Where do Fancy Cats, and all their cousins, come from?

Fancy Cats, Exclusive Cats, and Purrstige traits are all big parts of the CryptoKitties game

When a Mommy cat and a Daddy cat love each other very much… No, that’s not it. That’s sort of where new Kitties come from, but we won’t get into that here. We want to talk about where all of our cats with extra special art work come from! Fancy and Exclusive Cats, and Purrstige traits!

Fancy Cats are breedable — to a limit!

Fancy Cats are a series of special cats identified by their unique artwork and badge. Do you know the adorable Momo-chan, or the dreaded PhuZiQaat? They’re both Fancy Cats.

When we first released Fancies, you could breed as many of them as you wanted (have you seen how many DuCats are flapping around?!), but now, they’re all limited edition. Once you hit that Fancy’s limit (and it’s a different number or time limit for every one), no more can ever be created. We wanted them to feel special and rare.

How we brew a Fancy treat

Fancy Cats are created when users breed a cat with the right combination of traits. Let’s take Negato as an example. Negato is a stealthy assassin and creature of the night; he’s also an adorable ninja.

Every CryptoKitty has the same visible trait categories: pattern, highlight colour, eye colour, eye shape, base colour, accent colour, mouth, and fur. There are also two elements that only some Kitties have: a potential wild element like elk horns or daemonwings, or an environment one like salty. Plus, there are two unexpressed trait categories (so far it’s a secret what they do, but they’re there 😉).

We create and plan the Fancies in the CryptoKitties lab (okay, it’s an office, but lab sounds a lot cooler, doesn’t it?). For each Fancy, we select a combination of traits (usually four or five) that will make that Fancy Cat.

For example, if you had wanted to make Negato, you needed a cat with onyx, henna, wolfgrey, and slyboots traits.

Your Kitty could have any other set of traits; but you needed those four traits to get a Negato. We always choose a trait recipe that doesn’t exist in the wild, and then we release the Fancy Cat into the ecosystem. Once a player discovers that combination of traits, they’ll breed themselves a Fancy Cat! If you’d like to learn more about how to hunt for a Fancy Cat, we’ve got you covered with a handy instructional video.

You’re probably wondering what happens when you try to breed a Fancy cat after it’s reached its limit. Well, all those Kitties will stop turning into Fancies. So today, if you breed a cat with onyx, henna, wolfgrey, and slyboots, you’ll get a very cute kitten, but no Fancy.

So what does that really mean from a technical perspective? It means that on the blockchain, Fancy Cats and their regular siblings are actually the same. The only difference is the artwork, and (for now) that lives on our website. This gives us the flexibility to release Fancy Cats in the future without having to alter our smart contract.

Did you know that there are released Fancy Cats out there (at time of posting) that the community still hasn’t discovered? If you want to start hunting for a Fancy Cat, we recommend searching for trait combinations that don’t exist. Breed cats with those mixes, and you might just get lucky and discover a brand new Fancy cat!

Exclusive Cats are created by the CryptoKitties Team

Exclusive Cats are similar to Fancy Cats, except there are even fewer of them! Often an Exclusive will have only a single cat released, like Cathena, while sometimes there will be a handful, like the KnightKitties. This is because Exclusive Cats are often tied to a specific event. New Exclusive Cats never have Exclusive children — they’re exclusively introduced to the game by us (we’ll explain this further below).

Fancies and Exclusives seem similar if you’re just looking at their artwork, but they work very differently.

Designating an Exclusive Cat

Exclusive Cats aren’t bred the way Fancy Cats are. Instead, they’re created when we overwrite the artwork of a “normal” cat. There are a few conditions that can lead us to “overwrite” a Kitty’s artwork to create an Exclusive Cat.

For instance, Cathena was the 500,000th cat born. In honour of that impressive milestone, the breeder who managed to produce that cat was delighted to discover that it came out not as a simple cat with a blend of Cattributes, but as an Exclusive Cat! You can see from Cathena’s children that breeding an Exclusive Cats doesn’t get another Exclusive — the special art doesn’t affect the cat’s genes. Instead, the kittens look like whatever Cathena would have looked like if we hadn’t overwritten the artwork. If you Sire with Cathena, you will never get another Cathena. That’s what makes them — well, Exclusive!

Exclusive Cats are also created to mark milestones and important moments in the game, and are either given to a specific player or put up for auction. For instance, we made 11 Exclusive KnightKitties to honour our forum mods and active community members. Those were handed out directly to the players we were honouring.

A tail of Purrstige (traits)

When the game launched, Purrstige traits were only a twinkle in our team’s eyes. But when they came on the scene they made a yowling splash! Purrstige genes are the second to last gene category whose purpose has been revealed in the game. They’re secret traits that need to be specially unlocked, and they’re time-limited, so you have to act fast if you want to breed them! You can read more about them here.

We think our special cats are pretty special

If you’ve fallen in love with all our special types of cats, you’re not alone! These Kitties are often the most valuable in the game.

If you’re hankering for one of your own, you can find them in the marketplace — we’ve linked Fancies below, but you can get creative with your search terms to find the other Kitties!