Unsurprisingly, breeding is a major mechanic in Mewgenics. Making cats strong in a run is one thing, but giving them a stronger start will go a long way. Here's a helpful primer on breeding generational talents!
Mewgenics Breeding Stats Explained
The first thing you need to understand to learn about breeding are the stats of your House. Each symbol represents a score of some sort.
- 💤Comfort (Sleeping Cat): This represents how comfortable your cats are. To increase comfort, get more furniture for the House, or spread your cats out through more rooms in the house.
- 🧶Stimulation (Yarn Ball): How stimulated your cats are by their environment. Buying new furniture for the house can increase the stimulation stat. The more this increases, the more aspects that can be passed down from generations of cats, including the couple's strongest base stats and abilities.
- ⚕️Health (Medicine Symbol): Increased Health gives you a chance to heal wounds and cure diseases when ending a day at the House, while low health can be the cause behind said diseases. Increase this by cleaning (clicking on) poop, disposing of corpses, or getting new furniture from Baby Jack.
- 🧬Mutation (DNA/Double Helix): This increases the chance that cats in the room can mutate! Increase this with select furniture from Baby Jack.
- 🏠Appeal (House): Appeal doesn’t appear in any particular room, but rather represents the full House, seen at the top of the screen. Increasing this with furniture from Baby Jack will increase the quality of strays that appear at the House, giving them better stats.
You can also increase your breeding knowledge by sending kittens through the green pipe to Tink. Try to at least unlock Tink's base stat reader early! You can do so by donating kittens to him by putting them in the green tube to the left of your house.
Seeing base stats will really open your eyes to effective breeding in Mewgenics. Base stats are all that are passed down, so base stats being high are much more important for breeding than how strong they end up after an adventure!
Cull the Weak
Outside of cats that have obvious strengths, you can pretty liberally send your cats away. Ideally, you should wait for them to have some sort of value to an NPC. The easiest way is to send weak kittens to Tink if your babies don’t have desirable stats.
A good rule of thumb is if a cat doesn’t have at least a 6 in at least 1 stat, you can absolutely part ways with them. As you progress through the game and get higher quality strays, you can have higher standards like only keeping cats with multiple stats at 6, or cats with at least one 7 in a stat.
Upgrade Appeal Early
To upgrade your House, you'll need to buy furniture by selecting the box on the left side of the screen. Each in-game week, Baby Jack will stock this with a random selection of new furniture. Buy every piece of furniture you can, as every stat will be helpful to improve, and drawbacks can easily be shored up with other furniture.
If you're strapped for cash in the early game, though, we highly recommend you focus on upgrading your Appeal first. Appeal improves the quality of strays that show up at the house, increasing your chance to find cats with higher stats for you to pass from generation to generation. You’ll be trapped in a loop of mediocrity if you don’t start getting better strays!
After Appeal, focus on Comfort to increase your capacity and the frequency of breeding, and Stimulation to increase your chances that cats will inherit abilities and the stronger of the two parents' stats. Health is fine to keep at zero (just keep the House clean of poop and corpses), and Mutation is good to upgrade when you get the chance, but furniture for it populates pretty rarely, and it gives a chance for random mutations to happen in the House. If you're focused on good breeding, Appeal, Comfort, and Stimulation is the winning combination!
Separate The Winners
Once you donate your first cat to Frank, you'll unlock a second room: your home's attic! Unlocking the next room will be quite the lengthy task, with the third room requiring 25 more cats to be donated to Frank. So, you will likely only have the living room and attic of the House to work with for a while.
However, having these separate rooms is a very useful tool! Focus your furniture in the lower room to improve breeding conditions, and relegate growing kittens and weaker cats to the attic. This way, you'll improve the breeding of the living room, while the attic just gives the occasional extra kitten for you to donate to Tink.
As you progress further, deep into Act 2 or early in Act 3, you'll get a third room for your house. When you do, it's good to even further specialize your rooms, and cater your furniture to goals in certain rooms. We recommend the following setup:
- The Breeding Room: This room should be reserved for only your best retired cats. You want cats with strong base stats (at least one should be 7!), powerful abilities, and helpful mutations. Focus on building up Comfort and Stimulation, which affect frequency of breeding, and likelihood of kittens inheriting favorable stats and abilities, respectively. Boosting other stats is a good idea here, too! Once two cats have a kitten, move one of them to another room to avoid inbreeding!
- The Preparation Room: This room should be strong cats that have yet to go on an Adventure, with strong stats but few abilities to pass down. In this room, focus on building up Mutation and Health. Mutation will increase the chance for cats to evolve and gain mutations, as well as curing diseases and injuries.
- When you unlock a furniture idol from Stacy that increases the frequency of fights, put it in this room! This will allow the cats in here to fight more often, and reap greater rewards when they do!
- The Safe Room: This room should be for cats that you may not want breeding to avoid incest, but you want to keep around for uses like defending against House Bosses. In here, focus on keeping Health and Comfort high to make sure nothing goes wrong!
Keep the Families Separate
If you can help it, keep cats of the same lineage out of the same room! Inbreeding will lead to weaker (and uglier) cats, with heavier penalties the more inbred cats become. Birth defects, especially, will cause issues as inbreeding intensifies. You're better off sending most cats with defects to Dr. Beanies for his research, or simply sending them to Tink!
Treasure Your Mutations
Remember how we said 7 was the maximum for base stats? As you get to later areas, strong mutations will be key to reach even higher! Make sure you look at cats' mutations and see what are worth keeping. Are there no downsides? If so, that cat is absolutely worth keeping around! Even if there is a drawback, sometimes the pros will still outweigh the cons.
As an example, take an arm mutation that grants +2 Constitution, but -1 Dexterity. If you decide to make the cat a close combat class, like a Fighter or a Tank, you won't even notice the missing Dexterity!
On the other hand, beware of defects! Typically the result of inbreeding, these offer negative effects that will be passed down. These can really hamper cats, and no matter how good you feel they still are, their defects can cause a myriad of problems.
