Tribble breeding may be one of the strangest mini-games to have ever hit any MMO ever. Actually breeding the things is very easy:
- Take your tribble.
- Put in an enclosed area (such as your inventory) with anything edible and spare space.
- Wait one hour.
And that’s pretty much it. Given enough food, tribbles expand to fill the available space. They are also utterly adorable and can be taken out and petted while on ground missions, which provides the owner with either a small self heal or a buff.
The interesting side of tribble breeding is that the little fluff balls also come in different varieties. Some have different markings, some give different buffs. And if you right-click on your tribble to bring up the context menu and select ‘info’ you can find out to which sub-species your pet belongs. And the different varieties of child tribble that a parent will spawn depend strongly on which food item is available.
So if you isolate your tribble in a breeding box (ie. your inventory, containing only the food item you want the tribble to eat), you can breed predictable tribblets.
I mention this because Matt.C on rpg.net found a beautifully rendered guide to tribble breeding and evolution by KappaTau from the official STO boards.
This is the cut down version, if you go to KappaTau’s thread he also links to a rather gorgeous wallpaper edition, so you can stare at little tribbles all day and … I’m not sure where I’m going with this but it’s an absolutely awesome piece of work.
Sounds funny.
Are there special tribble breed boxes available? Room for 3 items: tribble-in, food-in, tribble-out? Do they only breed online? Would be interesting, if cannibal tribbles “provide” a nasty debuff.
Tribble breeding boxes sounds like a great idea, but no. You can breed them in your inventory, in your personal inventory (ie. which you take when you go groundside) and … I’m not sure if they breed in bank vaults.
I believe they only breed while you are online, but I’d have to check that more carefully.
Awesome.
I wonder who gave the tribbles their names. I was always hoping for them to get green text or a name, but one has to check “info” to see their effects.
The chart is probably still not final. But apparently Romulan foods are way to go if you want to breed tribbles. This is probably why I got most of my rare tribbles at Commander and Captain levels.
P.S.: Tribbles breed in the bank box, and faster in your inventory if you are zoning a lot. I also found a “Cavallaro” tribble on one of my officers, so don’t worry about it anymore. I will try to breed a blue tribble for Blue Kae.
My Orion Slave Girl needs to get her some Tribbles. I could do with some buffs for all that PvP we need to do Klingon side.
Here’s a tabular breakdown. Not as pretty, but what can ya do?
http://www.sto-intel.org/wiki/Tribble
Tribbles are named after the Devs