answrs wrote:Minimanta wrote:answrs wrote:I'm not gonna lie, consolidating my collection from like 16 species and event distinctions into one group I don't have to think "okay but the lion isn't really a holiday thing but was a special release and it came out of a cat litter, does it go in the lion, event, or cat group?" or "are monkeys chameleons because they're just an edit of the base? are possums monkeys or chameleons or an entirely new group? is this staff dog edited into a big cat a dog or cat or lion?" has removed SO MUCH pressure and stress I didn't even know I was having with it.
I still keep my trades organized into general species/event groups for ease of access, but it's legitimately so much easier on me to just "okay these guys grew up today, into the pile with ye! YEET!"
(also helps because my groups are already excessive in number already, I don't have an extra three scrolls worth of groups to dredge through to sort my hoards into their place of honor)
The idea of keeping my collection in one giant group gives me anxeity, lol xD
How on Earth am I going to find one specific pet if they're just in this massive pile of all pets ever released... My goodness, the thought alone terrifies me. And also, just think about misplacing a pet into said group. What about all of the lost doubles and hoard pets x.X
I avoid all of the stress of "Where do the hedgehogs go" by sorting my pets by the archive (by year and then species). If the archive calls the hedgehogs Syrian Hamsters, then into the Syrian Hamster group they go!
And I also don't seperate my groups by events/regulars either, but even if I did, just go by the archive. If the archive groups the pet as a regular pet, then into the regular group it would go.
Easy peasy. Then if I'm looking for a specific pet, all I need to know is the species the archive sort it as and whatever year it was released in. Boom, then I just need to go to that specific group and fetch it!
I think the only exception to this rule I have, is the distinction between sitting cats vs. regular cats. For whatever reason the archive group both cats as the same and that boggles my mind. Those are two seperate species and I will die on that hill! It seperate Tess horses from the regular horses, so why should it be different for the cats?
2022 alone has 26 categories. the idea of dealing with 400 groups just for your collection makes me shudder. if you mis-sort into one group you can just skip to the pets from that month. trawling through hundreds of different groups to try and find it? can't possibly imagine dredging through all those for a misplaced rat x_x
edit: misread your sorting for someone else's. whoops. still sounds like a major amount of work though :p
do you just have to wait for them to get sorted into the archive before you can put them anywhere? seems annoying imo.
Well, most of the time it's easy to tell what species a pet is or is based on.
The regular pets are very rarely edited to look like other species, so those guys are easy. And the event pets that are edited to look like other species, it's usually easy enough to tell what they're based on, based on the pose and the unedited parts.
You can tell the bears we got this Camping event are lions because they have the same pose and legs as unedited lions. You can tell the owls from the same event are macaws because they have the same wing pose as unedited flying macaws. Etc.
But it can of course get tricky like with the dimetrodons from the Cave event
(these guys). What on Earth are they based on? Well, they're rats and you can sorta tell by the pose and the low to the ground, round body type. And just to be sure, yeah you just have to wait for them to get added to the archive to get confirmation ^.^
But I usually don't sort my new pets into their permanent groups until the month or event is over anyway, by which point they've usually been in the archive for a while. So that's not problem for me personally :D
And keeping up with the way I sort is really no trouble at all. It took a LONG time, and I'm talking years, to figure out how I wanted to sort my pets. Trying out different ways to sort them, until I settled on how I do it now. And it does take a long LONG time to resort your collection, especially with how many pets we have nowadays.
But going by the archive is by far my favorite way to sort my pets. It's simple, it's to the point and it's managable. You know exactly where a pet is.
And yeah, that does mean you add like 20 new groups every year but it's worth it to me.
I also just like to sort stuff. I get an itch every so often to resort my pets, think about a little bit and then decide to keep my setup. I just like it too much over any other alternative.
I hope they add the ability to sort pets within their groups. I'm gonna go WILD sorting all of my pets to sit next to their litter mates in an appealing way 8D
/ Lycana / She/Her / Libra / 
