DragonVale Giant Habitats are here!

I like to think that BackFlip is listening to its fans, because almost every time you encounter a pain point in the game, here they come with a solution. Running out of space? 8th Island Getting all of your Shrines to “Gold” becoming a grind? Upgrade to Gold for gems. In a similar vein, they have recently released new Giant versions of each of the Elemental Habitat types, to finally solve the problem of small gold caps, and limited dragon quantities for high end players. Woo hoo!

But which habitat should I upgrade?!?!

Each upgrade costs 25 gems, and even if you’ve got a stash of them, you’ll probably have to make some choices about which habitats to upgrade first. When making this choice, I suggest evaluating three criteria and considering what is most important to you.

How much will the gold capacity increase?

How fast will the new habitat hit the max (with best dragons)?

How many more dragons will fit?

Gold Capacity

When you take a look at the increase for each habitat, there are clear winners and losers. Probably like most of you, I went straight for the Plant habitat and said “never again, you lowly 500 gold piece of #!#$… payday here I come.” As you can see though, the Plant habitat comes in almost dead last for the amount of capacity increase. Instead, Air comes out a big winner with a huge increase – and the two ranking earners in the “Large” category (Earth and Metal) come in a close second. This will be important when considering the next point.

Time to Full

For this chart I considered the current “best” dragons with best boosts for each of these habitats, all at level 15. Fully loading even one habitat with level 20s costs a fortune, so I did not include that here, but I did the math and it doesn’t affect much. For reference, the dragons and boost combos I uses are:

Plant: Paper Dragon, 2 Boosts

Earth: Panlong Dragon, 2 Boosts

Fire: Panlong Dragon, 2 Boosts

Cold: Paper Dragon, 2 Boosts

Lightning: Butterfly Dragon, 3 Boosts

Water: Panlong Dragon, 2 Boosts

Air: Panlong Dragon, 2 Boosts

Metal: Copper Dragon, 2 Boosts

What you can see is, most habitats fill up in right around an hour. Metal is the one big exception. This means, the caps pretty much dictate how much money you will make off of each habitat, once you have some pretty good dragons in that habitat. If you are checking faster than once an hour, you will start to see a difference – but you also have a problem and should seek help :). If you slow down to about 3 checks per day with a little more than 7 hours between each check, the Metal habitat joins the rest of the pack in that it’s output is dictated by hitting the habitat gold capacity.

Given these two data points, the result is that the Air Habitat is the big winner getting a huge relative bump in capacity that you can benefit from on pretty much every park check. Earth and Metal would be the next runners up with sizeable capacity increases, although you’ll benefit less from Metal if you check your park less often.

It’s not about the money, man

If the raw economic power of your habitats isn’t your only focus, you might also consider the number of dragons added. Here it is a pretty even story, with Earth and Cold benefiting just slightly more than the others. If you’ve got a huge back catalog of those dragon types that you are just dying to show off, maybe those habitats move up in line.

Summary

If you’ve managed to avoid the temptation to upgrade your Plant habitats to Giant, consider waiting till you’ve hit some of the others first, especially Air, Earth, and Metal. If showing off your dragons is more your thing, they are all pretty good choices – but Earth and Metal have the slight edge.

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