Newbie Guide

PsyPets is a very complex game, and is a prime example of a scenario where the more you play, the better you will understand all of the little details. However, this guide will help you to get started on the right foot! Make sure you read the Newbie DO's and DONT's.

The Newbie Guide consists of five parts:


 * Part One: The Newbie Guide Main Page
 * Part Two: Items & Money
 * Part Three: Pet Activities & Training your Pets
 * Part Four: Caring for pets
 * Part Five: Newbie FAQ

My House

 * Your house is where your pets live, where you feed, pet and play with your pets, and where you keep your items. There is a lot to explore around your house, and you can organize everything according to your own preferences.

See My House.


 * My Pets

The first thing you see in your house is the basic information about your pets. It is important to check this regularly, and the information will let you know what your next actions should be. The information displayed is as follows:


 * Pet name and size
 * Pet gender ([[File:Boy.gif]] for males, or [[File:Girl.gif]] for females). [[File:Boy_fixed.gif]] or [[File:Girl_fixed.gif]] indicates that your pet has been neutered or spayed.
 * Pet equipment ([[File:The_hand.png]] indicates that your pet is not equipped. Click on the hand to equip it if you have any Equipable Items in your house.)
 * Pet level
 * Pet experience (if the bar is at 100%, your pet is ready to be leveled up)
 * Pet logs (Click on [[File:Petlog_new.png]] next to the experience bar to see detailed activity logs for all your pets. You can see what they attempted to gather, hunt, defeat, craft, invent, or construct. You also see if they've eaten anything that you had stored for them. Keep track of what your pet is capable of, and try to develop it further in that direction. If the book is shown in gray [[File:Petlog.png]] it means that pet has not done any hourly activities since you last viewed their log.)
 * Pet status (hunger, comfort, love, esteem - in that order). If any of these categories are printed in red text (e.g. is starving ) immediate action on your part is necessary. Three dots (...) indicate 'average' - or in other words, if you see three dots in the first row of the status info, your pet is neither full nor hungry.


 * Only in the first week after joining PsyPets will you be able to see the exact stats for hunger, comfort, love and esteem. What your pet is capable of is based on invisible stats, such as intelligence, strength and speed. You can influence these stats when you are leveling up your pets. You will get a question, and depending on which answer you choose, your pet will develop certain stats and personality traits.


 * Rooms


 * You can split your house into separate Rooms. How you decide to organize your house - if you want to create a room for each pet or sort your items into rooms such as kitchen, library and workshop - is entirely up to you. In the beginning you have a Common Room and a Protected room (denoted with a lock icon on the tab)- all the other rooms you will have to create yourself. Items that you have sorted into protected room cannot be used as materials or eaten as food by your pets, but items there will continue to provide hourly bonuses. If you own rare but edible items, such as a Minipalm or a Bonsai Tree, put them into your protected room.


 * Suggestions: sort all of your items into specific rooms and keep the Common Room empty. All new items that your pets gather or craft, and all items that you buy or move home from your Storage, will land in the Common Room. This makes it easy to see what actions are being done, and the page also loads much faster. Keeping all of your food in the kitchen makes feeding your pets easier, as you don't have to browse through dozens of non-edible items. Keeping all your crafting materials in a workshop room helps you keep track of what your pets use up and what you might have to get for them.


 * Enlarging your House


 * If your house is smaller than 500 units you can buy additional space from the game through the Real Estate office. You can also purchase deeds from the Flea Market, the Market Square, or the Auction House, or through transactions at the Trading House. You can also acquire construction materials iron, Bricks, wood, Windows, Copper Piping, which your pets may use in Constructing but may instead be used in Crafting or Inventing if your house is not full.


 * Construction increases to your House Size 1-5 units. Although there is no limit to how many units your pet can construct, you can only access 20,000 units. Effectively, your maximum house size is 20,000 units. The excess can be converted into Deeds to 1000 Units and traded for new Basement levels through the Real Estate office.

Add-Ons
Add-ons are optional additions to your house built using blueprints and building materials. Here is a generally-accepted good order for building your add-ons.


 * Basement: Good for holding clunky things you don't use often but still want (like totems)
 * Attic: The extra space is going to come in handy!
 * Greenhouse: No longer available
 * Fireplace: Adds safety and lets you show items on your profile that normally don't show. It is expensive to keep lit, however!
 * Tower: Good for making Zodiac gemstones, but generally not useful beyond that as the Flying Monkey and Battle options are expensive.
 * Dungeon: Similar to the Menagerie, it shows what monsters your pets have encountered while Adventuring. Also as of December 2007, the Dungeon holds an Advent Calendar that gives out special items in December.
 * Moat: Adds safety, but is expensive to build. The fishing can be useful, though expensive.
 * Menagerie: A fun little add-on that only shows what monsters your pets have hunted, nothing more.
 * Map Room: Shows where you pets have gathered items
 * Windmill: Expensive to find blueprint that builds something that show son profile while letting you mill wheat into flour faster. Not useful.
 * Eiffel Tower: Gives out wine, cheese, bread and fireworks on Bastille day as well as access to a French Flag avatar and does nothing else.

Storage

 * When your house becomes too small (and it will!), then you should move items you don't need for your pets into your Storage. Do this early - do not let your house get too full. Your pets will not craft, invent or bring home anything when there is no space left in your house. The first 59 spaces in your storage are free, for every additional 10 spaces that you use, you will get charged 1m (that's why the extra 9 is free on the 50's) storage rent per day, along with receiving allowance of 10m.


 * Items have to be in your storage, so they can be...
 * sold back to the game
 * put up for sale in your User Store
 * put up for sale in the Sellers Market
 * sold for the highest bid in the Auction House
 * sent to other players via the Post Office
 * traded with other players
 * pawned via the Pawn Shop
 * put up as prizes for Park Events
 * forged or unforged in The Smithery
 * And/or Recycled (if they can) via Recycling
 * Sellback
 * Sellback


 * Items in your storage can be sold back to the game from within your storage. The sellback value changes every day and is determined by what items actually go for in the Market Square. If you need quick money, mark the items you want to sell and click the Sell button. But keep in mind that sellback value does NOT equal market value. Selling back to the game only pays you roughly half of what you may achieve in the Market Square.



Useful Services


Post Office

 * The Post Office is where you send and receive your PsyMail. An icon in the menu bar ([[File:Newmail.gif]]) indicates that you've received new mail, and clicking on it brings you to the Post Office. This is also the place for picking up your packages with items you've won in Park Events or items your friends sent you. The Post Office can store only 20 PsyMails for you, so make sure you delete old emails after a while. When your mailbox is full, you will still receive automated messages from park events etc. but no more private mail, unless you make some space.


 * You can send mails and packages to other players. However, when you send items via PsyMail, the Post Office charges you a shipping fee based on the items' weight (roughly 2m per weight unit).

Bank

 * The Bank is where you keep track of your moneys m. You can deposit money in your bank and earn interest (max. 20m per day) every day. However, if you want to spend that money, you have to withdraw it again. The Transaction History shows the money you made from sales in your User Store or in the Market Square, what you spent on the Flea Market or for Park Events, and more. Every transaction that you made in Psypets, buy and sell, is listed here with date and time.


 * Trades


 * As soon as you buy your License to Commerce, you can initiate direct trades with other residents. Read more about trades here.


 * See also: The Bank



The Park

 * Park Events are the easiest way for your pet to gain experience, which is needed to reach the next level. The Park is always filled with exciting events: Distance Races, Brawls, Capture The Flag, Scavenger Hunts, Strategy Games, Arts & Crafts, and Dance Mania. Find out what your pet is good at and sign it up for those events whenever you can - you will be able to level up your pet much faster. Some events even have prizes that your pet can win.


 * You need to wait 24 hours after you signed up for PsyPets before you can enter your pet into an event. Usually a small fee between 5m and 10m has to be paid for each pet you enter. Be careful, events that cost you more than 10m are worth entering only when they have prizes which justify the higher fee.


 * If you have a License to Commerce you can host your own events. The park charges you 5m for every pet, so if you host an event for 20 pets you will have to pay 100m in advance. You decide what you want to charge the participants and as soon as your event is filled, the park pays you the collected fee. You cannot enter any of your own pets in events that you are hosting. An event is completed immediately after it is filled, and you can see the results instantly.


 * The event's host and all participants will get the results of their park event psymailed to their Post Office. If you enter many pets in events, make sure you clean all the event mails regularly or your mailbox will be over quota soon (you then cannot receive any private psymails).



The Plaza

 * The Plaza hosts the PsyPets Forum which contains several Message Boards for discussing the game as well as completely random things. Make sure you post your topics in the appropriate board: General Chat is for discussing PsyPets related things, while Chit Chat is for off-topic talk of any kind. If you want to trade items, advertise your user store or park event, the board to go to is Commerce, and there are several other boards whose purpose is self-explanatory... such as Error Reporting and Game Ideas.


 * When you first enter The Plaza, you are asked to agree to the terms of use.



The Temple

 * The Temple is where the three PsyPets Gods reside. You can donate money to the gods, which can contribute to making them happy. The attitude of the PsyPets Gods affect the behaviour of all pets, and when they reach the highest level of happiness, they might even auction off a unique or rare item in the Auction House. Usually, you can not get personal benefits from donating, the attitude of the gods affects everyone's pets, so it could be worth your while. But if you make a moneys donation high enough to really please the Gods, they might send you a valuable gift.


 * See also: Temple, Donating to the Temple, PsyPets Religion



Pet Shelter

 * If you want more than one pet, you can adopt from the Pet Shelter for a small fee of 400m. The shelter used to have newborn game-created pets, as well as pets put in by other residents, but with the addition of pets giving birth, the game no longer creates randomly generated pets for the Pet Shelter. Most pets have adjectives attached to their name which loosely describe their character. So if you want to raise a hunter, a 'quiet and sleepy' pet might not be the best choice. Read more on Pet Shelter adjectives here. Sometimes you can adopt higher level pets, which means that other residents have put their pets in the shelter after they've raised them up to a certain level. Be careful, as it could simply mean that someone had too many pets and wanted to get rid of a few, or it could be an indication that this higher level pet was not very successful. You cannot raise an adopted higher level pet from the beginning, and are taking a chance on how the previous owner raised it.


 * Spaying or neutering your pet is free of charge. If you don't want your female pet to randomly get pregnant, you should have it spayed. The procedure leaves the pet unhappy and low esteem, so after the spaying you will have to give it some special care for a day or two. Neutering male pets does not actually do anything at the moment, so don't bother with that.


 * You may also change any of your current pets' names here, for a fee of 50 m. At the time of adoption, you have the option to change the name of that pet for free, before it is brought home.


 * If you want or need to give up ownership of a pet, you can give it to the shelter. There is no 'undo' for this, so consider carefully if that is the path you'd truly like to take.


 * See also: Pet Shelter

Commerce
For more about selling items, shops, how to get money and other things check out Newbie Guide Part Two 

My Store

 * You must have a License to Commerce!


 * By setting a Buy Price for items in your Storage, you make them available in your user store via the Flea Market. All items that have a Buy Price are available, if you don't want to sell an item, just delete the Buy Price. Selling items via your store preserves the item comments and allows you to sell homemade food (which raises esteem when fed to other pets) - in the Market Square, comments and maker information are lost.


 * After setting all the prices, do not forget to Open Your Store at the bottom of the page. Later on, you may want to close your store while you make large changes. Your user store can also be accessed from your personal profile page.



Sellers Market

 * This is a place where people with a License to Commerce can let others know they are looking for items by placing a "bid" and giving the market some money to pay for items. From there if you have something they are looking for in your storage, you may choose to sell it to other players for the money they are offering if you wish.


 * If someone is offering less than sellback value for an item, the listing will be highlighted to warn you so you won't be ripped off.



Market Square

 * The Market Square has replaced the old Grocery Store and Department Store.

The Market Square is no longer available. The Grocery Store has re-opened. 

Flea Market

 * The Flea Market hosts all the User Stores under one "roof". You can browse through all the stores, or search for specific items. The Flea Market is the only place where you can buy homemade food from other residents, and many residents update their user store inventories several times a day. If you open your own user store, its listings will become browsable and searchable on the Flea Market instantly.


 * Flea Market and Market Square are two different things. In the Flea Market you know who you are buying from, and you can obtain items with preserved comments and maker information (if applicable). The Market Square is anonymous.


 * See also: Flea Market



Other Areas

 * The City Hall is where That Guy Ben, PsyPets founder and the brain behind all this, posts announcements and game-related infos. It is always a good idea to check the City Hall when the little house symbol appears in the menu bar.


 * You can give items to the Giving Tree. The tree will randomly give out those items to residents who have been active in the past 24 hours. It's always nice to receive anonymous gifts, right? You may want to consider putting at least remotely useful things into the giving tree, however, and not your collection of 50 Clover Leafs.


 * Under Advertising you can put your own ads up on the PsyPets TV Network. All residents who visit The Plaza will see your message until the time paid for expires.


 * If you were able to obtain a Maze Piece you can place it in The Pattern, trying to pass an obstacle and if successful, get rewarded with a more or less valuable treasure. Basic rule for new players: playing in The Pattern is expensive, don't bother with it until you have some spare moneys.


 * The Totem Pole Garden is a place to show off your totem collections, once you gain some.


 * Daily Adventure is a place where your pets can complete challenges for prizes.



Quick Links
(The following icons will be shown at the very top of any PsyPets page, except the Wiki, below the PsyPets logo)


 * [[File:Newpost.gif]] New City Hall Message -- A new public message has been posted. Clicking on that icon brings you to the City Hall.


 * [[File:Newmail.gif]] New PsyMail -- You've got mail! Clicking on that icon brings you to the Post Office.


 * [[File:Mailboxfull.gif]] Mailbox Full -- Your PsyMail inbox is over quota, and you cannot receive private PsyMails until you delete some of your old ones. Clicking on that icon brings you to the Post Office.


 * [[File:Newpackage.png]] New Package -- You've got a package. Clicking on that icon brings you to Incoming.


 * [[File:Madesale.png]] Sale -- Someone bought something from you, either on the Market Square or from your User Store. Clicking on that icon brings you to the Bank.


 * [[File:Newtrade.gif]] New Trade -- A new trade has been started, or your trading partner has replied to your proposed trade. Clicking on that icon brings you to the Bank.


 * [[File:Newcomment.png]] New Comment -- Someone has left a new comment on your Profile page. Clicking on that icon shows you your Profile.


 * [[File:Newgift.png]] New Gift -- There is a gift waiting for you underneath the Giving Tree.

Note: This icon no longer appears, as all gifts from the tree are put into Incoming.


 * [[File:Mondayradio.gif]] Radio Broadcast -- The radio antenna appears on the days That Guy Ben is scheduled to do a new broadcast. Clicking on the link takes you to a page where you can send in questions to be answered on-air.

Note: This icon no longer appears, as That Guy Ben is no longer working on PsyPets.


 * [[File:Newgoldstar.png]] New Gold Star Sticker -- A post you made got a gold star sticker! Clicking the star takes you to a page displaying all of your starred posts.



Account Things


Vacation Mode
If you're going on vacation, or for some other reason going to be unable to check on PsyPets for a while, you might be worried about your pets dying, especially younger ones.

Fortunately, there's Vacation Mode.

To place your account into Vacation Mode, visit the My Account > Account Management page. Additionally, if you do not log in for a week or more your account will be retroactively put into vacation mode. For example, if you log in for the first time in 10 days, PsyPets will pretend you were in vacation mode for the last 10 days.

Vacation mode has the following effects:


 * You will not gain allowance
 * You will not be charged for storage space used
 * Your resident-run store will be closed
 * Pets' need hours will not decrease, meaning your pets will not become more hungry, require more love, etc.
 * Pets will not hunt, craft, steal, work, or adventure
 * If your pets are signed up for any events, they will participate in those events when they take place
 * Any auctions you are participating in will continue

IF YOU FORGET ABOUT VACATION MODE: When you get back, click the Retroactive Vacation! button. This makes the game ignore the time you missed since last playing. 

About Passwords & Forgotten Passwords
There is a form for resetting your password if you lose it, available on the front page beneath the login bar.

As it turns out, I could not tell you your password even if I wanted to. The reason is interesting, so I'll explain :)

The passwords are stored, encrypted, in the database in such a way that they cannot actually be completely decrypted.

It works kind of like a JPEG image. JPEG files are smaller than, say, BMP bitmap files because not all of the information about the image is saved. You can tell that this is true when you look at a JPEG image - some areas look blocky or blurry. This is because, even after decoding the JPEG image, not all of the image was available, so some of it had to be filled in with guesses.

The same is true for your PsyPets password. It is stored in such a way that if you tried to unencrypt it, you wouldn't get all of the information. Some characters would be off, or there might not even be the right number of characters, etc.

So how, you might wonder, does PsyPets know if you entered the right password?

The answer is strange yet simple: it takes whatever you type, and encodes it just like it did when you signed up for PsyPets and it saved your password to the database. Except this time instead of storing the encoded result, it compares it with what's already there. If what you typed encodes to be the same thing as what's in the database, then whatever is in the database must have been encoded from the same thing. So we assume a match.

As it turns out, since the encryption is "lossy", it is theoretically possible for two different passwords to yield the same encrypted string. The more lossy the encryption, the more strings will match when encrypted.

Also as it turns out, however, the encryption doesn't allow for a simple one or two mis-typed characters to also match. You'd actually need an entirely different string, so there is no (or at least very little) danger in someone reading over your shoulder and catching one or two letters and figuring out something from there.

Some people call all of this "scrambled egg" encryption - you can probably imagine why. It works well, except when you'd like your password retrieved, but that's what resetting your password is for :) 

Selling your account- legal or not?
It's not against "the rules", but you do so at your own risk.

If you're buying someone's PsyPets account for thirty dollars, for example, it would be very easy for them to take the money and not give you the login information for the account. Similar things could happen when buying accounts or items from other games with PsyPets money.

'''You should also make sure, when exchanging between PsyPets and another game, that it is not against the rules of that other game to make such an exchange. Many other games will lock/freeze/ban your account for making exchanges of this kind.'''

Exchanges for real money are probably safest, since you can go through a third party like PayPal or e-Bay who penalize their users when they do not fulfill their end of the bargain. It also avoids involving another game, which as previously mentioned may have rules against such transactions.