Free roam, strays and the hawk

Open Menu > Map > Outside and pick who flies. Only batchers (birds that reached 100% bond) can go out. Birds are called home at the end of every game day, so you send them out again each day. Racing birds, nesting birds and lost birds cannot be outside.

Training outside

While at least one bird is outside, the game rolls training every 15 real seconds (that is about 8 times per 2-minute game day, and it only runs while the game is open and the Outside or Loft screen is active).

• Each outside bird rolls once for Navigation and once for Stamina.
• Each roll has a 30% chance, or 40% when 3 or more birds are outside together.
• A successful roll adds +1 to the stat, as long as it is below the bird's potential.

Source: _tick_roam in scripts/loft.gd. Four rolls a minute at 30% is 1.2.

That is similar to a successful 20 km toss (+2 to +3 per stat) every day, but with no risk of losing the bird to a toss. The cost is the stray and hawk exposure below, and that you must keep the game open.

Stray arrival

Once per game day, if you own the Trap (150G in the Shop) and no stray is waiting, a stray can join the birds that flew that day.

• A stray stays 2 game days (3 with an anchor bird, see below). If you do not catch it, it flies off. While one is waiting no new one arrives.
• The stray roll uses the birds that flew that day, even though they are called home at the day change.
• Offline time counts. Every full 120 seconds the game was closed counts as one game day for strays, up to 6 days (the leftover seconds are kept for next time).
• About 5% of arrivals are not new birds but one of your own long-lost birds, see familiar strays.

The lure: flying and fancy birds

Flying and fancy birds in the outside flock draw more strays and better ones. Each bird gets a pull for each role it fills:

Show quality is a fixed number from 40 to 100 for each bird (average 68), decided by its own seed. A bird can fill two roles (the Pakistani Highflyer is both anchor and high flyer).

Condition multiplier

From pulls to a stray chance

1. Add the pulls of each role. Inside one role the strongest counts in full and every next bird counts 70% of the one before (1, 0.7, 0.49 ...).
2. Add all roles together to get the flock's lure L.
3. Stray chance = plain chance x (1 + min(L / 8, 1)). So the lure can at most double the chance (at L = 8 or more).
4. A mixed flock (at least one flying and one fancy bird) multiplies by another 1.25.
5. The final chance is capped at 55%.

• Anchor stay: if an anchor bird with Stamina 70 or more flies, a stray waits 1 extra day (3 days instead of 2).
• Rarer strays: high flyer and show pulls move rarity points from Common up (below).
• Breed class: show pull makes fancy breeds likelier; roller and anchor pull makes the other flying breeds likelier. Each point of pull adds 0.25 to that class's weight, up to 2.0.
• Younger strays: each point of roller pull adds 5% to the share of young strays (up to +15%).

What kind of stray arrives

The lure moves 3 x (high flyer pull + show pull) points out of Common, up to 12 points. They go 50% to Uncommon, 35% to Rare and 15% to Epic, and the Legendary and Mythic odds are multiplied by up to 1.5.

• After the rarity, a breed of that rarity is picked. A racing breed counts as 0.35 next to a flying or fancy breed, so strays are mostly flying and fancy birds.
• 65% of strays are young (160 to 330 days old); the rest are adults (400 to 900 days old).
• A stray has 90% of the stats of a shop bird of its breed, no parents, bond 0.
• Wariness (how easily it spooks in the Trap) starts at 10 + 0.3 x INT + 14 x rarity step + 4 if racing, at most 78. A common bird with INT 60 starts near 28; a mythic racer near 100 and is capped at 78.

The hawk

Heads-up: the numbers on this page are the rules in the current development code (the next update, 1.0.4). Version 1.0.3 still has the old hawk, which visited every 20 seconds with 25% chance. In the development code the daily check happens at the day change, for the flock that flew that day.

How often it visits

Each game day, if birds are outside, a hawk visits with chance 1/60 (1.67%), which is about once in two game months, or about 6 times in a game year (12 real hours of play). When it visits, it goes after one bird, and may or may not catch it.

Which bird it picks

A bird's chance of being picked is its weight divided by the total of the flock. Slow, poor-navigating birds and fancy birds are the easy prey; a bird with 90 speed and 90 navigation has weight 0.2, a Satinette (SPD 32, NAV 24, fancy) has 2.16, which is ten times more.

Whether it catches that bird

An escort is any bird in the flock with Speed above 70 and Power above 70 (it counts once). A caught bird is killed: it does not come back and is not lost-and-found.

The Map picker shows a risk word for the flock: low when the expected catch chance per visit is under 7%, medium up to 12%, high from 12%.

Worked examples