In Mewgenics, your job is to raise an army of genetically questionable cats and send them into danger. It is exactly as weird and unhinged as you would expect from creators Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel. Part of the experience plays like a management sim, where you look after your felines and build the best possible home. The other part is a tactical RPG layered with heavy RNG and a lot more to wrap your head around. Below are some tips that will help you land on your paws and avoid early grave mistakes.
Know When To Let Go
You can never run out of cats. Each new morning, you’ll find new strays at your doorstep, and the ones already present in your house will often breed to add new kittens to the pile. One of the first things you should avoid is hoarding them, which sounds harmless until they begin straining your food resources.
Part of the process is understanding when to cut your losses. When a cat has outlived its usefulness, donate it to the various NPCs. In return, you get upgrades that will help improve your house and raise the overall quality of future cats.
Don’t Get Greedy on a Run
Do not overcommit early on. Newly unlocked areas are often stronger than your current squad can handle. Just because the path opens does not mean you are ready for it. For example, after clearing the Alley for the first time, the Sewer becomes accessible on your next run. Walking in there with an underleveled or poorly geared team is asking for a wipe.
It’s a roguelite, so if your party dies, you lose everything from that run: coins, loot, items, all of it included. It’s recommended to clear the same starting area a few times until you get a party that you’re confident will progress further. Patience keeps your cats alive in Mewgenics.
Eat Your Food Cooked
I found this out by pure accident. I misclicked a fire spell that was actually meant for an enemy feline and hit a tile with food instead. It was a crucial move, and while I was annoyed at first, I noticed the food changed its appearance and its properties.
Cooked Food still heals for the same amount, but then it also grants a permanent +1 Strength to the cat that eats it. That is not minor, and for your Fighter, this is an easy way to stack extra Strength during a run.
Cleric Is the Best Class, Period
Early on, healing options will be scarce. You either step on food tiles mid-fight that are not always available or hope you survive long enough to regain some health after the battle. That is not reliable, and it makes early runs very tough. Once you unlock the Cleric Collar, which you do relatively early, your life becomes a lot easier as you get a consistent healing source without gambling on tiles.
Their basic attack heals allies, and their abilities can branch out into multi-tile heals and even full revives. Keeping a Cleric in your squad drastically increases your margin for error. If you value survival, this class will carry your party.
Try Using a Shovel With a Necromancer
Some item pairings with certain classes open up chaotic combos, and nothing proves that better than a Necromancer with a Shovel. It’s simply a match made in heaven. While the Shovel is a rare find, it does not break and using it knocks units back and, more importantly, digs up a corpse from the tile it is used on.
A corpse is fuel for a Necromancer. A cat with this Collar on can revive it into a zombie for an extra body on the field, or hopefully use Decompose to spawn multiple leeches from it. You can keep digging, keep spawning corpses and keep turning them into leeches. Before long, the arena is packed and those little monsters do most of the work for you.
Manage House Stats Efficiently
Understanding how house stats work is also important. Each room has five: Comfort, Stimulation, Appeal, Health, and Mutation. Furniture, cat population, and how messy the room is all affect these stats.
Comfort and Stimulation matter most for breeding. Higher values in these stats mean you’ll spawn more kittens that inherit the best traits from their parents. Appeal controls the quality of strays that show up, whereas Mutation and Health are just as important for your cats to get beneficial buffs and live longer.
Assign Dedicated Rooms
Speaking of house stats, you only begin with one room in your house. However, you’ll soon meet an NPC named Frank, and he’ll begin requesting the cats that have completed an adventure and returned home. Those are retired cats, and upon donating the required batch, you’ll unlock new rooms in your house.
Once you have extra space in your house, you’ll want to give each room a purpose. Keep your strongest cats in one room filled to the brim with Comfort and Stimulation-enhancing furniture to breed equally strong kittens for future runs. Use another room for mutation-focused furniture so your cats can grow useful new limbs and boost their base stats.
You Can Save Scum, but Do It Wisely
If you’ve reached the final boss and messed up, where a wipe is almost guaranteed, you can save scum and exit to the menu and do the fight all over again. You can only do this once per run, and doing so triggers a humorous reprimand from Steven. Save scum too a few times more after this, and Steven ultimately takes full control of your party during battles.
And there’s really nothing you can do about it but watch it unfold. However, if you use it wisely, you only get a formal warning pass, and this can let you start a confrontation fresh. This also applies to events, as you can generate a random event that could be more favorable for your cats.
Attempt the Hard Path
The hard path is meant to be hard, but the rewards usually outweigh the risks. You’ll find such paths in every area of Mewgenics. Once you are comfortable with the feral felines in an area, the hard path becomes far more manageable. However, it does not unlock immediately, since it’s tied to progressing to certain new areas. Like for the Alley hard path, you need to clear the Sewer first and return home.
Once it becomes available, it is worth considering every time. You will find more food, more coins, and better equipment than on the normal route. You have to survive and make it back home with the loot.
Get a Tactical View of the Battlefield
The arena can often get cluttered with enemies and loot, especially in more difficult areas. This can make it hard to identify smaller hidden enemies like leeches or mice. By pressing the middle mouse button or Y on an Xbox controller, you can get a tactical view of the battlefield.
This turns everything involved in the arena into checkers pieces, helping you distinguish the tiles occupied by your allied units from enemies and loot items. You can also right-click on an enemy unit to find their effective target range, helping you plan your move smartly.
