Zen Koi

[queer_scribbling]

Are there important things I should be doing? Yes.

Did I decide to take advantage of the new phone actually having space for a frivolous app? Yeah.

Is it possible that I'm a smidge embarrassed by how much I like the game so far? Maybe.

Zen Koi

It's Zen Koi from LandShark Games.

It doesn't take a lot of skill, really. It's not fast paced. You play as a koi, level up by eating different food items in the pond (to increase your speed and agility), and if you eat certain food items, you can make gems that will expand the pond (introducing new food). Once you get the last pond expansion, the koi levels up to a dragon, and really, if you do it once, you've probably covered most of what will happen in the game. The part that changes and keeps most people interested on repeating the whole cycle is that you can breed your koi with those introduced in the game and collect the different patterns. (Your rarity stat influences whether the mate will be common or rare.)

Granted, this depends on whether you have an empty slot on your egg list, which can only hold eight eggs, so it's entirely possible that your koi can ascend to a dragon without a mate being introduced to the pond. (One workaround to this is to ascend the koi on your 'My Koi' list, which only starts out with three slots, because dragons have a separate list, and an empty koi slot means you can hatch an egg. Or you can buy additional koi slots with the in-game currency [pearls].)

Did I find out that I'm a few years too late to trying this game, so most info is aimed at Zen Koi 2? Unfortunately. I think Zen Koi came out in 2015 and Zen Koi 2 left beta in 2018, maybe? Most content about Zen Koi seems to be dated to 2016 at any rate.

Anyway. This is the landing post for personal chatter about the game, which will be in the comments. I highly doubt that I'll be playing this on an aggressive collector approach.

Game started: 1 Jan 2021 || Originally posted on Pillowfort: 2 Jan 2021 || Archived here on Dreamwidth: 19 Sept 2024

Comments

[queer_scribbling]

2 Jan 2021 (1 pm, EST): I'm doing the "I went into this game cold with no strategy or prior knowledge of the game play involved" strategy.

This means that I let my first few koi breed with all available mates, filled up my Egg List super quickly, had to ascend koi to dragons without letting some color patterns breed, and probably will mean I won't finish this particular koi collection.

Apparently, there's a clone feature, so you can keep a particular color pattern to finish getting all possible color patterns from offspring while ascending the original koi to dragon. I know there's a release option after your koi have bred and you see the possible offspring (details on the Egg List), and it's possible to release a koi after it's hatched if you get a repeat. That's just not quite useful yet because I've just started out and have zero repeats, you know?

[queer_scribbling]

Breeding note: Once your koi has leveled up to level 4, it's an adult. Mates will appear once you're at the halfway point in a level. Mates will not appear (and you'll get a notification telling you that a mate can't come yet) if your Egg List is full, but they also may not appear if you're leveling up in one of the smaller pond levels (prior mate is "too close"), you've just hatched one of the eggs (offspring are "too close"), or you leveled up your koi too quickly.

~

Breeding quibble: There's got to be some nerdy notes about what color patterns will produce each possible offspring out there that I'm just not finding right now. I'm not sure if I should ascend a particular koi without worrying about breeding it because I've already got its possible offspring or not. (You'd think with certain Achievements being a direct result of breeding certain color patterns would mean someone's got notes out there.)