What is a Good Cat?

[EikoChano Resident]

Congrats with the triple Boo Boo. I've been busy for 3/4 year with a similar Boo Boo Cat, but could not get all my desired traits come together. I gave up. It was only my first serious breeding project, I know that if I tried again I'd do much better.

[Arwen Swordthain]

(04-25-2019 07:17 AM)EikoChano Resident Wrote:  Congrats with the triple Boo Boo. I've been busy for 3/4 year with a similar Boo Boo Cat, but could not get all my desired traits come together. I gave up. It was only my first serious breeding project, I know that if I tried again I'd do much better.

I tried the Triple Boo Boo on and off over the years, this was the first time I got it to come together. I remember one time Fabao pulling a triple boo boo straight from a starter and it was a Mega. He laughed when I told him how hard I was trying to make one because I loved the Boo Boo. He hated it, lol.
I'm happy I finally got mine though and as a result of hard work and love rather than a lucky pull. Makes you appreciate it more.

[Callie Cline]

wow!!! this thread is amazing!!! i LOVE seeing these and how you all put things together!! yes i do try to make colors and shapes to complement each other. it's an intuitive thing and i'm so glad you recognize it!

ultimately all the traits are made to be able to go together in a way the "artist" or "creator" (breeder) chooses.

i once bred a pink cat with a brown tone eye and was like OMG this is sooo ugly!! but i was soooo wrong!! i went and got her a little brown ear hat and collar and OMG it was the cutest cat... a bit later someone showed me one with caramel eyes and one of the brown whiskers and it was adorable!! with one of the foldie ears!!!

so yes, there's not one good cat... the creators and artists who work hard or get happy accidents are really quite amazing at what they come up with!! blows my mind actually how very different they can look...

thank you for your sharing i really love seeing this!!! made my day!

[Arwen Swordthain]

The endless possibilities are what makes KittyCats great. Even if we never had another new trait breeding would continue because of that. Of course we DO want more new traits, we always love seeing what you have for us to fire our imaginations.

[Fyrebird Courier]

I love my "flashlight" or "nightlight" kitties. It's the only ones that i really have tried to put a trait on another...I had this set:

Fur: Balinese - Cream Lynx
Eyes: Lucky Irish Clover (Shape: Mysterious | Pupil: Small)
Shade: Porcelain
Tail: Tiger Curl
Ears: Wild Tiger
Whiskers: White (Shape: Mysterious)
Size: Normal

and worked on them til I got this:

Fur: Balinese - Cream Lynx
Eyes: Blush Quartz (Shape: Mysterious | Pupil: Small)
Shade: Glitter
Tail: Tiger Curl
Ears: Wild Tiger
Whiskers: White (Shape: Mysterious)
Size: Normal

and with that glitter...they come out bright! *laughs* I loved the Blush Quartz, and being able to say I had triple tigers. *laughs* Jade works, but..honestly for the "nightlight" effect, i think the Blush Quartz works "better"...hmmm. maybe I will try to play with other traits now...*laughs*

[Prokofy Neva]

I hate to rain on your parade, but I have to say, I am unable to pay attention to all the issues of traits, and what is good, and all the rest. I'm like a lot of newbies to the KittyCats scene I suppose (although I have known Callie since she sold me wonderful pink love cabins for my rentals years ago!). We cluelessly barge in, we don't know the worth of our kitties, we send kitties to the Menagerie who probably have some super-duper never-before just-surfaced trait -- heedlessly, and it is lost to history, and so on. We're like the rube who says "I don't know anything about art, but I know what I like."

I don't follow all the issues of traits and values, so I just buy or keep kitties that I like the look of, or whose name is something I like, or other subjective and personal reasons. I then have tended to keep "the rares" but then not even all of those, and some I didn't even realize *were* rare. When I wish to sell them, I look at it like gatchas -- I see what that particular type of item named X with Y traits is selling for on the MP, and I adjust my price, either the lowest, or mid-level to sell after perhaps several cheaper ones sell. I really have no idea. I put "$100" if I can't figure it out, and probably lost some chances to make thousands.

I realize that someone like the late MsMagick was a pro who bred wonderful cats with all kinds of features and traits and compounded versions of them -- it's an art form. But either you have a game or hobby, so to speak, that only licensed people can engage in -- let's say like ham radio enthusiasts who need licenses and training, or hunters, who need licenses and training -- or you have it open to the public and what happens, happens.

If you just kept it a small game with highly trained and skilled professionals, that would be nice (breeders would be licensed; end users could only buy but not sell) but you might not get many people to play and breed -- and breeding needs to be refreshed and bring out traits.

There's also the RL factor that unless Callie and her company can make a profit on the cats, she has no incentive to keep trying to design and develop new ones with interesting features and maintain the whole data base and customer service structure which isn't easy. So she can't really afford the luxury of having "licensed/trained/perfected" breeders and end users not allowed to sell what they breed. She'd also face the problem of a possible black market in cats that could anger those trying to breed purely, and so on.

So it is what it is, and I think the only solution is for those who know their business and their own worth to arrange their own auctions and groups -- which is what they do anyway -- and not worry so much about the $100 cats on the MP. Because -- as you may have noticed -- most of them don't sell anyway.

[Arwen Swordthain]

I don't think you are raining on anyones parade. I took it that this thread was for people to showcase cats they love and have spent a lot of time breeding and developing, everything is subjective, thats a phrase I use frequently in KC chat when asked if a cat is good or worth a lot. Value is subjective as well as you see at auctions, where some cats go high simply because 2 bidders are willing to fight for a cat that catches their eye. It might not have new traits or any one thing thats particularly special but the way its put together makes it desirable to those bidders.
Ivy did state this wasn't about pricing in her OP, its about showing that for many of us breeding is a labour of love not Lindens. The Triple Boo Boo matchy cat I posted previously isn't even for sale, I bred that purely for me, maybe in the future if I breed more I might put some up for sale but not everything is about money. For a lot of us selling a few cats is about offsetting costs, others want to at least break even and the rare few might even make a profit. The great thing about KittyCats is that its a game for all, everyone had to start somewhere, none of us knew much when we started but its a great community with amazing customer support that are willing to help and answer questions. Another thing I see regularly in chat is "theres no such thing as a stupid question, just one you don't know the answer to yet".

[Ivy Norsk]

Since the death of Lady Magick I’ve been reminiscing a great deal about how we met and the group Cattery Chatter. I could put this post in the Lady Magick thread or here; I think I’ll just write it. It fits either place (with a few modifications).

Once upon a time, around 2015 there were no profilers, or they were just getting started. It was much harder to shop for the cat that you wanted. There was more competition among the market sims and some ill-feeling as well because there were some fundamentally different theories about how cats should be priced. In the face of the glut of cats on the market, one set thought that price controls were needed and another set felt that one could never control the market anyway and lower cost but higher volume and/or intrinsic charm would work. (Both sets agreed that most cats wouldn’t sell.)

Ms Magick and I met on the forum. We realized during these debates that both of us were adamantly against price controls which were futile and counter-productive. We set out to form a group, which became Cattery Chatter, which would function like the Kitty Addicts group but have open discussion about pricing. We wanted it to encourage heavy auction attendance, with members letting other members know what other cats had gone for. In the meantime we would teach breeding and pedigree reading.

Ms Magick was ideal to moderate this group because of her unfailing logic, sense of organization, practicality, skill with breeding and also her friendly and gentle speech. It was a fun chat group for awhile. Eventually the group closed; we never got enough members to create the kind of critical mass that was needed. MsMagick and I stayed in touch, but she was more into the auction scene and I moved into heavy-duty dominance testing. And now we have profilers and comparison shopping is pretty much automatic - which is a benefit to everybody. You can find the cat you want, with the traits that suit your needs, in less than 5 minutes and I suspect that not only have sales gone up, but the quality of cats on the grid has never been higher (in terms of variety of cats, matchy cats, availability of recessive cats).

All of which is to say that nobody in this thead has ever been on the price controls/ cat controls side of things. On the contrary, we were on the other side.

[Magnum Vaher]

Wow what a perfect description!!!!! thank you IVY

(03-14-2019 02:16 PM)Ivy Norsk Wrote:  What is a Good Cat?

There’s been a thread on pricing which is old and has bits of useful information but it’s not current. A lot of new people have joined KittyCats with the release of the new SweetCats Collection and the Birthday Cats. A lot of people are poking around and asking questions - about pricing, about traits, about the cats in general. One of the perennial questions that pops up in the Addicts chat is “Is this a good cat?”

That question can be answered in many ways, largely because people do the KittyCats hobby in different ways. You can say “all cat are good cats”. They are charmingly animated and come in a multitudinous array of traits. But most people are really asking “Is this a cat worth breeding and how much can I get for it?”

This is not intended to be the start of a pricing thread. But it is intended to show what is the sort of cat that people spend months developing - cats that take well over 1000L to develop - over (kitty) generations of careful mixing of traits and attention to aesthetic detail - and also breeding games based on trait names that KittyCats and the community have developed over the years. Please note that putting in 1000 lindens does not mean that you will get 1000 lindens out. Breeders of highly-bred cats will tell you, it’s a labor of love. You put in way more lindens than you get out - but the cats are gorgeous.

In the early days of KittyCats there weren’t as many traits available and the mechanisms of how to breed were just being discovered. In the early days, the pinnacle of breeding was the Quadruple Mysterious cat. You may have noticed that there are Mysterious ears, Mysterious tail, Mysterious whisker shape, and also the recessive eye shape is called “Mysterious”. Figuring out how to put all four traits on one cat showed that you understood what was going on. I regret that I do not have a picture of a Quadruple Mysterious to show you.

In our current days, I know one breeder who has done up a Quadruple Dreamy. Lady Magick (MsMagick) has a line of cats that have Dreamy tail, Dreamy whiskers (and maybe some with DoubleDreamy?), Dreamy Fold ears, and Sparkle or Crystal Dream eyes.


(The Bengal Black is a triple dreamy with tail, whisker and Sparkle Dream eyes. The Aussie Snow is the quad featuring Crystal Dream eyes and the Dreamy Fold ears.)

In between the Quad Mysterious and the Quad Dreamy, KittyCats themselves introduced the Triple Tiger with their Menagerie Tiger line. A Triple Tiger has Wild Tiger ears, a Tiger Curl tail, and your choice of 2 limited edition eyes that came out with the Menagerie Tigers: jade or blushquartz. These are often shown on bengal furs (for bonus points) but can be on any fur.

With the introduction of the Tiger! furs (based on the original Menagerie tiger furs) and the Tiger Fold ear, we now have an expanded range of Tiger cats. In the chat I have seen a number of people popping in to show off their Quadruple Tigers: Tiger! fur, Tiger Curl tail, one of the Tiger ears, and jade or blushquartz eyes.

Mind you, once the form has been developed, it gets easier to reproduce it by buying somebody else’s. It used to be really hard to get a Triple Tiger. Not so much anymore. But developing one through breeding, in whole or in part, does help to teach you how to breed.

Also the forms go together. It becomes apparent, if you spend any time looking at the cats, that Callie made certain traits to match each other.
This is my cat Camden:


Look at how precisely the Chocolate-Tipped whiskers match the Burmilla Blue-Shaded fur. That didn’t happen by accident. As you work with whiskers you will realize that the colors are Not the same on all shapes of whiskers: a Blonde-streaked Fussy whisker is Not the same color as the Blonde-streaked DoubleDreamy, which is not the same color as a Blonde-streaked Mysterious. Dark chocolate DoublePlush whiskers are burgundy shaded(!) but in DoubleSnappy they look more like a chocolate bar (with less prominent shading).



(Look at how the line of the DoubleSnappy whisker doubles the stripe on the toyger’s cheek.)

Auctioneers routinely tout cats that are “Matchy”. They are worth more money. They are cats where when you look at them, you say “that cat is perfect just the way it is”. They come from breeders who know the traits well and have put in the breeding kibble to develop the cat. The traits all come out onto the grid in starters as 1T, 2T, or 3T etc. Sometimes Headquarters helps: a lot of Toyger Snows were released in starters alongside Cream whiskers, for example. Here’s a Bubblegum Tiger! with Serendipity Glow eyes. The pink on both is the same. That’s not an accident.




Breeders often think of wonderful combinations from traits old and new that make for a superlative cat. This is a cat by Mirsoul Macbeth (Mirsoul):




Look at those whiskers! Those are Sassy whiskers in Butterscotch Tipped-black. The Sassy form highlights the tips at the end, and the tips perfectly match the rim in the Tapestry Royale eyes. Put it on the retired Burmese Sable fur and the combination sings. That took work. It took work even if Burmese Sable is dominant because it’s easy to lose a dominant trait. Sassy whiskers are mid-range; it’s hard to keep them on a cat line through the generations because so many whiskers are more dominant and will cover them up, and so much DoublePlush, DoubleDreamy, and indeed SwankyLite are lurking or showing on so many cats in the grid. Do not underestimate the mid-range traits. Many of them, like Sassy whiskers, are very nice indeed.

As this thread goes forward, I would hope that people would post pictures of well-thought-out cats and why they look special. We have the Showroom section of the forum for people to post pictures of their own cats to promote them and so I ask that this thread not be used for sales. This is ultimately meant to be a Discussion thread with illustrations.

What are the great cats you have seen? Also forms like Bastets (foxie ears, tiger curl on a russian black). Foxy Foxies. Amazing matchys.