Grow A Garden introduced a mechanic a week ago, where we could “feed” the NPCs to unlock a special shop.
By feeding the NPCs, we gain “friendship” points, like we did with the Giant in the Beanstalk event, and the points give us tiers of friendship, and the more friendship points we have, the more exclusive items we’ll have access to.
The first NPC we could feed was Sam, and feeding him allowed us to unlock a Tier 2 seed shop with seeds like the Cocomango and Broccoli, and now we’re able to feed Raphael at the Pet Eggs Shop.
We are only able to feed Sam and Raphael once per 24 hour period, and each level of the friendship is 15 points, and because you can only feed them once a day, you want to ensure you’re feeding them either Transcendent food or Prismatic food, as they carry the most points.
When you get Sam (the Seed Shop NPC) to level 2 of friendship, it unlocks the Tier 2 seed shop, but we didn’t receive any rewards or gifts for getting to that stage, however, Raphael does give you a reward.
As soon as you fill up the bar of level 1 friendship (15 points), you receive the brand new Pet Incubator cosmetic item in your cosmetic inventory, but what does it do? It doesn’t tell you anything in-game, but I’ve been testing it since I received it, and I’ll tell you exactly what it does, and if its worth having in your garden.
The Grow A Garden Pet Incubator is a cosmetic item you need to place anywhere within your farm, and once you do, you need to place a pet inside it.
You can put any of your pets inside the Incubator, and you have to “feed” the incubator fruits to “fuel” it, and there’s a fuel bar at the top of the incubator to show you how much fuel it has. Once you fuel the machine to 100%, the fuel lasts for 24 hours, and you’ll see another bar above the incubator.
This bar shows you the “LVL” of the pet, aka the age. You’ll see the blue bar moving constantly, once the incubator is fuelled, and the blue bar shows you how old the pet is, and how far away from the next age it is.
The purpose of the Pet Incubator is to age one single pet for you. Your pet will age up quicker in your garden, if you use XP boosting pets like a Capybara or a Dilophosaurus, but if you have a pet you want to age, but don’t want to waste one of your pet slots on that pet, you can use this machine instead.
It is very slow to age the pet. I put in one of my Phoenix pets almost 10 hours ago, and it’s only on level 14, but that pet wouldn’t have aged at all in my inventory and not being equipped.
I think this Pet Incubator would be handy for aging pets you want to get to age 50, to be able to use the Mutation Machine, like when you’re working through your Garden Guide achievements.
What is cool though, you can have a friend or an alt account “boost” your incubator, and when they do, a new bar appears above the incubator to show a x2 bar, and that friend power-up lasts for one hour.
You can only have one friend boost the incubator, and if another friend tries to boost it, a pop-up message appears to say the machine is already boosted, and to try again in XX minutes.
If you get a friend or alt account to boost the incubator, for 60 minutes you’ll get double the XP, which will obviously increase how quickly the pet ages whilst in the Incubator.
You can remove your pet from the incubator whenever you want, and place it back in. The fuel doesn’t disappear if you do remove your pet, and you can simply put it back in, and it’ll carry on aging for you – and it continues to work if you’re offline, which is really handy.