Moonstone Island – Spirits Guide and Tips

This guide will tell you everything you must understand about spirits in Moonstone. It covers where to discover them, how to interact with them, and the places where you can gather spirits on Moonstone Island. We’ll talk about locating spirits, battling them, befriending them, and growing more spirits. I’m composing this guide step by step because I haven’t encountered a superior one yet. We welcome your input and any adjustments, including how it’s presented and the terms used.

Choosing Your Starters

First, let’s talk about picking your starters.

To choose your starter, you’ll need to complete the tutorial. If you skip it, the game will pick one for you randomly. The other two starters can be found in the wild, but they’re a bit rare. The types of spirits you encounter depend on the island you’re on. Some types are more common closer to the main island, with lower levels and easier-to-tame creatures.

Earth-type spirits are the first ones you’ll come across, followed by Water, Poison, and Electric types, which are close to each other, and then Fire.

So, if you go for the Earth-type Ankylo, you’ll start with a team of 3 Earth types. If you choose Capacibee, it will cover the Electric-type role for the first season or so, and Sheemp will handle the Fire-type role for quite a while, possibly the first 2 seasons. This means that in terms of type variety, Sheemp is the best choice.

However, the situation isn’t as one-sided as it might seem. Capacibee’s ability to regenerate 10 HP instead of fainting is incredibly useful (all starters start with 20 HP), and its Electric type and multi-hit attacks are handy for Earth and especially Water islands, which are the first ones you’ll encounter. Ankylo’s ability and starting cards that give it Rage make it a strong offensive option, albeit a bit risky. On the other hand, Sheemp’s ability to apply Burn to a random enemy when hit by a Fire attack is situational and not as helpful.

In summary, Capacibee is the easiest choice to start with, Ankylo is the most challenging, and Sheemp falls in between. However, Sheemp’s type and Ankylo’s offensive power make them viable choices in their own right.

Making Your Team

Let’s talk about forming your team.

At the start, you can only have 3 spirits on your team. To have more, you’ll need to construct the Spirit Barn, which can be quite pricey and won’t be available for at least the first few weeks of your initial playthrough. So, in the early game, the only way to switch up your team after taming your first 3 creatures is to release one of them, losing all the progress they’ve made.

It’s a good idea to have a full team as soon as you can, but remember this when deciding whether to use items on your spirits. Earth types are easily accessible right from the beginning, Water types are the next closest, and all other types are more challenging to locate and tame (likely requiring a Spirit Barn). So, no matter which starter you picked, you’ll probably want to release one of your initial Earth-type catches and keep the other.

A spirit’s vulnerabilities are linked to their type but not entirely dependent on it. During a battle, you can check both their type and weaknesses by navigating upward from the card selection and choosing the enemies. Since you’ll likely have at least two Earth types at the beginning, try to choose ones with different weaknesses (or exceptional abilities).

I also suggest obtaining a Fluffox, as its ability increases your chances of building relationships with NPCs while it’s with you, which can be quite beneficial in the early stages.

Finding and Taming

Now, let’s delve into finding and taming spirits.

Finding:

As previously mentioned, the type of spirits you encounter depends on the island type, with various types being more common closer or further away from the main island. The distance from the main island also affects their average level, which, in turn, affects how challenging they are to tame.

It’s essential to note that you have a maximum level limit for spirits you can tame, determined by your talents in the Spirit tree. Initially, you can only tame up to level 5, restricting your choices to the closest islands, typically Earth and Water. Obtaining the first talent, which allows you to tame spirits up to level 10, should be a priority. You earn these talent points by battling and taming spirits.

Here’s the order of island types from closest to furthest:

• Earth – grassy
• Water – beach
• Poison – darker green grass, swampy trees, and stumps, with dark fog
• Electric – yellowish-greyish grass, with bolt-shaped trees
• Fire – ashy/basalt ground with lava flows
• Dark – Not encountered yet, could be a special case like Psychic

Psychic is a unique case; every night, a psychic storm occurs on a random wild island, indicated on the minimap by a purple swirl. This causes Psychic spirits and plants to appear there.

Islands seem to come in pairs, creating layers. The closest to the main island are Earth and Water islands, followed by a layer of Poison and Electric, and then Fire, with Dark presumably coming after. Keep in mind that this is not an exact science; occasionally, you may encounter an Electric island that spawns very close with level 10 monsters or a Grass island quite far away with level 20-ish creatures.

Taming:

When you travel to a wild island, spirits will begin to appear in the vicinity. A single spirit in the overworld can translate to either 1 or a group of 3 in battle, with species selected from available spawns. This means you can potentially find the spirit you’re seeking even when engaging in battle with another of the same type.

In battle, you can determine if a spirit is tamable by the blue heart icon to the right of its HP bar. If the heart has a padlock symbol, it means the spirit is too high-level for you to tame. If, instead of a heart, it has a skull symbol, it’s a boss version and can never be tamed.

If the spirit is tamable, the process is as simple as feeding it a plant or concoction with a Tame effect during battle. In the Spring season, Flax is the plant you can use. This action increases its taming meter, represented by filling the blue heart with green. Once it’s completely filled, a taming check is made, which can fail, requiring you to continue taming. Feeding is an action that costs 1 energy, so you can feed a taming item up to 3 times in a turn unless you want to perform other actions that use energy or execute plays to gain more energy, which would enable you to feed more than 3 times.

Farming

By constructing a Spirit Barn using a Moonstone Enchanter, you gain the ability to not only store spirits but also farm them. Initially, a Barn comes with a single stall, and you can create more stalls in the Enchanter using wood and cloth. Each stall can house one spirit, and you must feed them with Fiber (cut from grass) to prevent them from running away.

Feeding:

Spirits don’t require daily feeding, but providing them with food increases the chances of them dropping valuable items. There are also moonstone grass stalls that magically grow grass without your intervention, offering an ideal but somewhat expensive solution for those favorite spirits you want to ensure never run away, regardless of how much you neglect your barn duties.

Drops:

Each spirit type drops specific items. You receive a quest from Zed to sell all these drops to him, which is fairly straightforward. For instance, Earth types drop Clay, Water types drop Sea Glass, and so on.

These drops are essential for completing the quest (which also fills up the display cases in Zed’s lab) and for advanced crafting. Additionally, you have the option to sell them to Zed separately for money, independent of the quest.

Fighting

Fighting in the game is like playing a card battle game within the game itself. I’ll add more details later and might create a separate guide, but here’s some basic information for now:

Battle system

In battles, your team and the enemy team take turns playing cards. Who goes first depends on the Speed stat, but I’m not sure if it’s the highest or the average speed of the team right now. The enemies pick one card to play and choose their target. During your turn, you can see this in a bubble above them. You can also get more info about their stats, types, weaknesses, abilities, attacks, and effects by navigating up from the card choice.

You have a more advanced system. Each turn, you get 3 Energy, not to be confused with out-of-battle Stamina. Your cards cost between 0 to 3 Energy. At the start of your turn, you draw cards from your draw pile (your entire deck at the beginning). At the end of your turn, you discard everything left in your hand into the discard pile, which starts empty. When you run out of cards in the draw pile, the entire discard pile gets shuffled and moved into it. Playing cards means they go to the discard pile. Some cards have the Exhaust effect, which means they’re gone for the rest of the battle when played. Others have the Retain effect, so they stay in your hand at the end of the turn instead of getting discarded. A card can even have both effects.

Your deck is made up of the combined decks of your spirits, and the cards are shuffled randomly. This means you could end up with a hand full of one spirit’s cards. A smaller deck is more predictable and allows you to use the same card multiple times (if it doesn’t have the Exhaust effect).

Your goal is to either banish or tame all enemy spirits. Taming is explained in another section, while banishing means reducing their HP to 0.

Spirits have four stats:

1. Armour – Reduces damage from attacks and can even block them completely.
2. Speed – Determines which team goes first and affects how much armour is removed by Skills and Attacks.
3. Vitality – Decides the maximum HP.
4. Power – Influences the damage done by attacks.

Armour is super important. It lets a spirit reduce or block damage, but it can also be taken away by damage they’re weak to, certain skills, and attacks. When all the armour is gone, a spirit gets dizzy and takes more damage, can’t act or be fed, and has two charges of this effect. It loses one charge at the start of a turn, so when you make an enemy dizzy, they take more damage for the rest of that turn. They’ll lose one charge and not attack on their first turn, take more damage on the second turn, and at the start of their second turn, they lose the second charge, clear the effect, get their armour back, and can move again.

Cards

There are two types of cards: Attacks and Skills. Attacks deal damage, while Skills don’t. However, Attacks can have various effects, and their power is balanced between cost, damage, and effects. Skills, on the other hand, only have a cost and effects.

Cards can have a variety of effects, like removing armor, drawing cards from the draw pile or discard pile, buffing allies, debuffing enemies, transforming other cards, or regaining energy. Attacks can also be diverse, some dealing damage multiple times or to more than one enemy.

Cards have several details:

• Cost: Represented by the energy symbol in the top-left corner.
• Type: Shown by the color and decorations.
• Rarity: Indicated by the number of stars on the right.
• Upgrades: Upgraded cards have a “+” suffix in their name. An upgraded card is one rarity level higher than its base form.

Upgraded cards are generally much more powerful. For example, a card like “Rage” costs 1 energy, has Exhaust, and gives the target one charge of Rage, which makes it deal and take double damage. But an upgraded version, “Rage+,” costs 0 energy, doesn’t have Exhaust, and gives the target two charges of Rage, causing double damage for two turns.

There are talismans that can do three things: remove a card from a deck, add a card to the deck, or upgrade a card in the deck. These upgrades make cards stronger. Talents can also increase the chances of getting higher rarity cards or give a chance to upgrade a card when it’s added to a deck.