Dragonbred Beginner's Guide to Your First Week as a Keeper

Your first week in Dragonbred comes down to three habits: keep your incubator trays full, read every clutch for what it tells you about the parents, and spend your early Scales on the starter steps before anything else. This beginner's guide walks through the week in order, with the numbers you need at each step.

You start with 200 Scales and an empty pen, and the tutorial hands you a free crate with a breeding pair and an Instant Card. That is enough to breed, hatch and open a crate on day one without spending a cent.

What you start with

Every new account starts with an empty pen. The tutorial's free crate fills it, built to teach the basics.

The pair are old: their one clutch is their last, and they die laying it. What hatches is your first stock, a Striped and its normal-looking brothers and sisters. The pair and the Striped they hatch are yours to keep, breed and release, but never to sell or trade. Every dragon is named Dragon# plus a short tag until you rename it, and your first rename is free.

Day one: the tutorial clutch

The tutorial is short and worth doing properly. It's played on the game's own screens, one line at a time beside the thing to tap (some keepers get a quick gene game first): open your free crate, breed the pair inside, put the clutch in the incubator, use the Instant Card, crack the eggs, decide what to do with a hatchling, then take your first level and a free first skill, Rested Wings.

The two dragons in the crate are hidden carriers, proven het Striped. Both look Normal, both carry one Striped gene. When you put them in the pairing boxes on the Breed tab, the odds cards show what each egg could be: 25% Striped, 75% Normal-looking. Breed them, move the clutch into a tray, and spend the crate's Instant Card to finish warming at once.

Crack the eggs. Out of the tutorial's clutch comes a Striped, and one egg fails in the incubator, the lesson that eggs can fail. In your own clutches nothing is promised: each egg rolls on its own.

The next step is the important one. The normal-looking babies from that clutch are each 67% het Striped. You can't see which ones carry it. Finding out is the game, and hets and possible hets explained shows exactly where that 67% comes from.

Collect the starter steps first

Five starter steps pay 260 Scales in total, and the last one adds a sealed Iron Crate. Most of them you will finish in the first day or two just by playing.

The tutorial covers Open a crate, Breed a pair and Hatch a clutch straight away, 140 Scales waiting for you. Remember to collect each reward; finishing a step doesn't pay it on its own.

Days two and three: fill your trays

You start with three incubator trays. Each holds one whole clutch, and a clutch warms for 3 minutes to 4 hours by the rarest egg it could hatch (an hour if that's a Rare), even while the game is closed. Eggs never hatch by themselves, so check in and crack them when they are ready. The hatchlings then move to the nursery, a place of their own apart from the trays, and grow up there for about a day before they can breed; feed them when you drop in to take a couple of hours off. If your trays are full, new clutches wait in the nest and move in when a tray frees up.

Good second pairings, once a crate or the market has filled out your pen:

• Golden × Normal. Half the babies show Golden. Simple, and it gets you spare Goldens.
• Golden × Spotted. Each egg has a 25% chance of showing both genes, and two looks together grade higher than either alone.
• Striped × Normal. Pair the tutorial's Striped with an unrelated Normal: every baby looks Normal, and every one carries Striped. Pairings whose odds show only Normals warm in 3 minutes.

Every dragon has a breeding life of 4 to 10 clutches, counting each clutch it lays or sires, and it dies laying its last one. Any clutch can be fatal before that too: very rarely on its first two, more likely with every clutch after, and more likely again if the dragon is inbred. The Breed tab shows which clutch a pairing would be and the chance each parent dies laying it, so save your best dragons for the pairings that matter. Once a dragon has bred it can't be sold or traded, so sell young stock before you breed it.

Before you breed anything from your first clutch, check the kinship warning. The tutorial babies are brothers and sisters, and the game will tell you so if you try to pair two of them. Inbred pairings lay fewer eggs and hatch fewer of them, so pair them out to unrelated dragons instead.

Days three to five: prove a het

Proving a het is worth 80 Scales, the biggest starter reward, and it teaches you the core skill of the game.

Once it has grown up, take one of the normal-looking babies from the tutorial clutch, a 67% het Striped, and pair it with a Striped of the opposite sex. If the baby really carries Striped, each egg has a 50% chance of hatching Striped. One Striped egg is all it takes. The moment it hatches, the parent is stamped PROVEN, and the step pays out. The tutorial's own Striped will do if the sexes match, but they are brother and sister, so that clutch is 25% inbred; an unrelated Striped from the market costs you no eggs.

If the clutch comes out all Normal, that tells you something too. The "What the clutch taught you" panel will show the het chance dropping, and a second clutch will push it lower still. Reading breeding odds covers how to plan pairings like this.

Your first crate and the market

Crates are how new stock arrives. Each one holds dragons and sometimes bonus Scales or an Instant Card, never eggs. A Wooden Crate costs 100 Scales for three dragons, each with an 8% chance of being a morph. An Iron Crate holds three or four dragons at 35% each; it costs 100 Embers, the currency bought with real money, but you get one free from the starter steps, and other keepers sell them sealed on the market for Scales.

The Daily Pass brings crates too. Claim its reward each day you log in: the free track gives a Wooden Crate on day 2 and a Lava Crate on day 7.

Open crates early for fresh bloodlines, which help you avoid inbreeding. Don't buy crates expecting profit, though. On average a crate returns about a third of its price; its value is in variety and hidden genes. Crates explained covers each crate in full.

For the List a dragon step, put up a spare on the market: a grown dragon that has never bred. Prices run from 10 Scales upward, a listing stays up until it sells or you take it down, and the seller pays a 10% fee.

Two other ways to turn spare dragons into Scales:

• Orders. Three buyers a day each ask for a clutch from one of your own pairs. Breed the pair and the whole clutch goes to the buyer unhatched, for one and a half times what releasing it would pay.
• Releasing. Releasing a grown dragon pays by grade, from 8 Scales for a Common up to 132 for a Mythic, plus 8 for each proven het. A baby still growing up pays less: a quarter as a hatchling, rising to three quarters when almost grown. You get 10 seconds to undo.

Days five to seven: plan your first project

By the end of the week you should have a feel for the loop. Now pick a goal. The Breed tab has two tools for this: the Planner, which ranks every pairing in your pen for a target look, and Pairs to try, which suggests looks your pen can make but doesn't have yet.

A good first project builds on what you already own. A dragon showing both Striped and Golden takes two generations. Pair the tutorial's Striped with a Golden from a crate or the market: half the babies show Golden, and every one of them is het Striped. Then pair a Golden baby with an unrelated Striped, and each egg has a 25% chance of showing both.

The skill tree starts with a short trunk: Rested Wings (the tutorial's free skill), then Roomy Pen and Warm Nest, which opens the Breeder, Trader and Keeper branches. Two things past it are worth your skill points as your pen grows:

1. 1Hatch level. Hatching starts at Fair. Each rank of Strong Shells in the Breeder branch adds two levels, to Strong and then Superb.
2. 2More trays. Extra Tray, the first skill of the Keeper branch, adds a tray a rank, up to six.

Keep an eye on room, too. Your inventory holds 500 items in total, and breeding needs room for six eggs. Dragon genetics 101 is the next thing to read once you're ready to plan bigger. Then head back to Dragonbred and fill those trays.

Frequently asked questions

What should I do first in Dragonbred?

Play the tutorial, which opens a free crate, breeds the proven het Striped pair inside and hatches their clutch with the crate's Instant Card. Then collect the starter steps, which pay 260 Scales for things you'll do anyway.

How long do Dragonbred eggs take to hatch?

A clutch warms in an incubator tray by the rarest egg it could hatch: 3 minutes for Commons, 10 for an Uncommon, an hour for a Rare, two for an Epic or Mythic and four for a Legendary. The hatchlings then grow up in the nursery for about a day before they can breed, and an Instant Card skips one clutch's wait: its eggs are ready, or its brood grows up, at once.

Can I breed my hatchlings right away?

No. A brood grows up in the nursery for about a day first (half that for members), and feeding it or an Instant Card brings that forward. Once grown, avoid pairing siblings from the same clutch, since inbreeding costs eggs and hatch chance.

How do I get more Scales as a new keeper?

Starter steps, the Daily Pass, Orders, market sales and releasing spare dragons all pay Scales. An order pays one and a half times what its clutch would release for, so check your orders before you pair up.