When a Mommy cat and a Daddy cat love each other very much… No, that’s not it. That’s sort of where new Kitties come from, but we won’t get into that here.

Fancy Cats are a series of special cats identified by their unique artwork and badge. Do you know the adorable Momo-chan, or the dreaded PhuZiQaat? They’re both Fancy Cats! When we first released Fancies, you could breed as many of them as you wanted (have you seen how many DuCats are flapping around?!), but now, they’re all limited edition. Once you hit that Fancy’s limit (and it’s a different number for every one), no more can ever be created. We wanted them to feel special and rare.

How we brewed a Fancy treat

Fancy Cats are created when users breed a cat with the right combination of traits. Let’s take Negato as an example. Negato is a stealthy assassin and creature of the night; he’s also an adorable ninja.

Every CryptoKitty has the same visible trait categories: pattern, highlight colour, eye colour, eye shape, base colour, accent colour, mouth, and fur. There are also two elements that only some Kitties have: a potential wild element like elk horns or daemonwings, or an environment one like salty. Plus, there are two unexpressed trait categories (so far it’s a secret what they do, but they’re there 😉).

We create and plan the Fancies in the CryptoKitties lab (okay, it’s an office, but lab sounds a lot cooler, doesn’t it?). For each Fancy, we select a combination of traits (usually four or five) that will make that Fancy Cat. For example, if you had wanted to make Negato, you needed a cat with onyx, henna, wolfgrey, and slyboots traits. Your Kitty could have any other set of traits; but you needed those four traits to get a Negato. We always choose a trait recipe that doesn’t exist in the wild, and then we release the Fancy Cat into the ecosystem. Once a player discovers that combination of traits, they’ll breed themselves a Fancy Cat! If you’d like to learn more about how to hunt for a Fancy Cat, we’ve got you covered with a handy instructional video.

You’re probably wondering what happens when you try to breed a Fancy cat after it has reached its limit. Well, all those Kitties will stop turning into Fancies. So today, if you breed a cat with onyx, henna, wolfgrey, and slyboots, you’ll get a very cute kitten, but no Fancy.

So what does that really mean from a technical perspective? It means that on the blockchain, Fancy Cats and their regular siblings are actually the same. The only difference is the artwork, and (for now) that lives on our website. This gives us the flexibility to release Fancy Cats in the future without having to alter our smart contract.

Did you know that there are released Fancy Cats out there (at time of posting) that the community still hasn’t discovered? If you want to start hunting for a Fancy Cat, we recommend searching for trait combinations that don’t exist. Breed cats with those mixes, and you might just get lucky and discover a brand new Fancy cat!