i've only been playing a couple of weeks, and i'm much more invested than i expected to be.

i joined beast keeper because i was looking for a breeding game where i could pick a goal, work towards it, and not be slowed down by long breeding cooldowns. also no forced pet death or limited lifespans. that's a dealbreaker for me.

this is an old petsite, and its breeding system is an interesting mix of oldschool petsites where a "colour" is a singular appearance for the entire pet, and newer breeding sites where one pet can have many different colours showing at once.

pets can still only have one singular appearance, but that appearance is determined by colour and pattern - two different genes - expressed in combination. the skin library demonstrates how this works as a  punnet square. this lets you preview all possible pet art, of all species.

there's also a genetic library that explains how genes affect pets. note the "group" of each gene. appearance genes are right at the bottom, under "skin pattern" and "skin colour".

each pet has two genes per slot(group): one dominant, one recessive. in the pattern and colour slots, the dominant gene affects how the pet looks (other genes are for breeding health, crafting, and combat) but the recessive gene can be passed on in breeding. if two pets with the same recessive gene breed, the offspring can express that gene. this can result in two brown unicorns producing a white foal.

unlike most other sites, a pet's genes are hidden from you and you have to pay to "research" them. it costs 1 vermillion (a fairly rare, but infinitely replenishable, resource found in the explore minigame) and 100 currency per gene. you can research 1 at a time - and you can't choose, it randomly researches 1 gene - or if you can afford it you can research all at once. you can make some guesses about a pet's genes based on what you can see. obviously if it's green, it has dominant green gene - if it and its mate were black but the offspring is yellow, then both parents must have recessive yellow gene. once you understand how stats and genes interact, you can guess on the other stat-based genes by looking at the stats, at least to an extent.

if a pet's recessive and dominant gene is the same in the colour slot, marking slot, or both, that pet has a 1 in 10 chance of showing the "deviant" version. on some species a deviant marking is just a different pattern, such as on the unicorn or dragon. on other species, it changes the anatomy, too. the gryphon, puma, and cockatrice are good examples of this. deviant colour only changes the overall tone on any species.

sadly, some pet species don't have deviants (yet? i've seen the site admin talk about adding them)

unfortunately, same-species breeding only. also unfortunately: pets have a finite number of breedings. it's somewhat randomly determined, but the number is influenced by a couple of gene slots. a female with the exact same genes will, on average, have half the number of max breedings as a male.

that's not the only advantage males have: when bred, a female gets pregnant. she can't do anything for 24 hours until the offspring is born, whereupon she immediately recovers (no cooldown). the male can continue to do anything that pet would ordinarily be allowed to do, including breed more females. sex odds seem even, and there's no sex-change item or way to influence offspring sex. it's just random.

babies become adults in 3 days, and can breed immediately on adulthood. that's 4 days from breeding a pair to getting another breeding adult.

while i did originally balk at seeing that my first pet could only breed 20 times (it has bad genes, the number is usually higher than this), having played for a while i do get it. with pet appearance being restricted to a very specific set of tabulated options, and with deviance (generally, more visually interesting pets) being "have the same gene in both slots with 10% chance of success", it would be much easier to get a deviant - or really, any goal pet - by breeding a pair over and over until it happened. i imagine it's also to keep overall pet population down, due to the insanely fast reproduction rate. i decided to accept and work with that limitation, and honestly, i'm having a lot of fun.

it's probably too early to assess the true realities of breeding but overall: this is a breeding site with interesting genetics, rare pets i want, and fast breeding. exactly what i was looking for. i'm having a lot of fun, and i was delighted to discover beast keeper.

i really do feel like it's a fun game, and it's held back by its small userbase.

i have a hard time judging artwork on petsites, because by the nature of the game i'm going to be looking at the pet art a lot. the same art, multiple times a day, every day, for probably a long time (if i like the site, and in this case i do). there's a strange kind of...at once desensitiation to the art, and over-familiarisation with it. so i'm going to notice every problem with the art that exists, down to the last pixel, from tangents to inconsistent lighting to awkward or impossible poses to nonsensical anatomy to weird proportions or incoherent perspective....

also, on a long-running site like beast keeper that keeps adding new pet art over time, the oldest art will look very different to the newest, and it can be jarring to see them side-by-side.

dragons have no visible distant wing, but they stand in perfect profile and the near wing is quite well extended, so it's entirely possible that the distant wing is entirely obscured by the near wing. but, that's why drawing in perfect profile is weird. also, the dragon has three feet on the ground and they all line up exactly, making it look like the near foot is at an angle and held directly underneath the belly.

the unicorn art has that very specific level of surrealistic realism that you only ever seem to see in Horse Art drawn by Horse Artists. it contrasts so strongly with the much more cartoonish, less detailed, and weirdly-proportioned dragon.

the later species get increasingly more detailed and interesting, and some even deviate from the "walking in profile" Generic Petsite Pose¢¢

but i still really like both the dragon and unicorn art, and all the other art. i see flaws in them, patterns, familiarites. but those things don't make the art inherently bad. okay the dragon does stand out a lot next to the other species, but i'm still collecting dragons. it reminds me a lot of traditional dragon art, and i like that about it.

also, i feel this is the place to mention beast keeper has a custom skins sytem with a functional market where you can buy any skin made by any player for the fee they set. you need a premium currency item to apply the skin, and then it's permanently stuck to your pet. you can take it off, but that deletes the skin. if you release the pet, the skin goes with it. yeah this is...odd IMO but i don't have or expect to ever get premium currency so this doesn't really effect me.

i ticked n/a (i had to copypaste that slash because for some reason if you try to type slash on this site it highlights the search bar) not because there is no story - there does seem to be- but because i don't notice or care about stories on petsites. it's not what i'm there for, i usually stop reading as soon as i realise what i'm looking at is Lore¢¢ and not useful information about how things work. so i really can't judge something i wouldn't even notice the absence of.

there are very few players online at any one time, which certainly makes the market weird. lots of items aren't for sale, or if you try to sell them, no-one will ever buy even if yours is the only sale and it's cheap as chips. same goes for pets. certain colours, species, or colour-pattern combos just aren't on the market. it's making breeding for a specific deviant perhaps more of a challenge than it might otherwise be with a bigger userbase, but i'm enjoying that.

in terms of how people actually behave....seems fine? as is often the case in ghostly quiet petsites, a couple of people seem to be all over the forums and they seem very friendly and eager to help new players, so while there isn't a lot of community here, i think it's a good community.

might be too early for me to rate this one, i'm aware of certain elements of gameplay i haven't touched at all.

i'll list the things i haven't touched first just to make it known they exist: an apparel crafting system, a custom apparel system (though there's no market like for skins so? not sure what's going on there.), pvp battles, a new-blood first-generation pet RNG generator, and some kind of text adventure creation and sharing tool. yeah that one surprised me too.

as for the stuff i have experience with. first off, there is limited inventory space and boy is the limit tiny. 20 items - that's 20 stacks of unique items, not 20 items total. 100 wood only takes up 1 slot. the problem is, the place where you get items (explore) gives you way more than 20 types of items. and it's really unclear what's junk and what's useful. the list of recipes shows everything you can craft (except apparel, not sure where the recipes for that are documented if at all) and i really recommend CNTRL+F for every item you have, and if it can't be crafted into anything, just destroy it. don't even bother trying to sell it, it won't sell, and items for sale continue to take inventory space until actually sold. the only way to get your space back is to destroy the junk. also if it's only useful for high-level stuff, destroy it. once you have more space you won't be doing this any more, but trust me, with just 20 slots, you are ging to have to yeet stuff you don't have an immediate use for.

wood, stone, and clay are the things you want most, along with schemes and recipes for crafting things out of them. namely, "warehouse level 2" gets you 30 whole extra inventory slots and really opens up the game to feeling less like Inventory Management Simulator: Extreme Edition.

yeah i'm not being nice about this. i hate it. limited inventory space in a game with so many items and such an extensive crafting system is painfully punishing, it's not good, and beast keeper would be much better if it removed this particular mechanic entirely - or at least set the starting number to 100. also really resent that an item you've listed for sale still takes up space, which honestly might be the reason so many items aren't for sale at all. i tried to sell things to get space so i could pick up new (and more useful) items in explore, but didn't get the space back and had no choice but to cancel the sales and delete the items instead.

with the inventory issue aside, crafting requires pets. you use a scheme or recipe to learn how to make something, then when you have the ingredients you assign a pet with the necessary stats to do the crafting. it takes a few hours, during which time the pet can't do anything else. once the crafting is done, the completed thing is automatically added wherever it should be and you immediately gain whatever benefit it gives. the things you craft are permanent (except golems), but once you craft something, you forget the recipe and need to find another one if you want to make another one. which is....interesting. haven't really gotten far enough in to figure out how i feel about this yet. most crafted things are things you only ever need to make once, so in a way it's nice because it keeps your list of things to craft easier to navigate. and for golems, it definitely feels like necessary balancing given how they work.

you can craft a golem out of most resources in the game (including, meat, honey, ink, and a few other odd things...honestly some of the golems look great i'd love to have them as pets). all other crafting recipes require currency in addition to the ingredients, but golems are free. they just take a lot of 1 resource, a pet with the right stats, and nothing else. each day, the golem automatically adds some of its resource to your inventory, and reduces its lifespan by 1. i haven't figured out if you need to login every day or not for this to happen, and i'm earlygame enough that i'm not going to risk the loss. once the golem's lifetime reaches 0, it disappears, and you will have doubled the amount of whatever resource it was made of. a wood golem costs 50 wood to make and in total gives 100 wood.

most of the other things you craft are permanent buffs to your account, like more pet or inventory space, or a training ground for levelling pets, or the ability to craft apparel.

the explore minigame is where you get items from. it seems like petsites have exactly two different types of explore or adventure minigame. either it's a single button you repeatedly click with RNG giving you random stuff (or on some games, sometimes randomly taking stuff too) and now and again giving you a choice you probably click right past on autopilot....or it's a little grid that you move a character around and pick up items you stand on. beast keeper does the grid-pac-man thing. it has enemies, which some versions of grid-pac-man doesn't. those enemies have stats and levels (hover the enemy to see its level)  and if yours aren't good enough you will lose when you try to fight them.

there is also exactly one randomly-chosen event location in the map per exploration, and trying to walk into it interacts with it. these can be shops (one singular fixed item for sale, or one singular fixed item-for-item trade that's usually a really bad deal unless you're desperate for stone), boss battles (which you need a really good pet to beat but which gives great rewards), temporary pet debuffs, or weirder events like the genetic diversity programme i mentioned above. there's also a location that refreshes your pet energy.

only advice i have for explore: never fight on manual. it's one of the most basic combat systems i've ever seen, and you are more likely to lose on manual than if you set it to auto. sadly, it forgets your setting every session and resets it to manual so you will have to change it to auto every time you login.

pets have an energy or stamina or whatever you want to call it system. if your pet does something it loses energy. breeding costs 1 energy, losing a battle costs 1 energy. exploring is a kind of fixed action, it generates a new map to walk around and takes 5 energy from your pet. pets have 10 max energy so 2 explores per full energy bar. some things don't cost energy but do require it. quests (a "rng wants you to have this exact type of pet" style system, where the more specific the requirements are the more money you get for having the pet) require 5 energy but don't eat any, and crafting requires 10 but doesn't eat any.

speaking of eating, pets technically eat food but...yeah i don't understand food at all actually. i've read 3 different explanations of how it works and what it does (one of which says it costs money? or something?), they all say completely different things that contradict each other, and i can't observe anything going on food-wise. it feels like food is just taking up 6 inventory slots that could be going to other things. i don't know why i have it, i can't figure out what it does, i don't even know if i need it. all i can say is nothing bad seems to be happening to my pets vis-a-vis me not understanding how to feed them, when to feed them, or whether it even matters.

you can release unwanted pets to the pound. you get 500 currency per pet. you can only release adults. you can adopt one(1) pet from the pound per day, and i can't find a way to increase that. you can refresh the pound infinitely to see more pets, but it's completely random.

my advice for this: decide before you open the pound what you want. do you want a white unicorn? do you want a pet above level 10? sadly you can't view genes even if the pet's genes are researched because you can't view pet pages, so level and immediate appearance are all you can judge them by.you can adopt pets directly from their page, so save ID numbers of pets that look interesting alongside notes about why you wanted it because the pet's page doesn't tell you anything. when you're tired of refreshing pick the pet that seems it best serves your goal from the list you saved.

because all releaed pets go to the pound, and because all players get 1 pound pet per day if they choose to do that and remember to grab it in time...i'm going to assume that the pet population in the pound only ever goes up, and it is 99% junk. the most common species, in the most common colours and markings, are most of the pound's contents. and they're mostly level 1. i can imagine someone who's been in the game for a while would stop using the pound at all to get pets because there's a "new blood" pet rng system i haven't used yet that's probably much better once you can afford it. if you have patience and time there's some good pets in there.

never met them. seen admin forum posts that seem perfectly fine and reasonable? they behave like normal. i don't really know what to say.