Habitarium Break Strategy Guide

Long Break Tips

The next two sections of this guide include tips for longer breaks from Habitarium (about four days to as long as you are gone). Habitarium runs in real time, so time away will have a huge impact on your game if you don’t take steps to limit the impact.

Storing Away for Away Time

There are two important aspects of Habitarium--resources and petpetpets—which your Habitarium needs to function well. However, the lifespan of a petpetpet is only one week. Additionally, eggs produced by nesters will become broken after a long period of time if you don’t do anything with them. Also keep in mind that harvesting petpetpets only give you experience (XP) while the Habitarium is open. Therefore, if your vacation is over three days long, you should not hatch new eggs before you leave. The lifespan of the petpetpet will be over before they can produce enough XP to justify hatching the egg instead of discarding—remember that discarding an egg gives you 200 XP. With no petpetpets in your Habitarium, you’ll have to make sure you hoard enough eggs to replenish your population upon your return with some extras. Make sure the amount of eggs for each type of petpetpet is consistent with the ratio you like in your Habitarium.

For example: I have 2 soldiers, 6 nesters and 37 workers, so I’d make sure to have 4 soldier eggs, 8-12 nester eggs, and 45-50 worker eggs in my item bag before I leave. Then I’d have enough to refill my Habitarium’s population when I return, plus some extras in case petpetpets die.

Hoarding so many eggs means that you will have to harvest pretty much all the eggs laid by your nesters for the week before you leave. You may also want to consider hatching additional nesters before you leave to ensure you have enough eggs. While the extra nesters may result in lower amounts of XP produced for that week, it will definitely benefit you in the long run to be able to quickly get your Habitarium up and running when you return. If you hoard a lot of extra eggs, keep in mind that upon your return you can discard the extra extras for XP (200 XP each), though I personally like to keep a number of extra eggs available just in case.

Protect Your Buildings

As every Habitarium player knows, your buildings degrade over time and require fixing occasionally. However, there are ways to quickly and easily combat this destruction. The slowest way is to have your workers or soldiers repair the damage. However, when you come back from a break from your Habitarium, every building will likely be broken and needing repair, so the petpetpets would need to spend a lot of time repairing the damage. While repairing damage does give some XP, workers make much more while harvesting, so having them repair is not efficient.

Instead, there are two other options. The first is to buy hammers from the shop. The seed hammer repairs two levels of damage while the twig hammer repairs one. There is also a NC pebble hammer that repairs the building completely if you wish to use NC on your Habitarium. However, I’d only suggest the hammers if you have a plethora of resources and are not actively buying/building/upgrading/deleting nests (which is the best use of your resources).

The easiest and cheapest option is to store away your buildings in your item bag. Simply open your item bag before you leave and transfer all the buildings into it by clicking and dragging. You can’t place any buildings in the bag that have petpetpets in them or a nest with an incubating egg. Storages, however, will keep the amount of resources that have been stored in them from your harvesting petpetpets. You will notice that the resource amounts on the screen decrease when you place a storage in the item bag. Don’t worry, though! When you take the storage out and replace it in the Habitarium, the resources inside will be added back. The item bag will protect your buildings in the condition they were in when you placed them in the bag. So this is the perfect way to keep your buildings from being damaged when you are gone.

Also if you have neofriends that play Habitarium, they could help protect any buildings if you leave them out by repairing buildings with the daily friend Help Out. Helping friends gives the helper 50 XP, so if you aren’t helping your friends, I would suggest you do so. If you want help from your neofriends (if you don’t want to store your buildings away for some reason), a nice neomail to inform them and ask for help would be a good thing to do.

Short Break Strategy

Short breaks from Habitarium can be approached differently from longer breaks. I view short breaks as two or three days away. For these, the effect on your Habitarium is much less than if you were away for six or seven days; however, your Habitarium will suffer unless you take steps to protect it.

Buildings: Like the tip for long breaks from Habitarium, the best solution is to store your buildings away in your item bag until your return. Your buildings will be unaffected by your time away.

Nesters and Nests: For short breaks, your eggs should be safe from being broken by inactivity, so you should leave out your nests with your nesters on them. When you return, you will have made some XP while you were gone. Remember that nesters will still incubate the eggs while your Habitarium is closed.

Workers/Soldiers: Workers and Soldiers don’t do anything while the Habitarium is closed. So the best method to protect them and have them ready for your return is to place them in the houses/hospital/barracks. Make sure they are all in the buildings before you go! Sometimes the petpetpets are escape artists and it takes a few tries to get them to stay in the building. To make sure they are in the buildings, refresh after placing them and if you see any escapees drag them back into the house/hospital/barracks.

The End

Hopefully you have found this guide helpful. Enjoy your time away, but remember that your Habitarium is calling (and I’m sure your pets will miss you too).