Since it rarely gets mentioned in these 'cept when I do it, here we go. Like FiS says, you have to make your own fun here. The Devs are aggressively not interested in feedback or comms, and what little comms we had vanished when they had to get external jobs to keep the site afloat, since it doesn't make enough money on its own to keep the lights on (there are many reasons for this, it's a damage-by-a-thousand-cuts situation, but pet sites live and die on small, fairly frequent updates, so you can extrapolate from there I'm sure; either way, I won't get into the whole story here for fear of scaring you off). It sounds kinda terrible, but most of that has already happened & been done and we are just living the aftermath. The weekly profession rotations are posted by a bot set up on the admin account and never change, but the quarterly ones are at least edited to show the new stuff that gets added! Very rarely, we get a "patch notes" if they fix something behind the scenes.
I think it's very important to mention all that off the bat though, because if you know what to expect (or, what not to) I believe you have a better chance of finding your groove sticking around than someone showered in glitter and rainbows that gets to find out months down the line that yeah, we usually get about 4 updates a year when we get anything new. That woulda taken the wind well out of my sails if I started around now and then had to figure it out myself. :/
That said, it's a fun place if you don't expect much from it & you can self-motivate to find out what your niche is. Mine is breeding projects, and I'm sure that's probably top 3 in terms of how common that is. There are a ton of excellent potential combos that either don't exist yet or are not sold in the flea market, so if you are willing to blast a bunch of dogs together, I'm sure you can come up with something cool and not commonly seen!
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In terms of tips, I always give out the same ones, 'cause I think they are the most important for saving new players' stamina gains and also getting them started farming ms, 'cause you'll need quite a few to get your dens upgraded. Feel free to DM me or (almost) anyone else with extra questions if you have them, this spiel is one I give a lot and I know some of it might be confusing.
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 if 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
