First of all, thank you for this guide!

I'm a bit confused about the terms "theme" and "tagged" still.
For someone who has just started here, it seems to be hard to find definitions for those words.
Where do themed pets come from? What makes a pet a theme pet?
And how are pets tagged? I still don't really know what is a tagged pet.

I have just created my first 3 pets for my own breeding project to create something of my own design.
Is there a way to name your own design so that it would show it on the pets?

Also can you give me any pricing tips? When are the offspring worth something and how you determine how much?

For someone new like myself these things seem very confusing. :D Any help is appreciated.

First of all you're welcome! And thanks for asking such a good question! :D


As for 'themed' and 'tagged' pets, it all has to do with the game's much-loved Festivals!

For every season and for certain other holidays, the admins will host a themed Festival, like the Summer Festival, Fall Festival, Winter Festival, and the Spring Festival for the seasons which are the biggest festivals, and then they'll have smaller ones like The Week of Love for Valentine's Day, the Fortune Festival for St. Patrick's, and other similar events.

For each festival, the admins design a specialized Festival Zone. The zone will have many features unique to the theme, such as special bosses you can defeat for new avatar items, special items you can find from chests (or even pumpkins!), events held within the festival zone itself, and one of the most popular additions - themed pets.

Themed pets can only be found in the Festival Zone during the Festival, and they all have a specific color scheme that goes along with the theme. Using the Sweet Potato Qitari from last year's Fall Festival as an example, you can see that their colors are all nearly identical. And if you click on the image to their profile link and scroll down to the Genetics table, in purple lettering it will say "Sweet Potato Qitari." The purple lettering is the 'tag' for the theme, and all themed pets encountered in the wild will have the tag as a name rather than the standard "Wild _ Species _"



Themed pets can be found with any of the available traits for the species, which makes them an ideal candidate for breeding since a mass array of traits can be obtained. The offspring will also maintain the colors of the theme through the generations about 99% of the time, so the results of a project can be easily predicted. There is a slight color swing for the themes found in the wild, however, so there is a slim chance to get an off-colored offspring.

Giving an example of the color swings being a bit unpredictable, I once bred two Barn Owl Nytekrie together that were on opposing sides of the color swing (one nearly white, the other more of a brown tone) and the offspring ended up being a shade of pink. I chose to remove the pink offspring from the breeding project since I'd much rather have my Barn Owls look like Barn Owls.





It's an extremely rare fluke in themed pet breeding and seems to be most common in the lighter colors for pets since it's far more noticeable when a color gets skewed.

Themed pets are also quite popular, so there's always a market for both tagged pets, and for the purebred offspring which would have the same appearance of the parents. (Unless of course dyes are used on the themed pet, which would mean the offspring's colors would be effected.)

There are also two 'tiers' of themed pets. For each festival the admins will release two or more variations into the Festival Zone itself. These pets are found at random, and can be captured with nets just like regular pets.

The second tier would be the Wheel Pets, which are obtained through much harder means. They originate from the Festival's Prize Wheel, which has various lesser prizes as well - Pet Dyes, Mutators, Festival Avatar Items, and the like. Wheel Pets are an extremely rare prize, and players will spend millions of gold, or even thousands of diamonds in order to obtain them. On occasion wheel pets can also be obtained as a prize from the various festival games and contests.



Moving on from themed pets, at the moment there is no way to actually 'tag' your own pet projects. The best way to show that they're a part of a project would be in the pet names. You can also advertise them in the Breeding Discussion part of the forums.


As for tips for pricing, there is no 'standard set market' for anything within the game. Mostly it depends on the person who's selling, and who that person wants to sell to. If you want your project fails and results to be commonly found and easily obtained, then a lower price would be most ideal. If you want to keep it mostly to yourself or only to those who really really want it, a higher price would be more suiting.

Generally I deal in themed pets, but perhaps my own pricing guides will still be of use to you since the value varies to three tiers of pricing. :)


Offspring of Regular Themed Pets Found in the Wild:

5K per carried trait
10K per visible trait

100k for 6-vis male
120k for 6-vis female




Offspring of Fabled Themed Pets Found in the Wild:

25k per carried trait
50k per visible trait

500k for 6-vis male
600k for 6-vis female



Offspring of Wheel Pets:

50k per carried trait
100k per visible trait

1 million for 6-vis male
1.2 million for 6-vis female




Do note that I don't often sell my 6-trait pets (even 6-carries) since all it takes is a non-related male and female of these to potentially breed 6-vis offspring. I'm quite competitive by nature, so I don't like the idea of giving someone else an easy start to breeding their own 6-vis - especially in cases where I have yet to acquire my own.


Hope the wall of text didn't blind your eyes; I like to be thorough. ^^;

How do you get people interested in your breeding projects

The best way would be to advertise the project in the Breeding Discussion Forums.

Showing all possible outcomes and combinations for traits within the project can help add in a bit more interest as well. For example, if the project is a 3-vis with the chance of a 0-vis offspring, give an image for the 0-vis result, for each individual trait as a visible (Trait 1, Trait 2, Trait 3 all separate,) and also give the possible 2-vis outcomes (Traits 1 and 2, Traits 1 and 3, Traits 2 and 3,) as well as the final 3-vis product.

This will give a wider range of appeal for possible project fails, and if people like your projects well enough you may even be able to get a few requests for specific results.



The secondary method of advertising your projects would be the Pet Auctions forums. Either set up an auction or a sales forum for people to see.

Subject titles are an important tool for forums that is often overlooked. Add the name of the project itself (for example: Firedancer Vulnyx, Stormy Zolnixi, or whatever else your project may be named) to give an extra spark of interest. If it sounds cool, there's a good chance people will want to see it.

For general sales, the marker [S] is most commonly used (or [S/T] if you're also open to trades.) For auctions, the marker [A] is most commonly used. These markers can give you a bit of extra space to mark off the important information, like these for example:

[A] Firedancer Vulnyx! 2 vis
[S/T] Stormy Zolnixi! 4-5 vis


Using something more simple like "[S] Pets!" on the other hand will probably fall flat. Everyone's trying to sell pets of some type or other, so more often than not those types of posts will be completely overlooked just because the title doesn't give any specialized information.

Pets? Eh, those are everywhere.

Stormy Zolnixi... that sounds much more interesting.



At the end of the day, though, the interest of the people will depend entirely on the project itself. The most you can really do to boost the interest is to make your project available for others to view by using the forums. That's probably why I stick to themed pets myself - there's already a wide demand for them so that part's taken care of from the start. And I much prefer working on the breeding aspect rather than the marketing. People terrify me ._.;

I do have an ancient Project Forum that I... really need to get back to work on. It's horribly out of date, but the basic formatting I used for it has been quite effective. Feel free to use it as a guideline if you still need to set up a project forum. :)

Thank you very much for all the information! :) Greatly appreciated.

And I tend to write long explanations myself, so I really didn't mind reading it all.

This guide is very helpful, thanks so much for writing it. I had some questions related to breeding themed pets which come as exclusives with only visibles and no carried slots. Have you dealt with this before? Any recommendations as to what kind of pairings one should make in the early stages of the project? Obviously generating babies with more carries is the way to go, so pairing males and females that show traits at different slots is best. But how long should I be breeding back to the parental generation? Only long enough to develop sufficient 3-4 carry offspring?

I'm just starting a 6 vis Whispering Shadow Zolnixi project now, and because of the way that the mojo collection worked, most of my parental generation are either 1 vis or 2 vis. Any advice on carrying this out would be appreciated, as it's my first breeding project! More info on it can be found here: http://www.sylestia.com/forums/?thread=19354

Aww, you're welcome! I'm glad you've found it useful. :D


Have you dealt with this before?
While I can't say I've dealt with Mojo pets since their entirely new to the world of themed pets, I've dealt with exclusive wheel pets since their first appearance last Winter Fest.

Any recommendations as to what kind of pairings one should make in the early stages of the project?Obviously generating babies with more carries is the way to go, so pairing males and females that show traits at different slots is best.
You hit the nail on the head on that one; I definitely recommend breeding for carries when you start out.


But how long should I be breeding back to the parental generation? Only long enough to develop sufficient 3-4 carry offspring?
Again you pretty much gave it the answer. Your males will run their course of usefulness first, probably about the time you're breeding a fair amount of 3/4-trait offspring with their traits included. Females can usually stay in the running much longer than males, since there's no harm in breeding for more eggs in the early stages.

For 1-vis tagged females: I'd say drop them from the project when you're stacked up on 3-trait pets with their traits included.
For 2-vis tagged females: I'd say drop these from the project once you've bred sufficient 4/5-trait pets with their traits included.

By the time you're breeding with 6-traits, nearly all tagged pets will be obsolete for the project. In my history of breeding with 20 or so themes, and completing 5 or so, there was only one case where I used a 3-vis tagged for a longer period of time than the others. A female's traits aligned with one of my first 6-trait males to always produce a 6-trait, with a chance of a 3V/3C.

Example map:

Male:
G1 carry
G2 VIS
G3 VIS
M1 carry
M2 VIS
M3 carry


Female:
G1 VIS
G2 empty
G3 empty
M1 VIS
M2 emtpy
M3 VIS


When bred together:

Always a 6-carry minimum, with a maximum of 3-visibles and 3-carries.



A scenario like this would be the only time I'd suggest actually using a tagged pet by the time you're starting out with 6-trait breeding. I stopped using the pair in two or three generations, since by then I had multiple 6-trait offspring that could breed together.



Since you're in the starting phases of your project, I would suggest breeding for balance. Breed 2-vis males to 1-vis females for 3-carry results, and 1-vis males to 2-vis females, again for a 3-carry result. If you have any pets in the project that can't be used to breed for a 3-carry result, then try to keep as many traits as you can, such as a 1-vis with 2-carries.

This way all of your starting offspring will be just as strong as the others when it comes to traits, rather than having 4-carries and 2-carries, since the 2-carriers will instantly be outclassed and nearly useless.



Good luck! And if you come across any other questions, ask away! :D

Awesome, thanks for the answer! And yeah, having a background in evolutionary genetics definitely is a help when starting in on this, because you have the theoretical ideas all set, but it's great to hear from someone who has experience actually breeding multiple generations with an end goal in mind!

I've come up with a list of initial pairings I want to breed, so everything should take off from there beautifully, with a bit of luck ;)

Wow, this is great! It's organized, colorful, and very helpful.

I have two questions for you:
1. For the second question in the Q & A section, after you get to the part where G1, G2, M2, and M3 are visible and G3 and M1 are carried, what would you do? Would you have to use more regular essences to breed something that would mate with this pet?
2. This would be really long, so I'd completely understand if you don't want to, but could you explain how to make a 6-vis pet with enhanced essences?

Thanks!

I'm glad you've found it useful! :D


As for your question, the maximized result isn't exactly a common occurrence, so it's highly unlikely to get that result before the later generations take over with better traits. The person asking was more interested in knowing whether it's best to use visibles or carries for their essences, so I displayed the array of results possible between best and worst outcome. Using visibles would have led to the same path one generation after, since the offspring would instead be the 4-carry results. It's a month of time wasted which is why I don't recommend 2-vis generated pets for a 6-vis project. :)

Were this to happen, however, no other essences would be needed for the breeding project - you would simply have to breed the 4v/2c offspring to the third pet that was generated for the project. Any result from the first pair would be bred to the same pet, regardless of whether or not it was a maximized result.



As for how to breed a 6-vis with enhanced essences, there are two routes that I would recommend using with the minimum 3 essences, both which are explained in detail in the Q and A. The only difference there is the use of Mystical Essences in the player's question, which does nothing more than keep more accurate colors.

Just as explained there, I recommend using all 4-carry generated pets, or a pair of 1-vis/2-carry pets with the 3rd male as a 4-carry. The traits would all be coordinated just as in the Q and A:

[all carries]

Female:

G1 carry
G2 carry
G3 carry
M1 carry


Male1:

G3 carry
M1 carry
M2 carry
M3 carry



Male2:

G1 carry
G2 carry


M2 carry
M3 carry


1-vis 2-carry pair, with one 4-carry:

Female:

G1 VISIBLE
G2 carry
G3 carry


Male1:

M1 VISIBLE
M2 carry
M3 carry



Male2:


G2 carry
G3 carry

M2 carry
M3 carry






Whatever route you choose, the breeding order remains the same. Breed the Female with Male1 for Generation 1. Breed the female Generation1 pets to Male2, which begets Generation2. All Generation2 pets would be breedable to your Female and to Male1 to create Generation3. The offspring from Generation3, would then be breedable to Male2, and to your Generation1 pets.

Basically it goes back and forth for a while until you build their traits up to 6-vis. I advise keeping only 4-6 adult males at a time, with only the best of traits, and your best 10-20 adult females. If you don't remove the lesser pets from the project, it will greatly slow your progress. :)




I do hope this helps out. If not, it would probably make more sense if I could actually see the project you're planning - rather than "female" "male" "carry" "visible" and the like, I could give the actual traits and details of the pet and provide a more solid mapping. ^^;