Bear Trap & Pens

Using traps to protect the eggs you carry

The wiki's rules for bear traps are short, and they decide how you should use them. A trap only reacts when the player stepping near it is holding an egg, so it is aimed at thieves and not at players who are just passing through. When someone steps in, they are stuck for 7 seconds. You can have at most 3 traps on the map, and you cannot place them in the safe zone. The wiki notes that your supply is infinite and that there is no known way to get more than 3 at once.

Three traps means placement matters more than quantity. The moment you are most exposed is the walk back to your base with a fresh egg, so a sensible layout puts traps along the approaches to your pens and not out in the open. The owner can pick a trap up, or get it back when something triggers it, which makes it easy to move your defenses when you change routes. Seven seconds is long enough to keep a thief in place while you close the distance, which is the whole point.

Where pens fit in the game loop

Pens are the next step after the trap: the loop is pen, then pets, then income. Eggs you carry home are held and hatched in your pens, and the pets that come out earn cash every second. The wiki lists prices for only the two highest pen levels so far: level 11 costs 500 T and level 12 costs 5 Qa. It gives no prices for levels 1 to 10, so there is nothing reliable to say about the early upgrades.

Those two prices become clearer next to real pet income. Take a pet that earns $1B/s, such as Mecha Krakenoid or Unicorn, at base income with no mutation or weight bonus:

• Level 11 (500 T) equals 500,000 seconds of that pet's income, about 139 hours.
• Level 12 (5 Qa) equals 5,000,000 seconds, about 1,389 hours, close to 58 days.

A single $9B/s pet like Skeletal Sabertooth gets level 11 in roughly 15 hours and level 12 in roughly 154 hours. In practice you pay for these pens with many pets working together, so the useful reading is that the top pen levels are late-game purchases, and that guarding the high-value eggs on the way home is worth the trouble.