Rarities

Rarities are one of the central aspects of trading pets on Chicken Smoothie. This guide will give you an overview of the meaning and mechanics behind them.

What is rarity?

Every pet on Chicken Smoothie exists in limited numbers. The pets that are available for adoption change regularly, with previous sets becoming retired, and as a result there is only a finite amount of each outcome in the game.

To obtain pets that were retired from adoption, users need to trade for them from people who already own them. But not all pets are available in equal numbers: Through a variety of factors, such as the age of the pet, the probability of receiving a certain outcome, or its popularity, some pets are rarer than others. As a result, they can be more difficult to find, and therefore more valuable.

To help users determine the fairness of their trade offers, each CS pet receives a rarity tag that indicates how many of it currently exist in the game. This way, a common pet can be easily distinguished from a pet that is very rare.

Calculation

A pet's rarity tag is determined by how many of it exist in the game, compared to how many user accounts exist on the site. The idea behind this is to see how many users are potentially trying to get a pet for their collection, and how many copies of said pet are available.

To make sure these numbers reflect the actual availability of the pets, only active accounts and their pets are counted in the process.

An account is considered active as long as it has been logged into within the past [number] months. Accounts that are inactive are not permanently marked as such - if a user logs back in, their account and pets will once more be counted towards rarity calculations in coming updates.

Pets will only be assigned a rarity once they are no longer available for adoption.

Rarity Tags

Rarities of CS pets are not displayed in absolute numbers. Instead, they are represented by so-called 'rarity tags' or 'rarity bars'. There are seven official rarity tags, which -depending on user choice- may be displayed as plain text or colourful image bars.

Regular Rarities

Officially released pets are all assigned one of seven rarity types. Pets that exist in abundance receive tags on the "common" spectrum, whereas pets that exist in smaller numbers than site users will fall into the "rare" categories.

The rarities are, in ascending order:

OMG so common (blue) - Very common (teal) - Common (green) - Uncommon (yellow) - Rare (orange) - Very rare (red) - OMG so rare (purple)

Note that a rarity tag only shows how many of a specific pet exist on the site. They do not indicate how many different outcomes have been assigned this tag. Any given 'omg so common' pet is overall more abundant than a pet that is 'common', but there may be more pets that are tagged as 'common' than there are outcomes with an 'omg so common' tag.

Unknown

Pets that have not yet been assigned a rarity will show up with a 'rarity unknown' tag. This tag comes in two versions, depending on whether a pet is still growing, or fully grown.

In text-only display, they show up as 'unknown' and 'unknown until adult'.

If rarities are set to be displayed as image bars, the colour of the bar's question mark will differentiate between the two, with a blue question mark indicating a fully grown pet, and a purple question mark informing that the pet has not finished growing yet.

There is a chance for a still growing pet to already have a known rarity. If the pet was adopted very late, or has been adopted through a re-release event, its possible outcomes may already be known, and thus the eventual rarity can be predicted by its growth pattern. To do this, check out the archive's page of the litter, and take note of which growth days and stages correspond with the unknown pet.

Custom

So-called 'custom' pets are pets that have never been part of a regular site release. These pets are unique designs that have been created specifically for their owners. In the early years of the site, custom pets have sometimes been given out to regular users, such as friends of Tess, as gifts. Nowadays they are almost exclusively given out to site staff as a thank you for their work.

To make them distinguishable from official site pets, they are assigned a 'custom' tag that shows as a rainbow coloured image bar.

What influences rarity?

outcome probability, popularity, release type, length of release, pet age

Rarity Updates

heres an explanation on rarity updates and how pets change rarities over time

Timeline

2009

→ October 8: visible rarity tags added

more years

→ you get the idea