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Setting Up a Game (Day 1)

Gurniak’s Guide to Starting a Neopets Account in 2018

Have you ever wanted to try Neopets, but don’t know how to succeed? Are you confused by the game guides, because of how much information is outdated? Want to redeem your 9-year-old self who couldn’t get anywhere and eventually abandoned your game? Look no further – Gurniak is here to help!

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(This portion of the guide will presuppose that you are starting a new account, though you can use most of this information when reviving an old account)

1. Sign up for Neopets! And use your actual birthday this time – you’re old enough to play, and if you can’t remember the fake birthday you might not be able to get in later which is why I started a new account instead of reviving my old one…

Pick your Neopet! If you want some ideas, you can check out all the Neopets here, and all expanded Neopet designs here (though be aware that not all Neopets and designs are easily available – your first choice is limited to pets that are not limited edition, and you get to pick the colors red, blue, yellow, or green).

Opening an account will award you 2,500 NeoPoints (NP) and a Starter Kit. Go to your inventory and place all items you won’t be using (petpets, starter brushes, etc.) in your Safety Deposit Box for now. You can also put the Fashionable Potato Sack in your closet…if you care. Keep out the food and toy, and feed and play with your pet.

2. Get your moneymaker and make some bank! Now go on your phone and download Ghoul Catchers, the Neopets app game (Google Play; Apple). This is a connect-3+ game that awards your Neopets account with up to 1000 NeoPoints per game play, up to a cap of 50,000 NP credited! (note: Most daily events in Neopets reset at 12:00AM NST, but this game does not. It seems to reset 24 hours from when you first opened it, and continues this cycle forever)

1 star in game play = 350 NP

2 stars in game play = 600 NP

3 stars in game play = 100 NP

You can play however you want, but the quickest way is to just replay level 1 over and over. I use a counter widget on my phone screen to keep track! (Tip: If that app starts crashing a lot, empty your phone’s cache)

3. Put some bank in the bank! So now you have a new Neopets account with 62,500 NP on your first day! Woohoo! Take 35,000 of it and open a bank account with it!

4. Optimize your NeoCash! Did you notice the 150 NC you were given along with your NP? Head over to the NC Mall. Now you may be thinking that you should buy a cool clothing item for your pet, but DO NOT. You want to get the most bang for your buck here, and clothes are just going to sit around looking pretty.

Buy a Faerie Quest Fortune Cookie instead; this item guarantees that you will have a faerie quest each day for 9 days. Faerie quests are simple jobs you are asked to do in exchange for stat boosts to your pets (which you will otherwise be paying a lot more for).

Go to your Inventory and split that sucker open, and open the Shop Wizard in a side tab. Go back to your first tab and go on a Faerie Quest! (while on a Faerie Quest, you aren’t allowed to use the SW, but if your tab is open before you accept, you’re able to use it). The Faerie will ask you to bring her an item, which shouldn’t cost too much money for you, since you made that playing Ghoul Catchers. Bring her the item, and BOOM – your pet is at least 20% buffer. You’re welcome. (You’ll want to get your pet fighting ready, because there are site events that require fighting in the Battledome).

5. Invest! Okay, so you’ve still got quite a bit of money left. Head on over to the Stock Market and find a stock selling for 15, preferably with the price rising (indicated in green numbers on the right-hand column), and buy 1,000 shares of it (for 15,000 NP). 1,000 is the max amount of shares you can buy per day, and 15 is the lowest price you can buy shares for. What this is going to do is multiply your money, but over a long time. This stock market isn’t like the real one – you can only really lose your money if you sell your shares for less than what you paid. It’s still your money, and you get to decide how much it turns into – if you can wait to sell it until it reaches a hundred, you’ll have turned 15,000 NP into 100,000 NP!

6. Train! Hit up the Shop Wizard again and search for One Dubloon Coin (should cost between 600-900 NP). Take it over to the Swashbuckling Academy and enroll your Pet in a course

The stat you will probably have to start with is level, because none of your other stats are allowed to be more than twice your level, but they start out that way. Weird, but eh.

There are other training schools, but this academy is the cheapest. It only trains pets through level 40, but it’ll be your starting block.

7. Play! You should be left with about 9,000-11,000 on hand. This is a good amount to keep on you at all times at this stage. Now you can go play games, but

Don’t obsess over the flash games or try to get high scores on your first try. Only play games that you like (other than Ghoul Catchers which is kinda boring but totally worth it). Oh, and play Fashion Fever because you just have to start and then end the game to make bank off of it.

Don’t go crazy with the Battledome just yet. If you fight the Chia Clown you’ll lose a lot and spend more money on healing potions than you’ll make in winnings (OR get stuck fighting Punchbag Bob for an hour). The cost isn’t worth the returns yet. If you’re going into the Battledome buy yourself some weapons first... Or else you could be stuck in a stalemate with a punching bag and have to forfeit (which counts as a loss) this is spoken from experience

DO NOT GAMBLE. The fun shiny wheels you can spin multiple times a day? NO. NOT YET. You want to make money, not lose it (or cancel out the gains you’re making).

8. Check out the daily guide for other important things to do, like visiting Coltzan’s Shrine and the Quasalan Expellibox… just to get a sense of what’s out there, since you won’t be able to do most of it until your account is 24 hours old…

Looks like you’re off to a pretty good start! There are lots of things you aren’t allowed to do yet, but we’ll be back tomorrow!

Quick Ref

Open Account, pick your Neopet, organize your new stuff

Download Ghoul Catchers, connect account

Play Ghoul Catchers lvl 1 50 times to hit the 50,000 NP cap

Put 35,000 in the bank, upgrade bank account

Spend your starting NC on a Faerie Quest Fortune Cookie

Open the cookie and go do a Faerie Quest

Invest 15,000 NP in the stock market

Buy One Dubloon Coin and enroll your pet in Swashbuckling Academy

Go have fun but BE SAFE AND SMART WITH YOUR MONEY

Check out and do available dailies (some will be locked until account is 24 hours old)

Come back for Day 2 of Gurniak’s Guide (coming soon)!

[gurniaksguide]

Why I Was Awful at Neopets as a Kid

(Intro post to Gurniak’s Guide to Starting a Neopets account in 2018) Neopets was at its height of popularity in the mid-2000s. I got into it because of the amazing plush McDonalds toys, honestly, in something like 3rd grade. And I was…awful at it.

For one, I played it on the family’s dialup desktop computer, usually with my six-year-old brother watching (he wasn’t allowed to have his own account since he was too little, but I graciously allowed him to have his “own pet” on my account). The game was slow. I was poor. The flash games seemed to be the only way to make money, but I wasn’t good enough at them to make much, and they took FOREVER to load. I spent hours playing these games, throwing all of my money into buying food (from the NPC shopkeepers in Neopian Central) for my ever-hungry pets. The rest, I gambled away at the various Wheels of [Whatever], which seemed to be the only way to make upwards of 1,000 NP. Unsurprisingly… I lost most of it. I never got any item from the Money Tree because my connection was so slow. My inventory was overflowing with random items worth nothing (where did you sell off your items in this game???), stuff that my pets couldn’t even eat. My pets starved, and I was miserable.

So I quit.

Recently, I came back to the site, out of some kind of morbid curiosity. It isn’t super popular anymore, and I’d read about its messed-up economy, and wanted to see if it was really that bad. And honestly… it isn’t.

Part of this might be due to the player-base that is still left – there are ways to start up the game quicker now, presumably because the long-time, rich players wouldn’t engage in events and games no longer worth their time. But really, it turns out that Neopets is all about managing money. And it lets you fail.

I was awful at Neopets partially because I was a Pokemon kid – in Pokemon games, the game takes care of you financially. Every item you are given is useful in some manner, and if you don’t feel like using it then it’s also worth something to sell. There are items made specifically for selling, and you get everything you need for free. Yeah, you have to buy Pokeballs and Potions, but you’re given money just for playing through the plot of the game (through trainer battles), and random items that are all worth something throughout! And in Pokemon games… back when they still did gambling, let’s just say I never walked out of the Game Corner with less than I walked in with.

Neopets does NOT take care of you. There are thousands of items that you straight-up cannot use. Many of them are worth nothing, and much more of a hassle to sell than to simply donate or throw away. In Neopets, free does not mean useful – while you can get an Omelette every day that lasts for three meals, if you only have one Neopet and actually take the Omelette every day… you’ll end up with a pileup of a lot of junk. And you can’t really sell it, because everyone has it! At the Employment agency, if you don’t finish the job in two minutes or less, you’re likely to make less money than you spend collecting the objects for your job. The gambling takes full advantage of you, and sucks you dry unless you are lucky.

And the best way to make money is the stock market.

Hm.

I was awful at Neopets because I thought, as a kid, that it was another fun, cute pet game where you can play and battle with your pets. But really… It’s an economics simulator. And it’s not fun doing the billion tasks a day that you can do but that have horribly little returns. Not being able to accumulate enough wealth to start accumulating more wealth, there was very little I could do on the site. My love for my Kougra and my little bro’s Shoyru aside, playing Neopets made me feel awful.

So I’ve decided to revisit the game, as an older, wiser person with a much much much much much better internet connection (with adblocker). And it turns out that with just a bit of planning and the right knowledge, I actually have the ability to have fun on Neopets. I don’t even need to cheat or pay real life money to do it. And I’m already doing pretty well, five days in. Turns out the trick to Neopets is:

The less time you spend making money on Neopets, the better you are at making money on Neopets.

That’s not something that my 9-year-old self could really figure out, but that’s okay. I’m planning on making her proud anyway.