Guild Wars 2

The cats need to be given food in order to get them to your home instance..
But I’m honestly confused, how do people figure out what to give them.
I can look them all up on the wiki or on dulfy, but without any kind of ingame information, how did the wiki and dulfy get it?
are these achievements designed for to be datamined or something?

Trial and error? Isn’t that how Mystic Forge recipes are found?

Some it was common sense. When I got one of the first cats I just tried foods cats would like, poultry and the like and it worked. Later cats gave clues like this spicy cat or whatever and I tried spicy foods, peppers etc. Later on however I needed guides.

Indeed, trial and error. The people who seek out the brand new content stuff spot the cats, look at the text given or the environment for clues, and bring any and every consumable they can think of to try to feed to the cat until it accepts something. Then, they tell other people (including Dulfy and/or people who update the wiki).

So far as I understand it, they’re intended to be community efforts, similar to when the devs leak some story bit or Mystic Forge challenge.

While it can be irritating that it seems like the devs are taunting us with low-conveyance randomness, it actually creates an opportunity for player engagement. (And more site hits for Dulfy :P)

community effort or not, I’m often surprised at how fast this goes, because sometimes they announce a cat, and within half an hour after the patch its on dulfy, I wonder if it’s because they’re announced, so people make a char filled with all kinds of food, and then visit the cat in the hope something fits.. ?

Amaimon.7823:

I wonder if it’s because they’re announced, so people make a char filled with all kinds of food, and then visit the cat in the hope something fits.. ?

Given some of our playerbase, this would not surprise me. o_O

Rauderi.8706:

Amaimon.7823:

I wonder if it’s because they’re announced, so people make a char filled with all kinds of food, and then visit the cat in the hope something fits.. ?

Given some of our playerbase, this would not surprise me. o_O

According to the trial and error reddit posts I see when news of a new home instance cat breaks out, this is exactly what some people do.

Different people will approach a problem or a puzzle in different ways, which means what one person finds impossible another person thinks is obvious.

For example I can often just look at a jumping puzzle and see where I need to go and how to get there and I’ve been struggling to understand how people find the new map confusing when it seems easy for me to work out how to get where I’m going. But then I found some text and after about 20 minutes of trying everything I could think of I had no idea what it said or even what alphabet it was using. I posted it on the forum and talk to some people in-game and it took some of them maybe 2 minutes to translate the entire message. To them it was obvious, just from the context and the pattern of the letters apparently. But I’d never have been able to do that myself.

This is where working it out as a community comes in useful, one person doesn’t have to be able to do the whole thing themselves. One person can find the cat, someone else can work out what kind of food it wants, a 3rd person might know the foods that match that criteria and then a 4th person has all the recipes unlocked and is willing to make the foods to test it out.

Every time a new cat shows up, there’s a big trial-and-error process with findings posted on Reddit and these forums (and the wiki once the findings are confirmed). Some people do the character-full-of-food approach, others try subsets of food based on cat color since there’s been a pattern found of what type of food cats like based on their fur.

Think of it as a hive mind of a sort Any one person might not be able to figure it out fast (though I feel like some of the community can, and are so methodical they strike me as probably the best beta testers ANet could ask for) but a thousand people working the problem and sharing what they find can zero in on the correct answer quite quickly.

I’d really like a reward track for this. I have lots of them but I have no idea which ones I’m missing.

The Devs were asked a few years ago if they ever put Easter Eggs in their game for players to find. Their response was “We try but Dulfy and all her helpers find them all very fast!” They were not mad about the stuff being found fast but amused that the community comes together to help each figure things out.

DoctorDing.5890:

I’d really like a reward track for this. I have lots of them but I have no idea which ones I’m missing.

Not a reward track, but if you go the the Hungry Cat Scavenger Hunt Wiki Page, there’s a field at the top of the list where you can enter your API key, and then the list will show you what you have by graying them out, leaving the one’s you still need easily visible.

Hope this helps.

Endless Soul.5178:

DoctorDing.5890:

I’d really like a reward track for this. I have lots of them but I have no idea which ones I’m missing.

Not a reward track, but if you go the the Hungry Cat Scavenger Hunt Wiki Page, there’s a field at the top of the list where you can enter your API key, and then the list will show you what you have by graying them out, leaving the one’s you still need easily visible.

Hope this helps.

Thanks. That helps!

I actually find it amazing how the community works together to scour and solve even such minute puzzles like these.

I’m pretty sure some dev out there must be feeling a little disappointed that their little hidden surprise got discovered and cracked? in a short amount of time, but hey, that’s what makes us great. Haha.

Amaimon.7823:

community effort or not, I’m often surprised at how fast this goes, because sometimes they announce a cat, and within half an hour after the patch its on dulfy, I wonder if it’s because they’re announced, so people make a char filled with all kinds of food, and then visit the cat in the hope something fits.. ?

I think this has to be the case. How else can you account for someone having Rainbow Cake for one of the latest cats?

Sariel V.7024:

Amaimon.7823:

community effort or not, I’m often surprised at how fast this goes, because sometimes they announce a cat, and within half an hour after the patch its on dulfy, I wonder if it’s because they’re announced, so people make a char filled with all kinds of food, and then visit the cat in the hope something fits.. ?

I think this has to be the case. How else can you account for someone having Rainbow Cake for one of the latest cats?

Once you know the pattern, it can’t be that hard to figure out the next one. It’s not like it’s been completely different types of items.

Also interesting: there is at least one achievement or something tied to those rifts, as yet undiscovered, according to the developers. So not everything is instantly solved. (Though by this point I’m starting to suspect that perhaps it never will be, because it is some “primer” level sort of thing…)

If I remember correctly it did take longer when they first introduced cats who didn’t want meat, and there’s been some which took a lot of guesswork to unlock, like the feline familiar.

Others were fairly obvious as soon as you saw them. For example I found the leopard cub on the second day Bitterfrost Frontier was released, I doubt I was the first one but there was nothing about it on the Wiki at that point, but it was immediately obvious what you needed to do for it, and not a big jump (if you knew about the hungry cats) to guess it’d show up in your home instance.