Hi! I'm very new here and just figuring things out at my own pace, but so far it's a lot of fun!

It seems like there's a lot to do so I'm excited to figure it all out. Just got my first egg from exploring during the tutorial and I'm excited to see what comes out of it!
I'm not really sure when it'll hatch though, does it say anywhere? I read somewhere it takes 3 days to hatch and nurturing it can speed up the process, but I don't know by how much.

If anyone has some helpful tips I'd love to hear, I'll be taking a closer look at the guides in the forums when I've had the chance to play a bit more. ^^

Either way the pets look really cool so I hope I get more of them soon <3

Okay I just wanna say so far I really like how much you can do without needing a lot of Gold or Diamonds or something. Though I do wonder if there's a better way to get Gold than just exploring a lot? I did stumble upon the Jinxie's Jamboree which was fun.

I also saw there's a contest open for the next festival! Maybe I'll try to participate, although I'm not sure if I really know enough about the game to do that yet.

And the nurturing mechanic is such a cool idea!! I love helping others out and getting items for doing that is awesome ^^

Anyway, those are my thoughts so far, I'll continue playing a bit more and see what I think of it. I'll definitely stay here to experience the festival!

Welcome, I hope you enjoy your time here!

My big tips are to do missions and get three party slots as quickly as you can. Missions will earn you all the gold you need, and having a full team of three should let you participate in a lot of the festival when it properly starts.

With eggs and pets growing up in general, I really never expect it to take less than three days for eggs to hatch, or a full 28 days for a new egg to become an adult. Although the festival adds a lot more incentive to nurture other people's eggs and hatchlings, so that can certainly shave off several hours if you're lucky. It's a long time, but that's why I tend to have a few breeding projects going at once so there are different pets maturing, hatching, and being bred more regularly.
You can see an egg's progress towards hatching on it's profile, at the top of the 'genetics' section, as a number of hours out of 72

As a long term tip, an exeptional genetic testing kit is incredibly valuble. It lets you see the full genetic information about every pet you own, which is incredibly useful for breeding. You can ask people to test pets for you, there are almost always people who will do it for free, as long as it's only a handfull at a time, but for anyone who wants to do a lot of breeding pets for projects it's very good to be able to test pets yourself. It is a diamond store item, so either takes a fairly long time saving up gold and getting diamonds on the currency exchange, or real money. Even though I consider it a must-have, I'd still say don't worry about rushing to get it.

Getting some pets with max or 'super' stats eventually is also a good idea to help with battles. Max stat pets normally cost 250k-300k gold, though you can often find some cheaper. Super stats are stronger, but they vary in what their stats actually are and how much they cost - generally more expensive than max stats. If you buy either kind, expect it won't be able to breed. Getting pets to max stats and super stats is very resource intensive, so people who breed them aren't keen to undercut the value by making infinite max stat breeding available easily.
This is a max stat I bred if you want to see what the stats actually are:
https://www.sylestia.com/view/pets/?petid=8901807
I don't know how stat calculations work at higher levels well enough to say how much of a difference it really makes, but max level contents tends to be balanced assuming people have teams of max stats.

Feel free to ask me any other questions you have. Use the "@" symbol on a message or type a person's username into the "Ping Users" box to give them a notification about a response like you would have gotten from this.

Thank you so much, I'll keep it in mind!

250k sounds like a lot, I'm struggling to get more than a few thousand right now. Though to be fair I'm constantly buying traps just to get a few new pets, whoops. I'm sure I'll be able to get more soon! <3

And 3 days for an egg to hatch isn't bad at all. I'm looking forward to seeing the little one :D