Collect, breed and fight your army of cute pets! — A complete Axie Infinity Guide
After introducing you to the Gods in my last article we will look at something a bit different today... Axies! The cute little creatures you can see right above.
This article got pretty long so in case you are reading this over several sessions or want to jump somewhere specific beforehand you can click the links in the table of contents to jump to the desired section.
Table of Contents
What exactly are Axies?
What makes an Axie?
How to get Axies?
What can you do with Axies?
Breeding
Player vs Player Battles
Battle Mechanics
- Attack — Defense — Accuracy
- Abilities
- Miss — Counter — Critical Hit
- Roles
- Tanks
- Damage Dealers
- Supports
- Positioning
- Class Counters
- Last Stand
The Adventure Mode
Axie Mini Games
What exactly are Axies?
Axies are digital pets from a game called Axie Infinity. They are cute looking, but they also are battle-hungry creatures. You can collect and breed them to build your own army, which you can take out on adventures and battle against other players.
The game is like a mix between Pokémon and Tamagotchi, which you will surely remember if you were born or raised in the 90s.
Axies exist on the Ethereum Blockchain as non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
Non-Fungible Tokens
Non-fungible tokens (ERC-721) are different from fungible tokens (ERC-20) because a NFT is a unique token and can´t be divided. It is not possible to send half an Axie to someone and every Axie in existence is a unique object.
The game was released before the ERC-721 standard was. In consequence Axies do not show up as ERC-721 tokens yet. The development team is working on this however.
What makes an Axie?
Each Axie has a class and parts determining its appearance and statistics.
Appearance
The color of an Axie is defined by the class. Each class features different shades of the class color so there is more color variation. There also are albinos for every class.
The look of the Axie itself is defined by its six body parts: Eyes, Ears, Mouth, Horn, Back Piece and Tail.
There are a lot of different parts for each category, resulting in basically endless combinations of parts out there, for you to discover.
In addition there are different body shapes and body patterns to increase the diversity even more, however they are purely cosmetic.
- The brown Axie is of class Beast with the Sumo body shape. The white marks on the side are the body pattern.
- The green Axie is of class Plant with the Wet Dog body shape. The plait on the side is the body pattern.
- The red Axie is of class Bug with the Yak body shape and the plaits on the side are the body pattern.
Statistics
The stats, which are determined by classes and body parts, are the following:
- Hit Points — An Axie collapses when its Hit Points(HP) reach zero. There is a chance for any Axie to enter “Last Stand” before it collapses though.
- Speed — Speed increases the chance for an Axies to dodge an attack. The Axies with the highest Speed stats are the first ones to attack at the beginning of each turn.
- Skill — Affects the hit chance of an Axie. Axies with high Skill will rarely miss their attacks.
- Morale — Determines the chances for Critical Hits and Counter Attacks. Morale also determines the number of Last Stand turns.
Let’s take a deeper look at the classes and body parts Axies are composed of.
Classes
Up until now six classes have been discovered, but there are more to be found in the future. We can see three more classes listed in the filter of the Axie Encyclopedia, but the names of these classes are not known until they are discovered.
These are the currently found classes:
Each Axie class has different Base Stats. Here are some short descriptions for all existing classes:
- Beasts are warriors with high accuracy and solid attack damage values. Their HP pool is moderate but their defense values are fairly low.
- Plants possess high HP, strong defense, and mythical healing abilities, but are slow in return.
- Bugs do not have the best damage output. Their strong durability and high accuracy can come in handy though.
- Birds are powerful and swift like the wind. However, their defense stats are rather weak so direct hits can hurt badly.
- Reptiles have well-rounded stats and hidden attacks which definitly make them valuable even though their accuracy is not the best.
- Aquatics are fast, powerful, and slippery making them hard to injure. Their accuracy is not the best however, in consequence of their bad eyesight
Parts
Apart from the Base Stats every Axie gets from their class, additional Skill Points are added for every part the Axie has. Like already mentioned Axies have six parts in total. The parts are basically subclasses, representing the classes Axies can have.
The benefits these parts offer are the following:
- Beast Part — increases Morale by 3 and Speed by 1.
- Plant Part — increases Hit Points by 3 and Morale by 1.
- Bug Part — increases Morale by 3 and Hit Points by 1.
- Bird Part — increases Speed by 3 and Morale by 1.
- Reptile Part — increases Hit Points by 3 and Speed by 1.
- Aquatic Part — increases Speed by 3 and Hit Points by 1.
There are four levels parts can be upgraded to: Common, Rare, Ultra Rare and Legendary. These upgrades do not affect the skill points given by the parts, but they will level up the attcks of these parts .
Only Mystic parts are able to level up to legendary. Mystic parts are special body parts that are only found in some Origin Axies.
Here we see an Axie with two mystic parts. Parts with blue names are mystic parts. They also have different looks then their non-mystic counter parts.
The non-mystic parts of these two mystics are the “Pogona” Ears and the “Carrot” Tail if you want to look them up.
Skill Points
The highest ammout of skill points an Axie can have in any category is 61. Not all classes have stats that go up that far though.
Here are the maxiumum ammout of skill points an Axie can have for each category, depending on its class type:
- Beast — 49 HP|53 Speed|31 Skill|61 Morale
- Aquatic — 57 HP|57 Speed|35 Skill|45 Morale
- Plant — 61 HP|49 Speed|31 Skill|53 Morale
- Bird — 45 HP|61 Speed|35 Skill|53 Morale
- Bug — 53 HP|49 Speed|35 Skill|57 Morale
- Reptile — 57 HP|53 Speed|31 Skill|53 Morale
The sum of the maximum skill points for every class equals 194, resulting in every class type being equally strong. They just have different scopes of application.
Now that we know what an Axie is made of i will show you how to aquire Axies before we look at what you can do with them.
How to get Axies?
Ingame Marketplace
There is an ingame marketplace implemented into the game where you can buy and sell Axies at any time. The cheapest Axies are sold between 0.01 and 0.02 ETH at the moment.
There are way more expensive Axies listed in the marketplace too, but you should not really bother with them until you get the hang of the game and know what makes a good Axie and what makes them valuable in general.
Axie Lab
The Axies sold in the Axie Lab have a special tag displaying they are MEO Corp Axies. MEO Corp Axies are the new generations of Axies that get released.
There are no new generations of Axies available in the Axie Lab at the moment, but there are more to come.
The MEO Corp Axies introduce new traits to the gene pool.
Two generations of MEO Corp Axies have been released up until now. Generation one introduced new body parts and generation two was the first generation to introduce the genes needed to breed several body shapes.
Open Marketplaces
There also is the option to buy Axies on third party marketplaces, which are built on top of Ethereum. Like for example OpenSea and eMoon. Occasianlly some people are selling bundles on these markets. Buying bundles could save you some bucks but usually the Axies are sold for about the same price there as in the ingame marketplace.
Trading
You can also trade with other people to get Axies. You can use BoxSwap for this, which is in beta at the moment.
Every Ethereum token can be traded with others for Axies there. So every ERC-20 and ERC-721 tokens, including Axies can be used.
Attention! This is not a marketplace. You need someone who is willing to trade his Axie with you.
What can you do with Axies?
Now that you know how to get yourself some Axies, what they are and what defines an Axie let’s dig into the things we can do with them and how everything works.
Breeding
Breeding Stages
Every Axie starts off with 400 experience points when it first reaches adulthood. These Axies are often referred to as virgins.
Here are the XP values needed to breed for every breeding stage:
1st Breed: 700 XP
2nd Breed: 900 XP
3rd Breed: 900 XP
4th Breed: 1500 XP
5th Breed: 2400 XP
6th Breed: 3000 XP
7th Breed: 3000 XP
There is no 8th breeding stage because Axies will become sterile after their 7th breed.
To gain experience points, so you can start breeding, you need to send your Axies into battle against other players as teams of three. Soon you will also be able to go on adventures and fight non-player characters, called Chimera, out in the Kingdom of Lunacia.
But more on that in the next chapter, let´s get back to breeding for now.
How Breeding works
Axies do not have a gender so you can breed any Axie combination you would like. There is only one rule. Incest is not allowed, so parents and children and sibling and sibling cannot breed with each other.
When you breed two Axies you will get an egg. This egg will transform into an Axie over 5 days and 4 different stages.
The egg will transform into a larva in 1 day. After another 2 days your Axie will be ready to be morphed to petite state. This is the first time you will be able to see the class and parts your Axie has, but it is not fully grown, so you can´t do anything with it yet. Petite Axies can be morphed to adult Axies in another 2 days. At this point your Axie is fully grown and is able to join a team and start getting experience to breed again.
Morphing from Larvae to Petite, and from Petite to Adult, will cost a small transaction fee because morphing is handled on the blockchain. Breeding Axies also costs gas and a transaction fee because you are basically buying storage for your Axie on the blockchain. The fees are subject to change once the game is integrated into the Loom Network.
The parts an Axie gets when bred can be of any type mentioned in the parts section. What parts the Axie will get depends on the genes of its parents though. Both parents can pass on their genes to the offspring.
The class, parts, body shape and body pattern of an Axie are part of their DNA, but there also are hidden genes for every Axie. The hidden genes can also be passed on to the next generation, causing mutation in a sense.
There are genes that can not be passed on to the next generation. For example the exclusive christmas skins from past year or the mystic parts some Origin Axies have.
Pureness
An Axie can be Pure. Pureness indicates how many of the parts an Axies has, are from the class, the Axie itself is.
A plant Axie with five plant parts has a pureness of 5 and a plant Axie with six plant parts would be considered pure, like seen in the picture below.
To breed a pure Axie your best bet is breeding two Axies from the same class with high pureness with one another, and then hope you are lucky!
A pure Axie is never warrented however. Even if you would breed two Pure Axies with another the offspring could be non-pure, due to the hidden genes. But the hidden genes can also be beneficial occasionally.
There are tools to explore the hidden genes that can help you if you want to try your luck.
Going for pureness is not always the best choice though, especially if you are just starting your collection. Being pure makes Axies inflexible and susceptible to being countered.
At the start you should get Axies from multiple classes to build versatile teams. Only having plant Axies would definitly make your teams weaker when playing against certain classes. In return your experience gain would be lower, slowing the rate you will be able to breed at.
If you own a bigger collection and have some high pureness Axies in there you should probably test your luck. Due to their rarity pure Axies can get pretty expensive. So breeding for pureness could yield some returns.
Axie Mating Club
If you do not have a second Axie to breed you can instead use the Axie Mating Club, found under the Axie Marketplace. Here you can breed with an Axie from another person, who set his Axie up for siring.
When you breed with an Axie in the Mating Club, you will receive the egg and the owner of the other Axie will receive the siring fee, which you have to pay for mating with the Axie.
You can also set up your Axies for siring in the Axie Mating Club.
Now that we know how breeding works let´s check out how battling works so you will be triumphant in your battles!
Player vs Player Battles
Overview
As soon as you own three Axies you can build your first team. You can then send your team out to look for battles. Every team can be sent to battle 3 times every 12 hours.
Like already mentioned every Axie has six parts: Eyes, Ears, Mouth, Horn, Back Piece and a Tail. These parts, except the eyes and ears, are used to attack and defend. Thus every Axies has 4 moves it can execute.
The PvP battles are automated and are turn based. You can check out an example battle here.
If you want to see more battles you can change the number appended in the link, its the battles ID.
Move Order
Your moves happen in the order you specify when building your team, so you should think about what moves would be useful to use early and which ones to use later on. These moves can be attacks and abilites, like for example healing.
Using healing on the first turn would be a bad idea. Use it too late and the Axie you want to heal could already be out of the fight.
If an Axie survives long enought to execute all 4 moves, it will loop back, starting with its first move again. The team with the last Axie standing wins the match.
You need to carefully build your teams if you want to maintain a positive winrate and keep climbing the leaderboards. Here is a tool that can help with building teams.
If you follow this guide and start having enough Axies to build several good teams you should be set to start climbing!
Experience Gain
At the time of writing the you will get 15 XP per win and 7 XP per loss. The team is gradually reducing the experience gain for battling at the moment. The next and final reduction will happen on February 14th at 10 AM EST to 10 XP per win 5 XP per loss.
Activating Bean’s Blessing will net 12 XP per win and 6 XP per loss from now. Bean´s Blessing only boosts experience gain for PvP battles and can be activated every 24 hours for a small gas fee.
Matchmaking
The game is using the ELO system for matchmaking. Because the battles are played 1v1 this system is really accurate. The ELO system originated in chess. You can read more about it here, if you are interested.
As of yet the playerbase is rather small. So matchmaking can still be a bit unbalanced at times. Occasinally you will not be able to find matches against players at your skill level, especially while you are still in the process of building up better teams, but are already out of the beginner skill bracket.
Winning a match, against a far higher skilled player, would net you a lot of matchmaking rating (MMR) though. Losing in return only reduces your MMR a little bit. So besides affecting your XP gain a bit it should not matter too much in the end. Especially if you only start losing a few more battles then ususal.
Once you have more teams, sending our all teams three times can be a bit of a hassle. There is this chrome plugin that let’s you send all your Axies with a few clicks.
Battle Mechanics
Attack — Defense — Accuracy
…are the three attributes for every move an Axie has:
- Attack — How much damage the currently active move does.
- Defense — How much damage the currently active move blocks.
- Accuracy — How likely it is to hit the currently active move.
In this example the Aquatic Axie attacks the Beast Axie with an attack move that has an accuracy of 90 and attack of 23. The Aquatic Axie lands his attack but the currently active move of the Beast Axie has a defense value of 13. So the resulting damage is: 23(dmg)-13(def) = 10 damage dealt.
You can check out the highest damage and defense abilities here with this tool from the Axie Dex website
Abilities
Apart from dealing damage some moves will trigger an underlying ability. There also are moves that will trigger a spell without dealing damage but all abilites can still block damage.
The abilities can be healing, buffs for teammates and debuffs for enemies.
Up until now the abilities are pretty simple. I will cover some in the Roles section below. There will be a wider range of available spells once leveling up Axies and their parts will become a thing
Miss — Counter — Critical Hit
- Miss — There is the possibilty for your oppenent to miss his attack.
- Counter — Occasionally an Axie will fight back during the enemy attack.
- Critical Hit — Sometimes an Axie will hit a critical dealing double damage.
Roles
Axies with specific skill point and move combinations can fill different roles. These three roles established since the release of the battles.
Tanks
Tanks are Axies with high HP and Speed stats and with high defense values on their moves
Having high Hit Points lets your Axies take more hits, so the HP stat is the most important for your tank. Having high Speed increases the chance to dodge hits, making your tank even tankier. Moves with high defense values are as important as having high HP. Like explained above defense values on the moves reduce the incoming damage. So with high HP and high defense moves your Axie will be able to tank a lot of incoming damage.
Damage Dealers
Damage dealers sometimes called DPS, are Axies with high Skill, Speed and Morale stats as well as high damage values on their moves.
Morale is the most valueable stat for a damage dealer because it increases the chance for critical hits and counter attacks. Skill increases your hit chance and high Speed lets your Axie attack first. This can be useful because the high damage attacks can occasionally take out a squishy enemy before your other Axies waste damage on it. Speed also increases the chance to dodge attacks which helps in battle because damage dealers are low HP Axies most of the time. Why you want high damage values on the moves of a damage dealer is a no brainer.
Supports
Are Axies that assist other teammates in battle and disrupt the enemy team.
Support Axies do not really have any stat categories they specialize in, the power of support Axies lies in their moves. Support moves are moves which buff or heal your teammates or debuff enemies. Team buffs are mostly healing until level two parts will be unlockable but there are several enemy debuffs.
Here are some examples for debuffs:
- Target Axie cannot defend next turn.
- Set target Axies accuracy to zero until next turn.
- Apply a poison debuff to target Axie dealing 1 damage at the start of every enemy turn.
The moves that will not buff or debuff targets should be high damage moves instead.
Positioning
When you set up your team you will see the following tile with nine spots. You can place your three Axies on any of the glowing spots, but there can always only be one Axie on each spot.
Where you position your Axies can definitly affect the success of your team.
Here are the basic guidelines:
The currently attacking Axie will always attacks the nearest Axie first. If there are multiple Axies in the closest row the target to attack will be selected at random.
For this reason you want to have your tank in the spot furthest to the right, defending your weaker Axies from incoming damage. Behind the tank you want your damage dealers and supports.
Where to place your damage dealer depends on the attack moves the Axie has. Meele moves deal more damage if your Axies are in front, but then they block less damage when defending. Ranged moves have higher accuracy if the attacker is in the frontline and if the enemy is standing in the frontline, your accuracy is even higher and vice versa. The graphic below illustrates this concept im more detail.
Where you place your support depends on his moves. A lot of healing abilities heal Axies in front of the caster or neighbors of it, so you should keep an eye out for that.
Class Counters
We already talked about you wanting your teams to be versatile, because every class has different advantages and disadvantages. But not only in relation to their skill points. Every class has two counters and two classes it counters.
Lets take Birds for example:
Axies of class Bird counter Bugs and Beasts and are countered by Reptiles and Plants.
When stronger classes attack weaker classes, their attacks will deal bonus damage. On the contrary, when weaker classes attack stronger ones, the attack damage will be reduced. — Axie Infinty
Last Stand
Last Stand lets your Axie take additional turns before it collapses. The maximum of turns your Axie can take before it leaves the battlefield is six, including the turn the lethal damage is dealt. The number of turns is dependent on the Morale skill points of the Axie. The lower the Morale, the lower the Last Stand turns.
To calculate the number of Last Stand turns you divide Morale by 10. To determine if an Axie enters Last Stand the following check is executed:
if((incomingDamage — currentHP) <= (current HP * (morale / 100)){ enterLastStand()}
So if your Axie is full health and gets downed in one hit, you have high chances to enter Last Stand. On the other hand if you are low HP and get killed by a high damage attack your chances to enter Last Stand are low.
The battles have been a cool mechanic to level your Axies and test their fighting capability. But there is something i am way more excited about coming to Axie Inifinty soon..
The Adventure Mode
The Adventure Mode for Axie Infinity is finally coming to light! Soon you will be able to take your Axies out for adventures, either alone or teamed up with friends.
You will be able to gather resources, explore the world around you and fight off the evil Chimera, who are troubling the once save and peaceful Kingdom of Lunacia.
These fights will be held in real time. There will also be bosses and strong Chimera out there in the land on Lunacia. So occasionally you will need to team up with others to make your quest, to save the Kingdom, succeed.
The Kingdom of Lunacia
Lunacia is based on a 301x301 grid. Every Spot on this grid is a tokenized plot of land, called Terra. Everyone can buy these plots of land at the moment by buying chests that also include some items for your land. The cheapest plots, the savannah plots are already sold out for the first round of sales. There are still chests available for purchase at the moment though.
In the current phase of the land sale 25% of the land can be claimed. According to tht team the prices for the chests will be at least 10% higher in the future sales.
Here is a short description what you can do with your plots of land:
Landholders can upgrade and customize their territory to host shops, Chimera summoning beacons, produce resources, house NPC’s, and even act as access points for dungeons! Independent developers, content creators, and companies will be able to seamlessly build on top of Lunacia using clickable wormholes as a launchpad for this content. The possibilities are infinite! — Axie Infinity
Below is a preview of how the land will most likely look when released. This was a sneak peek for the community, released by one of the developers on the Axie Infinity Discord, so it may not be final!
In my opinion it is looking really polished and resembles the different territories well already, so there may not be too much changes until release.
In addition to the player plots there will be road and river plots. When travelling on roads you will be 300% faster then offroad.
Roads crossing rivers will become bridges. Axies will not be able to swim through rivers. They will need to cross the rivers using the bridges. There will also be plots with resources and plots with Chimera, so there is always something to do out in the Kingdom.
This is the current map of the world:
Orange Plots — Savannah Land
Green Plots — Forest Land
White Plots — Arctic Land
Teal Plots — Mystic Land
Black Plots — Genesis Land
Red Plots— Lunas Landing
Pink Plots — Resource/Chimera
Beige Plots — Roads
Blue Plots — Rivers
How to buy land
Savannah, Forest, Arctic and Mystic Land can be bought through chests. In every chest you buy, there is a chance to get Genesis Land, and in addition to your land you will get some items. Lunas Landing will be used to incentivize content creators and host a variety of world events. The Road, River and Resource/Chimera Plots are not ownable by players.
The chests can be bought with various cryptocurrencies. For every purchse you make you will get a 10% cashback in Luna and if you buy it via a referral link the referrer will also get a 10% cashback in ETH. You can spend the Luna cashback on more chests or keep it, until you will be able to spend it ingame.
If you consider buying some chests i would really appreciate if you would consider buying them using my referral link, which is the link below leading to the sale page.
If you buy multiple chests at once, all of the land you bought will be next to each other. If you buy the chests in different sessions they will be in different locations.
Up to 100 chests of a certain land type can be purchased at a time.
You can look at the different chests available on the land sale page here, if you want to know what else is included in each chest.
Items
The items included in the chests can be used to decorate your plots of land but will also have buffs or debuffs affecting the land and Axies fighting on it.
There will be four rarities of these items:
- Common
- Rare
- Epic
- Mystic
Here we can see a mystic bird plushie.
When this plushie is on your land the item drop rate from Chimera increases by 20% and it also increase all base stats for Axies of type Bird by 20%. These plushies exist for all Classes.
Here is a list of all currently available items and if you own a lot of items you can check out the ammount of items you have for any rarity tier with this tool right here.
Guilds
When the adventure mode is released you will also be able to team up with friends and other likeminded people by creating guilds.
Form alliances with other players to combine land, pool rare resources, and produce Artifacts — limited edition items that provide powerful guild buffs which can turn a team of adventurers into powerful warlords . — Axie Infinity
Resources
The resources, you are able to produce and gather in the world around you, can be used to upgrade your Axies or your land if you own plots. The available resources are the following:
Some of these resources are more likely to be found in different habitats. There are also items which are tied to the seven moons of the Axie Kingdom, these will only spawn when a special moon is shining.
Axie Mini Games
Due to the nature of the blockchain assets from a game can be used in different applications built on the same blockchain. This has already been done for Axie Inifinty. These are the two mini games with Axies i know of:
Axie Sushi
Axie Sushi is a game where you can use your Axies to race others. To enter a race you need to pay an entry fee. The entry fee of all players are added up to the prizepool. The winner of the race will take the pot.
The Axies will race along a line where sushi pieces are placed. The Axie to eat all the sushi first to reach the finish line is the winner.
How powerful the Axie you are racing is, depends on its skill points.
- HP and Skill stats determine an Axies base movement speed towards the finish line.
- Morale increases the chance of a “Critical bite”. This will cause two pieces of sushi to be gobbled up in a single bite.
- Speed increases the chance of a “Speed buff” which will cause an Axie to eat twice as quickly for 2 bites.
And here are the rules taken from the games infopage:
- Maximum 5 axies per game. Races will start immediately when all places are taken or after 3 minutes if there are a minimum of 2 Axies on the race track.
- Anyone can participate or spectate. Players without Axies can log in through guest mode and pick an Axie from list of “free to play” Axies. However, only users logged in with metamask can view their statistics and take part in weekly competitions.
Flappy Axie
Flappy Axie is a Flappy Bird based mini-game where you can use your Axies to fly through an obstalce course to survive as long as possible.
I guess that should have been everything there is to know about the Axie Infinity game everything revolving around it. If you have any suggestions for stuff i could add or i was misinformed on something please feel free to message me here on medium.
You can also reach out to me and find all my articles posted on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/EthereumGaming
