I am VERY excited for a breeding grounds update, especially the ability to set breeding pairs and see the traits of my pets when breeding! It will certainly be very helpful when I'm breeding and make it much easier to find pets that carry the only instance of a trait! :D

Although a breeding fee wouldn't hurt me very much personally, the most it would do was make me a little more conscious about which pets I choose to breed which is probably not a bad thing, I do worry that it would deter a lot of current players from completing their breeding projects and new players from ever beginning them.

Would there be any consideration put towards implementing a function similar to how 'Nurture Boosting' currently works, and I don't mean scaling the price of breeding pets to match the current amount of egglings when breeding, but rather players being able to breed a certain amount of egglings without paying the breeding fee? I was initially thinking a smaller number like 20 pets, but maybe something like 50-100 would be a better number. It would allow players to continue their breeding projects, but still deter large-scale breeding of pets that just get auto-released.

Regardless, lovely work as always Krin! Very excited! <3

I dont usually chime in but I wanted to expand/agree with something that Volinolona mentioned! While Im a little unfamiliar with the term dishwasher pet, breeding is one of the most fun aspects of the game. I only recently started a project, but prior to that breeding was just fun to see how colors and traits mix together. Hatching eggs and having hatchlings is what brought me to the game as a 14 year old.

They dont always turn out the prettiest, but sometimes that doesnt really matter to a player. I agree with Volinolona that a breeding fee is likely to just punish smaller/younger players for their playstyle, and be a hassle to those who already have a lot to manage project wise. I only just started one and most of what hatches cant be used (granted, Im no expert so user error is likely) but for the more advanced project people with several projects going on, I imagine itll add up very quickly.

But the rest of it looks awesome ^ ^ !!

I read the post and I am not 100% sure if it was said or not because my brain is on auto-pilot. But did the enhanced information include limiting to specific themes? Will it exclude pets that are unable to breed due to being related? I keep trying to breed siblings by accident because I uhh.. Don't have the mental bandwidth most of the time to set the breeders in a way that makes sense even to me. Not really your problem, but would help a bit to be able to exclude unbreedable and pets of a different theme.

I get the inspiration for the breeding fee, but it mostly seems like it is a small number of players that breed the excessive amounts of dishwater pets. Some do it in such a way that it kind of seems like they use a program, is it possible you could look into that or speak to those players about it directly to find out more about what they are doing and see if you could reason with them or something? Breeding projects do require a ton of offspring in order to get the desired results and it would likely make it prohibitive for newer players.

That other person (sorry I forgot the username by now) mentioning the option for permanent deletion does make sense, but it should be optional. I do not like naming most of my pets and while I could manually move them to stables, I do rely often on them automatically going into my stables. I know you can change the settings on your hatchery to release un-named and whatnot, so if it was able to be set as an option that makes sense. I do the mass release from the hatchery for bad offspring, but the earlier offspring that were previously useful, I am holding onto for release boards and it is going to be a struggle to find and delete those older ones. It took thousands of pets to get the first 6v of my project. That adds up really quickly for cost and most of them were released but I would have been okay with permanent deletion of those offspring. The 7 day waiting period for those is nice, because I have accidentally released one or two I didn't mean to and had to recover (oops!)

This is just my 2 cents.

Obviously anyone who breeds a lot will dislike the fee existing, myself included, but I do see the point of giving a baseline value to offspring by doing this.
If the plan is to have a stablehand that offsets the breeding fee to help people doing projects, that probably needs to be implemented at the same time as the breeding fee itself. If it's a reasonably expensive gold cost per week but reduces the breeding fee down to almost or literally nothing, then it'd function like a soft cap on how much the breeding fee costs people doing projects. Like if it became better to hire the stablehand when breeding 50+ pets per week, then I imagine everyone doing a project would be taking it, at least on days or weeks when doing a round of breeding, and that would be as much as breeding your own pets can really cost.

Since project breeding is the way a lot of people mass breed, and breeding with care to create a controlled valuable outcome is the opposite of random breeding flooding the market, there does need to be more specific accomodations than the assumption that people doing projects will find a breeding fee negligible. For hundreds or thousands of project duds to add up to a negligible cost without something like a stablehand reduction, the fee would have to be too negligible to work for its intended purpose.

So yeah, my issue with the cost idea is basically that linear cost scaling will inevitably punish people who are being selective about what offspring they keep, because released duds could be hugely expensive. Stablehand acting as a cost ceiling might be a way to deal with that. A gold payout for releasing that acts as a partial refund might also work.

breeding is the whole point of this game, it already cost us to much to expand our stables to keep our hard worked on projects, now you want to charge us to breed ontop of that? i already buy premium currency to help me out, if this gets implemented ill be deleting mine and my daughters accounts and you will be loosing atleast 2 paying users. We already have found a few pet sites that have been up longer, who dont charge you money to breed or even for "pet slots" and allow you to have unlimited pets. if your real concern is server space, do like the other big name sites that came in the 90s, released pets get deleted from the system completly.

I am so excited that we are getting closer to this happening. All the new features look awesome and being able to set pairs for breeding will help so much. Will it show what theme the pet belongs to as well as the traits/colors? Some themes look similar in base colors for me and it would be nice if theme name showing was possible but it's not a deal breaker or anything. Would we have a link to the pet if theme can't be shown or maybe just for ease of going to their page to double check things? I know I'm not the only one who gets paranoid that I might have the wrong pet lol.

Personally I'm not bothered by the breeding fee and am actually in agreement with it. I have probably around 100 projects, with more being added each fest, that I slowly trudge along with to keep myself busy. I'm not bothered if I have to pay for breeding my own pets since it makes sense to give them some sort of base price and the market isn't flooded with thousands of 1g pets that nobody wants. Though gold is kinda easy to get so I, and probably many others, would still have some pets for "free". I also since it would mean more thought going into any breeding since people would be doing. A low enough fee that people won't riot over but also high enough so that those out there breeding crazily and causing data inflation would maybe think before they do so.

I'm not bothered by the gold fee idea because gold is easy to get. Spend a few minutes in Esior's Haven in one of the areas and get a bunch of gold. I also don't understand the need some have to hoard gold? It's not even real? Or maybe it's just the idea of spending gold to breed when the pet may just end up useless. I'm just not bothered. I'll shrug and just put the pet in my release stable for when it's old enough. That will be its use and so it won't be a waste of time. I guess it may also be because I don't breed to sell to other people. I have no care to make projects for profit since I would then be disappointed in the end or come to hate the project. I breed for my enjoyment and don't care if I pay a small fee to do it.

Anyways, I got a bit off track there but wanted to explain my thoughts on the fee everyone seems to dislike. I'm really liking how things are coming along and can't wait to see it finished Krin. Thank for always keeping us updated on how things are going with the site! <3 ^-^

There's a bit too many specific questions at this point for me to reply to each and every one of them. I'll try and provide a wide spread response to cover as much as I can.

For all of the questions about displaying various information, I will definitely try and incorporate everything that I can to improve the QOL of the feature and other relevant features.

Regarding the fee, I think some are reading more into it than it will actually be. I took a look at some of those commenting that a breeding fee would make or break the game for them and then calculated what they'd actually be potentially spending (I am still figuring out what the fee will be) on the fee over the past 60 days and it's an incredibly small value. For one player who breeds a lot, it was less than 1% of their Gold atm. For others, it ranged from 1-5% or so. For the higher percentages, it usually was still a total breeding fee cost of maybe 10,000 to 20,000 Gold. This is less Gold than a player can get from a single chest run in the Lost Grove - over the span of 60 days. I really don't think this will have much of an impact on anyone's bottom line outside of extreme cases. The amount of Gold required to breed will be pretty inconsequential to 98-99% of the entire playerbase. Those most affected will be brand new players who don't have much Gold built up and this is 100% how it should be.

Sylestia has always been a game where players have to work their way up from the beginning as a new player. It takes time, it takes effort, it takes learning and experience. The game is literally built this way, by design, across all major aspects of the game. Incorporating a small breeding fee will be in line with many other of the game's built-in gameplay mechanics.

Now, on the flip side, as mentioned before, I will definitely be giving players a lot more tools to counter this breeding fee. I can't provide a specific timeline, but it's 100% coming in the future. I mentioned one of these things, which is some sort of hired breeding assistant. Other things that I didn't mention would be the following:

- Adjusted prices on purchasing Stable Tabs and Inventory Tabs. Coming sooner than later.

- A way to recycle un-wanted pets for some sort of bonus/benefit. Coming sooner than later.

- A Player Skill Tree system where players can improve various aspects of gameplay, such as breeding, where they can have permanent bonuses to offspring, more control over offspring, less time on cooldowns, lowered fees, etc. This will come when our Exploration system is completely overhauled.

While I don't have any specific timeline for these changes, they are all features I 100% plan on implementing in the future as I continue to revamp Sylestia's core gameplay.


At the end of the day, I know a lot of you have been here for many many years. I know that almost everyone is naturally resistant to change and that virtually everyone will always be against anything being changed that has a "negative" result - such as a fee when a fee didn't previously exist. I totally get this. But I ask that you please trust me in the process as your game developer. I would not be wanting to implement such a mechanic if I didn't feel it will have a net positive on the game over the course of time.

Games need costs, they need gold sinks, they need an economy. If everything were free, no cooldown, no restrictions, etc - it'd get very boring very fast for almost the entire playerbase - there wouldn't be a game as there'd be no point to doing anything other than to just do it. It'd be like playing a game like Minecraft 100% on creative mode only. I fully understand some people do this and love it and that's awesome. However, the average person would rather play the game as it's intended where there's risk, achievements have to be earned, etc. Sylestia has always been a game of the latter and always will be.

As the game developer, it's my responsibility to implement mechanics and systems that are fair and balanced. Sometimes this requires implementing things that are challenging where I know players will fail and struggle. Sometimes it requires adjusting the economy to get some Gold out of the game. Sometimes it requires adjusting rarities of items and pets to make things more valuable and desirable. Believe me, I never do any of this without good reason and without a lot of consideration. I always try to make everything as fair and balanced as I possibly can because I know that Sylestia is a game and not a job.

There are a lot of things that should have been implemented into the game from day 1. But just from a lack of experience and lack of understanding how things will go years down the road - they weren't. For example, I saw multiple posts in this thread talking about how you guys throw all the Male pets away because they're useless. That is terrible game design and it's why, a few years ago, I wanted to implement a system that made Males more valuable. It was vehemently disliked lol. And, well, here we are where a player only needs a SINGLE Male to breed with 10,000+ Females. That is terrible game design lol. It absolutely should not work that way. It's beyond silly.

If Males had a soft breeding limit from day 1, most wouldn't even bat an eye as it's pretty standard in a lot of various breeding simulation games. However, it wasn't and because it's not, adding one now is a hard ask. Change is hard. Everyone gets comfortable with the status quo and when you're comfortable with the status quo, very few want to leave that. I completely understand it.

I have been wanting to implement a breeding fee for a very long time into Sylestia - it is very past due. I felt this was the opportune time to implement it as a compromise to all of the new features being added with the new Breeding Grounds and with the promise of more never-seen-before bonuses to breeding coming in the future.

All I ask is that players give it a chance and hopefully will realize it really isn't that big of an effect on their bottom line. And if it is, we absolutely can have that conversation afterwards. It is something that is extremely easy to change after the fact and you should know by now that I am always willing to change things if something misses the mark.

I hope this message will help to quell some of your fears regarding the fee and will hopefully bring back the focus to all of the new features coming to the Breeding Grounds and Sylestia in general. If you got this far, thank you for taking the time to read this. =P

I'm all for it. My issue with many breeding games is how easy it is to get what you want quickly or with money and then coast on that. My perspective, after many years of many different games is: If I can get what I want too easily I get bored and drop it fast. I implement personal rules to keep myself from eventually getting bored and leaving like not buying pets from other players and not accepting pets from others unless it's a special circumstance. Making breeding have limits and fees and other things is just another way to keep me working towards my goals for longer. Which I like. I want to work harder to my end goals, like my first projects, so it'll be more satisfying when I get there.

I dunno if I should put this here or not but this got my thinking. Maybe there can be like a special "Breeding Quest" that you can send your pets on for a fee that last for a loooong while, maybe days i dunno, but when they do, they get some sort of bonus on the next breeding. During the quest they can't do anything.

Oh, can't wait to see how it's all going to look like!

Just being able to see the traits live will help when trying to pick the right pet, saving Breeding Pairs will also save quite the headaches when trying to remember which pets was paired with which when making Projects (maybe I'll be less scared to do bigger Projects in the future if I don't have to recall which pet I wish to breed)

Seconding for inbreeding info, I do like to see very low inbreeding where possible.

Eyeing the idea of a Player Skill Tree system, it would be something interesting to work for!

"Obviously anyone who breeds a lot will dislike the fee existing, myself included, but I do see the point of giving a baseline value to offspring by doing this." Quote from Silverkitsu

I breed alot. usually 100+ a week and i see a need for this.

Lets look at a specific breeder. I wont name them but they have 94 stables and 6525 pets. Every single one of their stables are 100% full. They have 3,262 female pets and during fests all of those girls get bred anytime they can breed. But here is the stat that is striking Pets Found: 173,722. They breed and when those pets are adult they get auto released. Those 173 THOUSAND pets are taking up space in sylestia's database and bogging things up and they are breeding ALOT. Short of banning these players there isnt alot that can be done about the fact that they are mindlessly breeding with no end. A few females have entered their stables in the last few weeks so they are at least changing up their stables somewhat.

So what can be done? A breeding fee if its high enough would deter these players who just dont make sense in my head. I dont understand the end or why you would come online and breed only for all your results to be released. I would be ok with a 500-1,000 gold breeding fee. If im breeding 100 ish pets once a week that would work out 400k a month or 4.8m a year. Would likely mean i dont take on projects from others but other than that it would be business as usual. If it stopped the endless and needless breeding of pets that take up space in the database that get autoreleased im all for it. Something needs to be done or Krin is going to have to purge the database of ALL released and i occasionally reclaim pets so i would hate to lose this as a feature cause some people have nearly 200k pets released

Ok lets talk about release pets from a legit breeder.
I breed alot, I have done so very many projects and i breed for others too (im at 20+ projects for others) i release my pets for events and release boards. my total? Lets see mine and a few others shall we?

Katty: Pets Found: 77,479
Faeyla : Pets Found: 118,047
Squarebug:Pets Found: 29,246
Alicehearts: Pets Found: 22,109
Niverus: Pets Found: 16,270
Angelzrulez:Pets Found: 9,463
Xavion: Pets Found: 68,967
GoldGryphon: Pets Found: 33,875
Plus many many many more amazing project breeders. Even project breeders who have been breeding for 5+ years do not have anywhere close to 200k bred pets. This is because alot of us do not breed for them to autorelease as adults.

Something is going on, this is just one person who mass breeds to auto release and there is no logic behind it. They need to be stopped and if adding a fee for breeding is the way, well yeah we need it. Im sorry to anyone that is bothered by it. When it comes in if you cannot afford the fee feel free to message me what projects you have and I will either take your projects on or i can give you some gold to get them started. We dont want to stop the newer players from playing the way they want to but something needs to be done about the mass breeders that are breeding to auto release

the nearly 200k pets autoreleased are just from one person. If i was to add together all the pets being bred like this... im scared to look. How many of the currently 8,635,743 pets in the database are dishwater pets bred for no reason other than to be released

ok im getting a headache trying to apply logic to a situation where there isnt one. You are all, mostly, amazing people and i know change is hard. Im on the spectrum so i know its hard when things that have been the same way for over a decade change. But please give Krin a chance and see the changes in place before you decide they are game breaking.