Tips

What's this page about?

This page is dedicated to tips about Niche. You may find tips that should help the survival of your pack or even learn new things about the game. Feel free to add your own tips and tricks if you have them!

Adam and Eve

Small note: this is somewhat out of date as of 1.0. In story mode Adam is almost entirely static while Eve is almost entirely randomized. The tips though are still useful, especially in sandbox mode where the two starter Nichelings are both randomised.

Adam is completely static- Eve is randomized, with some genes that do not appear (derp snout, wings, webbed feet, etc). Adam's genes are as follows: medium ears, no horns, eyes (inactive shortsighted eyes), poison fangs, big body, 2 runner legs, hind legs, medium tail, no melanism/albinism, red + yellow fur, black eyes (inactive brown eyes), white horns, black + brown markings, stripes, shape D, pattern density + size unknown

Another static gene is Hemophilia (which though recessive in Adam, it can appear in creatures very easily). Hemophilia is a gene you are going to want to keep recessive and ultimately remove it from your gene pool. To do so, you are going to want to choose your breeding pairs (very) wisely.

Right from the start, you are going to want to try and get Ram or Antlers into every creature. Doing so will provide each creature +1 Strength (the other gene in this slot provides no benefits).

Unless you want to get water creatures, (in which case Beak and Gills are a good thing to have, and mingle that with Water Body so they can breathe underwater) there are two head genes you will want to get. "Cracker Jaw" and "Poison Fangs". Cracker Jaw allows you to get acorns and clams with out the need of Nimble Fingers. Poison Fangs provide the ability to poison most attackers. However, this does not work with the newly added apes of the jungle island, so "Big Nose" is a good alternative, so you can smell things farther with the scent view, including prey, predators and most food sources, such as berries and clams.

Abilities

Some people like to go for the "great" genes to make their creatures powerful, but by doing so, they make their creatures slow. For example, people go for Nimble Fingers and Claws, and while useful, they do limit speed, meaning a double Claw creature is quite slow compared to others. This is quite negative, as it can take a few turns for creatures to get to places. This means you are going to want to keep an eye on the speed of your creatures. This is why Lean Body is a viable choice for body genes, as it has a lot of stealth and speed added on to your creatures statistics.

If you aren't aiming to swim in the waters of the islands, Webbed Hind Legs are useless, as they don't grant much speed, unlike the regular Hind Legs.

Breeding Traits

Most of the time, I find it easier to focus on one trait at a time when breeding healthy creatures.

For example, on the starter island, I will usually try to breed in Normal Eyes, while still keeping varying genes so the nichelings won't get sick. Once all of my creatures have normal eyes, I move onto the flower island. Then, I focus on maybe, for say, Deformed Paw. Once all of my creatures don't have Deformed Paw, I move to another flower island. After I have the most important traits, I can focus on cosmetics like fur and eye colors, to design my creatures as I wish. (I find black fur with blue eyes to be my favorite!) Notice that you should be careful with cosmetics to try to use the correct fur color if you are not planning on deterring predators through Stinky Tail and similar genes, because fur color actually has the purpose of camouflaging you in the correct biomes and is essential in the more difficult biomes otherwise.

You can continue to do this until you have the perfect creatures for whatever Island you plan to conquer, whether it be the jungle, oasis or killer islands. And the best tip for survival that people often forget (including me) is: if you can't use your strategy to adapt your creatures, then adapt the strategy to your creatures -in other words, it will be much easier to use a strategy if the genes you need are already there. Don't be afraid to change your strategy if a setback or new opportunity comes. And finally, mixing and matching your strategy may be the best way to go sometimes -My original plan to the jungle was being as deterring as possible, but now, I've decided to take advantage of the fact that I have a lot of spotted creatures to camouflage, yet I still have a lot of Stinky Tail creatures around.

If you don't move islands much/at all...

Just breed and collect food. You will get a pretty diverse gene pool and a stable bloodline. Remember to invite in most wandering Nichelings to vary it a little, but be careful to make sure they don't have bad genes (deformed paw, hemophilia etc) first. You can also use this to prepare for moving to new islands where you will encounter more predators and different climates.