Ty for answering :)

Wow, others already managed to cover the question I had about artifacts and whether bulbs were the next revamp planned.

1) When it comes to reworking the battle system, is the lost grove more of an example of what a reworked system could look like, or a final iteration on the current pre-rework system?
2) Reworking core functions and pages like the breeding grounds sounds very tricky and time consuming. What features are the easiest to work on?
3) Do you have a crazy dream feature that would never actually be feasible to add?

Hi. I have a few questions

1. Have you ever think about extending the choices in the Advance Search? Like it would gonna be great if we could have more selection choice like for finding ReGen pets if we want without wasting time :P

2. What do you think about extending the story in order to unlock more place/zone in the World map? The current World Map is large, yet just 3 places. Curious about what happen to other places.

3. Have you ever think about making the adolescent pets and the adult pets of each species looks different to each other? I think that would help everyone doing projects easier to know if their pet has fully grown or not.

I have only 2 questions: one is pet theme related and the other is related to limited genes and mutations options so I apologize if one or both are complex to answer

If you ran out of new ideas for brand new and future themed pets, will you be going back to the themed pet designs in previous forums that weren't picked in the past, adjust them and add those or just have players constantly keep changing their unpicked designs in hopes they get lucky to win? I'm not trying to be mad so please don't be offended.



My second question is will there be more options to genes and mutations for certain Sylesti species in the future? Because I love the Bulbori species to the moon and back because it's a rabbit with gems and would love to see a lot more options for the gene 2 slot and even the mutations 1 and 2 trait slots. For example: the bulbori has limited options for gems, tails and wings and hoping there could be more options like cosmic wings, aurora borealis essence for any gene or mutation trait, aurora gems, etc even if trait design contests aren't held? Because the bulbori just seems to have less of those traits and using those same traits over and over again for themed designs to use in seasonal fests just seems a bit bland while several other Sylesti species have a dozen options in the genes and mutations. I won't be mad if there won't be more options in the future but it would be cool if there were more trait options to the Bulbori species, thank you for letting us ask you our long-awaited questions! Also I apologize if this question is complex to answer, I tried to make it as simple as possible while writing a lot!

I did have some questions abouts the future.
1. Total revamp Ive heard rumors that the site with have a complete rework of the entire exploration system from Esiors Haven to the lost grove is that still being considered?
2. Will we go pasted level 75 in our pet levels like to 100?
3. Would you consider hiring some help for Sylestia I know that there are moderators Like Pirate But when your discus not having enough time would it be helpful to Hire someone on the back end to clean up the code? This is your baby and your project but if you cant do it all would it be helpful to get another person even if part time?

1. To kind of piggyback off of the stable comments, would there ever be a feature to either edit the number of stalls per row, or just have all the tabs have even numbers per row (which would probably require an extra stall but :/)? It's slightly irritating lining up breeding pairs and having the last row broken up, and an extra un-paired pet on the page.

2. A pet game I used to play called Wajas has a Bank feature, where you can store your currency to help you budget. Flight Rising has a similar Vault feature for items and I think also currency, but I could be mistaken on that one. Is a bank/vault-type feature something you would consider implementing here, for gold and/or diamonds?

3. This is technically two questions, but both pertain to fest quality-of-life, so hopefully this is allowed (and if not, please disregard the second one).
As more players join, leaderboards have become increasingly competitive, especially nurture boards. I understand that that is, in fact, The Point, but I also see myself, and judging by region chat, many others who get kicked off by a VERY small number of points. Would you possibly consider increasing the boards to maybe 15 slots? As for my second point, I am aware it would require re-coding unless something could be maybe copied from another fest (I know absolutely nothing about coding), but would Summer Fest sand sculpting ever switch to slow hourly point increases like the other fest catalyst creations?


But anyway, thank you for this wonderful game :)

Edit: we already have 15 leaderboard slots, I may be illiterate

Link: https://www.sylestia.com/forums/?thread=110784&page=1#10 Author: Leen Time Posted: 11/5/2025 at 3:24 PM Lovely idea to make an AMA, I keep remembering questions I have :9 1. Will we ever get more frequent non-restricted traits? I think all the new restricted traits and sets have been fun, and I am aware the disruptors probably help fund Sylestia, but sometimes it's nice to dream about all the nice contest entries for single traits people have entered and could naturally occur on Sylesties. 2. Also I think you mentioned sometime you'd make a thread or post about your process to choose themes for festivals. I'm sure a lot of it is personal taste, but through hearsay I heard that you also consider the names, of course if it is similar to an existing theme, etc. but well, that's just hearsay. Is that still on schedule, or any chance you could expand on it in some way? I am sure I am not the only one looking to consider possibly important aspects during theme submission creation! 3. Also also on that note I think more Grove themes could be fun again, especially to hunt between fest downtimes, even though I only encountered like a handful myself. Any chance there will be any more additions in the future?

1. I would definitely like to, yes. As you alluded to though, a lot of the decision making around this is in regards to revenue. Restricted Traits bring in a lot more revenue than regular Traits and with our current volume of new Traits, it's unfortunately one or the other. I hope that once I can get things revamped and get Sylestia back to growth-mode, that we can then put a lot more focus and spending on new artwork on a much more consistent basis.

2. I don't recall plans to make a dedicated post about the process, but I am more than happy to discuss it here. It easily could have been something I am just forgetting though lol.

So the process begins by me going through the Themed Pet thread, one species at a time. I start with Aeridini and end with Zolnixi. For this part, I am basically just quickly looking at the design and assessing if I think it could potentially be good enough. If I deem it could be, I copy the design, the name, and the designer into a Google Sheet. I usually have pretty low qualifications to make this list because I want a lot of designs for each species. It usually takes me about 15-30 minutes for each species.

Once I'm done with filling out the Google Sheet, I then go through the species one by one. Here, I am now picking out the actual Themed Pets to be officially added. I will look through the 10-20 different designs I put into the sheet and usually find ~5 that I like the most - or potentially like the most. Then I will load each one into the Generator to play around with different Traits. There are a lot of good designs that end up not being very flexible with different Traits as the design was designed around specific Traits and it's just not viable for other Trait combo's.

If the design passes the Generator test, then I check existing Themed Pets to see if it's unique enough. I am looking at last year's Themed Pets for that specific Festival of that species, all Themed Pets for all of that specific Festival of that species, and then all Themed Pets for that species. If it passes this test, I mark the Themed Pet as 'good enough to be picked'.

Once I've gone through all of the designs for that species and picked out my top picks, now I compare to decide which one or two to pick. Sometimes it's easy, I only picked two. Sometimes it's hard, I didn't pick enough. Sometimes it's even harder, I picked too many. In the case of the latter, I then look for "tie breakers". This could include the name - but not just because someone picked a cool name - but rather because it triggers some sort of extra feeling of excitement or intrigue. A simple example from this year's Festival would be "Goblin Thief Lunemara". I definitely got a little chuckle out of that name. It's very fitting for Fall Festival, it's very fitting for the color scheme, it's a fun name, and it's a unique name. That definitely helped me to want to pick it. Of course, the design has to be good to begin with - but the cheeky name definitely helped in that case. If it were instead called, "Green Tree Lunemara", that doesn't quite illicit the same type of response. All in all, this takes me about 30-60 minutes per species.

In conclusion, I really have no personal preference when I pick Themed Pets. I truly don't care who's designs I pick and I don't personally care if I pick ones I personally like or not. I know that sounds weird. But I truly look at the whole process as unbiased as possible. My ONLY goal is to pick the Themed Pets I think YOU guys will want the most. That is truly my one and only goal. Here is an example of what the Google Sheet looks like:



3. There will probably not be anymore Lost Grove Themed Pets. However, I have major plans for Themed Pets when exploration is revamped. So they absolutely will be a part of future content when we can finally start going down that road.

Link: https://www.sylestia.com/forums/?thread=110784&page=2#12 Author: Silverkitsu Time Posted: 11/5/2025 at 4:41 PM Wow, others already managed to cover the question I had about artifacts and whether bulbs were the next revamp planned. 1) When it comes to reworking the battle system, is the lost grove more of an example of what a reworked system could look like, or a final iteration on the current pre-rework system? 2) Reworking core functions and pages like the breeding grounds sounds very tricky and time consuming. What features are the easiest to work on? 3) Do you have a crazy dream feature that would never actually be feasible to add?

1. The Lost Grove would be the closest we have to what my future vision is for battling, yea. The biggest changes for battling will be changes to Elements, Abilities, Proficiency Points, and Expertise. We will still be keeping the 6 Elements, but I want to greatly expand the Ability trees and the amount of customization for different play-styles. For example, I want each Ability node for each Element to have multiple choices - such as an ability that's more focused on Offensive, one focused on Defensive, and one focused on Support. Some Elements would still be better suited for certain roles, but you'll have the choice of, say, sacrificing some offensive capabilities on a Fire Pet for maybe some added Support. Then, for each Ability, there will be a more in-depth Expertise system where you can expand and customize each Ability even further.

2. The features that are the easiest to work on are the ones that are just pure back-end stuff and detached from everything else. I can just rebuild them in a vacuum and it's pretty easy. The most time-consuming coding is always front-end interface stuff. Not only does it just actually take a lot of time to design, but it also requires a lot of time to test and tweak. By far, that is what is making the Breeding Grounds take so long. There is just a TON of brand new interface code I've had to write, test, and tweak for it.

3. While I would love to someday transform Sylestia into an explorable 3D world, I think I can safely say that that is not going to ever be feasible lol. Perhaps some day we can have Sylestia the Sequel and it could be a 3D world. =P

Link: https://www.sylestia.com/forums/?thread=110784&page=2#13 Author: Sirenn Time Posted: 11/5/2025 at 9:06 PM Hi. I have a few questions 1. Have you ever think about extending the choices in the Advance Search? Like it would gonna be great if we could have more selection choice like for finding ReGen pets if we want without wasting time :P 2. What do you think about extending the story in order to unlock more place/zone in the World map? The current World Map is large, yet just 3 places. Curious about what happen to other places. 3. Have you ever think about making the adolescent pets and the adult pets of each species looks different to each other? I think that would help everyone doing projects easier to know if their pet has fully grown or not.

1. I would love to expand the Advanced Search. However, I quickly ran into the problem of realizing that when you are not properly optimizing your database tables for, now, 9 million entries... it doesn't work very well to run large search queries on them. In order to have a proper search some day, I will have to completely rework our database tables to be able to handle searching through millions of entries and not massively clog up the server's CPU. I will get my first chance at this for when I work on the Pet Search part of the Breeding Grounds. While there won't be millions of pets up for breeding, I will have a very in-depth search to allow for searching by Traits, Statistics, and other basic info.

2. Yep, that definitely is the long-term plan. When I can finally get to reworking our exploration systems, Sylestia will actually rewind a bit and everyone will go back to the beginning of the story - albeit, it will be a bit different post-revamp. From then on, though, you guys can expect continuous updates to story content as we explore through the entire continent and beyond.

3. Unfortunately, something like that just wouldn't be feasible. At this point in time, we have literally thousands of hours of artwork time and thousands of hours of my time putting in and coding the artwork that adding another set of bases for each species is just completely unfeasible. It would literally take years of non stop work and hundreds of thousands of dollars in artwork costs. Fortunately though, we have separate Baby and Adolescent/Adult bases and separate Male/Female bases for each species - which a lot of other games don't even have.

Link: https://www.sylestia.com/forums/?thread=110784&page=2#14 Author: Guiltyelphelt255 Time Posted: 11/5/2025 at 9:12 PM I have only 2 questions: one is pet theme related and the other is related to limited genes and mutations options so I apologize if one or both are complex to answer If you ran out of new ideas for brand new and future themed pets, will you be going back to the themed pet designs in previous forums that weren't picked in the past, adjust them and add those or just have players constantly keep changing their unpicked designs in hopes they get lucky to win? I'm not trying to be mad so please don't be offended. My second question is will there be more options to genes and mutations for certain Sylesti species in the future? Because I love the Bulbori species to the moon and back because it's a rabbit with gems and would love to see a lot more options for the gene 2 slot and even the mutations 1 and 2 trait slots. For example: the bulbori has limited options for gems, tails and wings and hoping there could be more options like cosmic wings, aurora borealis essence for any gene or mutation trait, aurora gems, etc even if trait design contests aren't held? Because the bulbori just seems to have less of those traits and using those same traits over and over again for themed designs to use in seasonal fests just seems a bit bland while several other Sylesti species have a dozen options in the genes and mutations. I won't be mad if there won't be more options in the future but it would be cool if there were more trait options to the Bulbori species, thank you for letting us ask you our long-awaited questions! Also I apologize if this question is complex to answer, I tried to make it as simple as possible while writing a lot!

1. There was a point in the past where we would dig through old submissions from previous years when we didn't find what we were looking for in the current year, but it seemed like players largely did not like that so we stopped. At this point, I pretty much exclusively pick Themed Pets from the current submissions and try to make very few adjustments. Sometimes, I will make minor adjustments to like a Gene or Accent color. But overall, I try and honor everyone's submissions as is. It seems like players have been pretty satisfied with the Themed Pets as of late so I plan on sticking with that formula for the indefinite future.

2. The reason that the Bulbori hasn't received more Traits relative to other species is due to that they are planned for a revamp. They are the last remaining species that we plan on doing a full revamp for - something I wanted to get started on this year but now am planning to get started on it next year. When they are revamped, they will release with a lot of new Traits and then be up for consistent updates like other species. We don't plan on doing a major revamp for them. We are happy with their concept and poses. So it will just be updating the artwork and re-organizing their Traits to fit the slots better.