Making a "Starter Form"

Making a "Starter Form"

A timeline of various stages of Ivy's Chick breedfile. The leftmost stage is a tan egg, the middle stages are varying stages of egg mixing into chick, and the right one is an orange chick.

My Chick and some of my Lizard files start out as eggs! But what if you wanted to do this yourself?

Because I had to experiment with the few guides I had, here's a certified Ivy-approved process for creating a starter form!

Add an addball

To start, you're going to want LNZ Pro to access the LNZ of your breedfile for sure. You can do it entirely in LNZ Pro, but you could also use either Pet Workshop or LnzLive for visuals on the side, if you wish.

Firstly, open up your LNZ. Make sure you're using a breedfile, because petfiles are different! I'm using the Petz 4 Great Dane file, the basis of my Chicks, if you want to follow along.

Add an addball to the end of the [Add Ball] section. It doesn't matter what it looks like — you can always edit it in a visual editor later!

An image of the program LNZ Pro, open to show the Add Ball section of the breedfile. A line at the very end of the section is highlighted. The numbers in the line read '48, 0, 17, -79, 10, 0, 0, 0, 0, -1, 80, 0, 0, and -1'.

The first column of the addball is the base ball it's attached to (and thus follows the motion of). I suggest using ball 48 as a basis for dogz, and ball 2 for catz. This is the "belly" ball for both, and thus roughly the middle of both.

Shrink the addball...

Let's add a [Ball Size Override] section now. Anywhere in the file is fine, I usually add it at the bottom though!

Make sure to identify the ball number of your addball! In this Great Dane file, it's ball 95, but it varies from file to file, so make sure to count. The original devs occasionally leave notes marking certain balls that might help, but the easiest way to tell is to use a visual editor and select the ball somehow.

Once you have the number, add it to this [Ball Size Override] and make sure the size is set to -100.

An image of the program LNZ Pro, open to show a newly-created Ball Size Override section. There is a line reading '95, -100'.

And then shrink everything else...

Now, the tedious part. Yay...

Open up the "child" section of the LNZ (in this case, GDPUP). If there isn't one, create another [Ball Size Override], but there probably already is one because puppiez/kittenz tend to be, well, smaller than adults.

And now... make every ball size -100 except the addball. Yep. (You may want to use a batch generator for this, like this one.)

An image of a batch generator. It has parameters of starting number 0, ending number 94, increment of 1, and suffix of a comma and -100.

In the case of the Great Dane file, you'll want ballz 0 to 94 to be set this way.

And... done!

That should be it! Make sure to test it out and make sure it works. If it does, it should work like this:

A red Lizard in Petz grows up from an egg to an adult.

With addball shenanigans, you can adapt this tutorial into any sort of starter form... such as in the evolving Pokémon at Kalium's Petz, which are super cool!


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