Dragon Deities joining the game Here you can learn the basics of keeping your dragons and using them for forum game play. Types // Battle Card // Stages // Castles // Getting Dragons // Aging Dragons // Active & Inactive Dragon Types DD Dragons can come in a variety of shapes, colours and types. No matter how strange and diverse our dragons get, they have been designed so that each dragon will fit into one of the seven different dragon types / categories. Western Dragon Thick long body, four legs, bat-like wings Western Drake Thick long body, four legs, no wings Eastern Imperial Dragon Serpant-like body, four legs, usually lion mane, and two long whiskers Hydra Multiple heads and necks Wyrm No wings or legs, serpant-like Wyvern 2 legs, 2 wings (usually bat or feathered) Amphiptere No legs, just wings (usually bat or feathered) Battle Card The Battle Card was created to keep everything a little bit more simple and solid when it comes to the stats of your dragon. You see, there are so many stats involved with these dragons that we needed some way to keep them all organized and easily accesable. Understanding how the battle card is set up can really help you when you begin putting your dragon(s) in events and getting him or her ready for Battle Season! Below is a diagram of a battle card for an Earth Dragon... depending on your dragon's element, the card will be coloured differently. Each card will have your dragon's pixel portrait on it in the top rectangle of the card. Also in the top rectangle of the card wil be the name of your dragon, your dragon's type, your dragon's immediate parents (its up to you to keep track of your dragon's family tree...), your dragon's bond-god's name and the element he/she rules, and finally a symbol for your dragon's gender. There are five colours that a battle card comes in... blue (wind), aqua (water), green (earth), red (fire), and grey (time). The bottom rectangle of your battlecard is where it gets a little more complicated. There should be two large rectangles and eight smaller ones located in the bottom rectangle. There are seven small rectangles that are really two boxes that stand side by side... (so really there are 14 squares) in the left ones there are symbols (droplet, star, heart, wing, fire, arrow, and diamond) and in the right ones are numbers (1-5). These are your dragon's physical stats (aka Inherited or Natural stats). Droplet = Intelligence Star = Agility Heart = Loyalty Wing = Speed Fire = Temperment Arrow = Endurance Diamond = Strength For the most part you'll be wanting each one of these stats to be as high as possible because the higher the stat the better the dragon is within each of these realms. 5 would be strongest, fastest, most intelligent, most loyal... and so on, while 1 would be least. However, Temperment is a little bit funny because it really depends on what you want to do with your dragon whether or not you want your dragon to be short tempered (5) or really docile (1). But you'll figure that out as you play... Now, in the largest of the rectangles within the bottom rectangle should be three letters... C,M,B... they are there to desribe your dragon's Powers. Each dragon is born with mystical powers that are inhereited from the God and Goddesses of the Elements... their three highest powers are recorded on their BattleCard with their Level of Ability recorded on the side (1-10... 10 being high and 1 being low). The 'C' means that the dragon can CALL something... in this particular case Merenwae can call Earthquakes to do her bidding. The 'M' means that they can MOVE something with their MIND... in this particular case Merenwae can move boulders, stones, and rocks of any sort and size with her mind. Finally, the 'B' means that they can BECOME or shift their BODY in some way... Merenwae can Liquify herself to fend off an attack. When a certain power that a dragon has is connected to their Bond-God... (like in the case of Merewae both her call and move abilities are elemental earth abilities and her bond god is the goddess of earth) that power is heightened upon birth. You can already see this recorded on Merenwae's battle card as both of her earth powers are higher than her water power. Finally... Resistance and Piety. In the middle rectangle of the bottom rectangle of the battle card you can find Resistance and Piety... These are very special stats that serve to govern the rest of the the dragon's stats (namely his or her Powers). Before a battle a dragon owner can choose to use some of his or her Dragon Fortune to heighten their dragon's resistance or piety a wee bit to help their dragon win the battle. A dragon's Resistance plays against his or her opponent's Powers and Piety.... a dragon's resistance allows them to 'resist' against the other dragon's attacks (like a shield). A dragon's Piety ups the impact of their Powers on their opponent. Their ability can be from 100 to maybe even in the thousands depending on the dragon. The last box on the BattleCard is the little one in the bottom righthand corner... it is the ID number of the dragon. Merenwae looks to have been the 45th dragon introduced into the game. Dragon Stages DD dragons hatch from eggs and then grow quite rapidly until they reach their full size... but between their being laid and their hatching one of the great Deities will 'bond' with it and their spirit will live within that dragon. To show the life cycle of a DD dragon and their mystical awakening in cyberpet form there are three stages that DD dragons come in. When you first receive your dragon it will be in an egg form, obviously... but then instead of the next stage being a hatchling... we thought that it was more important whom they bonded with... so the next stage is a symbol of their Bond-God and LifeForce... and finally, the last stage is their adult form. Below are the three stages that Merenwae came in... The colour of the egg will not necissarily help you to determine which bond-god will end up bonding with your dragon... with Merenwae, it just turned out that way. The colour of the egg you receive indicates two things... the colour of dragon who laid it and the colour the dragon that will hatch out of it. But even this is a little deceiving as it may not be completely accurate... you may get a blue egg with red spots and end up with a red dragon... but usually, the egg will help you to determine the colour of your dragon. When you receive your egg, you must put it up on your DD website (on your active dragons page) for showcase. A dragon egg is considered an active dragon, so if you have three dragons active... you must put one to rest to be able to receive your dragon egg. Once a bond-god has bonded with your egg, you will receive the next stage. You must then remove the egg and post the lifeforce or bondgod symbol stage on your active page of your DD website. You can keep a collection of all your past stages of all your dragons on a seperate webpage if you like. When you receive your lifeforce stage you will be prompted to send the chosen name for your dragon. You will send two names... a name if its female and a name if its male. There are only two rules in the naming of your dragons... 1) The first letter of your dragon's name must start with the first letter of its bond-god's name (Merenwae was given her name because Milanna, the goddess of earth, is her bond god)... and 2) your dragon's name must be only one word. Other rules are a given; like no rude, crude or offensive names. Soon your dragon will grow to its final stage and this stage will be sent to you along with your dragon's BattleCard / Stat Card. This is when you will learn all about your dragon and be able to either start playing with him or her right away or decide to put him or her to rest while you play other dragons first. Creating Your Castle So, first thing you'll need now that you are a brand new DD player, is a place to house your dragons. In Pixel Ponies you now need to buy land to house your ponies, So lets say for argument's sake that we're living in the medieval norman times of britian (and the rest of europe) and instead of buying land to keep your ponies on, you need to build a big norman style castlated keep for your dragons. As you get more dragons you'll need to expand your keeps to be able to house all of your dragons, so you keep building on to your keep and soon you'll find you have a castle on your hands! Without somewhere to keep your dragons, you really won't be able to do anything with them.. I mean, you cant really keep them in your backyard! You do this by purchasing little mini pixel icons the represent the capacity of your castle / website. You get to put them together however you want so that it makes a castle the way you want. This would just be a icon sort of thing to symbolize your 'castle'. One way of incoorperating this icon into your layout would be by making the castle into an image map and using each of the images of the keeps as links to the separate webpages that showcase the dragons whom would be living in the particular keep. You can do up your websites to be as simple or as exciting and beautiful as you want. You will not be given the leisure of editing the castle parts themselves but you can put them together (even overlapping each other) in MS Paint to the shape of a castle you want and you can colour them and shade them however you like... but no editting the castle partt shapes or sizes! What you buy is what you have. Each Keep must be represented in a separate webpage of your DD site, you can not have active and inactive dragons in the same keep. So you need at least two keeps if you have enough dragons to have some inactive and some active at the same time. Now, every castle needs a name (the name of your DD website) just as every separate keep needs a name. You name a castle by calling it "Castle/Home/Kingdom/etc of (a) -verb/adjective- -noun-" for example one could name their website Castle of Flaming Skies or Kingdom of Holy Lands. Then, judging on your castle's name you must stay with that theme for your Keep names... so if my castle's name is Castle of Flaming Skies then my keeps' individual names should have something to do with Flaming Skies. A keep webpage should showcase the dragons that live within it. (the url to unlock the second prize of the dragon deities treasure hunt is fghe dot html... right after the url for this website). All you need on each Keep webpage is the title of the Keep, maybe a short introduction or summary of what the keep is for and what stays in it and finally all the dragons within it. Your dragons should be listed with their names and should be linked to a separate page that you have created to hold each dragons' separate information. Your website should be easily navigated. Now, you can't just have random keeps standing all over the place, they need to be fortified by walls and arches and doors and things like that so that you can actually have a castle and not just a bunch of keeps or towers standing in a line on a hill somewhere. Additional castle parts can be suggested in the Grasslands section of the Picco Forum and will then be later added to this list. To purchase Castle Parts, check out the Village Shops! Attaining more Dragons First things first, I want to make this very clear... unlike other cyberpets, Dragon Deities is not just about hoarding all the dd dragons you can get your hands on. We would like you to go further with your cyberpet experience with Dragon Deities and play with your dragons, develope them, create sound bloodlines with excellent battle and prebattle records, and level them more than just breeding and breeding them every time you get a chance. Now that we have that out of the way, lets talk about how to attain more dragons. For one thing, you can check out the village shops to find out how to purchase additional dragons and custom dragons for real money. But you don't have to spend real money to buy dragons; you can buy and sell dragons on the picco forum using precious gems (our game's currency), you can breed your dragons to get more eggs that will later hatch, you can trade dragons between players... and once in a while there will be random dragon give-aways along with prizes that will become available on the Picco forum as well. How Your Dragon's Age DD Dragons (just as pixel ponies) age in pixel years... 1 RL Month = 1 Pixel Year. You are expected to keep track of the hatch-month of your dragon as it will age a pixel year every real-life month. You can breed any dragon once it is a pixel year old. However, a female dragon will not be completely fertile until she is two pixel years old and a male dragon will not be fertile until he is one pixel year old. Once a dragon reaches 25 pixel years old, it must be permanently retired. Because we can never tell for sure when a dragon that was caught from the wild was hatched we keep track of its capture-month instead of its hatch-month. Wild dragons will be considered fertile from the day you capture them until the day they are retired; they must be retired once they have been in captivity for 20 pixel years. Active and Inactive Dragons On the first of every month you will be given the opportunity to choose which of your dragons you are going to play for that month, if you are a novice you can only have three dragons active at a time and if you are a paying player you can have six dragons active at a time. Inactive dragons are not retired forever, just for the 'turn', 'pixel year' or real life month. Inactive dragons take up less room in dragon keeps, one could say they are sleeping or hybernating and don't need to be tended to. Eggs are considered ACTIVE so are Life forces... adult dragons can be either inactive or active... retired dragons are inactive, always. When a dragon hits 25 pixel years old, or a wild dragon 20 pixel years old... they are retired. The thing about having active and inactive dragons is that you can not have inactive dragons in the same keep as active dragons, the way to show this would be to physically move them around on your website. You need at least two keeps if you are going to have inactive and active dragons. A way to make the moving of dragons around easier would be to only post their image and name on the page of the keep and have it link to there own separate stats page so that you only have to move the name and image around when making them active or inactive. You can not breed inactive dragons, nor enter them in events or battles, nor give them resistance or piety boosts, nor have them up for stud... if you sell an inactive dragon the person who ends up buying it has to wait until the next month to set it to active. Please note that Dragons who are set to inactive continue to age.