Grow A Garden dropped their Christmas Part 2 update this weekend, and with it, they introduced a brand new egg; the Christmas Egg.
As always, there are two versions of the new egg, with the free version we can earn from participating in the new event in the center of the map, by opening different gifts (Common Gifts, Rare Gifts, Mythical Gifts, Gold Gifts and Rainbow Gifts), or you can get the Premium Christmas Eggs via the “Shop” icon on the left side of the screen.
The Christmas Egg has a cute festive design, with it being green all over, and sparkly little blue and yellow squares like fairy lights, with a red ribbon tied around it.
It’s not an egg we can really grind for, unfortunately, as we can only submit festive mutated fruits once every 10 minutes, and you’re not guaranteed to get an egg, so they’re quite hard to get hold of.
I decided to use some of my Trading Tokens to buy some of the Premium Christmas Eggs, and I managed to get one of the 1% Festive Eggs.
Inside the free Christmas Egg, there are five brand new pets:
- Turtle Dove – 50% chance
- Reindeer – 30% chance
- Nutcracker – 18.5% chance
- Yeti – 1% chance
- Ice Golem – 0.5% chance
When you’re purchasing the Premium Christmas Eggs, the odds are slightly different:
- Turtle Dove – 49% chance
- Reindeer – 30% chance
- Nutcracker – 18.5% chance
- Yeti – 1% chance
- Ice Golem – 0.5% chance
- Festive Egg – 1% chance
On placing a Premium Christmas Egg in your garden, when you click and hold the egg to “hatch” it, the eggshell can break to reveal a sparkly dark green Festive Egg, with a green ribbon around it, and you’ll have to wait the 30 seconds for it to hatch, like the other Premium Eggs within the game.
From my Premium Festive Egg, I managed to hatch the Festive Nutcracker pet, so I wanted to do a comparison between the free to play version and the pay to win version, to show the difference between the two.
The Nutcracker Pet in the free Christmas Egg is an 18.5% chance, and is the middle pet in terms of rarity, with two pets that are rarer, and two pets that are more common.
The “Festive” version of the Premium Egg is the equivalent of previous “Rainbow” hatched eggs and “Ghostly” hatched eggs, where the Festive version of each of the five pets gives you a more OP and more premium version of the pet.
I love the design of the Nutcracker – it has a super traditional, cute Nutcracker design, inspired by toy soldiers.
There’s so much attention to detail in the design of this pet. I actually think it’s the best pet design from all five within the egg – the Reindeer and Turtle Dove have such plain and simple (dare I say boring) designs in comparison.
Not only is the design cool, it marches around your farm, like a toy soldier. I love it when the devs put details like that into the game,
It looks good, but what does it actually do? This is the ability for my 2.71kg hatched, age 1 Nutcracker:
“Every 11:48 minutes, cracks open a random Nutty type fruit and grants a random Christmas related reward. Ignores favorited fruit”.
Here is a look at my Festive Nutcracker Pet, from my Festive Egg out of the Premium Christmas Eggs.
All of the Festive versions of the Christmas Egg pets have the same color design – a design with three shades of green in sections, with red facial features.
I have to be completely honest, I don’t like the design. The design of the Rainbow hatched pets and the Ghostly hatched pets are amazing – truly amazing, and so easy to spot, especially in the Trading Plaza, but this design is so mid.
You can’t see the FX in the above photos, as I disabled the feature to show the colors properly, but there is a glowing gold and red orb that surrounds the pet, with little gold stars.
Here it is with the FX on, there are also tiny very faint little gifts that float off the body of the pet, but compared to Ghostly, and Rainbow, it’s just no way near as impressive visually, but it’s what the pet does that matters…
For comparison’s sake, I was lucky to hatch an almost identical weight of both versions of the Nutcracker, so that was handy.
Here’s the ability for my 2.66kg hatched, age 1 Festive Nutcracker Pet:
“Every 5:50 minutes, cracks open a random Nutty type fruit and grants a random Christmas related reward. Ignores favorited fruit“.
That’s a crazy buff from the ordinary version – every 11.48 minutes vs every 5.50 minutes, and that’s without any extra mutations, like Nightmare.
Here’s the comparison of both of my Nutcrackers, if they were both age 100 and had Nightmare mutation as well:
- Nutcracker – at age 100, with Nightmare, would be 27.1kg and would do its ability every 7:27 minutes.
- Festive Nutcracker – at age 100, with Nightmare, would be 26.6kg and would do its ability every 3:05 minutes.
What Christmas Rewards Does The Nutcracker Pet Give You?
I hate it when Grow A Garden give a vague description like they have for the Nutcracker – what even is a “random Christmas related reward”?
I equipped my Nutcrackers with my HyperHunger Mimics, to get as many rewards as possible, to see what you could actually get, and it’s not all Christmas rewards, unlike the description.
Here’s a rundown of the rewards I’ve received with either of my Nutcracker pets (the premium Festive version does not give you better rewards – it just gives them quicker). These are all single rewards you get from one activation of the ability:
- Snow mutation to one fruit
- Chilled mutation to one fruit
- Ornamented mutation to one fruit (I’ve found that this is the rarest reward to get)
- 1 x Medium Toy
- 1 x Christmas Sprinkler
- 1 x Reclaimer Gear
- 1 x Small Toy
- 1 x Christmas Radar Gear
The best method, if you have them, is 15 second mimics and just Nutcrackers, so the mimics just copy the Nutcracker’s ability, and nothing else.
Now we have the HyperHunger Shard, you can make a 15 second Mimic Octopus with a 69.69kg Mimic. So, you can purchase a 60kg Mimic from the Trading Plaza, with Trading Tokens, and use the Age Break machine to get your Mimic up to the 60.69kg weight, then add the HyperHunger Shard.
If you have a 15 sec Mimic Octopus, it doesn’t matter if your Nutcracker is the ordinary version, or the Festive version, because your Mimic Octopus will do the ability every 15 seconds regardless of the time stamp on the ability of the Nutcracker.
When it comes to the best Nutty type fruits to use, if you check your Garden Guide, and click Plants, type in Nutty in the search bar, and it’ll bring up all the current Nutty plants within the game; Acorn Squash, Hazelnut, Castor Bean, Coconut, Christmas Cracker, Pecan and Acorn.
The best fruit is definitely the Coconut – it gives decent amount of points, as it’s a Mythical rarity, it grows back quickly, and you get around 15 coconuts per tree, per harvest.
Even more if you use Cape Buffalo to harvest them, as a Coconut is classed as a Safari type fruit, so you get 100% duplicated fruits with every harvest for handing into the event for getting gifts, and then the Nutcracker (or Mimic copying the Nutcracker) can harvest one Coconut with each ability activation.
Overall, the Nutcracker is a great pet to own, to help you AFK and stock up on Medium Toys, Small Toys and Reclaimers – which are not Christmas themed rewards. To get free mutations, and the festive gear items, it’s a win, and the standard version is an 18.5% chance, so it’s not too hard to get hold of, either.