I covered the five new pets inside the new Grow A Garden New Year’s Egg in my post about the new Celebration Puppy, and the New Year’s Chimp is one of the other five pets we can hatch from a New Year’s Egg.
This pet, just like the Celebration Puppy, has an ambiguous ability description, so I’m going to let you know what this pet actually does, and why the ability is broken. I don’t mean OP broken either, I mean, Grow a Garden dropped the ball, and gave us a pet that doesn’t work properly…

The New Year’s Chimp is the 15% chance pet from the new egg, and the ability for this pet is:
“Every 7:48m, grabs a random crop from your garden and brings it to 1 of 4 different things for different bonuses! (Ignores favorited)“

What does this description even mean? It grabs a random crop and “brings” it to 1 of 4 different things? That doesn’t even make sense.
So, I tested my New Year’s Chimp in my garden, to see what it actually does and what it brings and to where.
Basically, the chimp will randomly pick one of your unfavorited fruits in your garden, and it holds it above its head while it walks around your garden, and then it performs one of four abilities, at random.

Your chimp, after picking one of your fruits, will do one of these four things:
- It’ll give 2000 XP to one other pet at random
- Advance the hatching time of one single unhatched egg by 200 seconds
- Applies the Clockwork mutation to a fruit
- Can give you a bundle of Recall Wrenches or a bundle of Event Lanterns
So, why is the New Year’s Chimp broken? Well, the Clockwork mutation doesn’t exist in the game.

When your chimp tries to do the Clockwork mutation ability, you get an error message on the screen, which reads:
“New Year’s Chimp wanted to Clockwork-mutate a fruit, but the mutation “Clockwork” was missing.”
The Grow A Garden devs haven’t added the Clockwork mutation to the game files, so the chimp literally cannot apply the mutation to any fruit in your garden.
It’s been three days since the egg launched, with the New Year’s Update, and many people are complaining about this in the official Discord for Grow A Garden, and yet, they still haven’t fixed this.
Yes, we can still get the other three abilities from the chimp, but we cannot get the Clockwork mutation at all, regardless of how long you wait, and the Chimp still picks a random fruit from your garden, before it fails to apply the mutation, which is a waste.
You can still get the 2000 XP boost, the 6 x Recall Wrenches, the 6 x Event Lanterns, or the advance of 200 seconds of hatching time for one single egg.
I did wonder whether we needed a New Year’s clock cosmetic item for this ability to work, and maybe we’ll get a 24-hour limited time New Year’s shop, on New Year’s Eve, and that could be something we can buy?
It’s doubtful, as we’ve not had any limited time Merchant shops since Halloween, but right now, the chimp is broken, and we can’t get the Clockwork mutation for our Garden Guide, and the Yeti pet is also broken too – it’s like they’ve given up on the game.
