Part 1: Choosing and Raising your Statter

Let’s start with choosing your future king.

You have to make an important choice before starting your stat journey: you must choose the lion you are going to be staring at for a minimum of 21 in-game years. Now is the time to ask yourself: what am I looking for in a king?

Understand this - the lion you are choosing to be your statter will NOT be your appearance lion. You will be using this male for his stats and heritage, and possibly for his mutation as well. It does not matter at all what he looks like - only his stats, heritage and mutation matter. If you do not understand how keeping your king’s appearance works when retiring, please stop reading this guide and go read up on that. I will not go much into that topic here.

I highly recommend a G1 or G2 lion for statters. Each has their pros and cons, which I will explain below. You can raise the stats on a lion of any generation, but keep in mind that your cubs become less and less desirable the longer your king’s generation becomes and you are likely to get fewer stud requests with a longer generation king. From my experience, people are most interested in G1 - G3 lions as kings, but we’ll keep it to G1 or G2 for now (we’ll be saving the idea of a G3 king for Part 5).


Pros and Cons comparing G1 & G2 lions…



How to obtain a G1 lion:

So you’ve decided to obtain a lion with no heritage to be your future king? Awesome! Read on, my friend. G1 lions, also known as “Groupies,” can only be obtained during the May event from V’Kai. All male Groupies are under 2-years-old when claimed. Groupies can come with any base or marking in the game (minus hybrid-exclusive ones) and can even come with mutations! However, the only passable mutation that male Groupies can come with is Primal - if you see a G1 king with a Patches or Piebald mutation, that was not from the Groupie, but rather from applying a Mutie on Demand applicator. In addition to being found naturally on some lucky Groupies, Primal can also be applied using the Primal Mutie on Demand applicator, which is considerably cheaper than any Patches or Pie MoD. It is definitely possible to get a G1 with a mutation, but especially if you want a Patches or Piebald king, it can be quite expensive. Non-passable mutations are generally cheaper (such as Polycaudal, Overgrown Tongue, and Melanism), as they cannot pass down to cubs. They can still look really cool, though, so if you decide you want one, by all means, go for it!

If you are looking for a Groupie outside of May, you will need to buy one from another player. The good news is that they are generally only a few GB most of the year. Many players freeze a bunch of groupies in May and sell them later in the year, especially in November when the new MoD applicators are released for Black Friday. After November, their prices can rise considerably. If it’s still May or just after May, try to find a G1 that is under 2 years old and with 150+ stats. If it’s later in the year, you’ll have to be less picky, but still try to aim for the youngest and highest statted G1 you can find in the TC. We can make up stats to a degree, but we can’t turn back time for our submale, so focus on age over stats. The G1 that became Mørketida was claimed as a Groupie by yours truly in May 2022 with 169 stats - he also came with the Melanism mutation, which is not passable, so I ended up using a Mutie on Demand: Piebald on him, and got one of the rarer pies - the Mottled mutation - so I was quite happy about that!

I already alluded to this above, but as far as passable mutations go on G1 lions, you are limited to what can be applied by Mutie on Demand applicators. Standard Primal and the various Patches and Piebald mutations are the only ones that can be applied to a G1 male lion. The Primal MoD can cost upwards of 25 GB during certain months, but you can get it from the January event for only 4000 SB in the Boneyard. Buying it around this time makes it fairly inexpensive. For Patches and Piebald mutations, they come from a number of different MoD applicators that are only available during Black Friday when buying $50 or more worth of GB. Any other time, they must be purchased from other players - and they can get quite pricey. A less desirable one may be under 50 GB, but a highly desirable MoD could be as much as 300 GB or more! I highly recommend going for Primal if you want a mutated G1 king. They are the least expensive and can produce some amazing G2 mutations for you like Smilus and Felis, plus more Primals and even Primal Fangs, too.


How to obtain a G2 lion:

Decided on a G2 over a G1? Great! This is probably the best bet for a new statter, and honestly, fairly simple. There are two main ways you can get a G2 lion for your future statter - buy one from the TC or breed an NCL to a G1 king. You could occasionally win them from raffles, but this is not a consistent method to get a new heir, so if you get lucky with one, GREAT, but don’t count on raffles as your source for a new king.

The best thing to do here is to find a passable mutation that you would love to have on your future king. Mutations that are passable from kings include: Patches and Piebald, Primal, and Dorsal Fur*. Patches, Piebald, and Primal would be the big ones that most people use. Once you’ve chosen a mutation, go to the TC and see if you can find G2 cubs with that mutation. Try to avoid adult lions for two reasons: #1 - adult muties cannot be sex changed, so you’d have to find a male, since females are useless for our purpose, and #2 - adults that weren’t cub trained likely missed out on lots of stats and patrolling time that we cannot get back. I’ll repeat what I said in the last section: We can make up stats to a degree, but we can’t turn back time for our submale, so focus on age over stats. If you are able to find a cub for a good price, awesome! If not, see if you can find any G1 kings with the mutation and breed your own G1 ladies to him and hope for a mutie. Your chance is fairly low, but if you aren’t in a rush, it’s worth trying since it will save you some GB!

If mutation isn’t all that important to you or you plan on applying one later with an MoD, you might be more interested in finding a high stat cub. For this, I recommend searching 1000 as the minimum stat and G2 in the keywords box. Although these cubs might not come with mutations, they will have a nice boost to their future stats! You can also choose to breed a G1 lioness to a high stat G1 king, but keep in mind that they tend to have high stud fees and often do not roll more than once a month.

Quick interlude for a pet peeve: if you have a particular mutation in mind and you cannot find one for sale in the TC, you may want to message someone about buying a cub you found via searching that is NOT in the TC, not in a sales cave, or is not marked for sale. Keep in mind that this IS against the Code of Conduct and you can get reported for doing so. That being said, if you choose to go this route, please take my advice: DO NOT message them telling them you want to buy it and DO NOT message them with an offer prepared. If you want to message them, politely ask if the lion is for sale (and please include a link so they know what lion you’re talking about) and then say something along the lines of “If not, no worries and have a great day!” Make sure to reread your message to ensure you do not come across as entitled, and also that you DO come across as polite and respectful.

*Note on G2 Dorsal Fur and Ferus kings: These are produced a bit differently than the other mutations mentioned above. There is no such thing as a G1 Dorsal Fur or G1 Ferus king. In order to breed a G2 Dorsal Fur, you must breed a G1 lioness to a G1 king that had completed the Punk Breeding Challenge in May. This will result in a G2 Dorsal Fur lion. Outside of May, the only way to get a G2 one is to buy from the TC (unless a king still has their DF Boost unused). For a Ferus, you must have the Mukombero item. It can be found in March as a rare explore encounter OR as a bonus item during the Black Friday sales. If you want a G2 Ferus, you give this item to a G1 lioness and breed her to a G1 king. The resulting litter will have one G2 Ferus cub born. You can also buy G2 Ferus cubs born in this way, but they are VERY expensive, so I do not recommend going this route, especially for a first time statter.

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Your new lion and you!

Now that you have your new statter, it’s time to start raising his stats! Actually first, if he was a female when you bought him, make sure to sex change him before he becomes an adult (as adult muties and adult heritageless lions cannot be sex changed). That being said, your lion can be safely trained as a cub or as an adol as a female before sex changing (in case you do not have an adult submale). If you bought a G1 lion, it’s probably an adol right now, so you can skip the next section and head straight to “Raising your Adol.” For proud owners of G2 lions, you might have a cub or an adol, so choose the section that is correct for you and keep on reading!

Before you continue though, I highly recommend recording your heir’s starting stats. It’s very nice to see how far your cub has come over time. I personally record starting stats and stats at every year (usually at the end of the day) from 2 years and on. I also record when he hits important milestones, like 1000, 1500, 2000 stats and so on. It’s up to you what you want to record, but please don’t feel like you have to record daily stat gains. That’s a little much even for me! If you plan on using my stat calculator for submale patrolling (more on this in Part 2), you MUST at least record his stats when he turns 2, or else the calculator will be of no use to you.


Raising your Cub

The most important thing for cubs is CUB TRAINING. For a statter, I wouldn’t even buy a cub older than 5 months if it wasn’t already being cub trained by its original owner. Cubs CAN be trained while in a trade in the TC, so there is really no excuse for someone not doing cub training, in my opinion. All the cubs for sale in my sales caves are ALWAYS getting their daily training, especially my high stat G2s, since most people purchase them with the intention of kinging. Head on down to Cub Training in the Crossroads. Simply choose a course and train! Your cub has an 80% chance of succeeding at the training. From 5 - 11 months, you can train your cub once per day, and you MUST do this. This is where a cub gets most of its stats from. Even a few percentage points is better than nothing. I’ve had a lot of people ask me which course they should do with their cub. It doesn’t really matter much - I usually do Wrestling on Monday, Pouncing on Tuesday, and so on throughout the week, ending with random clicks over the weekend. Sometimes, I just choose one for a few days instead. You do whatever works for you!

Meanwhile, every day, you should be doing THREE things with your little bundle of joy in the following order:

1. Play with your cub with an amusement stat item.
2. Feed your cub a food stat item.
3. Click Play, Tussle, or Groom (may award cubs 1 skill point).

These will help your cub gain stats daily, since otherwise, they really don’t grow in stats until they are fully grown. See below Raising your Adol for more information on what kinds of items I recommend for feeding and playing.

Then, head to Raising your Adol to see what’s next for your cub!

Raising your Adol

Adol training is important, but not as important as cub training. If you obtained a G1 or a G2 who was already an adol, this is the section for you. The goal of adol training is to get your boy to at least 75% cub training. 100% is better, but you must get to at least 75% if you want to see any stat gains. If you have not sex changed your adol, you can send her hunting with your lionesses to increase her training bar. She will still be sex changeable after, I promise! If you have a male already, send him patrolling with your submale. Submale patrolling tends to be the quicker option as males get 2-3% per patrol, whereas females get 1-2% per hunt. Regardless, you can get this done in a few days.

If you do NOT have a submale to help your adol male patrol, you have three options: if you can afford it, sex change him to female to hunt with your lioness and then sex change him back to male when he is done (will cost 2 GB total); buy a cheap adult male to patrol him with and chase him/resell him when you are done; or ask a trusted friend to patrol him for you. You can also contact me to patrol him since I normally have no adols to patrol with my submales - I usually do this for free or for a few hundred SB depending on if I know you or not - just mention that you were sent by my guide and I’ll understand what’s going on!

The goal of cub and adol training is to get the training bar above 75%, as I mentioned above. If you did cub training with your heir and also got him to 100% training as an adol, he is likely to get between 50 - 100 stats when he becomes an adult at 2 years. Nice stats boosts for your young adult! Here’s the bad news: if you have a G1, or you got your G2 as an untrained adol, even if you get him to 100% training, you are likely to see between 1 - 6 stats when he turns 2 years. Yikes. Unfortunately, that’s the way that LD’s cub training system works. Even if you use Medlar Fruits (which boost cub training by 5% per fruit), your adol is still not likely to gain many stats.

It is also important to note that NONE of this cub and adol training gives your heir any stats while they are still a juvenile. You will only see the stat boosts once they become an adult. The only way to get stats on your heir as an adol is the same as for cubs. Do the following three things in this order:

1. Play with your adol with an amusement stat item.
2. Feed your adol a food stat item.
3. Click Play, Tussle or Groom (may award adols 1 skill point).

Continue to the next section to see what kinds of items you should be using on your adol.


Recommendations for Stat Items

First of all, you should familiarize yourself with what kinds of stat items are available on LD. Check here for that list. Not all of these items are created equally, though. There are a few items that give more stats more frequently than other items, but they can be expensive. Don’t worry, I’ve included back-up options for those of you on a budget.

My top choices for items that are available year-round are Honeycombs for food and Kudu Horns for amusement. Honeycombs can be won from playing Serengeti Shuffle or bought from other players (I try not to spend more than 1 GB per comb, although lately this has been getting difficult to do). They have two uses, which can both be used on the same lion, but they also increase mood, so only use them AFTER you have played with your statter. Kudu Horns can be found in explore from rescuing the antelope or purchasing from other players. Good back up items are Egg Yolks (more on these later), Small Tortoises, and Gerbil Carcasses for food, and Dry Palm Leaves, Coal, and various skulls for amusement. If you have none of these, I have pretty good luck getting stats from Zebra and Warthog Carcasses, which are fairly common items, and you can always use Jacana Legs or feathers from explore if you have no skulls. Keep in mind that the budget options have a lower chance of giving stats, but they are still better than using nothing. Certain months, such as February, have stat food and amusement items in the event shop. Those are definitely worth checking out (look at the top section on the wiki page I linked above) as it can net your boy more stats and save you money in the long run.

Item Recommendations in Order:

1. Honeycomb
2. Egg Yolks (but only if you can get them for 1 GB or less)
3. Gerbil Carcasses (only fills 5% hunger on adults)
4. Small Tortoises (only fills 10% hunger on adults)
5. Zebra Carcasses (budget option)
6. Warthog Carcasses (budget option)


Amusement Recommendation in Order:

1. Kudu Horns
2. Dry Palm Leaves
3. Coal
4. Any Skulls (AWD, Leopard & Serval are best if you have them)
5. Jacana Legs (budget option)
6. Any Feather (budget option)


After all of that, it looks like it’s time for your young male to grow up! How exciting! Continue on to Part 2 to learn about his life as a submale.

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Part 2: Patrolling your Submale

Your heir made it to adulthood! Congratulations!

Now is the time when he will be gaining the vast majority of his stats. For most players, this is not a difficult process - simply a very long one. It does not have to be expensive either.

To get the maximum stats on your future king, you will be patrolling your submale from the moment he turns 2-years-old until the day he turns 14 years and 11 months. That is a VERY important number, so don’t forget it! If you let your submale turn 15, he has a chance of dying on that RO and every RO after. No one wants to spend 13 in-game years patrolling a submale only to have him die on you before you are ever able to king him and cash in on all that hard work. What I usually do is king my submales in the late afternoon or evening on the day that they turn 14 years 11 months so that I have time to get in a few last minute patrols while also having time in the evening to level up my new king.

If you’re reading this going, “Uhhh, vermax, I only wanted to patrol my male until he turns 3-years-old,” that’s fine, but it won’t net you very many stats. You can certainly king your submale at ANY age, but going until 14 years 11 months gets you the most bang for your buck. Keep in mind that if you king your submale when he is younger than 3, he will be aged UP to 3, thus losing out on precious patrolling time. If you king him when he is between 3 and 10 years, he will keep the same age, and if you king him when he is 10 years 1 month and older, he will be aged DOWN to 8 years. That is why we raise submales so long. Even though they seem like they’ll be really old when kinged, they will actually only be 8 years old, meaning you have 8 years with him as king, so you actually only lose out on 5 years of time as a king (since all non-rolled kings start at 3-years-old).

Let me show you what I mean with an assist from math: first of all, know that a king can live to 16 years - that is, he will die on the RO he turns 16, which is a year longer than a lioness or submale can live. A male kinged at 3 that was patrolled for 1 year ends up with a total of 14 years of stat gaining time (1 year as submale plus 13 years as king), while a male kinged at 14 years 11 months after patrolling his entire life ends up with 21 years of stat gaining time (13 as a submale plus 8 as king). That means that a submale kinged after a full life of patrolling will have 7 years more time to gain stats (possibly even 9 if de-aged in April). That is incredibly significant and will make a world of difference if you really want a good stat king.


How to Patrol (aka Why RNG Sucks)

Ahhh, submale patrolling. It will feel great some days. Other days, you’ll want to rip out your submale’s mane fur. Good news, patrolling is super easy! All you’ve gotta do is go to Patrolling in Crossroads, select your submale, choose any 10 spaces and press Patrol! Your submale will return in one hour, and when he does, click finish patrolling. You will then see a screen that shows you what he returned with: it may be nothing at all, or it could be an item and/or some stats! The stats are for him, of course. While many patrols will net no stats because RNG is a cruel mistress, you may get anywhere from 1 - 10 stats per patrol. Most commonly, I see 0 - 4 stats per patrol. While this may not seem like much, it really adds up over time. Side note: If you have more than one submale, recommend putting some symbol like * in front of your submale’s name so he shows up first on the list. You’ll be patrolling him a LOT over the next few months, so you really don’t want to have to scroll to get to him every time you send out a patrol. Keep in mind that you cannot successfully raise two submales on the same account, so if you want to raise more than one, be sure to have one patrolling in your side account, too.

In order to see long term gains, you need to patrol your submale at least 10 times a day. That means checking back on him once an hour, 10 times a day for nearly 6 real-world months. It is a lot, but once you get used to having a submale patrolling, it becomes second nature to check back on him. You can always set a timer if you don’t trust yourself to remember. My personal goal is 12 - 14 times a day. Any more than that is too much for me since I do need my sleep, but honestly, 12 is still a reasonable amount of patrols to get in once you get used to patrolling. If you are only able to get in 5 - 9 patrols a day at first, don’t panic. Your male will still have gains, but it will be less than if you could get in more patrols. My first submale definitely didn’t hit the 10 times a day mark, but I was still able to king him with over 3000 stats. Be prepared for many failed patrols where your submale brings back nothing at all. It’s frustrating, but that’s RNG for you. It seems to go in cycles for me, but regardless, it can be very disheartening to see your male return with no stats over and over again. Don’t worry too much though - it’ll work out in the end!

While he is patrolling, don’t forget to keep recording his stats at each year and/or each milestone. You won’t regret it later. It’s one of the best ways to see how far you’ve come, comparing one king’s growth per year/milestone to the next, and so on and so forth as you king each new statter.

The key to good submale patrolling is persistence. It is very easy to give up and king your submale early, but try not to if you can help it. If you can make it to 14 years 11 months, the payoff will be immense. It’s a long-term commitment for sure, but one that will be very worth it in the long run. Even a Groupie with double digit stats can end up with over 3500 stats EASILY if patrolled like this.


Don’t Forget to Use Items!

Just like when he was a cub and/or adol, you should continue to use stat foods and amusement items on your submale daily. In case you skipped directly to this section, you need to do the following two things in order:

1. Play with your submale with an amusement stat item.
2. Feed your submale a food stat item.

Note that playing/tussling/grooming no longer gives skill points to adults (with the strange exception of the day a lion turns 2 years old - it still can give a point on that day only). You can certainly still press that button, but make sure you’ve let him play with a stat amusement item first. If you’re not sure what I mean because you didn’t read the last section, you might want to take a trip up there to learn about stat items.


The Takeaway (and a helpful tool)

You want to aim for an average of 25 - 30+ stats per day. This includes stats gained from patrolling plus his daily stat food and amusement items. If using Honeycombs and Kudu Horns/Dry Palm Leaves, this should be easily obtainable. I generally manage to get 5000 - 5200 stats on my submales doing this, averaging over 30 stats per day.

You might be wondering how you could know how many stats your submale is gaining daily since I told you not to bother keeping track of daily stat gains. Good news, I have a solution for you! As long as you kept track of what your submale’s stats were when he turned 2 years old, you can use my Stat Calculator on Google Sheets (created solely by me, please leave my credit intact) to see his daily average stat gain, projected stats at kinging, and more! Simply open the link, make a copy for yourself, and enter your submale’s current age at the top (king’s age is optional), starting stats, and age he began patrolling (which should be 2 if you were following this guide). Then, as he patrols, start to fill in the other boxes - his current stats, total patrols and total stats gained from patrols (the latter two can be found right above your submale’s biography box). At first, the numbers may be a bit skewed, but after a few days or weeks of patrolling, the numbers will settle - this is because the calculator relies on historical data to predict future trends, so it’s difficult for it to make accurate predictions at first with limited data to work with.

Every time you want to make a new prediction, simply make sure his age is correct, then adjust his current stats, total patrols and stats gained from patrolling. You will be able to see what his projected stats are easily at any time! The calculator is VERY accurate, and only gets more accurate the longer you patrol your submale, so it is a great resource for statters (says the proud creator hahaha). I generally keep a link to the calculator in my submale’s bio, along with his yearly stats and stat milestones for easy access. If patrolling more than one submale (say, one per account), duplicate the tab so you do not have to keep adjusting all of the information each time you want a prediction.

Once your boy hits 14 years 11 months DO NOT FORGET TO KING HIM!! Don’t let all that time patrolling go to waste. Remember to king your looks lion first (unless you want to keep the appearance of your current king), and then king your statty submale, keeping the appearance of the current king. Once he is finally king, head on down to Part 3 to learn how to keep up the stat gains for the rest of his royal life!

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Part 3: So Now You’re King

Finally, your little boy is a king…. Now what…?

This is both the most exciting and the most difficult part of being a statter. Most people do just fine up until this point, but then fail to properly level their kings and miss out on gaining thousands of stats. Most of what you have read so far is likely similar to what you could have read in any stat guide on LD (minus the stat calculator). This section, however, is where my guide will differentiate itself from the rest. This is the part where I will share my personal experience on how to have an amazing stat king and still be able to roll whenever you want (which from now on, I will call “rolling daily,” even though you may not RO every single day).

First, the good news! If you follow my advice, you can expect to get another 3000 - 5000+ stats on your king during his 8 years as king!! That is on top of the 3000 - 5000 ish stats your boy got as a submale. This means that you can easily get a minimum of 6000 - 8000 stats on your king by the end of his life. Depending on your king’s starting stats, it’s not unreasonable to end up with 8000+ as your king’s ending stats. This isn’t easily obtainable by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s very doable so long as you’ve been following my advice.

If you'd prefer to freeze your account and only roll once or twice a month, then you could expect to see upwards 10,000+ stats gained in your king's lifetime! I will go over a little about frozen stat accounts below, but please keep this in mind: this route is NOT recommended for first time statters. If this is your first stat king, you will mess up - that is almost a guarantee. To save yourself hassle, time, energy, and GB, save kinging a frozen stat king until you've at least tried it out once before.

You should continue keeping track of his yearly stats and/or stat milestones as well! I usually separate the submale’s stats from the king’s stats with a line that says “Kinged stats:” to show how many stats he had at the moment of kinging. Don’t delete the stat data from when he was a submale - part of your self-monitoring for improvement will be looking back at this later, so it needs to stay.

Now, before we talk about actually being king, let’s talk about how you should prepare for your submale to be kinged long before he ever takes the throne.


Shopping for Experience

This is the expensive part of raising a statter. It is not 100% necessary, but without doing what I recommend in this section, you will lose out on hundreds, if not thousands of stat points. There are several items that will help out with increasing your king’s stats outright or via leveling. They are as follows: Giant Tortoises, Broken Drones, Coconuts, UAVs, Dove Feasts, Energy Boosts/Meat Pies, Roasted Lambs/Red Bulls, Coffee Beans, and Lucky Feet. Giant Torts, Drones, Coconuts and UAVs give experience, Dove Feasts give impression, Energy Boosts and Meat Pies give 100% energy, and Roasted Lambs and Red Bulls give 8 hours of double energy regeneration. Coffee Beans make it so each explore step costs less energy for 15 minutes. Lucky Feet allow you to instantly win a battle.

For experience, you want to focus on getting Giant Torts and Drones, since they give you the best value. Drones are generally cheaper, so if you can’t afford Giant Torts (which go for 1 - 2 GB), try getting a bunch of Drones. You can also get them in explore during the wet season, so you might already have a supply of them in your hoard. Before you king your male, try to get as many Giant Torts and Drones as possible. You will be using them as soon as he is kinged. You may want to stock up on Dove Feasts as well, and possibly save your anniversary Meat Pie or birthday Energy Boost for your new stat king, but you certainly do not have to. I do also highly recommend stocking up on Roasted Lambs and/or Red Bulls. These are the items that make the biggest difference in terms of stats. Try to get them from Wenet in April if possible, but if April is a long time from now, buy them when they are 1 GB or less. If you buy too many of them, you can always resell them later in February for 5 GB each or more for a sweet profit. Lucky feet are also from April, so you’ll have to buy them from other players in other months. While useful, they are not mandatory, since losing a battle is not the end of the world. If you can stock up on them, great! If not, don’t worry about it. Coffee Beans can be found in the Treasure Hunting mini-event held at the end of January and September. They can be helpful to add together with Catnip (more on this later), but they are not mandatory by any means.

The final thing to buy is one May Personality Changer, if you don’t already have one from the May event. Even if you have to spend 10 - 15 GB on it, it will be worth it, so trust me here and buy it.


Being King - Day One (plus a helpful tool)

Once your statter is kinged, the first thing you should do is change his personality to Stoic using the May Personality Changer. While that sounds kind of mean, you have to understand how helpful this is. Stoic makes it so that your king only loses 7% energy per successful battle vs. the standard 10%. This allows you to get in several more battles per energy bar. Experience gives you levels, and levels give you stats, so it’s a simple conversion of energy to stats, really. Do not go for Hyperactive. A lot of people tout Hyperactive as the best personality, but a single 30% energy boost is nothing compared to what you get back from Stoic in a day. Fun fact: if you enjoy claiming lionesses, Candid actually gets you more energy back on average in a day than Hyperactive does. Not the most useful personality for statters, but I’d recommend it over Hyperactive any day.

Next, you want to use his entire energy bar right away exploring. He should already have been fed as a submale, so he’s ready to explore! Use that energy bar, fighting all the NPCs you find and claiming or fighting the NCLs you meet. At this time, do NOT use any Dove Feasts. You will be getting 6% impression per claim or battle, but this goes down to 1% when you get closer to being a Dreamboat. If you have Dove Feasts saved for your king, use them when he is a Dreamboat or nearly there. If you have enough time to make it worth it, feel free to use a Roasted Lamb or Red Bull on your king’s first day. It won’t hurt, and it will just give him more experience to get through those first levels even more quickly.

What you do want to use are your Giant Torts, Drones, Coconuts and UAVs. Use them all!!! Then, once you have used up your whole energy bar exploring (and fighting all the NPCs), level up and use that fresh energy bar exploring once again. Be sure to explore in the highest area you can since you will gain more experience that way. Continue doing this until you run out of energy and have no more experience to level up. I try to aim for 15 - 20 levels on day one. More is better, of course, but only do what is comfortable for you. Your goal is going to be to get to the Waterhole as fast as possible, which requires you to be at level 31. The good news is that you’ll gain a lot of stats along the way. By the time you get to level 31, your king will have gained 990 stats from leveling alone!

At the end of day one, make sure to record your king’s stats and level. You will need this information for yet another stat calculator! This one requires a bit more input, but it is very handy to project your king’s potential stats. Day one is a bit of an anomaly thanks to all the experience items and how easy it is to level up at first, so that is why I exclude those levels from the calculations for average yearly level gains. Like the submale calculator, this one uses historical data, so it will be a bit before it predicts accurately, but give it some time and you’ll find it works just as well as its predecessor.

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Daily Dos and Don’ts

You’ve made it through your first day with your new stat king. Congrats! Come tomorrow, you’ll need to know how to keep being a statter. After all, one day does not a statter make. Let’s run down a list of things to do daily and things to avoid. Stat kings need some special TLC that other kings don’t, so you need to be careful to do certain things (some in certain orders) that you may not have done before.

First, the Dos list:

1. First and foremost - feed your male as soon as you RO!! You can’t play with him anymore, so just go right ahead and use that Honeycomb or other stat food item on him first thing. You want to do this first because while exploring, your king will snack on random meat he finds. Since he won’t get hungry again until your next RO, you lose out on some stats for the day. Beyond this, order doesn't matter - just make sure to feed your king before exploring! In March, he can get hungry from exploring due to poacher encounters, so you can feed him more than once if you are paying attention. Maybe have some extra stat foods on hand for March rolls!

2. Spar with your submale on your den page. It can be done once a day, and it can give experience, impression or even stat points for only 10% energy. Definitely worth doing!

3. Baoball - free stat points anyone? You will get 2 - 4 stats just by playing this “game,” if you can even call it a game. It’s just free stats, so don’t forget about it!

4. Gorilla Enclave quests - take a difficult one and switch quests if you need to in order to get a reasonable one (I usually skip marking ones unless it is a common NCL marking). Once you have the cub, turn it in for experience. Many people will tell you to take energy, but based on the amount of experience you get (which scales with level), you simply can’t do better with energy. Sometimes I will take the energy reward during February, but at any other time, experience is the best reward.

5. Snake Quests - make sure to get a doable one, using Snake Skulls on ones you don’t feel like doing. Also be sure to use Snake Scents on quests that require you to fight certain enemies. You’ll get experience and impression, and although it might not be much, take it! It will help in the long run.

6. Bone Marrow - This item can be purchased from Monkey Business for 80 SB and can be used once a day for a 20% energy boost. Make sure to use it while you have low energy so as to not waste it.

7. Event Quests - if there is an event going on with daily quests, do them! Some of them give experience, impression, or even energy, plus event currency.

8. Lioness Quest - If you have the quest, finish it as fast as possible. Two of the possible rewards that I tend to see get rewarded together are 100% energy and 100% impression, my personal favorite rewards (yes, more than the Lion Meat). Make sure not to turn in the quest until you have recently boosted your impression and used all your energy just in case that is the reward you end up getting. There is also a reward that gives a TON of experience that scales with your level - so this is definitely a quest worth doing!

9. Use a Roasted Lamb/Red Bull - if you have time, use a Roasted Lamb or Red Bull at the top of the hour. These items give double energy regeneration for 8 hours, but it counts back to the beginning of the hour you start it in. Meaning if you start using the lamb at 1:30, it considers it having started at 1 and you lose 30 mins of energy regen. Try to use it at 1:00 or a few minutes after instead (or the top of any hour, doesn’t matter which). Fun fact - if you use two or more Roasted Lambs and/or Red bulls at the same time, the energy regen just lasts that much longer. I regularly use 2 at a time for 16 hours of double energy. Some freezers use THREE for 24 hours of energy. Me? I like to sleep, so 16 is plenty for me. More on Lambs later, though.

10. Explore explore explore. Oh, and when you’re done, explore some more. Most importantly, FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT. Fight all the NPCs you come across and claim or slap all the lionesses you meet. I’ll go into more detail on this later, but experience = levels and levels = stats. You’re gonna want to get to the Waterhole as soon as possible, but again, more on that later. While exploring, feel free to use Catnips to summon more NCLs to you so you can slap them and get in even more battles than usual! Combine this with Coffee Beans for a very efficient exploring method! If you choose to claim NCLs with Candid instead of beating them up with Stoic, you'll find it VERY difficult for your energy to decrease if you are using Coffee Beans, so it's a great way to grind for impression!

11. Eat beetle larvae in explore. Ok, this one sounds a bit weird… But every time you successfully slurp up a beetle larva, you have a chance of gaining 1 stat point. Worth doing and costs 0% energy to do! Because of this, I actually would recommend NOT using Sanafica for statters. You WANT these encounters, so don't use an items to skip them.

12. Level up as much as possible. This includes actual levels and impression. Remember not to press level up until you have used all your energy since leveling up gives you 100% energy back for more exploring! For impression, it can’t go over 100%, so be sure to improve it as soon as it hits 100%. Experience can build up long past 100%, but not impression, so this is an important distinction to make.

13. Use energy boosts when you have them. This includes Energy Boosts, Meat Pies, Fermented Marulas, and Grubs. Any item that gives you energy. They can be expensive, but they are worth using to help get more experience if you can afford them. For Fermented Marulas, be careful not to use them unless you are at 0% energy, since they can cause you to LOSE up to 10% energy… or gain up to 10% energy! They are very much a gamble, but I like to stock up on them in December and use them when I am close to leveling up.

14. Use events wisely. This is very specific to two events: April and November. First, in April, you can choose to de-age your king by two years. If your statter is king during the last days of April, have him take a sip from the Primordial Spring and de-age him two years. That’s two more years of statting, which can make a huge difference! In November, you can use your Piety to get stats. For 12 Piety, you can get 15 random stats. You can generally do this several times during the month, meaning you can get a few hundred stat points during the month. If you king your statter at the end of the month, make sure to save all your Piety until then and use it on him all at once.


Time for the Don’ts:

1. Don’t stud to VLF lionesses. The minimum fert to stud to my stat kings was 40%, but now with Mørketida needed the energy he does to level up, it is 51%. I won’t even breed to my own lions with less than 30% fert without a Black Stallion or at least 2 Chasteberries. Studding to VLF ladies gets you nothing in return, but it does have the nasty effect of making you lose out on stats. If you have a high stat, low gen king, people will stud even if your minimum fert is high. Trust me.

2. On that note, don’t undersell your king. Your stud fee is a reflection of the effort you put into your king. Asterus’s fee was between 5 - 12 GB, increasing as his stats did, and he regularly sold out of all 21 stud slots toward the end of his life. I used a similar pricing with my G2 Ferus king with the same results, and still now with Mørketida and his 20 GB stud fee. Don’t be afraid to have an expensive stud, especially if your looks lion was an RLC, a multi-rosette, or a hand-bred BO bomb. I have seen stat kings undersell themselves in the recent past, and the stat market took a hit as a result. Please don't do this to yourself and other statters out there. There is very little competition with low gen stat kings, so price yourself properly. Feel free to message me if you need help determining a stud fee for your stat king.

3. Don’t waste your energy. Try not to let your energy get to 100%. Use it long before then. As I said already, experience = stats, so use your energy to gain experience. Of course, you can also breed to your lionesses and accept stud requests instead of exploring - just don’t let it sit at 100% for long, if at all.

4. Don’t skip (most) fights. With the exception of a few NPCs that I do not like fighting (curse you gorillas and pygmy hippos), I fight EVERY NPC I meet in explore. With high stats, you’ll win the vast majority of fights, especially if you follow my guide below. It’s ok to lose some fights - every once in a while, a lioness will kick my king’s butt. It’s embarrassing, but it happens.

5. Don’t level up without using all your energy. Each level up gives you 100% energy, so leveling while you have any energy left is a total waste. Use it all first, and THEN press level up, otherwise you lose out on stats.

6. Don’t attack other players for anything, unless you still need to attack for territory. You should never be attacking other players for skill or experience. It costs 20% energy and you get barely anything in return. That 20% energy will be much more useful in explore, where you can use it for 2 - 3 battles and much more experience than you would have gotten from PVP. Also, skill is useless, so don’t bother trying to improve it. Skill is the only stat not passed on to cubs. All cubs are born with 1 stat point in skill. This means that boosting skill is not helpful for breeding at all - all it does is pad your total stats.

7. Don’t forget about your beetles! This might sound weird, but winning a beetle battle can give 10 exp, which isn’t a lot, but hey, experience is experience if you raise beetles anyway!

8. Don’t use experience items past level 20 or so. After that, they generally don’t give enough experience to be worth using. At that point, you’re better off buying Roasted Lambs, Red Bulls, or Energy Boosts with the same GB.

9. Don’t roll stat kings in February if you can help it. I learned this the hard. You want to avoid fighting in Feb so you can maximize your HS, but stat kings HAVE to fight to get experience… meaning you have to choose between HS and experience. Not good. I recommend focusing entirely on grinding HS on a side account during the month if you have a stat king in one account. If you are about to king a statter, try to wait until March if you can. If you have to roll your stat king, then be prepared to lose out on HS or stats. You can’t have it both ways, sadly.

10. Don’t worry about karma. Being a statter usually results in being an evil lion, since slapping NCLs results in -5 karma. However, despite this, my final Asterus ended up being a good lion, so go figure. Meanwhile, Mørketida sits VERY high on the evil leaderboards... so I guess it evened out in the end! Regardless, karma will not be your main focus, so try not to worry too much about whether your king is a good kitty or not. If being bad bothers you, you can balance it out as my king did by being good whenever possible except on a few choice encounters where the negative karma option is the better one for a stat king (see the Waterhole giraffe encounter below).

11. Don’t buy Egg Yolks outside of April. During the April event, Egg yolks can go for 1 GB or less. During this time, I highly recommend buying as many as you can use on your king and/or submale. They only fill 3% of your lion’s hunger at a time, meaning you can use 7 per day on him. Egg Yolks have the potential to give up to 15 stats per use, so these little guys really pack a punch! They are hands-down the best stat food items in the game. However, they also have an EXTREMELY high failure rate. If you buy one Yolk for 5 GB outside of April and it fails, how do you think that will feel? From experience, I can tell you that it feels pretty awful. They just aren’t worth using unless you can snag them for cheap. If you can, use them as much as possible, but just don’t bother if they cost more than 1 GB per Yolk.

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Exploring and Fighting NPCs

You want to aim for the Waterhole as your zone to explore, so try your best to level up as quickly as possible to get to level 31. The reason for this is the wide breadth of encounters it offers - to start with, you can encounter nearly any NPC in this zone, making Snake Quests so much easier to complete (especially using Snake Scent). There are also some nice impression encounters, such as one where you see a drinking giraffe - if you let it drink, you get 3% impression and 35% energy (wow), but if you attack it, you get a Giraffe Carcass, 200 exp, and 10% impression (WOW). Depending on your current energy and impression, either one is an amazing option. This encounter alone is worth getting to the Waterhole for. While we’re talking about explore encounters, I want to mention the hyena pack one you can only get with very high or very low karma. When you encounter the hyenas, you have an option to bribe them. If you do, you have to pay 30 SB, but you’ll also get 10% impression, so aim for that option! 10% impression is half a Dove Feast, so that alone is worth around 500 SB to 1 GB if we had to put a value on it. Definitely worth the bribe!

Now for the crux of your king’s life - spending his energy on fighting NPCs in explore. Experience comes from battling, simple as that, so you have to get used to fighting everything. Seriously, do not skip out on fighting while exploring. That being said, there are a few NPCs that I do not like fighting. They are Gorillas, Pygmy Hippos, and Black Mambas. Mambas give really good experience though, so I usually try anyway, or just use a Lucky Foot on those battles. The other two I either skip or use a Lucky Foot on, but I’ve found that Pygmy Hippos just don’t give much experience, so I generally skip them entirely. If you find a certain enemy is too tough for you, just ignore them. As long as you aren’t ignoring more than 10% of the NPCs who you should be fighting, you’ll be fine!

You’ll find that your king will have the arrows pointing in his direction at the start of the battle, giving him an advantage and allowing him to strike first. This is your stats at work! You’ll want to keep battling in the highest biome you can as you’ll gain more experience this way. It is important to note that this is NOT true for event battles. Event battles are the same difficulty in all biomes, so going to a lower one will not make those battles easier. When it comes to actually battling NPCs, it helps to know their weaknesses or what will work best on them. A list of enemies with hints on how to fight them can be found here on the wiki. However, I don’t use that. Maybe I should, but I’ve found what works for me, so I just use my own crazy methods. I will also share those with you here. Without further ado, here is vermax’s NPC battle guide! You may notice I have a preference for stun locking my opponents. It’s what works for me, so give it a go yourself and see how it feels!

General combo - Use this for any enemy that isn’t listed with a different combo below - including lions, lionesses, small cats, vultures, hyenas, and more. I also use this for most event battles.
Charge, Rest, Charge/Pounce, Grab until successful (if your pounce fails or you charge), Pound on repeat (which results in a stun lock so the enemy can’t attack)

Thin-skinned combo - For dogs, storks, geladas, humans, etc.
Charge, Rest, Charge/Pounce, Grab until successful (if your pounce fails or you charge), Claw on repeat

Non-lion big cat combo - For cheetahs and panthers/leopards (these guys are ANNOYING to fight, so my method to battle them is strange, to say the least, but it works!)
Charge, Rest, Charge/Pounce, Grab until successful (if your pounce fails or you charge), then alternate Pound, Claw and Kick in any order
(you can also skip the grab and alternate Bite and Swipe instead until you grapple them, then switch to Pound, Claw and Kick)

Big boy combo - for elephants, rhinos, buffalo, large antelope, crocodiles, etc.
Charge/Pounce, Grab until successful (if your pounce fails or you charge), Pound and/or Kick on repeat (I prefer Pound for the stun lock cuz these big boys hit HARD)
DO NOT REST WITH THESE ENEMIES - they will charge you, stun lock you, and then you are doomed


Impression and Energy (aka Doves and Lambs)

Once you are a Dreamboat, you no longer increase your impression to new levels. Instead, when you fill your impression bar, you get 5 stat points! This makes impression a HUGE help for stat kings. You get it from winning battles, claiming lionesses and other explore encounters anyway, so you might as well take advantage of it. You can also use Dove Feasts to increase 20% impression at a time. This means that you need 5 for a full bar, which equates to 5 stat points. I like to think of it as 1 Dove Feast = 1 stat point. It makes it much more worth it when I decide to buy them! Dove Feasts can only be crafted in February, but they are also a reward from Serengeti Shuffle, so you will see people selling them year-round. I never buy them for more than 1 GB each, and I try to get them for 500 - 900 SB if I can. You can use 50 Dove Feasts a day on your king. I’ve only done that once or twice, but I do use them fairly frequently when I can afford them. Just try not to use them until you are a Dreamboat or nearly there (say 2 levels below) since you gain much more impression from fighting and claiming prior to that that the Dove Feasts are really wasted up until that point. I’ve probably gotten around 1000 of Asterus’s stats from impression boosts alone - counting both Dove Feasts and natural impression increases, and I think that may actually be a low-end estimate.

Roasted Lambs… my saviors. THIS is where most of my past kings’ stats have come from. Roasted Lambs and Red Bulls do the exact same thing, so even though I’m only going to be referring to them as Lambs from here on out, just know that I am also referring to Red Bulls, too. Lambs get most of their fame from February, when people use a ton of them to help grind HS. However, I use them year-round to help grind stats! I like to use two at the same time to get 16 hours of continuous doubled energy when I have time for it. You’d be shocked by how much these little things help with leveling. With the help of Lambs, I was able to level up my king so much more quickly than before. Even in the 30s and 40s, I was able to consistently level up in just a few days. Without the Lambs, it might have taken me a week to level up the same amount. If you don’t have much GB to spend on your stat king, put that money to Lambs. Buy as many as you can afford and use them on days when you have the time to explore regularly over 8 hours. These things give more value for your GB than even Giant Torts do. Thanks to Lambs, you can boost impression several times a day, resulting in 15 - 25 stats some days - and that’s without really even trying! I fully endorse using Lambs over ALL other experience and energy items.

Energy boosting items like Energy Boosts and Meat Pies are also very useful. If you can afford them or you have them around, use them! Only use them when you have 0% energy, of course, otherwise it would be a waste. These can make a big difference in the amount of leveling you can accomplish during your king’s life, but they are rather expensive at 2 GB per Boost in the Oasis, as you’ll need numerous to get any significant amount of experience. Regardless of cost, they are excellent for stat kings. Energy Boosts are how I've gotten Mørketida's stats so high. However, despite their usefulness, they are VERY expensive way to gain stats. I wouldn't recommend their use to daily rolling statters more than every once in a while. However, if you have a frozen account and can use your other account to earn GB and put that toward Energy Boosts when you roll your frozen account, it makes it much more worth it!

Another thing you can do is use Catnip! A relatively inexpensive item that can be commonly won from Serengeti Shuffle, Catnip attracts more NCLs to you for 30 minutes. This is helpful for a statter because you can slap all those girls and fight them! It sounds so mean to attract ladies just to beat them up, but it’s for the stats!! Try to use them when you have energy boosting items to use so you can continuously regenerate a full bar of energy, slap and beat up a bunch of ladies, and repeat. It’s a simple and effective way to get more experience. This strategy here is how I’ve managed to get so many stats onto Mørketida. If I have them, I will also use Coffee Beans to decrease the amount of energy used per step for even more grinding efficiency!


The Choice Between Rolling Daily and Freezing your Stat King

This is a huge choice to make - do you continue rolling your account once your statter is kinged, or do you freeze it and roll on a schedule to preserve your king’s life? Most G1 statters choose the second option, rolling once a week, once every two weeks, once a month, or even less often - sometimes as few as a handful of times per year. Freezing does make sense though - lions on LD have limited lifespans and a lot of resources have to go into these guys as submales and as kings to give them their amazing stats. Having them live for 8 years as king is sad in a way, and to some, could even be considered a waste.

However, I decided to be brave and choose to continue playing LD as usual even after kinging my stat king Asterus. I loved being able to help others by providing a stud who is always available for when they want to breed a statty girl to a clean statty king. However, with a daily rolling statter, you can’t hope to achieve the same level of stats as someone who chooses to freeze their account. Just look at Ysdaar and YoRHa, for example. Both kings have 30k+ stats and use their other accounts to gather GB and items to use on their statters when they roll them. Smart! Folklore, Halogen, and most other G1 statters do the same thing, but as of yet, none have quite reached the levels of those super stat kings. With Mørketida, I ended up having to freeze him, even though he was supposed to be a daily rolling statter. The upside of that is that he's gained far more stats than he could have being rolled daily! The bad news is the cost - I used to use around 45 energy boosts per level up (90 GB) for some time, then it became 50 boosts, and now 60+ boosts per level up. My last level up to level 91 was the most expensive yet at nearly 200 GB in energy boosts. This is extremely costly - and that’s not even counting any other items, like Dove Feasts and Lambs. Please only invest in a frozen statter if you can handle these kinds of expenses. To be honest, there have been times where Mørketida ran me into the ground, completely bankrupt - and other times where I was ready to grind out a level for him, but I didn’t have enough GB to even roll his account. It can be very tough at times.

I personally recommend NOT freezing your account for your first 1 - 3 stat kings. There are two reasons for this. The first is that you are still learning. You will be able to do better down the road, so why freeze the first one? Use the first few kings to learn the ropes, then later on, if you decide to go that route, you can make your account a freezer to preserve his amazing stats. The second reason is more shallow - it’s about your king’s appearance. If you are freezing your king, you are going to be looking at the same lion for a long, LONG time. I know I’d personally get VERY bored of a lion I didn’t really love. So before you king the statter that you’d like to freeze, remember to buy or breed a gorgeous looks lion with a Special or Combo base, lovely BO eyes and a ton of markings that you love - maybe even with Rosettes or BO skin, if you like those things.

Long story short - don’t freeze your first stat king - wait until later when you have a better stat heir and a better understanding of statting to freeze. Oh, and once you have a great looks lion that you won’t mind staring at for what may actually be years. That is fairly important, if you ask me!


In Conclusion…

You’ve done it!! Congratulations! You have a statter king that I hope you can be proud of. If this guide helped you in any way, I’d love to hear about it! Feel free to post about your king on the SSS clan thread, send me a message on LD, or if you are in our SSS discord server, ping me there. If your king meets the requirements, you can even post on our SSS Stud Thread and have him added there! I’d love to hear about your endeavors as a statter!

Once you’re comfortable with statting, maybe toward the end of your first king’s life, or maybe on your second king, try reading Part 4 & Part 5. These are not necessary to read to be a statter like Parts 1 - 3 were, but they are good to extend your knowledge on how to continue into the wide world of stats. Think of them as extra credit - nice to have, but not needed, unless you really, really want it.

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Part 4: Hunting Lionesses

Now for the ladies…..

Maybe you’ve been a statter for a bit now and you want to try something new with stats, or maybe your king is getting old and you’ve started thinking about your next stat king. Maybe you would love a high stat Ferus for an heir and you’d like to breed him yourself. Whatever the reason, here is a fun stat challenge for you - raising statty lionesses! I have way too much fun raising my lionesses. I can’t tell you why, but I can only hope you will too! I will not be explaining how to hunt in this section - I assume at this point you already know, so if you don’t, you are NOT ready for this section - go read the wiki instead.

Warning: Consider this a bonus section. I do not recommend new statters trying this out at the same time they are statting their first king. Please be sure you are comfortable with raising submales and kings as statters before attempting to raise your own hunters. ALSO - this is a VERY expensive process to do correctly. Expect to spend about 300 GB a month on your hunters. If you cannot afford that, you can still raise hunters, but you will not be able to achieve the stats I have on my hunters. Don’t expect 5k+ stats unless you are skipping 10 hunts a day.


The Basics of Statting Hunters

First, you’re going to need FIVE lionesses. I highly recommend matching their generation to the generation of your current or upcoming king. If you have a G1 stat king, make your hunters NCLs. If you have a G2 stat king, make your hunters G2 lionesses. I recommend trying to get them as young as possible - under 3 for NCLs and as cubs for G2s - and around the same age as each other. If you get them as cubs, definitely make sure to go through cub and adol training with them. Oh, and make sure they aren’t related to the stat king they will eventually be breeding with. No one wants low gen inbred lions.

As for what these hunters look like, that is totally up to you! You might want to get ladies that compliment your king, or you might just grab the first 5 decent girls you find - it’s totally up to you, and there’s no wrong way to go about this. I usually change their bases to compliment my king’s if they don’t have a breed-only base, and I might change opacities or rarely add markings, but I typically try to find lionesses that are at least semi-decent-looking to begin with. Some people like to add Overgrown Fur MoDs to their ladies, and some people even go as far as adding Piebald or Patches MoDs to them. You certainly don’t have to do any of this, but the choice is all yours. You’re going to have these ladies around for a long time, so just make sure you like them!

These five ladies will become your ONLY hunters, so go ahead and disassemble all your other hunting teams. You will be aiming for 20 - 30+ hunts per day with these 5 lionesses. No other lionesses in your pride should hunt while these girls are alive. I can sense the question already forming in your mind - if lionesses can only hunt 10 times a day, and these are my only hunters, how the heck am I supposed to hunt double to triple that amount?

The first way to add hunts is to go to Replenish Hunts and simply pay to add 10 hunts. To quote that page: “The first 10 additional hunts per lion per day cost 10 SB each to add, after that the cost per hunt increases to 30 SB.” The first 10 hunts for all 5 hunters will cost 500 SB total to replenish, and you can always replenish more later if you need to.

The second way to replenish hunts is to use GMO Chickens. These also add 10 hunts to the lioness they are fed to, while also increasing their mood to 100% and hunger to 0%, meaning you want to use them AFTER playing with your girls. Speaking of which, be sure to treat your girls similarly to how you treated your king as a submale. That is, play with them with a stat amusement item (Dry Palm Leaf or Kudu Horn for me) and then you can feed them if you want, but DO NOT feed them to 0%. What I feed them is a Gerbil/Jerboa Carcass and/or Small Tortoise if I have them, leaving some room for the GMO Chicken. I find Honeycombs a little too expensive for hunters, so I usually avoid them unless I have a plethora for some reason, but if you do have them, one bite per girl is enough to leave room for a GMO Chicken. There are a few other items that work, such as Turtle or Snake Eggs, but those are harder to find - use them if you have them!

Here’s the order of operations for your hunters:

1. Play with amusement item.
2. Feed Gerbil/Jerboa Carcass and/or Small Tortoise (not to 0%).
3. Feed GMO Chicken.
4. Replenish hunts as necessary.

This combination of items and replenishing hunts will allow your hunters to gain several thousand stats in their lifetimes. Using this method and hunting 30+ times a day, I got standard NCLs to over 5500 stats by the time they were 14 years old. You won’t need better stat foods than what I mentioned to see these kinds of gains, nor do you even need to feed them anything but a GMO chicken a day in order to get those stats. For example, here is Tali, the best NCL I have trained using this method. Her starting stats were 157 and as you can see, she was a normal chased NCL. Her current stats are over 6600, and she is projected to easily pass 7000 stats (but I'm hoping for 8k, if I can stretch it). Yes, this is a NORMAL NCL, hunted using normal Lioden methods.

If you can afford it, you can also get in more hunts per day by paying 1 GB to auto-complete a hunt. You can do this up to 10 times at the 1 GB price, and after this, it goes up to 2 GB to auto-complete a hunt. I try to do this 20 times a day when I have the GB for it. The good news is that once you have a good stat king, your stud fee should cover you being able to afford to do this every few days, if not every day! I do spend a lot of extra GB to skip hunts for Tali and her fellow huntresses, even sending them to my other account to skip an additional 20 hunts. Funny story - I've actually been accused of cheating or finding some kind of loophole on site because of the stats and total hunts of my current NCL team. That is obviously not the case as I have just explained how I do it - I just spend a ridiculous amount of GB on my girls as they are a big project for me at the moment. Kind of crazy to be accused of something like that just because I intimately understand the ins and outs of Lioden's hunting system.

If you’d like to see what the projected stats of your hunters are, you can use this Hunter Stat Calculator to project them! Use it in the same way as the previous calculators by making a copy for yourself. It has room for all 5 hunters, with each one having her own column. Fill in all the blue boxes to start (yes, you need starting stats and age again) and adjust the darker blue boxes daily or as needed. It also works based on historical data, so you will need to give it a few days to a week to see accurate predictions. It tends to be a bit conservative with calculations, so you may find your hunters gaining more stats than predicted.

Initial credit for this style of raising hunters goes to Zeiirle. They are the one who originally gave me the advice to help me get started raising statty lionesses and I took it from there.


Timelines

While anyone can have a stat king and anyone can raise statty hunters, what is the point if you don’t have both at the same time to breed? Ok, maybe that’s a bit extreme, but combined, stat kings plus stat hunters make some amazing cubs. Unfortunately, you need their ages to line up in order to get the best cubs possible. Truthfully, the hardest part here is getting the ages of your hunters lined up with the age of your king to maximize potential for the cubs. There are two options you can use to line up their ages: freezing and pre-planning. Freezing is the easier option while pre-planning is considerably more difficult (and requires… math!). I will actually explain pre-planning first since both methods require the same basic knowledge, and you’ll see that freezing is actually a dumbed down version of pre-planning. I promise this will make sense in a moment!

Pre-planning:

The first thing you need to know is that the last day you can breed lionesses is when they are 14-years-old. This differs from kings because kings can breed until they are 15 years and 11 months old. In order to maximize cub stats, you want your hunters to turn 14 on the same date or close to the date when your king is 15.11 yrs. That way, you are breeding your hunters AND your king when they have their maximum stats, or at least as close to maximum stats as possible. Of course, you will want all 5 of your hunters to be around the same age as well (although they do not have to be the EXACT same age). Figuring out the ideal time to look for your hunters will require some math, as I will demonstrate below.

Let’s assume you’re raising your G1 submale to king him when he turns 14.11 yrs so he ages back to 8 yrs upon kinging. You need an approximately 2 year age gap between your king and your hunters, so that when your heir is kinged, the hunters are approximately 6-years-old. Since you have a G1 king, you will want NCLs as your hunters. Working backwards from this, with the knowledge that chased lionesses can be found in explore as young as 2-years-old, you will want to find 2-year-old (or near 2-year-old) chased NCLs when your submale is 11-years-old. You can start hunting them in advance so that your girls are already getting their stats up by the time your heir is kinged.

If you are going to be de-aging your king in the Primordial Spring in April, this must be taken into consideration when locating your NCLs. For all intents and purposes, this is like starting your king at 6-years-old rather than 8-years-old. We still need the 2 year age gap between the hunters and the king, so you would begin searching for your hunters when your submale is 13-years-old, giving you two more years until you need to find hunters.

If you will be looking for G2 or G3 lionesses to be your hunters, you will have to factor into consideration the fact that you want to buy them as young as possible (5 months if possible) in order to put them through cub training, since so many people do not train their cubs in the TC. This means that you will have to start looking for your hunters about 1.5 years sooner than if you are looking for adult lionesses. If kinging as usual to de-age to 8, you will need to start looking when your submale is 9.5-years-old. If kinging and then de-aging in the Spring, you will need to start looking when he is 11.5-years-old.

If you are not raising a submale and simply kinging at 3-years-old, then you will need to start looking for NCLs when your boy is 4-years-old and has been king for a year. If a G2 or G3 king, then you will need to start looking for G2/G3 cubs when he is 6 months from being kinged, or right around the time he is kinged. If you are kinging at any other age, you will have to do the math yourself, frankly because I do not recommend kinging at any other age. Hopefully this serves as a decent enough guide that you can calculate it yourself. If you cannot, shoot me a message on LD and I’ll help you out!

WOO. There is a lot that goes into that! As you can see, you have to plan years in advance in order to line up the ages of your girls with the age of your king. That is why I call this method pre-planning. Don’t worry too much, though - you don’t have to memorize this information. In the future, I will add charts here for simplicity.


Freezing:

Ready for the easy version of pre-planning?

First, find lionesses you like at some point during your submale’s reign. Make sure they are all around the same age, just like in pre-planning. You can start hunting them, if NCLs, or complete their cub/adol training and then hunt, if G2/G3 lions. Once they are around the age you will need them to be upon kinging (via the above charts), simply transfer them to your frozen account and keep them there until you king your boy.

This is essentially the lazy version of preplanning - and there is nothing wrong with that! If you have a frozen side, or at least a side you don’t mind freezing, or a trustworthy friend to freeze for you, this is a much easier way to guarantee that the ages of your hunters will line up with your king. This is the method I have taken to using as of late, which is why my semi-frozen side queen Avalyn will probably live forever. The best part about this method is that if you are unable to king your submale when originally anticipated (say, I dunno, by taking an unplanned 2 month break), your hunters are still safely frozen and will remain so until you are ready to king your submale.


Some Final Advice

Keep on hunting!! It’s kind of obvious, but keep your girls hunting their entire lives, or at least until they are 14 and run out of breeding time. If you aren’t interested in breeding your hunters yourself, you could sell their heats, as there are always players looking to breed with high stat, low gen lionesses, especially NCLs. If you do intend on breeding them to make super statty cubs, head down to section 5 to find out how to maximize the potential of your future cubs.

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Part 5: Breeding your Next Heir - Stats Edition

The crux of the entire game…

What’s Lioden all about? If you said “lions”, I can’t exactly fault you, but I was thinking “breeding” - after all, it is a breeding sim! This section is all about breeding - not the basics of passing bases and using breeding items - no, I will assume you have all of that down before entering this section - but rather it is about breeding on a more advanced level. If you don’t understand how breeding works on Lioden, you guessed it, go read the wiki for a long while and return when you know how breeding works in its most basic capacity.

I would assume that most people who are interested in stats have been on site long enough to have a good grasp of how breeding works, so this section will take all that to the next level. We won’t be focusing on breeding for looks here, so that’s going to be up to you. I’m not saying your cubs have to be ugly, but rather that we will only be focusing on maximizing the stats of our cubs regardless of their appearance. As a matter of fact, one of the main reasons I got into statting was because when I returned to Lioden after my hiatus, the only good, clean high stat lions were multi-rosette lions who produced the most BORING cubs. Rosettes don’t pass easily, so most of these lions’ cubs had only a few markings and were extraordinarily plain. I wanted high stat, clean lions that looked good, so that is why I kinged an RLC without rosettes as my first big statter. Fun fact - it worked. Asterus’s cubs had great stats and looked good on their own. After him, I did a breeding project to get a lion with traits I loved - namely Margay and Panther markings - and VOILA - Mørketida produces some of the cutest Black based cubs I have ever seen on site (yes, I know I'm biased haha). Now it’s your turn to learn how to produce these kinds of amazing cubs!


Using your Hunters’ Heats

Anyone who breeds hybrids, dwarfs, RLCs, or other high-value lionesses will know that you can squeeze 8 heats out of a lioness if you use a Zebra Heart on them when they age up to 2-years-old and use an IBF on each and every one of their heats. This is very important for these lionesses, as it increases their chances of producing desirable cubs during their lifetimes. This might sound strange, but for our hunters, we will be completely ignoring this information and breeding them in a very, very different capacity. As a matter of fact, I’m only going to recommend breeding your hunters 3 or 4 times during their lives. Let’s see why!

The reason is, of course… STATS! I know, shocking in a guide about stats. Specifically it’s because your lionesses will not have good stats at first. As a matter of fact, if you start with NCLs especially, your lionesses will have AWFUL stats to begin with. There is no point in wasting your king’s energy, your girls’ hunting time, and your items for cubs that won’t even be good. By waiting a few years, you will allow your hunters to improve their stats alongside your king, who will also be growing as a statter. Waiting means you will have higher stat cubs, which is better no matter what their purpose is - keeping, selling, gifting, kinging, what have you.

My last NCL hunters were bred 3 or 4 times each, with the youngest one having one extra heat used (technically she had 5 heats used, but one was gifted to a friend, so I’m not counting that one). If you want REALLY statty cubs, then you would want to aim for 3 heats from each of your hunters. If you are more interested in seeing what kind of cubs you can get, then you might want to breed them 4 times, or possibly even 5. I don’t recommend breeding them more than that since your hunters simply won’t be very strong early enough in their lives to make those heats worth it. If you have been prepping your hunters in advance of your king, they likely missed those first one or two heats anyway, and really, it’s not a loss.

Everything under this line is under construction. If you have questions about breeding your own hunters, please DM vermax anytime until this guide is completed.

Add normal timelines in chart form (no CRB) and breeding chart (for 3 and 4 heat use, maybe 5 heat)

Work backwards for heats, so 7.4, 9.0, 10.8, 12.4, 14.0 (confirm this when not tired) and make sure to add that people will need to subtract if they have to breed their lionesses earlier based on their king’s age - give example to show what I mean - (also add that these include no wiggle room and they can start breeding earlier than these dates, but they cannot breed LATER if they want x# of heats.



The Stat Difference

Compare normal NCLs and low stat lions to the hunters to see what the cub stat difference would be and give the WHY behind statting hunters

Throw in the cub stat calculator, show how it works, and then show examples I already created:
Chart to compare cub stats between NCL (100) and statted hunters at 500, 1000, 2000, 3000, 4000, 5000, 6000 plus a 5000 and 10000 stat king. Done in calculator, now make chart for here!!


To Use Items, or Not to Use Items?

CRBs and timelines, Lion Meat/GMO Cow, Buffies/GoPs plus Roasted Vulture (spd)/Shamanic Stew (str) [also the boost in November]

CRB heats would be 8.0 (8.3), 9.11 (10.2), 11.10 (12.1), 13.9 (14) - again, confirm when not tired and include the no wiggle room and that these are the latest dates that they can be bred


Mukombero and the Dorsal Fur Boost

Breeding special statty cubs (especially for G1 stat kings)

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Future additions: Part 5 and editing

For Part 4: Pre-planning - add charts to line up age of king and hunters. Also add something about how expensive doing this is (include price of daily added hunts, 10+ GB for skipped hunts and possibly for chicken too)

For Part 5: the breeding section - include timing for CRBs and non CRBs, number of litters and recommended item use. Mukombero and DF Boosts

Add april adol training and may cub training? - maybe add an event section to cubs (pt 1)

epilogue for self-improvement

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Include links to calculators here (and link this is TOC)

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reserved for guide

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