Saturday 20 August 2016

Fish Adventure Seasons 101




 (Screenshots of Mermaids, one of the few mythical creatures you can breed in this game.  Most of the creatures are varieties of sea creatures that are found in Nature.)

This post is dedicated to my dear friend, Georgann, who started to play this game because I recommended it!

Basically, as with any of the 'farming simulation' type games, progress is based on your Experience Level.  You will need Coins in order to buy new items, and thus the ability to earn Coins is linked to progress as well.

When you first download and open the game, you should give yourself a 'nickname' that is unique.  Otherwise, you will have a default name that begins with Player and is followed by a series of numbers.

Look at the icons at the bottom of your screen.  There will be a big icon for Shop, followed by Friends, Tank, Breed.  When your level increases, a Club icon will be added.

For now, however, go to the Friends icon and tap on it.then tap on the Profile Tab.  See the little pencil icon?  Tap on that and you will open your keyboard to create a nickname.  Do that.  Now you need to find Friends.  If you know a friend in the game, you can go to Community and perform a Search for the Friend by name.  Otherwise, go to Community and choose some Friends randomly.  There are a number of advantages to having Friends.  One is the ability to visit them to collect Rewards daily.  The other is to allow them to visit you to deposit gifts into your Gift Box.  Gifts are invaluable.  They can consist of Coins, premium Cash in the form of Seastars, Decorations that can be placed or sold and Elixirs.

You can add and remove friends on a daily basis, but when you find Friends who leave gifts for you on a regular basis, those are Friends that you need to keep.  The idea of the Clubs or Clans is to have a group of active players who all reciprocate in regular visits.  Unfortunately, many of the Clubs are not very useful.  My club is Harvest Moon and as I am willing to accept any one, some of the members are not very useful but I have not reached the limit of 50 Members so delete no one as long as they do not cause any disruptions.

To visit a Friend, simply go to the Friends icon, find your List and tap on a name.  You will be transported to that Friend's aquarium.  Here you can clean the tank if it is dirty for 9 points, empty the Coin Shell for Coins and possibly an Elixir (random), and then tickle or pet the fish there for 1 Coin each.  You can feed the fish if they display the fish food icon, although you will not gain points or coins for that.  What it does do, however, is allow you then to earn Coins by interacting with the fish by petting it.  A hungry fish will not be interested in your tickling!

Before you leave your Friend's tank, make certain that you tap on the Gift Box to leave a gift.  You can choose any colour or shape.  I do not think the colour or shape determines what is inside the gift frankly.  I always choose the gold treasure chest and it can contain anything!

If your Friend has more than one tank, visiting each is a good way to increase your XP when your Levels are low.  More likely than not, many of those tanks will need a good scrub with your sponge!

This game is all about Colour.  New species can be unlocked either by advancing to higher levels or by finding new items in the 'Featured' section of the Shop.  This is where high level types of fish are offered temporarily to EVERY player for the most part, usually for premium cash.  The Whale, for example, was featured last week.

When you return home, what you want to do, especially at the start, is BREED and SELL.  The Goldfish are wonderful for this.  They can be bred every five minutes.  Every type of fish takes time to recover after breeding but the Goldfish takes less time than any other species.  After breeding, an egg will drop to the bottom of the tank.  This egg will display the colours of the goldfish that will hatch and it should hatch in 2 minutes.

Speed Option
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You can speed the process of hatching and growing a fish as well as restoring a fish that has been bred to the point where it can breed again by using your premium cash or Seastars.  There is a point, however, where you will be given the option to speed the process free of charge.  To see this, use the general tank menu that is found by tapping on the fish icon on the top right of your screen.  It will tell you the precise time when any fish egg will hatch, any immature fish become adult, any bred fish be restored as well as the current cost of speeding any of these options.

The Speed-up is a way for the game to make money quickly in my opinion.  One can become very impatient with an Egg that will take 17 hours to hatch, as with the Mermaids and it is a temptation to pay to speed the process.  Try to resist.  Your premium cash is better utilised to purchase species that cannot be purchased with coins.

When Should you Spend Premium Cash/Seastars?
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I have mentioned this in passing elsewhere but perhaps it is worth making the point here as well.  Try not to spend your Seastars on Speed options but rather use them to purchase species that do not have any variety that is offered for a Coin price.  The Puffer Fish, for example, is an early option in the Market but ALL colours are sold for Seastars only.  Here I would make another suggestion.  The Puffer Fish will serve as an example.  The following are sold in the Market:

Puffer Fish (yellow and brown): 23 Seastars
Neon Puffer: 44 Seastars
Bloody Puffer: 66 Seastars
G Puffer: 77 Seastars

The Neon Puffer is a lovely blue colour.  The Bloody Puffer is red and the G Puffer is black and white.  Buy the regular generic yellow and brown Puffer Fish for 23 Seastars, then use Elixirs to create the other colours.  The most difficult colour to achieve will be the black or white but it can appear in any breeding experiment randomly.  Do not be dazzled by colours in the Market.  When a new species of Fish is unlocked or offered, look for the variety with the Coin price, purchase both a male and female and then work to breed the colours you like.  This is the wisest course to follow, although it requires patience.  To be honest, though, it works in your favour in other ways, because the sale of fish is oe of the ways to earn valuable XP.  If you purchase the expensive colours instead of breeding them yourself, you waste Seastars that otherwise could be used for new species.

If you are willing to invest limitless amounts of cash on this game, the advise does not apply... but remember: the value of ANY Fish is determined only by species.   Those expensive colours that you purchased with Seastars are worth no more when sold than the less expensive Coin variety of the fish.  ANY Puffer Fish sells for 2500 Coins and gives 15 XP.

It is the icon on the very top right of your screen that will show you every fish in your Tank as well as all the Eggs.  Each will display its gender, name, sell price and the amount of experience that you earn when you sell that fish.  On the right side of the entry are two options:  Move and Sell.  If you have more than one tank, you can move any Adult fish to any of your Tanks.  If you have only one tank, you can move it into the Inventory.  That is essentially a storage space.  Inventory is accessed, oddly enough, through the Shop Menu.  It is the last entry in the Shop Menu.  You can store up to 20 Fish and up to 20 Decorations in your Inventory.

The other menu that will display the fish in your Tank (but not the Eggs) is the Breed Menu.  You will find this by tapping on the Heart Icon on the bottom left of your screen.  Here you will see the Males on one side and the Females on the other.  Tap on a Male and a Female to place them in the appropriate slots on the right side of the screen, then tap on Breed.

Another way of earning rewards of Coins, XP and Seastars is through the Goals Menu.  This is accessed through an icon on the bottom left of your screen.  It looks like a target with an arrow through the middle.

Goals are partly tutorials.  Your first goals will be to breed and sell Goldfish of various colour combinations and to decorate your Tank.  You can find a Decorations tab in the Shop.  There are three colours of Goldfish in the Shop that can be purchased at Level 1 using Coins.  These are Goldfish (yellow), Blue Fish and Red Fish.  Only today, two premium colours were added in the form of Silverfish and Pitch Black Fish.  By breeding different colours, you can create new colours and new combinations.

Remember your primary colours:  Red, Yellow and Blue.  Mixing these creates the secondary colours of Orange, Green and Purple.  Randomly, you may obtain White or Black as well.  The Goldfish have quite a lot of potential for different colour combinations.  You have the body of the fish, the top fin, the lower two fins, and two possible colours for the tail.  Crossbreeding can allow you to add new colours or attempt a new solid colour.  Experiment with the Goldfish and you will know how to create special colours later for other species.

Perhaps it is because the Silver colour is new, but I have been unable to achieve any mixtures with it in crossbreeding so far.  The offspring simply hatches to look identical to the parent, all silver.  The Pitch Black, on the other hand, can be reflected in the offspring partially as a Black Tail, black fins or Black body... with colours from the other parent fish.  I hope this will change to allow us to have partially silver Goldfish, if that makes any sense.

I made a mistake initially when Mermaids were offered as a special item because I was so enamoured with them that I neglected the goldfish.  I could have created the colours I wanted on the mermaids far sooner had I crossbred more Goldfish first!

Although there is no reason why you should not keep some of your Fish, especially if they have a premium price in the Market, one of the primary goals in  this game is to sell fish.  You earn XP as well as Coins by doing so.  Many of the Goals involve the sale of specific numbers of fish.

The Power of Elixirs
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You will not have Elixirs when you begin the game, but they begin to appear quite early.  I believe they will begin to appear randomly when you tap on a Friend's Coin Shell or open a gift once you reach Level 3.  The basic Elixirs that you can receive in this way are: Red, Yellow, Blue and Green.

As I wrote in another post on this site, this game is based somewhat on the old Colour Wheel rules where primary colours can be mixed to obtain secondary colours and so on.  The exception here is the addition of Green, a secondary colour, to the basic Elixir group.

An Elixir will not usually take over the entire fish that is being created but it will dominate the colour scheme for the most part.  I have found the following  to be true:

When breeding two different colours of fish, the offspring either will be identical to the father or to the mother, if no Elixir is used.  This is the most common result.

Less frequently, when no Elixir is used, one part of the offspring will take on the colour of the parent it does not resemble most.

  Example:  You have a father with a blue body, red top fin, red and white tail, and blue bottom fin.  You have a mother with a red body, yellow top fin, red tail and red bottom fin.
The most likely result will be a fish that is identical either to the father or the mother but sometimes, if the fish takes after the father here, you may find that the red top fin has become a yellow one (mother) or that the blue bottom fin has changed to red or even that the tail now has lost the white half.

Another possibility, and this is the one most breeders seek, is that the colour wheel will kick into motion, mixing blue and red into purple or red and white into pink... or whatever else can be done with the primary colours.

Now, if yiou added an Elixir, the colour of the Elixir will be dominant but not necessarily a total change.  In other words, a Blue Elixir could act on ANY part of the offspring to transform it to blue or it could act as a colour wheel combination option, to change red into purple or yellow into green or act on the white to create light blue.

Colour Wheel
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Primary Colours:  Red, Blue, Yellow

Secondary Colours:  Orange, Purple Green
  Blue and Red equal Purple
  Yellow and Blue equal Green
  Red and Yellow equal Orange

Tertiary Colours:  These colours are created by combining a Primary with a Secondary Colour.  You will find these in the Elixir Slot Machine as the Lime Green, Brown, Dark Blue and so on.

Magic Elixirs
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Until you reach Level 10, you will be limited to the basic Elixirs, although you can create ANY colour combination with or without elixirs really, if you are determined and with a bit of luck.

At Level 10, you unlock a gambling game that will appear on the right side of the screen below the other icons.  It is a series of four shelves with 6 elixir bottles on the first and second shelves and three elixir bottles on the bottom shelf.  The bottles take three different forms.  Gold bottles always appear in the top left and their appearance can depend on the number of Elxiirs you are willing to wager.  The white Elixir bottles always appar on the bottom shelf but you can add more on the second shelf by wagering more of your Elixirs.  Usually in the past, when the game begins, there are no gold bottles at all and only three white bottles.  Today, the game begins with two Gold Bottles at the top and a total of 6 white bottles on the second and third shelves.

How the game operates is that the cursor will jump randomly from one bottle to another.  It will stop when you press or tap 'Bet'.  At the very bottom of the screen, you will see the total number of basic Elixirs that you own.  You can bet a combination or colours or only one colour but there is a limit to the number of Elixirs of the same colour that you can wager on one bet.

The brown bottles are the more common colours that are easily obtained by crossbreeding.  Brown, Lime Green and Orange are some examples of these.  There are more brown bottles on the shelves than other types.

The White Bottles contain rarer colours such as White, Black, Pink and Purple.

It is the Gold Bottles that contain the Magic Elixirs.  These are colour-change Elixirs that will cause your fish to flash.  Quite magical indeed.  Among them are Blue Colour-Change, Purple Colour-Change, Yellow Colour Change and Red-Colour Change.  There may be a Green one as well although i have not won one yet.

Two Elixirs usually is the minimum number you can wager to activate the 'Bet' button but today I have been able randomly to wager using only one bottle.  Incidentally, the Elixirs you have won never can be wagered.  The only bottles that will be available for wager are the basic Elixirs.

The first use of a Magic Elixir appears to transform the entire fish that is hatched into the flashing colour determined by the Elixir.  It is only when THAT fish is bred that you can obtain a result that flashes only in one area.  I have bred a purple-colour change Mermaid with the result of a child that had only stars and crown that flashed.  In another result, only the tail flashed.  Usually though, the entire fish will be another colour-change Fish.  The Magic Elixirs are very powerful.  Thank God for that!  It would be sad if one went to all the trouble to obtai n one and then used it to have it overpowered completely by ordinary colours.

When to use Magic Elixirs
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When you decide to use your Magic Elixirs is entirely up to you but I save mine for the Mermaids.  In fact, in one aquarium, I am at Level 12, with two Yellow Magic Elixirs... I am trying to save both if possible.  Mermaides are unlocked at Level 15.  Mind you, there are many other species that are quite dramatic when a Magic Elixir is used.  Even the little Goldfish can be wonderful when the colours flash.

Clubs or Clans
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One of the early goals in this game is to find a Clan or Club to join.   Finding a good Club/Clan can make a big difference as good active members will visit one another daily to leave gifts that randomly contain Elixirs, Coins, Decorations and even Seastars.  Our Club is Harvest Moon.  Any one at Level 4 or above is free to join without invitation.  Level 4 is very easy to reach and the only reason to set a minimum limit is to make certain that the Club only has active players in it.  After all, a good member will go down the list and add other members as their friends in order to visit daily.

One flaw of this game, in my view, is that fellow Club members are NOT added automatically.  You actually have to add them manually.  There is a limit to the number of Friends that you can have.  Unfortunately, when I first began to play this game, I went through the Community tab to add players randomly as friends as I did not have the Club yet.  You can delete friends but there is a limit to the number you can delete in any given time period.  The reason one deletes primarily is to get rid of people who are not playing or who do not send gifts and more importantly, perhaps, to be able to add all Club members to the Friends List.

Elixirs are so much a key element in this game and the only way to obtain them is through the Coin Shells or inside Gifts.  There are Clubs in most of the Frismos games I play and the same system of visiting and gifting, but none of the others are really vital the way the Gifts are vital in this game.

Useful Tools
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I should have mentioned this sooner perhaps.  To see the entire contents of your Tank, you tap on the fish icon with notepaper that is at the top right of your screen.  This will show you a list of every fish in the current tank, its gender, its status and so on.

It is the tools on the bottom right of the screen, accessed by tapping on the gloved hand with extended finger that give you the tools to interact individually with each of your fish.

Tap on the pointing finger to see the following icons:

Fish
Move Arrows
Sponge
Pointing Finger
Bottle of Fish Food

The Fish icon is very useful.  When it is active, you can tap on any fish directly to see its identity and status.  You will have the following options:  Rename, Move, Sell.  The little menu that pops up will let you know how happy or hungry the fish may be as well as its name and gender.  You can find this by using the general Fish List as well but sometimes it is more convenient to tap directly on a fish, especially if you wish to use a specific fish in breeding.  Ofteh the little portraits of the fish in the main list or breeding menu are too small to show the colour of a small area, such as crown or stars on a mermaid.  It is only when the fish is in the tank that these can be seen clearly.  Thus, you can tap directly on the fish, find its name or rename it and THEN access the Breed Menu to breed it.

The Move Arrows allow you to move Decorations either within the current tank or to another tank or into Inventory to store them.  It allows you to move any Fish to another tank or into Inventory.

The Sponge is used to clean either your own tank or a friend's tank when it is displayed as dirty.  You earn 9 XP whenever you clean any tank.

The Pointing Finger icon is used to empty a Coin Shell, place a Gift in a Gift Box, access your own Gift Box or to pet or tickle fish either in your own tanks or in your friends' tanks.  It is the primary action tool.

Finally, the Bottle of Fish Food is precisely that.  When a fish is hungry, a tiny icon showing a bottle of fish food will hover above it.  Use the Fish Food icon in the Menu to feed the fish.

Initial Full Walkthrough
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I started a new game on another device to log early goals and this is the result:

Feed your Fishes  0/2
  Reward: 6 XP, 50 Coins

Empty Your Shell  0/1
  Reward: 6 XP, 30 Coins

Make your Fishes Happy 0/2
  Reward: 7 XP, 50 Coins

Breed a Baby Fish
  Rewards: 1 Seastar, 8 XP, 60 Coins

  You can breed a Gold fish by tapping on the Breed Button on the bottom of the screen which will take you to the Breeding Lab.

Your First Coral /1
  Buy a Pink Coral from the Shop in 1st Tank
  Reward: 2 Seastars, 8 XP, 60 Coins

  The Pink Coral is the Cocoon Coral costing 80 Coins.  It sells for 40 Coins and gives 3 XP

More Fish, More Fun
  Buy 2 Blue Goldfish from the Shop in 1st Tank
  Rewards: 8 XP, 60 Coins

Goldfish coloured in Yellow and Blue
  Breed Yellow Fish and Blue Fish to get desired mix.
  Reward: 5 Seastars, 4 XP, 80 Coins

Goldfish coloured in Red and Yellow
  Breed Red and Yellow Fish until you get your fish
  5 Seastars, 4 XP, 60 Coins

Selling Novice
  On the top right corner, you will see a fish icon.  Tap on it and it will take you to the Sell List.  From there press the 'Sell' Button  0/1
  Reards: 2 Seastars, 6 XP, 80 Coins

When you have completed a few of the first goals, you will go to Level 2 and more Goals will appear.

Now it is time for Red
  Buy a pair of Red Goldfish  0/2
  Rewards: 1 XP, 65 Coins

Time to Have Friends  0/5
  Tap on the Friend Button on the bottom of your screen and from here go to Community Tab and add Friends

  Rewards: 1 Seastar, 6 XP, 100 Coins

Novice Collector
  Empty 5 Treasure Shells in friends' tanks
  REwards: 1 Sesstar, 6 XP, 100 Coins

Cleaning Novice
  Visit friends' tans and help them clean by selecting a sponge Tool from the Tool Menu and dragging it across the dirt until the tank is spotless. 0/1
  Rewards: 1 Seastar, 8 XP, 80 Coins

Novice Gifter
  Leave gifts for your friends in their Gift areas
  Rewards: 6 XP, 70  Coins    0/5

Novice Tickler
  0/15
  Rewards: 1 Seastar, 7 XP, 90 Coins

Triple Coloured Goldfish
  Try to breed pairs of fish containing Red, Blue and Yellow colours
  Reward: 7 Seastars, 6 XP, 180 Coins

After completing a few of these, new Goals appear:

Novice Feeder
  Feed 20 Fish
  Rewards: 1 Seastar, 11 XP, 250 Coins

Novice Designer
  Buy 7 items for your First Tank
  Rewards: 1 Seastar, 3 XP, 450 Coins

Novice Spender
  Spend 750 Coins
  Reward: 1 Seastars, 3 XP, 750 Coins

Better Place for your Fish
  Buy a new Theme for 1st Tank
  Reward: 3 Seastars, 6 XP, 500 Coins

  N.B.  Buying new theme probably will give you the Novice Spender Goal as well.

The next type of fish, which is the Betta, unlocks at Level 3.

When you reach Level 3, you will see new Goals:

Your Second Fish Tank
  Buy your second fish tank
  Reward: 1 Seastar, 8 XP, 250 Coins

Home for Bettafish
  Buy and place 2 Bettafish in second tank
  Rewards: 1 Seastar, 13 XP, 800 Coins

Breed a Baby Bettafish in second tank
  Reward: 1 Seastar, 15 XP, 500 Coins

Stealth BEttafish
  Buy 3 Leptopsammias and place them in 2nd Tank
  Rewrads: 2 Seastars, 9 XP, 500 Coins

Apprentice Designer
  Buy 8 items and place in 2nd Tank
  Rewards:  1 Seastar, 20 XP, 1000 Coins

Apprentice Spender
  Spend 3000 Coins
  Reward: 2 Seastars, 9 XP, 950 Coins

Make the Goldfish family bigger
  Breed 5 pair of Goldfish in 1st tank
  Rewards: 2 Seastars, 5 XP, 700 Coins

The 2nd Tank costs 600 Coins.  3rd Tank unlocked at Level 5.  Fourth Tank unlocked at Level 7.  Fifth tank unlocked at Level 9.

Bettas can be purchased for Seastars or Coins now.  There are two Colours of Bettas that can be purchased for 600 Coins eash.

More new Goals:

Selling Apprentice
  Sell 4 Fish
  Rewards: 2 Seastars, 3 XP, 150 Coins

Monday 15 August 2016

Why is the first fish the Goldfish?






Although i have been playing games for years and writing strategy guides for almost as long, sometimes the penny takes a long time to drop.  I am ashamed to say that I did not pay sufficient attention initially to the Goldfish in Fish Adventure Seasons.  The reason that the Goldfish are the very first fish to be available is because they constitute a sort of in-game tutorial on colour breeding.  The cost of the Goldfish in the shop is very inexpensive as is the cost of breeding.  Both are only 50 Coins.  There is no other fish that is as inexpensive to buy or to breed.

You begin with the option of purchasing three different colours:  Red, Blue and Yellow.  The four Elixirs that are available as random items when emptying a Coin Shell or opening a gift are: Red, Blue, Yellow and Green.  In other words, you are given the primary colours and one secondary colour in the form of Green.

In my first game, I was given a special offer that allowed me to buy Mermaids before I had unlocked them.  They are unlocked at Level 15 ordinarily.  I was so excited by the Mermaids that I ignored the Goldfish except to complete Goals that involved them.  Now, in a different Aquarium at a lower level, I am experimenting with the Goldfish.

They are rather amazing.  You really do not need Elixirs or the special Colour-change Magic Elixirs to create amazing new colours in this game.

At the top of this post, you will see some screenshots that show the current tank that is filled with the results of my breeding experiments.  The first thing that occurred rather to my surprise was that I had obtained a goldfish with some pink in its body.  I took that goldfish and attempted to bring more pink into the mix.  I then tried to create purple.  Rather unexpectedly, I received one black and red goldfish named Gizmo.  (The game gives the fish default names.)  Breeding Gizmo twice, I received two very different results from the same partner.  The first was a fish that resembled the mother.  The second was a fish that resembled Gizmo.  This is breeding without any Elixirs.  I experimented with the Elixirs as well.  In this tank, I have not reached Level 10 and therefore cannot obtain the special Elixirs but I used the regular ones.  They tend to be a little overpowering generally.  It really is not necessary to use them apparently.  You can obtain almost ANY colour without the use of Elixirs although you have to do a lot of breeding.

Essentially, this sort of inexpensive breeding is something the game encourages as well as the sale of the results.  Sale of fish gives valuable XP.  In the case of the goldfish, you do not earn many coins through sales but every tank has a maximum population of 30 and you do need the space if you are going to do a lot of breeding.

I take screenshots of the breeding laboratory in order to keep logs of my results.  It is a nice little option in the game but results are erased every day to make way for new ones.  If you do not keep your own log, you will have nothing.  With the mermaids, I hoped to see which of the patterns related to the hair, the crown and stars, the top and the tail.  I haven't spent enough time studying the eggs to know, however.  I need to study the goldfish eggs to see which patterns relate to the fins, body and tail.  My next experiment will be to try to obtain the colour white.  That may be quite challenging.  I expect the easiest way would be to use some Yellow Elixirs.