First, NEWBIE GUIDE!
I'll ping more if and when more folks we tempted with apples and dragons join, and the veteran users add their own posts o' free dergs.
But first, a NEWBIE GUIDE!
YOUR PROGENS
The progens are the two dragons you got upon joining. Hang onto them. It's always a better idea to keep them even when you get fancier dragons. You can't sell them, trade them, or give them away, and if you exalt them you'll get no money. They're first generation- meaning not related to any other dragon on the site except their own children and grandchildren- which actually makes them valuable in site terms. The only other way to get first gen dragons is through unhatched eggs. (Which ARE tradeable, it's only progens that aren't.) Some users take particular delight in making projects of first gens, geneing and breed changing them into something gorgeous. (I'm actually one of them.) These are my two progens plus one dragon from their first clutch whose colors I loved, finished projects:
If you don't want to make projects of them, you can use them to churn out fodder, which I'll explain in a bit. You're probably not going to make the money you spend geneing them back even with second gen babies, it's mostly done for "they were my first and I luv them" reasons, or lore reasons for those that enjoy RP and/or attaching personalities and backstories to their dragons.
FOOD
I have/will send some stocks of food to start with to you all; that will hold you quite awhile with a small lair. At first it will seem very plentiful and easy to come by. This will change quickly as you grow and acquire more mouths to feed. Each dragon has dietary preferences; a few only eat one thing, more eat two things, and a few eat everything. Whichever item is listed first is what they prefer; they'll only eat the other thing(s) on the list if you don't have their favorite in stock at all. As a rule seafood is the most expensive since it's a bit harder to come by and a lot of popular breeds either only eat it or like it best of all. Plants are the cheapest since there are only three breeds that preferentially eat them, and only one of those three is all that popular. Meat and bugs fall in between; fewer like bugs best, but the two that do are very popular.
There aren't any real consequences for letting your dragons starve (other than the nervous twitch some users will have on seeing it), but there ARE bonuses for keeping them well fed- extra money, gathering turns, and a gem per day they stay that way once you've kept them fed for three days straight.
Food has an autosell value; don't. There's checkboxes next to the food that you use for both autoselling (don't!) and converting. Converting places food in your stores, and from there you can hit the feed button to distribute it automatically.
BREEDING
Here's the thumbnail version:
- Different breeds have different cooldowns, with five "tiers". The four "plentiful" breeds- Tundras, Guardians, Mirrors, Fae- have the shortest cooldowns, 15 days each. Next tier up has twenty, next 25, next 30, and the last one- Coatls and Wildclaws- are 35. The cooldown length corresponds to "rarity", i.e. the odds that hatchlings will be one parent's breed or another. 15 days - 20 will usually have one or two hatchlings from the rarer breed; 15 days-35 almost never will. Breed changes can be bought and put on a dragon- but some of them are now very rare and thus very expensive because they aren't in the marketplace. Nocturnes, Imperials, and Wildclaws fall into this category.
- Genes are on the same rarity tier system; basic is always the most common/dominant, and iridescent/shimmer/crystal/facet/circuit are the rarest. Genes can be bought and applied; they're priced according to their rarity. There is sadly no Mendelian inheritance- dragons with a parent with a rare gene that didn't inherit it can't pass it on to offspring.
- There's a color wheel, and color inheritance always goes the shortest distance along it. Breeding white to blue will take you across greys, blacks, and purples on its way to and possibly through the blues; breeding white to yellow will take you through the pinks, reds, browns, and oranges. Each set of color- primary, secondary, tertiary- is calculated separately.
A much more complete guide lives here:
http://www1.flightrising.com/forums/gde/1207958
You can also use the scrying workshop to see what kind of range two of your adults could produce between them, what a given dragon would look like with a breed or gene change (or to build a hypothetical dragon from scratch), and to check that two dragons are sufficiently unrelated to breed together.
The only things about a given dragon that cannot be changed are its sex, eye color, and colors. Thus leading to a fair amount of "GOD DAMMIT WHY WEREN'T YOU A GIRL/BOY?!" rage at hatches.
$MONEY$
You don't start with much as you may have noticed. There are several ways to get it, and two types of currency.
Treasure is the basic in-game monetary unit. Gems are the unit that can be bought with real money, and in the site marketplace the highest-ticket items are bought with gems. You do not, however, have to spend real money to get them; they are tradeable, you can sell things on the AH for gems, and there's generally a brisk exchange market for treasure-to-gems and gems-to-treasure with a current going rate, much like real world currency. Right now it's 500-550 treasure per gem; that will probably drop with the registration window bringing in new users.
1. Sell dragons. This is actually the hardest way. Site trends come and go, and if you're trying to sell a dragon to a lair that wants to keep it rather than as fodder (I PROMISE I WILL EXPLAIN THAT), you will have to put on your salesperson hat and trawl the dragons wanted, dragons for sale, and flight sales forum. You can also sell "fodder", which goes for 4-9k per dragon depending on how many flights are pushing for dominance and how fiercely that week, day of the week (Saturday is the busiest and most profitable), and whether the dragon is a hatchling, an adult, or just about to become an adult. If you hate seeing "unnamed" in your offspring list, then name the dragon whatever before you put it on the auction house.
2. Play the Fairgrounds. This is probably the fastest way to make seed money; pick a game you like and go to. The two harder games, Tidal Trouble and Shock Switch, are probably the most profitable. It's not really the most efficient way in terms of time spent to money earned though. When you're just starting out Higher or Lower is a great way to get some basically free money; it will become not worth your time.
3. The trading post. Swipp makes trades of items for other items; Crim gives treasure for random items; Pinkerton gives you one free item per day; and Tomo gives you 300 treasure per correct answer to 10 trivia questions per day. Be cautious with Crim- sometimes she'll offer you a very low price for a very valuable item. Unhatched eggs, ambush and eliminate stones, and some familiars and apparel for example, are worth MUCH more than she offers. And you usually don't want to give her Swipp items.
Tomo answers:
http://www1.flightrising.com/forums/gde/1128248
Swipp items (a quick guide for what you don't want to give to Crim or autosell when you're cleaning out your inventory):
http://www1.flightrising.com/forums/gde/1097009
4. The Coliseum. This is the high investment/high reward option, and the most profitable one. And also the most daunting to get into. It's a grind, and it's sometimes a frustrating grind, especially starting out. It's how I make the vast majority of my cash, and it keeps me well funded, including netting me enough gems through AH sales of desirable items, food, and apparel to have funded multiple gem genes for those geneing projects I mentioned.
THE COLISEUM
Coli grinding gets you many things: a steady supply of food to keep your own larders stocked and eventually to sell to other players who hate coli grinding or don't have time for it, a constant stream of autosell items/vendor trash (it isn't much at first but it adds up), apparel, Swipp items, and familiars. (There's even a slim chance of unhatched eggs.) Once you've leveled and stoned a good coli team you can either farm for food/battle items/familiars/apparel, or you can use them to train exalt fodder.
Exalting dragons gets you two things; money, and contribution to dominance for your flight. You get a set range of money and sometimes gems depending on how leveled a dragon is; a hatchling will get you a few thousand treasure, a level 10 will get you about 15k, and so on.
Dominance is a site-wide weekly competition for the various elemental flights. Gaining one of the top three spots nets each player in a flight a discount on treasure items in the marketplace, which can turn grabbing and reselling things off the marketplace quite profitable once the discounts start to really add up, and extra gathering turns per day. Some flights care a whole lot more about dominance than others- plague tends to go after it tooth and claw, earth only seems to care the week before their elemental holiday, and so far. (It's considered courteous to let a flight whose holiday is upcoming win dom the week before so they have it for their holiday.) You can either grind and exalt fodder for your own personal profit line, as part of a push by your flight, or breed fodder to stick on the AH during a big dom push by several flights, or the flights that really pursue dominance. I've had hatchlings sell instantly for 7k when I put them on the AH on a Saturday when plague or light are pushing. Adults or "5 day hatchlings" which will become adults on rollover are worth even more.
I did say that coli grinding is high investment/high reward. Yeah. Here's a good leveling guide, but it'll still be rather painful leveling your first team, especially if you can't afford the really high-value stones like ambush and eliminate or don't want to spend and instead wait for them to drop (this is what I did):
http://www1.flightrising.com/forums/gde/1040710
You can also pay other users to level your team, leaving you to buy stones yourself, or buy fully stoned pre-leveled dragons- but that'll cost you plenty in and of yourself. A fully stoned level 25 will typically go for 300k. Which makes grinding up and selling level 25s yourself a rather excellent profit source in itself, especially with dragons you're too attached to to want to exalt or see someone else exalt...
Edited to add: You want to pick three melee dragons to start with so you don't have to restone. Melee breeds are mirrors, guardians, spirals, ridgebacks, wildclaws, imperials, and... I have no idea with snappers, actually, I think melee too. The rest start as magic users, though you can that with stones. It's much easier to start with melee-by-default.
Oh, and try your best to pick dragons you know you'll want to hang onto forever- you will probably NOT want to do this again.
GATHERING
You get a set number of turns per day, how many depending if you're keeping your dragons well fed, whether or not your flight has one of the top three dom slots, and whether it's a holiday during which extra turns are granted. There are basically two ways to spend your turn: gathering food, or digging/scavenging. Gathering food has an obvious purpose, digging and scavenging are more profitable and offer the chance of juicier rewards. All of them will get you Swipp items and familiars.
Usually I recommend newbies start off gathering food to build their stocks, then move straight to digging and scavenging. I've maxed out both and gone back to food because I collect familiars and there are a number of them that are gathering-only.
AUCTION HOUSE
This is pretty self-explanatory. The only tips I have to offer are to search by price rather than expiration, and if you don't want to spend gems (you won't want to at first), enter a minimum price of one treasure since it lists prices by gems first. You might one to leave that undone when selling, though, as some more desired items can be a great way to get gems.
Dragons are worth waiting for a good deal to scroll by on. Some users have an easier time resisting impulse buys than others...
FAMILIARS
They look cosmetic, and mostly they are. They have no impact on gameplay. They do, however, give you some treasure when "bonded" with once per day, and when they reach certain bonding thresholds, they give you treasure chests. The first three chests are rusted- bottom tier- then there's iron chests with better stuff and a gilded chest at the end with the best stuff. After that point you'll get 50 gold per bonding click, but no more chests; it's usually worth it to give the dragon a new familiar. Bonding applies across dragons and with every "copy" of that familiar; if you take a familiar off a dragon to send the dragon away to breed, you don't have to start over with it or worry about selling the "right" version of it.
I THINK that's about it. If you have a question, ask!
