Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26427455-20150807023637/@comment-26871289-20150822185652

Good deal Ben (Dac)!

If Ghazt is your first and only Ethereal, I would advise breeding one of the other four single-element Ethereals as soon as you can. With only one Ghazt, it will be a lone monster earning limited shard income. But as soon as you have another, you can breed them against each other an steadily fill up your Ethereal island with shard earners. Even without breeding success on a dual-element, you'll be spawning 1-element copies of the parents.

If possible, I'd advise shooting for the Reebro by breeding the Riff against the T-Rox on Air Island. The reason is your fails will be 8-hour T-Rox rather than a 12-hour something else. So you'll be able to get in more breeding attempts and hopefully hit success sooner. If your Air Island is not yet developed, then you'll probably be shooting for the Grumpyre on Cold Island, which is OK too.

On whichever island you pick to breed your second Ethereal, you should place 10 torches. Then of course you'll need to add some friends to light those torches. You can find friend codes all over these forums and in many user comments on the My Singing Monsters facebook page. A good place to start would be to post your friend code in this thread so your tribemates can help light your torches. I pretty much light daily and my friend code is 23577249NF.

If you've not placed any torches on your islands so far, you might want to only place them on the island where you're attempting to breed your Ethereal. That will prevent your friends from getting distracted and lighting torches on less important islands. If you do decide to place torches elsewhere, you can direct most of your friends to light the right island by changing your display name to something like, "Ben: Air Plz".

Even with the lone Ghazt earning shards on Ethereal island, you can probably earn enough to make 10-20 tribal levels per week. To get to that point, you'll have to refeed the Ghazt after it's teleported to increase its earning power. You'll also have to spend some of your early shards to place the decorations that the Ghazt "likes". Since we're already in the 1500 club, you can probably focus on your startup costs rather than tribal levels for another week.

Once you're breeding on Ethereal island, you can choose to aggressively feed/level the Ethereals you plan to keep permanently. Beyond this handful of permanents, I'd classify the rest of your population to be temporary earners. You can moderately feed the temporary earners to increase their earnings, but I wouldn't recommend wasting a lot of food on them since they'll eventually by sold and replaced. Levels 8-10 would be appropriate for temporary earners, depending on how much food you can afford to divert from your main islands.

I'm sure you're already thinking along these lines. Sorry if I'm spelling out (at great length) the steps of which you're already aware and planning. Since earning shards has suddenly taken on an increased importance, I'm hoping a plan for getting Ethereal island up and running would be useful, whether to you or someone else.