With the Grow A Garden Zen Update, we got six brand new pets thanks to the new Zen Egg, which is available for purchase within the new Zen Shop. This new egg has the rarest pet the game has ever seen; the Kitsune, and the Nihonzaru is one of the other pets you can find inside this new zen-themed egg.
What Is the Grow A Garden Nihonzaru Pet?
A Nihonzaru is a Japanese macaque, and is also known as being a Snow Monkey. Now we can hatch our own Nihonzaru monkey within the game.
The Zen Egg costs 30 Chi Points, and can be purchased from the Zen Shop, if you ever find it in stock – it is almost permanently out of stock, but they do have a feature that allows you to restock the shop with your sheckles, but even with sheckle restocks, it’s so, so hard to find it instock.
You get Chi Points by giving the Tanuki on the event display your Tranquil fruits (fruits with the new Tranquil mutation), and you are then given Chi Points, which you can spend inside the Zen Shop.
The Zen Egg has a black and white design, and takes 4 hours and 10 minutes to hatch, and you’ll find one of these six pets inside it:
- Shibu Inu – 40% chance
- Nihonzaru – 31% chance
- Tanuki – 20.82% chance
- Tanchozuru – 4.6% chance
- Kappa – 3.5% chance
- Kitsune – 0.08% chance
The Nihonzaru is the second most common pet you’ll hatch, and it’s a silvery grey color all over, with a pink face, pink inner ears, and pink on its stomach.
It behaves really weirdly, but I’ll cover that in the next section, as its behavior is connected to its ability.
What Are The Benefits Of The Grow A Garden Nihonzaru Pet?
The Nihonzaru monkey only performs a benefit if you purchase the Hot Spring cosmetic item out of the Zen Shop. If you don’t have this item, the monkey literally stands on the spot you placed it, and doesn’t move whatsoever.
Its ability is: As long as you have a Hot Spring in your garden, the pet bathes in it, and boosts all pet’s passives by a small percentage.
This “small percentage” is not advertised anywhere, which is so helpful, but it is supposedly 2.5%, and I know from experience, it does stack, and I have two of the monkeys in my garden right now, and they perform better together, than they do alone.
When it comes to how they behave, when you put one down, it will walk over to your Hot Spring cosmetic item, and usually it ends up jumping up and down repeatedly, like it’s stuck and glitching.
Sometimes the monkeys try and get in the same spring, and end up jumping up and down on each other, and looking quite inappropriate.
Very occasionally, they lay down, and it looks like they’re bathing, but 99% of the time they just get jammed jumping up and down, and look ridiculous.
I don’t know why they behave like that, and it does feel pointless that they don’t do literally anything other than staying in the hot spring, but the boost on the other pet’s abilities is worth it.
I like how they boost my Blood Kiwis and Bald Eagle, to help hatch eggs quicker, which works so well with the Zen Eggs, when trying to hatch the Kitsune. I wish they did more than just glitch and jump up on down on one another, but I can ignore that, when they help improve the efficacy of your other pets in your garden.