[Guide] Getting Started on Egg Cave

christened_moon • 1 June 2016 at 4:53 PM

Hello new (or old) member! This guide is meant to help you past the formal introduction of the site and help old players catch up or remind themselves of how things work.

Hatching Critters
I have no doubt that by now you know how to get some creatures. That's great, but the next thing you need to do is start hatching them. There are several resources here on the site that will help you do this.

1. The Click Exchange
That link will send you to the Click Exchange, the primary way of hatching an egg on Egg Cave. In order to start using it, first click Manage Your Creatures (at the top of the page) and select the creature you want to have fed/clicked. Then you can tell other players if you want your pet clicked or fed.

ALERT!
Just because you've indicated that you would like other users to feed your creature, does not mean that they will, though you are guaranteed a click for every credit you have.

You may be asking yourself, "How do I know what my creature needs to hatch?" The easiest way is to go to The Archives and enter the species of your creature. You can also visit your creature's profile and near the bottom should see a link that says Read more about this species which will take you to its Archive page. There, you will find the requirements to hatch your pet and even get to see what it will look like when hatched. Not all creatures have had their requirements revealed, however, so sometimes you may only see shadows with ???.

Once you've decided on clicking, feeding, or all stats for your pet, you may set a limit on how many clicks they get. This limit will automatically remove your pet from the click exchange once it has been hit. This is so that your pet will not use up credit if you have a specific goal in mind. If you don't have a goal in mind or don't care if your pet uses up credit past your goal, simply leave the counter at 0. You can have up to ten creatures in the Exchange at one time.

Now, onto actually using the Exchange. By clicking the Exchange Home link (located near the link you clicked to enter your creatures) you will be faced with a couple of creature pics. Simply click on the picture and you will get a credit. For every credit you earn, someone else will click your creature. A preferred method of doing this is to hold down control and click all the pictures on that page. This will open up individual pages for each creature you've clicked. Then you can go through feeding and closing the page using control+w. This is one of the faster ways to get credits.

After clicking all the pictures on one page you can go back to the top and click "Refresh the Page" for more creatures to click. There are only so many creatures in the Click Exchange at one time, so eventually you will get a notice saying that there are no more creatures to be fed. This means exactly how it sounds so you should wait and come back later in the day or even the next day when everything has reset.

Clicks are distributed evenly between the creaures you have in the Exchange, so if you have 30 credits and 3 creatures, at the end of the day each creature will have ~10 clicks each.

2. Click/Feed Groups

If you waltz on over to the forums, you will find a variety of subforums. Click/feed groups usually congregate in the Forum Games section. Really active groups will show up often in the livepulse, which is located under the community tab or at the top of any forum page.

These groups are started by other users and are usually limited in size. The rules for the group (including size limit) are usually listed within the first or second post. General rules tend to be feed everyday and the limit size. The first post will also have information on how to contact the host in order to join.

What these groups do is guarantee feeds on a creature you decide in exchange for feeds on their creatures. This is generally a more reliable way to get feeds for your creatures, but the groups are usually small so it will still take some time.

3. Feed Other's Coves

Most users on egg cave will be willing to feed your cove if you feed theirs. A notice will let them know you've fed and if they're feeling friendly and have some spare time, they'll feed yours back. Some people will have listed on their profile that they don't want their cove fed or that they won't feed back, so feed at your own risk. Other users, with larger coves, will sometimes have tabs at the top of the creature box that are labeled "Feed". This means that those are the creatures they want fed if you don't have a lot of time and don't want to feed their whole cove.

4. Cash Shop

In the cash shop you can buy feeds, clicks, and views under the heading Stat Boosts near the bottom. These are bought with real money, so please be responsible.

Creature Trade Values

First up, understand that when other users talk about common creatures, they're discussing creatures that you can get from the cave any day of the week. When discussing trade values, common creatures are considered nearly worthless and if they are still in egg form, worthless to anyone but a collector. Common creatures that are hatched have slightly more value.

Next, we have endangered creatures. These are creatures that were once common cave creatures, but have since been retired. These creatures can still be found at the Leila Oasis, but have a very rare chance of appearing. The trade value of these creatures can vary. Some collectors or newer members of the site would love to have them, while older members usually already have a few and aren't that chuffed about them. If you want one, just check back at the Oasis every once in a while and you may get lucky.

Asteriod and Thief Shop (TS) creatures can be obtained at those respective places. The Mysterious Asteriod can be tried once a day and the Thief Shop can be checked up on at multiple times of the day, like the Oasis. These creatures are fairly rare, but still obtainable, so it is up to your and whomever you're trading with's discretion as to how much they are worth, trade wise.

Limited edition creatures are creatures that were only offered for a short amount of time in the cave. This time usually spans a month, but may be shorter for holiday creatures. Older limited edition creatures are generally considered more valuable than newer ones, but this can also depend on the popularity of the creature. It doesn't happen often, but every once in a while there's a creature that more than a few people don't like, so less people want one.

Event creatures are creatures that can only be obtained by participating in an event (like these). These can be super valuable simply because a lot of people either missed the event or couldn't complete the event.

Finally, we have Cash Shop creatures. These creatures can only be obtained monthly in the cash shop (which costs real money) so people tend to either want to hang onto these or will only trade them for more cave cash. There are exceptions for extremely rare/old species, but that tends to be the rule.

Trading CSP (Cash Shop Park) creatures for other CSP creatures tends to be done by age of the species and general appreciation for its art.

In general, trading creatures is pretty easy. If you like the creature you can usually ask the user if it is up for trade (UFT) or not. If not, please respect the user's wishes, but if it is, feel free to negotiate an offer with that user.

Additionally, things like stars and immortalization will raise the trade value of any creature you have. Stars can be found on any egg, though they are rare, and will increase the stat needed by that creature to evolve by a small amount (2-8). This is convenient because you do not have to work as hard to get it to evolve/be immortal. It also just looks really nice and can be customized in your creatures list on the right under "Manage Star".

Immortal creatures are creatures whose level (the number located under their picture, next to their name) is above 2000. Level is determined by taking the average of a creature's views, clicks, and feeds. This is important because until your creatures reach level 2000, they can die if their unhappiness meter reaches less than 10. Luckily, you can feed your pet daily or reserve them a spot at Tim's Food Shoppe to keep them happy until they are immortal or even afterwards if you are concerned about that.


Getting Cooler Creatures

If you want to get some of the cooler, older creatures on this site, you're going to have to put a bit of work in. Having a decent amount of EC (~100,000) to start is a must, which you can get by feeding your and other's creatures. If you want to know how many creatures you have to feed to reach that amount, know that you can roughly estimate that you get 100 EC from each creature you feed. That means, to get 100,000 EC, you need to feed 1,000 creatures. It sounds like a lot, but you can do it in a day if you're dedicated and a few days if you're not.

hoppingfrenzy • 1 June 2016 at 4:53 PM

Next, you're going to want to hang out around the auction house and bid on a few creatures that you like. Most of the low end limited edition creatures won't run you more than the EC you've saved up and this will start to build your cove's value.

Trading with other players will become a lot easier once you've got a few LE's under your belt. This way you can work up to some of those older creatures that you want. Continuing to stalk the auction house too as you never know quite what will end up in there.

Don't forget to take opportunities that are thrown at you. Collecting the current month's limited edition creatures and other event creatures may seem like you're getting nowhere, but eventually their value will increase as well. Time is the name of the game here.

To get a full list of what creatures are considered what, check out the Archives. Every creature is there and organized according to how it can be obtained and how old the species is.

Other, general information about starting on Egg Cave can be found here. This guide isn't meant to replace that, just give a little bit more information that can be hard to figure out on your own.