Treats

Treats


Treats are essential to leveling up your dragons. Treats can be grown on Treat Farms.

Paid Treats
Treats can be purchased as Treasure through the Market screen for real money. The images on the right show how many treats you can buy per USDollar. Obviously Backflip gives you more treats when you spend a larger sum of money at one time as an "incentive" to spend more. It's one of the backbones of the In-App Purchase system, more money equals more stuff.


 * Example : If $0.99 (£0.69) equals 750 treats then the first two purchases made do not include the "incentive" extra treats. If you choose to spend $4.99 (£2.99), you get 250 extra treats ($4.99 (£2.99) would normally be 3,750 treats at the standard $0.99 (£0.69) per 750 treats ratio) and this makes the user feel like they're getting a deal. This goes on exponentially, 750 bonus treats for spending $9.99 (£6.99) at once, 2,250 extra treats for plopping down $24.99 (£17.49) and a whopping 8,500 extra treats for spending the maximum $49.99 (£34.99). This "incentive" model is built to make the player feel like they are getting a deal, or more than they bargained for. "Wow! 2,250 free treats!" when in fact, the treats weren't free... they were $24.99 (£17.49). This model is the standard in the industry because it works. If you plan on using that much food, you would want the most economically sound package available (which coincidentally is also the most expensive). But if you pay to play then you might as well get your money's worth, right?

When you can grow the treats for free, it seems that the only value in purchasing them would be to level up your dragons very very quickly. In this editors personal experience, he has never paid for anything and all of his dragons are above level seven. The time it takes to get all the dragons hatched and bred gives you plenty of time to grow treats for them. In his advice, if you are going to purchase something... purchase gems.

Free Treats
As you may notice, the shorter and smaller treats actually give you more food per hour and cost less than the larger, less economical treats. This is because the larger treats don't require your attention to harvest and re-plant them constantly. Imagine all your farms growing Dragon Snaps, you tap twice per farm to initiate the growand if you have 10 farms that's 20 taps in 30 seconds just to start growing them. Then once the cycle starts it's 3 taps. One to collect, one to select the farm again and one to select Dragon Snaps. Times that by ten and you're tapping 30 times in 30 seconds just to keep up with the treat cycle. I have personally tried to do this while maintaining the park (collecting the Plant, Fire , Lightning and Air Habitats ) and it's not worth the effort, in my opinion.

The trade-off is that the larger treats don't require all the fuss above and they provide more experience to the player than the smaller treats. The larger treats actually cost less per second than the smaller treats as well. Experience becomes much more important than food around level 15 or 16, so you usually choose one of the larger treats available. I personally grew Blushrooms or Zazzberries all day (when I could actively look at the iPad once every 2hrs or 30mins respectively) and then chose the Pumpermelons overnight. Once I had all my dragons to level 10 I switched to the Dragon Fruit for the experience gain.

Dragon Snaps


* XPH = Experience Per Hour  FPS  = Food Per Second  FCPS  = Food Cost Per Second

Blushrooms
 

Note: A blue mushroom exists by the name of Entoloma Hochstetteri. It's found in New Zealand and India and is so rare, it's unknown whether it's poisonous or not, though most of the members of the Entoloma genus are poisonous.

Dragon Fruit


Note: Dragon Fruit is the only treat in the game that is actually real. They are one of the most exotic looking fruits available with bright pink skin and green tipped leaves and a white, pink or red flesh speckled with black seeds. Truly a beautiful fruit and the perfect example of the phrase "looks can be decieving" or "don't judge a book by it's cover" because this gorgeous fruit doesn't taste like much more than water.

Real Fruits
Here is a picture of a Real DragonFruit but don't be fooled. They look absolutely  delicious unfortunately though, they aren't. Taste is mostly water and if you could imagine a Strawberry, Kiwi and about 4 cups of water mixed together you could imagine the taste. They are very good for curing bowel related problems such an incontenance and impaction due to extremely high fiber but they don't taste all that great and cost a fortune. Oh well, I'll stick with Cherimoya and Passionfruit as my 'exotic' fruits.