Your Guide to a Healthy Habitarium

Professor Milton Clodbottle is your friend and teacher. When you create your habitarium, the professor will guide you through every step. First he'll ask you to choose the landscape. It doesn't matter which you choose—just go with whichever you like.

After you've chosen your landscape, it's time to start raising some petpetpets (referred to as p3s from here on out). Professor Milton will pop in from time to time to help you get used to the game layout and controls. After you go through the beginning stages with him, he'll only show up every now and then, when you clear a level, run out of storage space, lose all of your p3s, or various other triggers.

Basics and gathering resources

To start with, there are three types of p3s—soldiers, workers, and nesters. Each type of p3 is able to perform specific tasks as follows:

• Soldiers - fighting and building
• Workers - harvesting, building, and fighting (if the pest is right next to it while it's harvesting)
• Nesters - nesting and harvesting

No p3 is able to perform all four tasks. So you will not see any soldiers harvesting or nesting, any workers nesting, or any nesters building/repairing or fighting.

You will notice that your habitarium has certain geographical features. There are rocks, flowers, mud, trees, water, and grass. Rocks, mud, and trees are the ones you want to focus on. They yield stone, mud, and wood. After harvesting those resources you will be able to buy buildings. As for the flowers, water, and grass, they provide resources that you can use to buy food and decorations for your habitarium. They aren't necessary for advancing.

Buildings

There are many kinds of buildings you're able to buy. Storage, nests, houses, hospitals, and barracks. However, you only really need storage, nests, and houses. Unless you feel like burning through your resources, don't bother getting any hospitals or barracks.

• Storage - The name is pretty straight forward. It stores your resources. It's essentially your bank. But it does have limits as to how much it can hold. So you'll need to have more than one.
• Houses - They are able to completely replenish your p3s. They will allow them to rest, eat, and heal. Since houses can satisfy hunger, buying food for your p3s isn't needed. You'll only attract pests.
• Nests - These allow your nesters to lay and incubate eggs.

Of course, to buy any kind of building or to upgrade you'll need to have plenty of mud, stone, and wood stored up. This is why it's best if you just focus on those three when you harvest. Buy more storage or upgrade whenever possible so that you'll be able to hold more resources.

Under attack!

Pests can wreak quite a lot of havoc. They can ruin your resource tiles, damage your eggs and buildings, and even kill your poor little p3s! It's up to your warriors to fight them off.

Deal with the pests that attack your nests/eggs and resource tiles first. Even if a pest brings your storage or house to ruins, they can always be repaired. But damage to an egg or resource tile can set you back up to three hours or even cause you to lose an egg.

If you are neofriends with people who also have a habitarium, you're able to raid theirs. If one is successful, you can get free resources out of it. But just remember that they can do the same to you! And don't forget to leave some soldiers to guard your own habitarium while you are on a raid. Otherwise you'll be left defenseless if pests show up while your soldiers are away.

Leveling up

Leveling up can give you many things. Not only will each level up award you neopoints, but you're also able to receive some kind of perk (depending on which level). Your habitarium can grow larger, you'll be able to care for more p3s, you'll be able to upgrade your buildings/p3s so that they can hold more or become more efficient, and so much more.

So now the question is how to level up as quickly as possible. Since you're leveling up in an ever-expanding habitarium, you will need to keep up with the growth. That means more houses to hold your p3s and more storage to hold more resources for your constant spending. It is recommended that you have more workers than anything at this stage. That way you'll be able to rack up experience while you earn precious resources.

If you're in no hurry to buy anything, however; you could focus your efforts on nesters. Once an egg is done incubating, you can earn 200 experience points by deleting it. But you should be sure to have some eggs in storage. It is recommended to have at least 3 eggs of each type of p3. That means 3 mootix worker eggs, 3 mootix soldier eggs, and so on. You want them stored so you'll be ready to re-populate your habitarium once your p3s die. The professor will always provide you with a new nester if you run out, but re-populating an entire habitarium through one nester will take a very long time.

Maxed out

Once you reach the max level, the way neopoints are awarded changes. Instead of an increasing amount as you level up, you will get 500 neopoints for every 1000 experience points you earn. Once you earn 1000 experience points, a purple gem will pop up on your screen. Clicking it will award you 500 neopoints. As to how to get those gems quickly, you actually have a few options at this point.

1. You can have a lot of nesters and produce a lot of eggs. You will continue to get 200 experience points for each egg you delete. That adds up fast.

2. You can go the more laid back route. Simply have your workers continue to gather and just keep hoarding whatever they get. This way, when the later levels do come out, you'll be rich in resources! Or, you could always go on a shopping spree. Whichever.

3. You can focus mainly on gathering and building. Once you've gathered a lot of resources go ahead and buy some buildings. Have any free worker/soldier get to work on building it. Then upgrade once built. You get 200 experience points for building a new structure and 300 experience points for upgrading. So if you were to use a nest as an example, you would get 800 experience points after building a new nest and completing two upgrades. Once you've finished upgrading, simply delete any unneeded buildings. This will eat up your savings, so you may only want to use this option after using option 2.

I hope after reading this guide you will have a little more insight into making and maintaining a healthy habitarium!