Unlocks – At various stages in the game, you will be presented with a “bubble” indicating that an area/item needs to be unlocked. Generally, you must be at a certain level and have the designated amount of coins to open that area. However, sometimes you must be at a certain level, have the coins, AND provide an item from the game. These bubbles are presented so you will know that there is an area coming up where you will need a boatload of coins and possibly an item. 

While you CAN click on the bubble when you have met the criteria, I have found that the game will go more smoothly if you patiently wait for the game to direct you to that area. Players frequently post that they are having problems opening an area when it turns out that they were trying to click on a bubble before the game sends them there. It is only natural to want to open a new area as soon as you can because the graphics in this game are absolutely amazing. But, learning patience early will go a long way to dispelling frustration. 

Also, by opening one of these bubbles before the game directs you, you may run out of coins to continue with your current quests.

Crafting Items and Pets – The Laboratory becomes available/is introduced at Level 5. When you click on the laboratory icon, there will be a list of items that can be crafted on the left side of the page. Initially, some items will be locked; as you level up, they are unlocked. The right side of the screen will let you know what is required for crafting that item. Sometimes, an item will be unlocked, but will bear a ? in one of the fields. That just means that the HOS or ZZ in which this item is found has not been made available to you. 

When you have found all the components and click on the “get” button, circles will pop out on each side of the item you are crafting. Most of the items displayed in these bonus circles are “eye candy.” The only bonus items you will receive are coins, pet food, stamp, crystal ball, wand, lightning flash, or diamond. The number of coins you receive increases in increments of 3 coins as you level up in the game. On Level 5, your bonus coin bundle is 12 coins. Level 6 yields 15 coins; Level 7 yields 18 coins, etc. until at the current max Level of 122, you receive 363 coins in your bonus bundle. 

(The crystal ball, wand, and lightning flash are considered HOS "hints." The crystal ball will show you the location of every item in the scene. The wand will collect all six of the items listed to be found. The lightning flash will convert the scene back to "normal.") 

Also, on the left side, you will see another tab next to “Items” that will be a paw print. If you click on this tab, the pets available to be crafted will be displayed. As with the items, when you click on a particular pet, it will show you on the right side what components are necessary to craft that pet. As of December 2019, when you have crafted a pet, it will no longer show in the laboratory. It will, however, be shown on your “paw” tab of your inventory.

As stated earlier, Griffin (your first pet) is given to you at the beginning of Level 7. However, the remaining pets must be earned or crafted. Most of the pet eggs come from the Fortune Wheel; friends can also gift one to you. But, you can get 4 of the pet eggs by completing a particular level of an achievement: 

Egg for Flap-Eared Puppy -- Steer Clear, Level 2 
Egg for Gold-Bearing Turtle -- Lucky One, Level 3 
Egg for Hopping Tiger -- Dragon Fighter, Level 2 
Egg for Pink Piggy -- Breadwinner, Level 2 

Some pets have “eggs” and some do not. Some are regular/original pets, and some are seasonal pets. Also, there are 4 “exclusive” pets that become available when you reach Level 69 in the game. (These will be discussed when listing the character quests for that level.) 

You can “set” any pet you own to be the one you display in the lower left of your screen. To do this, just go to your Inventory, click on the paw tab, click on the pet, and select the “set” button. There are 5 different types of pet food: Simple, Special, Rare, Unique, and Exclusive. Click on the pet in your inventory, to see what type of food that pet requires. 

The pet info tab will also tell you what type of chest that pet can give, the percentage of the time you can expect to receive a chest type, and whether it is an event pet or original pet:
Original and Exclusive pets – no icon in upper right corner
Fall pets – pumpkin in upper right corner
Winter pets – snowflake in upper right corner
Spring pet – egg in upper right corner

When you feed your pet, you will receive a “goodie” chest. There are 5 types of chests: 
Wooden – receive 3 items; coins are 50 per bundle 
Iron/Bronze – receive 4 items; coins are 100 per bundle 
Silver – receive 5 items; coins are 200 per bundle 
Gold – receive 6 items; coins are 400 per bundle 
Platinum/Blue – receive 10 items; coins are 200 per bundle (These are only from the Exclusive/Level 69 pets) 

Contents of the chest will vary. Pet chests can deliver HOS, ZZ, and crafted items among the items you receive. Be advised that frequently relying on pet chests to get your items in the game can have a negative impact. By going into the HOS to get the items (and waiting for it to recharge), you will get airship items, pet food, and stamps. And if you also go into every other available HOS, the items build up quite nicely. Naturally, you need the pet food to feed the pets, but you also need an inordinate amount of the stamps to craft the various items as you progress in the game. 

After your pet has been fed, it will sleep…..the time varies for each pet. It is best to set/choose to display another pet immediately after you feed your pet. (Pets can be awakened for diamonds. It costs 1 diamond for each minute they sleep. So, if a pet sleeps for 1 hour, it would cost 60 diamonds to immediately awaken him/her. Many players have accidentally clicked on the sleeping pet. There is no pop-up asking if you want to awaken your pet….if you have the diamonds available, the pet is automatically awakened……and you are out bookoodles of diamonds for an errant click.) 

Reminder note: The Exclusive pets are explained in more detail in the questing list. There is a narrative at Level 69 to help explain some of the special things that happen in the game at that time. 

The Inventory – This is where you can see what items you have in inventory. It has been divided into sections with a circle icon for each section. The current icons we have are as follows: 

Satchel – for HOS and ZZ items 
Paw – for pets you have acquired 
Stamps – stamps and thank you postcards ….. Your Gift for a Friend boxes will also be here 
Lab beaker – crafted items 
Eggs – pet eggs you have collected that you have not “hatched” yet 
Blimp – airship items 
Event – event items 
Amulet – current amulets you have received 

Most of the inventory is self-explanatory, except there is one area of confusion. Regular pet eggs will be on the “Egg” tab. However, any seasonal pet egg will be on the “Event” tab because they are event specific. So, if you get a Fire Rooster egg or a Reindeer egg, you will find it in the event section of inventory. 

The green, blue, red, and golden eggs that you see on the Events tab are “pet associated” eggs, but they are not pet eggs. When a pet requires this type of egg, it is in multiple amounts…..see Baby Boy, Baby Girl, Cook as examples. These eggs are explained in more detail in the Fortune Wheel section.  

Added note: You will see Gift for a Friend boxes on your Stamp page of inventory. These boxes come randomly when completing an HOS. For many months, they had no value or use -- that changed when the Christmas private room was created. When you click on a friends' tree in their Christmas room 1 or their Santa sack in Christmas room 2, you get a popup telling you how many of the gift boxes you have and asking you if you want to leave one for your friend. Clicking yes will give that friend some random game item, will remove one gift box from your inventory, and you will receive a Santa Medallion as a thank you.

Friends – The friends aspect of the game is introduced at Level 6 when Just John shows up. Just John is a computer generated friend, not a “real” friend, hence the reason for his level being 121. You have 2 “slots” available to you for free to post items you hope your friends will gift to you. There are 2 other slots that you can unlock for 5 diamonds each. It is to your advantage to spend the 5 diamonds on each of these slots so you can post more items and give friends more choices. When you receive a gift, the “mailman” icon will show up on the upper right portion of your screen to let you know that “you’ve got mail!” 

To add a friend, please refer to the various posts/lists for friends. They will be listed by platform. You add a friend by sending them an invite using their game ID or the exact name displayed in the list. Since some players post notes/info after their game name, it’s best to use the game ID for sending invites. Again, you can only send a friend request to a player who is playing in your same platform.  

You can gift up to 15 different friends each 24-hour day. There are 3 gifting time slots: 
1 to 8 hours from the GMT day roll
9 to 16 hours from the GMT day roll
17 to 24 hours from your GMT day roll. 

Those actual times will vary depending on where you live. And, if you are in an area that observes “day light savings” time, or something similar, the local times for your gifting will change. 

For instance, the gifting times for CST in the US are from: 
6:00 pm to 1:59 am 
2:00 am to 9:59 am 
10:00 am to 5:59 pm. 

However, when day light savings starts, the local gifting times change as follows: 7:00 pm to 2:59 am; 3:00 am to 10:59 am; and 11:00 am to 6:59 pm. 

You will notice that there are green and red indicators at the top left of each friend card. This indicates if a friend is active or inactive. This can be helpful in determining if you want to continue to gift this person. General info on sending/receiving friend requests: 

1. If you send an invite to them, YOUR invite to them will be in your Invited folder.....ON THEIR SOCIAL PAGE, your invite to them will be in their New Requests folder until they either accept or decline. 

2. If they decline, YOUR invite goes to THEIR Declined folder, but the invite remains in your Invited folder until you decide to remove it. 

3. If they accept, their card goes to the back of your friends’ folder until their wish list is published by the server. They then go to their alphabetical place with your other cards. 

4. If EITHER PLAYER then deletes the other one......the one who does the deleting will have the deleted player in their Declined folder........the one who was deleted will see the other player's card in their Invited folder. If you then remove it from your Invited folder, it will disappear from the declining friend's Declined folder. If you never delete your card from the Invited folder, your card will remain in the other player's Declined folder until BFG does their periodic clean up of that folder. 

5. There is no way for a player to remove cards from their Declined folder except to accept them back as a friend (BFG periodically purges the contents of this folder). 

There was a short, short period of time in the Fall of 2016 when in-game messaging was enabled for the PC players. For about 3 to 4 days, we were able to click on the green indicator…..get a pop-up box…..and be able to type a very short message to that player (it may have been all of about 50 characters at the maximum). However, several players were experiencing issues with the feature. The message had to be manually deleted. There were a few players whose message (meant for one friend) got sent to several other friends. 

As a result, the feature was disabled and was not pushed out to iOS or to Android. Some day we hope to have that feature return as it was quite helpful. (Currently, the only way to contact a friend is through the forum PM capability, and not all players know about/participate in the forum.) 

When you view a friend’s list, the items will display with the item that you have the most of on the far left side. If you select an item, you will get a pop-up telling you how many you have in inventory. It will also ask you if you want to gift this item to this friend. If you say yes, your inventory is reduced by one of those items and it is sent to that friend. 

If a friend has an item on their wish list that shows up (to you) in red, that means you do not have any of this item in your inventory. Sometimes this will be a more senior player asking for an item that has not yet become available to you, or you might just not have any of this item in inventory. For many of the items, you can choose to either purchase that item with diamonds or coins. However, some items can only be purchased with diamonds – seasonal items and pet eggs are two of those type of items. .... Only items purchased with diamonds (not coins) count toward the Market Master achievement. 

You may read in the forum about players “swapping” items. Some of the achievements require you to “get” a certain amount of an item. However, you do not necessarily need to have that many of the item in inventory. So, if I send you a snowflake, my inventory is reduced by one snowflake and you get credit for “getting” a snowflake in your achievement. If you send that snowflake back to me – then your inventory is reduced by 1 snowflake (but your achievement total remains the same) and my achievement is credited with getting 1 more snowflake. So, we can swap that same one snowflake back and forth many times until we each meet the achievement requirement. 

Most players want to have more than Just John as a friend. As mentioned previously, the 3 platforms have different software structures, so they cannot communicate with each other. If you play on Android, your friends must also be on Android. If you want to play MC on both PC and iOS, then you will be playing 2 entirely different games – you cannot send gifts from PC to iOS or Android.