitude is arguably the most important number (since you can build aptitude as high without any real limitation), trait’s rank also affects a pet’s power greatly.

Level is also very important especially at an early stage since growth rate per level is greater in the beginning but gets closer and closer to the point of diminishing return as level gets higher. In short, pets get stronger fast at first, then slow down quicker and quicker.

### **Aptitude Building**

Aptitude is key! Your pet should reach target aptitude even before being given desired traits. Build aptitude by keep breeding pets you find/have randomly, ignoring their other attributes. The offspring pet gets full aptitude from parent on the left and roughly half to two-third from parent on the right. For that reason, it’s most efficient to keep higher aptitude pet on the left unless aptitude isn’t your main concern.

However, starting from v0.11 update, an option to feed currently hatched pets with other eggs is available. Feeding consumes eggs to increase the Aptitude of the selected pet. Aptitude is increased by 25% of the egg's Aptitude. Feeding does not reset pet's Level. This method is arguably easier and faster than breeding as you can now create pets with desired traits first, then start building aptitude through feeding without resetting the pet's Level or Rank.

### **Transferring Traits**

Each pet can have up to three different traits, and that should be your aim most of the time (with few exceptions). Breeding proper three-trait pets, however, is tricky since three-trait pets are unstable. If you try to breed them with another random pet, at least one of the tree traits could be affected or disappear altogether. Two-trait pets, on the other hand, are a lot easier to control. So, when building three-trait pets, build 2 two-trait pets with one overlap trait on each pet first, THEN breed them to get three-trait pet at the very last step. Here’s the list of some basic formulas.

Assuming that A: Trait 1, B: Trait 2, C: Trait 3, and, Z: Other Trait

* Pet A + Pet B = Pet AB
* Pet AB + Pet C = Pet ABC
* Pet AB + Pet B = Pet AB (A’s rank unchanged while B’s rank might change)
* Pet A + Pet AB = Pet AB (A’s rank might change while B added as is)
* Pet AB + Pet AB = Pet AB (A and/or B’s ranks might change)
* Pet ABC + Pet AB = Pet AB (A and/or B’s rank might change while C disappears)
* Pet AB + Pet ABC = Pet ABC (A and/or B’s rank might change while C added as is)
* Pet AB + Pet BC = Pet ABC (A and C’s ranks unchanged while B’s rank might change)

This is where things get tricky:
Pet ABC + Pet Z = one of the three scenarios where one trait from the first pet will disappear.

* Pet ABZ
* Pet ACZ
* Pet BCZ

If you can detect a pattern from the formulas, the way to introduce new trait(s) to your aptitude pet is to put them on the right side. Traits on the left pet, on the other hand, could disappear if another pet you breed it with has no overlapping trait(s).

Of all the formulas, the **Pet AB + Pet BC = Pet ABC** formula is the one you are going to use at the final stage to build your perfect three-trait pets.

### **Trait’s Upranking**

As mentioned earlier, one can only uprank pet’s trait by breeding it with another pet with the same trait AND equal rank. The result, however, is not guaranteed.

* Rank I + Rank I = either Rank II or Rank I
* Rank II + Rank II = either Rank III or Rank II, and so on…

However, the time may come when you need to breed pets just to switch their position without losing rank. The breakdown is as follows:

* Rank II + Rank I = either Rank II or Rank I
* Rank III + Rank I = Rank III, Rank II, or Rank I

As you can see, the trick where you breed and keep the higher rank of the two pets only works when the difference between their ranks is two or less. So, keep that in mind.

### **Order of Conduct**

1. Build aptitude pet (doesn’t need to care about traits at this point, so feed your highest aptitude pet whatever eggs you don’t need to raise its aptitude to desired target). As of v0.11 update, this step becomes optional with pet Feeding method, although having a good starting Aptitude is still recommended early on.
2. Once reaching target aptitude, start converting it into your AB pet by using the above methods to breed *out* the unwanted third trait.
3. Once your aptitude pet has lost that third trait and becomes your AB pet, start building each of those traits' ranks one at a time. **Remember that breeding pet AB with pet B only affects trait B’s rank, so you don't have to worry about A's rank at all while trying to build B's rank as long as you breed your pet AB with pet B only (absolutely no other trait allowed)**.
4. Once your aptitude pet has achieved desired rank in both A and B trait. Leave it be for now.
5. Start building Pet BC using the same formulas. **This one doesn’t need to have high aptitude.** Remember that we always keep the high aptitude pet on the left so pet BC is only there for traits.
6. Once pet BC achieved target ranks, you are ready for the final step.
7. Breed Pet AB with Pet BC. Pet AB, as a high aptitude pet **MUST BE ON THE LEFT** or the aptitude you’ve spent so much time and effort building will be severely compromised.

### **Egg Placement**

When breeding two pets, the offspring egg will go to the **younger of the two parents**. Younger pets here mean their eggs got laid **last**. Pet’s age starts when eggs are laid, not when they hatch. Two-hour egg that was laid before two-minute egg is considered “older” even though the two-minute egg hatches way earlier. Keep this in mind while building a pet so you can control where they end up. It might not seem that important at first, but once you start having more than one pet you can’t get rid of, building higher trait’s rank pets becomes harder and harder to the point you might want to rip your face off because you should’ve thought of that sooner.

### **What to Build First**

There are many good pets to build and you probably would get different answer from different player, but it’s safe to say all of us agree that without a good **Incubation+Training** pet, building any pet that could make a difference is next to impossible. So, no matter what pet you want to build, you have to start with good **Incubation+Training** pet. You need both traits in one pet to save a precious spot. You should aim for high aptitude. How high? That depends on what you want. A **100 Aptitude** pet with **Rank VI Incubation** can reduce incubation significantly depending on their level.

**Flaming Skull**
The Flaming Skulls have one second incubation time without any help from Incubation pet. You can get them by farming at Mount Firax. They hatch from Hot Eggs and about 70 percent of hot eggs from Mount Firax are flaming Skulls.

### **Farm Eggs Faster**

Once you can hatch and breed pets faster, you’d need a good egg farming strategies to match that speed. Eggs come in green chests which could also contain gemstones (unless you run the Depths or ID Dungeon, then you won’t get any gemstones) and as you’ve probably already notice, they are quite rare. The chance can be improved by a few things that help with rare and legendary item drop improvement such as **Lucky Looter** skillgems (from Jester), **Spirit of the Season** skillgems (from Teddy), **Treasure Hunt Wizard Power**, and **Statue of Treasures** (If you have to reset Ascension Orbs to put most of them into the Statue, it would cost 500 gems or 100 Ascension Token. Quite expensive especially for newbies, so make sure you plan well before making a reset).

### **Hero Facet Perk**

There is one Hero Facet perk (benefit) that can be unlocked after completing each Hero Facet within the **Mammalia** group. After unlocking the Mammalia perk, all top row nests in the Hatchery will always hatch male pets while the bottom row nests will always hatch female pets. This is useful especially for building Aptitude faster, so unlock the perk as soon as you gain access to the Hero Facet feature.

### **Additional Notes**

Beside pet feeding, v0.11 update also adds another quality-of-life feature. If a pet being bred is shiny, then there is no longer randomization for resulting traits. Traits will always rank up if they are both of the same rank. This should make building desired pets quicker and less randomized.