Despite not really caring for the game, I played through it anyways (a masochist perhaps?) And I can give the following information.
Creatures are split into two groups, passive and aggressive. Aggressive creatures will always remain aggressive, regardless of level, while passive creatures will not attack unless attacked first.
Passive creatures include:
- all types of beetle
- swamp mutant
- Skeleton
Aggressive creatures are:
- all types of snake
- all types of scorpion
- all types of elemental
- all ogres
- the skeleton warrior
- the female swamp mutant
Aggressive creatures will attack you once you get into a certain range of them, your pet also triggers this.
Levelling up:
A good way to level up is to get to an area with only passive creatures, and constantly attack the passive creatures, stopping when you need to to regenerate health.
If your pet is heavily damaged and you have no healing goods, then commanding it to stay and fighting monsters yourself until it levels up or you get healing items will save it.
Telling your pet to stay in an area with passive monsters poses no risk to you or your pet. In areas with aggressive monsters, you can use the items that monsters drop as a barrier - nothing can pass through the item - so you can completely block yourself and your monster off and fight one at a time.
Always buy the best armor and weapon for your level, it's an immense help. Your pet also needs to be 8 to 14 levels above the monsters in the area in order not to take huge amounts of damage from battling them.
Egg hatching times are kept track off, even if you log off the game, this isn't mentioned anywhere, but it means that you can leave your game overnight to let things hatch, rather than having to spend all the time at the computer idling.
Scorpions have a glitch that's been mentioned, where their sprite won't show up, and it will be a green or red patch with a skeleton by it, this is a graphical fault, and nothing more.
Special abilities of monsters include:
- poison: all snakes and two of the scorpions have this, but it's a fairly worthless ability because it only ever does one damage.
- stun: the ogres have this ability, stuns the enemy for a turn or two.
- freeze: only the ice elemental and the ice scorpion have this ability. Against you, it acts like a longer stun, but when your pet has it it seems to act rather as an instant kill that happens extremely rarely. The ice sword probably also has this ability, put I haven't gotten it yet, and don't think I'll bother.
One final tip: if you can afford it, always try to have a castaway feather, especially when doing the generator quests, so that way you only have to touch the generator and then use the feather to warp back home.