Huntbot

Former huntbot guides have always tried to give exact instructions, such as “upgrade this twice, then that once”.
I feel that vastly oversimplifies the whole topic though, so I’ll also try to give more insights into how exactly people got to those exact instructions.
And then you can maybe adjust the instructions slightly based on your own situation!

Upgrade cost grows polynomially, this means that as your huntbot is leveled higher, and becomes more useful, it becomes increasingly expensive to upgrade.
These are the relevant formulas for upgrading to level x from the previous level:

Efficiency(x) = floor(10x^1.748) for x ≤ 215
Gain(x) = floor(10x^1.800) for x ≤ 200
Duration(x) = floor(10x^1.700) for x ≤ 235
Exp(x) = floor(10x^1.800) for x ≤ 200
Cost(x) = floor(1000x^3.4) for x ≤ 5
Radar(x) = floor(50x^2.500) for x ≤ 999

Efficiency ( alias cd )

Efficiency directly affects the amount of pets you catch per hour.
At level 0, you catch 25 pets/h and every level adds 1 onto that.
Such that when you’re at the max level of 215, you gain 240 pets/h.
Each caught pet costs some cowoncy though, which actually means that you’ll make your huntbot burn more money by upgrading efficiency.
Sold pets definitely make up for this, but it’s important to be aware of.

Caught pets are commonly sacrificed for Essence or sold for Cowoncy.
The average pet is worth 16-22 essence and 20-32 cowoncy, depending on various factors (/).
Assuming you never need to sell any of your pets, this basically means an Efficiency upgrade gains you +16 to +22 essence/h.
Now, if you take the amount of extra Essence gained in some timeframe, and divide that by the cost of the upgrade, you have your Return on Investment (ROI).
This Return on Investment is the main thing that huntbot guides try to optimise, and it’s incredibly important, but I’ll go into more detail later.

This source of Essence makes Efficiency one of the two primary Traits of your huntbot, the other being Gain.
They’re so essential because they’re the best method to accelerate your huntbot leveling.
Invest mainly into these two and your other traits will also be leveled faster!

This is the tierchart, it’s important to understand when sacrificing and selling pets:

	58.849% - extra pets	30%	10%	1%	0.1%	0.5%	0.01%	0.05%	0.01% × Gem Tier	0.000004% × Radar Lvl	0.00025%	0.001%	0.005% ⇒ 0.05%	0.0001%
	1 EXP	10 EXP	20 EXP	400 EXP	1,000 EXP	400 EXP	2,000 EXP	2,000 EXP	5,000 EXP	-	100,000 EXP	100,000 EXP	250 EXP	300,000 EXP
	1	3	10	250	5,000	1,000	50,000	15,000	30,000	50,000	300,000	250,000	6,000	1,000,000
	1	5	20	250	3,000	500	25,000	10,000	20,000	10,000	200,000	100,000	5,000	500,000
	1 ZP	5 ZP	20 ZP	250 ZP	3,000 ZP	500 ZP	25,000 ZP	10,000 ZP	20,000 ZP	30,000 ZP	200,000 ZP	100,000 ZP	500 ZP	500,000 ZP

• Bots are only obtainable in huntbot.
• Gems and Distorted aren’t obtainable in huntbot.
• Special catch rate is nerfed by 75% in huntbot.

Above, you can see that the lower Tiers reward more Essence through sacrificing, than Cowoncy through selling.
This is reversed for the higher tiers, which sell for large amounts, but don’t sacrifice as well. If you’re short on cowoncy, it’s thus the better choice to sell the higher ranking ones instead of the lower ranking ones.

Gain

Gain directly gives you an amount of essence per hour. It starts with 0 ess/h at level zero, and each additional level gives +25 ess/h. At the max level of 200, that’s 5000 ess/h.

As already mentioned, besides Efficiency, this is the second main trait of your huntbot.
It similarly affects the amount of Essence your huntbot gains, and is thus essential for fast leveling.

The Efficiency vs. Gain debate

These traits are often compared, especially because the intent in upgrading them is the same. Which one should you focus? How much should you focus one over the other?
Generally speaking, keeping them roughly the same level is advised, but we’ll try to look a bit more into the math behind why this is the case.

1. Return on Investment

Click here for the calculator.

In the case that you want optimal essence return ratios of your upgrades, you should look at your upgrade costs and the essence gained from said upgrades. Let’s continue with Level 100 Efficiency & Gain, with no Radar nor Patreon for simplicity’s sake. Your upgrade costs would be 31882 and 40530 for Efficiency and Gain respectively.
An Efficiency upgrade would gain +1 pet/h, which is +16.09 essence/h—simply the pet worth assuming no Radar/Patreon.
You could continue with this hourly ROI now, but I feel like the daily ROI is slightly more intuitive. So I multiply this by 24 for +386.1 essence/day.
A Gain upgrade would give +25 essence/h which is +600 essence/day.

Now, to calculate the return ratios:

• Efficiency: 386.1 / 31882 = 0.0121
  ⇒ An Efficiency Upgrade has a return of 1.21% per day.
• Gain: 600 / 40530 = 0.0148
  ⇒ A Gain Upgrade has a return of 1.48% per day.

This would mean you have a better return when leveling Gain, and it would make more sense to invest into Gain rather than Efficiency. These ratios change somewhat with every level, and also upon other factors. In the default scenario, best ROI is achieved by keeping your Gain roughly 10% above your Efficiency. But if you have Patreon, it more-or-less makes sense to keep them at the same level.

Exactly this calculation is what most HB guides are based on—it’s super important to level your huntbot fast, as that will also allow you to better invest into your other traits.

2. Other factors to consider

• An Efficiency upgrade will make your HB less efficient. Both in Essence/owo and in Exp/owo. Furthermore, your efficiency ROI is hampered when you’re forced to sell your pets. So if you’re low on Cash, you might want to hold off on Efficiency upgrades.
• Efficiency is inconsistent, gain is consistent.
• Focusing on efficiency gives more pets along the way.

Duration ( alias time )

Your huntbot starts with a duration of 30 minutes. And every Duration level adds +6 minutes (0.1 hours) onto that. At the max level of 235, you have a full day.
Duration is just a convenience upgrade. If you’re very attentive to your huntbot, then all levels of duration are practically the same. But I’m lazy, and you probably are too. So invest into Duration to the point that you can have your huntbot running for the entire day with little effort. This is probably ~8h for most people, as that’s how long they sleep, and it also nicely divides the day into 3 huntbots. But I’m super lazy and focused Duration until I had 12h cycles, which gave me 2 huntbots per day.

This concept of cycles is pretty important; Any duration longer than 12h won’t help you—until you reach 24h—you will still have 2 huntbots per day.
Once you have the primary two traits maxed, then you can think about further leveling Duration & maxing it.

owo hb 12h using this time format is the fastest way of sending your hb out with a given time.
I used to specify cowoncy (owo hb 14400) for way too long, because I didn’t know of this format.

Experience ( alias xp )

You start with 0 Exp/h and gain +35 Exp/h per upgrade. At the maximum level of 200, you gain 7000 Exp/hour.
This is actually a huge amount per day, and for many people the main source of Exp. You probably shouldn’t invest too much as a beginner though, as your pets are probably temporary for now anyway. Investing a bit into the cheap upgrades is a safe bet, but it probably shouldn’t become a focus until after Efficiency & Gain have been maxed.

Cost

Cost is a shackle forged by the hands of capitalist oppressors, binding the grinders to their ceaseless toil. Under the iron grip of this system, the fruits of labor are siphoned away, leaving the masses with mere crumbs while the bourgeoisie (OBS staff) feast upon the banquet of excess. The factories hum with the rhythm of exploited souls, their sweat and blood staining the gears of the profit machine. But fear not, comrades! For the winds of revolution whisper through the spam channels, and the proletariat shall rise, reclaiming what is rightfully theirs. The ledger of history shall be balanced, and the cost of liberation paid in the currency of blood. (please stop owo pay-to-win im begging)

radar

Bot chance is 0% by default, and every Radar upgrade adds +0.000004% onto that.
The max level is technically 999, but this can’t be achieved, which is why there’s no real “maxed” huntbot.
Whenever we refer to such, we only mean a huntbot that has had everything but Radar maxed.

Because Bots pets sacrifice for more than Common pets, we could also talk about the Return on Investment here, such as with Gain & Efficiency. It doesn’t make much sense to do this, as the effects are miniscule, but I’ve included the calculation on the calculator anyway. Going solely by ROI, you should have a level 2 Radar by the time Efficiency & Gain maxed.

Though, that’s probably not why you’re considering Radar.
But even as the biggest Bot-enthusiast, you shouldn’t have Radar over level 30 by the time you’re maxed.
It’s just way too expensive and probably has no payoff.

math 😱

We’ll calculate some more; this time Bot chances.
Assuming you have a level 20 Radar, your base chance is 0.00008%.
Thus, our chance of not getting a bot for each individual pet is: NoBot = 100% - 0.00008%

Imagine we have a maxed huntbot and we leave it running for 5 weeks.
We will have gotten 35 * 5760 = 201600 pets by then.

Now if we take Unlucky = NoBot ^ pets, then we’ll have the chance of not having gotten a Bot within so many pets.

Now your chances of getting a Bot pet are 100% - Unlucky
In this example, within 5 weeks we had a Bot chance of 0.14895, i.e. 14.895%!

Walkthrough

I do acknowledge all of this has been extremely theoretical,
so I’ll try to give a rough walkthrough which you can adjust according to your priorities.

1. Start by investing equally into Efficiency, Gain, and Duration.
   • You might want to keep Gain higher than Efficiency. The Huntbot Calculator helps with the ratio.
   • Keep Exp roughly 50% to 75% of the level of these three.
   • Upgrade Cost every 20 levels and Radar every 10 levels.
2. Cost will be maxed by the time Efficiency and Gain reach level 90-100.
   • Continue with the rest as in the previous step.
3. Duration reaches 115 Level (12h) — stop upgrading it for now.
   • Continue with the rest as in the previous step.
4. The next maxed traits will be Efficiency and Gain.
   • Exp is still 50% to 75% of your just maxed traits.
   • Duration is still at level ~115
   • Radar at level ~20
   • Choose Exp or Duration to be your next focus. The choice is personal preference.
5. Once you are finished with your preferred trait, max the other.
6. Now, all that’s left is Radar.