Yay, I get to give the welcome spiel again~
First, this is a game where you have to make your own fun if you want to last very long. The weekly updates are just a bot on rotation, the most dev comms we get are during the quarterly holidays 4x a year where a lil bit of cute new art is added. Presumably there is still work being done on the backend, but we don't get to hear about it. Stuff happens when it happens, and mostly just doesn't happen. The upshot to this is that the dogs regain stamina over time instead of lose it, so if you decide to take a break, they will always be here waiting on you to immediately jump back in again.
So. Sad news out of the way:
For stamina management, avoid the trap of complex recipes in the cooking pot despite how "good" they appear on paper. None of them are better stamina per minute OR per cooking slot than just raw fish and meat. If they gave you more than one item per craft, they easily could be gangbusters, but they don't. So you end up using a fully upgraded 24 slot pot to make 4 feasts that give you 80 stamina each (for 320 total), but only feed 4 wolves no matter how much stamina that is. So you have to waste a ton of that stamina "overfeeding", or you feed one each to 4 wolves and have to top them off with something else anyway.
Or you could cook 24 fish that each give you 20 stamina, end up getting 24 items worth 20 stamina (for 480 total) but you can feed them much more linearly and not waste anything. That also allows you more freedom in HOW you spend that stamina, or if you just want to top off your fisher or miner for one more trip without "wasting" stamina you won't use before looking away from the game for a while.
Related: make sure you are checking your den for the Autofeed button, and making sure you are only putting food there that you want the dogs to pull from every time you hit a feed all or autofeed button anywhere. Since I have no reason to grind outside of the quarterly holidays, I just leave these off during everything but the 4 months of the year the holidays are happening and passively accumulate endless raw food to use between. I have never run out of food, and indeed have thousands more than I can ever use now. :P During your first bit, you will probably want to keep at least some food in rotation depending on your level of personal tolerance for manual feeding.
You will have to go uncheck most new food items you get if you don't want them to be fed out automatically, which is the biggest pain when you're new and getting new foods ALL the time.
Used to be you'd also have to check your auto-feed list after every new update, cuz they were always messing with them and that would reset their auto-feed status.... That isn't as much of a concern anymore, but worth taking note of.
The exception for this is you enjoy the farming minigame (it's a mobile game sit and wait timer, but some people like that) it can be worth it to produce specifically the blue rarity meals the farmers enjoy. Farming itself doesn't really become super worthwhile until you can plant nuts and carrots, and those are better fed to your wolves raw over cooking them (for the reason explained above). But once you get there, that can be a source of quite a lot of food if you find yourself constantly grinding for whatever reason.
The other thing is the main way to farm Moonstones (the premium currency) is to use what's called a frog farm. It won't work at its peak until the companions are level 10, but assuming that's the case, here is that mini-guide:
You attach 1 basidio companion to each fodder wolf you want to level. You attach 2 other one-hour pebble generating companions to 2 other wolves. Easy as that. Then when you play with Nana, you won't lose money by having the frogs taking up space and not giving you anything. That only shakes out completely once the companions are leveled, but that doesn't take a heinously long time or anything. You won't be making a ton of pebbles that way, but the point isn't to make pebbles, it's just to avoid losing them.
Then when the fodder wolves you are leveling hit level 10, you release those bad boys for 10k pebbles and 1 knucklebone token. That KB token can be sold on the flea market for MS, cuz people will spend TONS of them in lots of 50 on a random WW Hunt that will show up when you have 50+ in your inventory.
The main reason to do it with this frog method, even though it's slower, is that you don't waste any precious stamina taking those useless lugs through campaign doing it this way. It's almost never worth it to level a dog in the campaign, with the exception of the passive leveling you get done just unlocking the areas the first time you're going through it anyway.
There's no reason to bother hiding this "open secret", cuz there are always those peeps addicted to cracking open WW Hunts like there's always people addicted to cracking open eggs on FR. >:P They will always sell.
If you need pebbles to fund other activities, the best thing to do is hit the quarterly "pack holidays" hard and buy as many of the purple tier companions as you can. Most companions of any rarity tier will give you about the same "pebble per hour" ratio, but the higher tier colors will just make you play with them less times per day to GET to that max... The same isn't true of the quarterly holiday familiars as of last check; they give out a better pebble/hour ratio for some reason. Presumably to make grinding the event worthwhile? The next of these holidays is in January, so you're here at a good time to get some initial stamina food hoarding in, though the playerbase is largely sweet and will often help you out if you let them know you've totally run out of food.
spoot
