We have an exciting new feature that we have finally released: the Themed Pet Codex! A much requested feature, this is the first iteration of an official resource where players can view every existing Themed Pet in the game. This feature can found in the navigation menu under Explore -> Themed Pet Codex.

Regarding the feature, it is a bit barebones at the moment. We were really just focused on getting it physically released first instead of trying to add all of the bells and whistles to it. We will revisit in the short future to add some more depth to the searching and to the display of information. But at least it is available now for players to play around with.



In order to use, just select what you're wanting to see from the drop down menus and then click the search button. The related results will then fill the page in descending order for players to look over. At this point in time, if players want a closer look, they will have to copy the image URL and manually paste it into the Generator. We plan on adding more display options in the future. Additionally, the only information provided for each Themed Pet is just its Theme Name. Again, we plan on expanding this in the future as well.


Themed Pet Selection Feedback

Faiona and I wanted to take a moment to address the various discussions regarding official Themed Pets, the designs that we pick, and the processes around them. Firstly, we have had access to a much more simplified version of the Themed Pet Codex with our admin tools for quite some time - probably 2-3 years or so. Since that point, whenever we selected Themed Pets, we always review our selections against existing Themed Pets to make sure that the new color palettes are unique and not redundant. As you can imagine, as we keep adding more and more Themed Pets to a species, this gets more and more challenging. But we have been doing this for years. However, now with the Themed Pet Codex widely available, players can now do this themselves and compare their new design concepts with the official palettes of existing designs.

We have seen a lot of discussion where players feel that we are constantly picking "brown" designs, or "red" designs, etc. However, it seems a lot of these arguments are simply just comparing the base Trait-less versions of Themed Pets against each other. The majority of Sylesti have very simple Trait-less palettes, some are literally like three total colors. When Themed Pet designs are compared with Traits actually visible, almost all of the "these are all brown"-type examples no longer hold up. When we are selecting Themed Pets, we compare with Traits visible, not Trait-less. Traits are the essence of breeding projects and what players seek for.

There are also only so many colors available. When a species has 80+ Themed Pets, it's basically impossible not to start having some overlaps with palettes when you're just lumping all blue, brown, red, green, etc colors together in a category.


We have also seen suggestions where players want some sort of voting system for Themed Pets. This has been something that we have been contemplating for years and I even actually began creating such a feature awhile back. However, we ultimately decided that it would just not realistically work well. It would be impossible to prevent collusion with the system. We felt that it would almost guaranteed devolve into a popularity contest, or worse. Players could easily just buy votes offsite via Discord, etc to sway the results into their favor. Players also would probably be inclined to vote for their friend's designs, or specifically not vote for players' designs whom they do not like, etc. Of course, the system on our end would be anonymous, but we are sure players wouldn't have much of an issue figuring out which designs belong to which players. All in all, we feel like this feature would create more problems than it would solve. So we have decided against implementing a feature like this.


Lastly, I would like to address the confusion over us using old designs or changing designs to different species. Sometimes, players will create a very nice palette for a species that we end up not using. Perhaps there were a handful of really nice designs for a specific species, but we simply can only allocate one or two designs for that Event/Festival and so the others are left out. Or, perhaps a design is really nice, but the species already has something similar - or we are specifically looking for something else for that species. When situations like this arise and we run into a situation where a species still needs a design, we may pluck old designs or switch species. When we do this, we always adjust the design to fit the new destination species, if applicable. Sometimes, the final result ends up being completely different. However, since we used a player's design as the initial inspiration, we want to be generous and still award them a prize for having their design picked - thus we state that the design belonged to them.


All in all, the Themed Pet selection process is a very involved process that takes about 15-20+ hours every major Festival. Faiona and I spend a lot of time on it and take into consideration many factors which ultimately dictate our choices. Over the past couple of years, participation in the design contests has dropped quite a bit which is making the process even more difficult as the available pool to choose from shrinks. Coupled with the fact that it's getting harder and harder to choose designs as more Themed Pets keep getting added into the game, it is why we are having to take some additional steps to fill in all of the required Themed Pets with each Festival or Event.

I hope this helps to shed some light on the process and we hope that the release of the Themed Pet Codex will make it much easier for players to design future Themed Pet submissions. If you have any additional questions or concerns, please don't hesitate to ask.

Very very nice. In relation to voting for themed pets. If you took say the top 3 and you and Fai chose which you liked that would cut down your work significantly without the voting system really being open to cheating if you will. I do believe you are right about the system ending up a popularity contest though so maybe your current system is best for the moment. In the future it might be an idea to gather a consul of themed pickers that help you narrow down the entries.

Thank you so much, Krin!! This is great!

I was wondering if it was intentional to display some restricted-trait-only themes with non-restrictred traits. Looking at the puffs since I'm most familiar with them, the Cupid's Angelic, Cupid's Broken Heart, Cupid's Valentine, and Steampunk are displayed with normal traits while the Enchanting Angelic and Twilight Steampunk are displayed with restricted traits only.

Link: https://www.sylestia.com/forums/?thread=102026&page=1#3 Author: Tigress Time Posted: 3/11/2022 at 7:22 PM Thank you so much, Krin!! This is great! I was wondering if it was intentional to display some restricted-trait-only themes with non-restrictred traits. Looking at the puffs since I'm most familiar with them, the Cupid's Angelic, Cupid's Broken Heart, Cupid's Valentine, and Steampunk are displayed with normal traits while the Enchanting Angelic and Twilight Steampunk are displayed with restricted traits only.

Unfortunately, only about half of all Themed Pets (so about 800/1600) have saved specific dedicated Traits. When you select the "Default" from the drop-down menu, it is loading from these specific presets. However, for the ones that are not in the database table, they would display as Trait-less. When that happens, it reverts to the species' default set of Traits, which is what is currently displayed when selecting "Matching" from the drop-down menu.

We do plan on eventually filling in these missing 800 or so entries. But, as you can imagine, it's a very time consuming process to do that when you're doing it one by one.

Would there ever be any consideration to having picked designs put out before release like when releasing themed revamps? It would let people publicly post and discuss about designs they like and wouldn't be a voting system - it would just help y'all as admins get an idea of what the community as a whole wants for a fest lineup.

Or perhaps bring back this sort of thread from fall fest 2015.

I am really looking forward to the themed codex! Has to be one of the biggest things i've been excited for recently!

Having access to this is really cool. Having to try and use the advanced search to view different themes was a lot messier and took a lot longer.
I did notice that the Blazing Fireworks themes seem to default to no traits, and personally I'd love to be able to filter themes based on obtaining method eventually, like how the festivals' themed pet list splits up wild, exclusive, and restricted themes.

Got it ^^ No rush, it doesn't make a huge difference either way and I'm sure you have a lot on your plate hehe. I'm very happy we finally got this feature ^^

Thank you so much. As someone who's only been on the site a few months, this is a godsend resource to use when experimenting in the generator for design contests.

Awesome! Even in its barebones version this seems like it would be very useful. I'll definitely check it out when I get a chance.

Hey! I love this new feature, so helpful for aspiring designers to get a good idea of the existing themes!

The only thing I would say is are you planning to implement a way to organize them by age instead of alphabetically? Or maybe a toggle for both? I would rather see them in order from newest to oldest.