Pet Aphid

Pet aphids are a special entity in the game that follows the player ant and provides bonuses.

## General information

Pet aphids are very similar to the aphids that appear at aphid farms, which are going to be called "farm aphids" to differentiate the two different entities, however, pet aphids are directly connected to the garden rather than fire ants or honeydew. Another difference with farm aphids is that pet aphids can come in random colors and don't produce honeydew. Instead, pet aphids grant two bonuses that are picked randomly out of 6 possible bonuses they can have.

## Obtaining

Pet aphids can appear randomly when harvesting a flower. When this happens, the player will see a message on screen with the text "Obtained a new pet aphid", and the picture of the pet aphid obtained below. The chance of apparition of pet aphids when gathering a flower is unknown. The color and bonuses they have is random.

## Bonuses

Pet aphids have two bonuses each one. These are picked from a list with 12 options, that are:

* Increases player ant movement speed.
* Increases worker ants movement speed.
* Increases soldier ants movement speed.
* Increases creatures movement speed.
* Reduces the fire ants movement speed.
* Obtain more honeydew from the bee nest.

* Increases the soldier ant damage.
* Increases the soldier ant resilience when fighting.
* Increases damage from the flower cannons and spitting at the Frog Pond Co-op.
* Increase chance of obtaining a special skin from Co-op mode
* Reduces the price of planting seeds (-1/5).
* Increase resources obtained from Co-op mode (5/25).

When obtained, pet aphids always have 1% or base level bonuses, but *these increase as they are leveled up*.

## Managing pet aphids

Pet aphids can be managed from the "Pets" tab on the "Garden" menu.

Players can see what their pet aphids are on this tab, including their appearance and level, as well as their bonuses and feeding status by clicking on each one, and even discard pets they don't want.

For leveling up, pet aphids are fed with scarlet sage flowers , *depending on its level the flowers needed to level up may vary*.

Feeding a pet aphid is done through this tab, as selecting an aphid will activate a button that contains the scarlet sage flowers that the player has in their inventory, and pressing that button will feed the aphid with one flower. 20 flowers are required to fill the level up bar, unlocking a button to upgrade to the next level.

Selecting an aphid also activates the "Call" button below the flower, which will activate the bonuses of the pet aphid, and will make it follow the player everywhere, including battles, co-op mode, and every other location. Calling another aphid while one is already called will replace the previous one. The player can "uncall" a pet, by pressing the little red "X" button next to the aphid icon at the right of this tab, which will allow selecting the aphid and interact with it.

### Rerolling stats

Players can use gems to reroll the aphid pet stats and color. Doing so will replace the current stats with two new random stats or replace the current color with a random color. There is no guarantee the new stats or color will be ones the player desires. Rerolling the stats does not affect the color and rerolling the color does not affect the stats.

Aphids can be discarded for 10 seed tokens.