CryptoKitties!!!!!

The main reason I like this game is because it forced me the newb, to use MetaMask, interact with the community, and make transactions. Admittedly I first thought it would make a good investment (seeing cat price double in a day), but I am no longer quite as confident. Anyways let’s just jump in…

How it works: Each kitty has attributes including a unique DNA code that can lead to rare or common “genes”, it has a breeding speed, and a generation number. Everything is a transaction. Buy a Kitty, sell a Kitty, breed a Kitty: all a transaction. Everything is traded in ETH and as of early December 2017 some people are try to sell their kitty for between 0.025ETH others ask for ridiculous amounts like 1,000,000ETH.

Steps:

Make a MetaMask account — Easy: This is a browser extension and seems to work with many browsers but Chrome is probably the safe way to go (please please if you use Microsoft Internet Explorer, just stop using it, love PC’s hate IE). MetaMask suggests downloading the Brave browser; I tried it and have found it useful to have a browser to switch to when chrome isn’t working. MetaMask will give you a bunch of special words as a password this is really important so keep them in a safe place — I wrote mine on a piece of paper in addition to keeping a text file. Register for CryptoKitties (cryptokitties.co) —Easy: MetaMask fills in your public address, you also need an email address and a username. Transfer ETH to MetaMask —Medium: As of early December transferring 0.01ETH aught to do for now, you can always add more later. You have a unique public address with your exchange and with your MetaMask. Public addresses start with 0x always make sure you are sending it to the right address. See picture below, the red arrow shows you where to find your public address in MetaMask (this number is not a secret: my address is 0x5075CaFecB3c121603D9eFb60cE3c8c54863EE34 feel free to send me ETH to pay down my student debt! ). There is a fee normally associated with transfers but I think the exchange may wave this. Normally the exchange also takes care of something called Gas price and GWEI but if yours does not we will cover that below.

Red arrow points to your public address.

4. Buy your first kitty!— Hard: This is where you start using MetaMask. Organize by cheapest kitties, choose a kitty and press buy now until MetaMask pops up. The maximum total cost of the transaction to buy the kitty will equal: selling price + (gas limit*gas price). Note this is the maximum fee, MetaMask shows approximately how much USD this is and it regularly falls well below this max transaction fee. As of early December the combination of gas limit and gas price that is definitely working for me is 300,000 gas limit and 30 GWEI gas price. I got this number from a CryptoKitties Twitch streamer called bry_guy13 (https://www.twitch.tv/bry_guy13). I highly recommend joining and following this fun community, good advice and there is often generous kitty giveaways! For more info on gas see MEW or check out Eth Gas Station. Any time a transaction has a number you can check it out the transaction or your public address on https://etherscan.io/. EDIT: It seems like the gas strategy that should work most consistently is set GWEI equal or higher than Eth Gas Stations SafeLow, and set the gas limit to equal to or higher than what MetaMask auto populates (right now around 260k).

i. Check for a warning at the bottom of MetaMask saying the Gas Limit is really high, (as of December this means MetaMask will auto-populate a value of over 6,000,000) PRESS REJECT, if you have to do this several times buy a kitty from a further page or wait. If you tried to submit the high transaction your transactions could get frozen for hours, I did this and then fixed it with this youtube video by Truth Force (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nm9cnin9RUA&feature=youtu.be) ii. Buying a kitty from the 2nd or 3rd page will lead to more successful transactions. **Try this if your transaction does not go through. iii. If transactions are still failing try logging into MetaMask and CryptoKitties in another browser (Brave came in handy for this). Or deleting the MetaMask extension and reinstalling (as long as you know you pass-words).

5. Sire/breed your cat with another kitty — Hard: CryptoKitties as of December charges a 0.015ETH fee to breed in order to incentivize blockchain miners. So the max fee will be: Breeding cost + 0.015 +(gas limit*gas price). Once this completes your cat will be pregnant for a while and have a timer associated with it. If for some reason a timer doesn’t show up but https://etherscan.io/ and your account shows a transaction, don’t worry your cat still has a “bun in the oven”. It will hatch regularly according to the mating speed it’s just a piece of the UI is dislodged. I suggest just leaving it, but if you want to make a transaction to try and fix it here is a link that may get your timer working: https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoKitties/comments/7hcy0c/guide_how_to_fix_bun_in_the_oven_issue/

6. Sell a kitty — this costs you nothing other than the transaction fee, and you can choose to allow the selling price to go down over time to increase the likelihood of sale! *Note this breeding and selling Kitty-Ad will stay on the marketplace until sold or cancelled (cancelling is another transaction).