Steal an Egg Forest: what each egg is worth and which to take first

Each egg hatches the pet of the same name, so a Bear Egg gives you a Bear and a Bird Egg gives you a Bird. The table below takes rarity, income, grow time and reward from each pet's own infobox, and the last column from the wiki's Drop Rates page, which says its figures came from the game files. Forest's eight values add up to exactly 100, so each one can be read directly as a share of spawns.

One pattern saves you some reading: the cash half of every reward is exactly 100 times the pet's income. A Chicken pays $1/s and $100, a Bear pays $240/s and $24k, a Brr Brr Patapim pays $1.8K/s and $180k. The hatch cash is therefore worth 100 seconds of that pet's income, whichever egg you pick. The Speed half moves far less: from +420 to +1k across the zone, while income rises 1,800-fold. So Forest eggs differ enormously in money and only slightly in Speed, and that gap drives every decision further down this page. One assumption sits under the sums that follow: the infobox labels this field only "Reward" and does not say when it is paid, so we read it as paid on hatching, with income starting from the same moment.

Divide each Steal an Egg Forest reward by its grow time and the zone sorts itself into two opposite lists. Chicken is the best Speed egg by a wide margin and the worst income egg. Brr Brr Patapim is the reverse. There is no egg in the middle that wins both ways, so the sensible question is which of the two you are short of right now.

Before you reach Lake's gate you are short of Speed, so the short eggs win: a minute spent on Chicken eggs yields about six times the Speed of a minute spent on one Bear. After the gate, Forest's Speed rewards fall behind, because Lake's lowest-income egg outpaces all of these (see below). What you carry out of Forest at that point should be income, which is why the bottom of this table is the part to remember.

These rates assume one egg growing at a time. The wiki does not say how many pens a new player starts with, so if you can grow several eggs at once the rates add up, but the order of the eggs does not change.

Take Bear whenever you have the choice. Fox and Bear earn exactly the same income per grow-minute, $120/s, so the tie breaks on the hatch reward. Start both at the same moment. The Fox hatches at 1m 30s and pays $18k, then earns $180/s for the 30 seconds until the Bear hatches, which brings it to $23,400. The Bear hatches at two minutes and pays $24k at once. It is ahead the moment it exists, it stays ahead by another $60/s, and it adds +820 Speed to the Fox's +720.

What Fox has is availability. The wiki's Drop Rates page lists it at 4.5 against Bear's 2.5, so a Fox appears 1.8 times as often: about one egg in 22 against one in 40. That settles the other half of the question. If a Fox is in reach and no Bear is, take the Fox. The wiki's Eggs page says eggs reset every 5 minutes, and waiting one reset for a Bear that may not come costs more time than the whole of a Bear's two-minute grow.

Brr Brr Patapim sits in a different league: 7.5 times a Bear's income for 2.5 times the grow. The Drop Rates page lists it at 1, one egg in 100. Weight each egg's income by its listed value and the average Forest egg is worth $40.93/s, of which the Patapim alone supplies 44%, Fox 20% and Bear 15%, while the Chicken, the most common egg in the zone, supplies under 1%. Our arithmetic, and the reason a Patapim in a nest is worth any detour.

Mutations can close that gap. The wiki's Mutations page gives Golden ×2.5, with a roll weight of 4 out of 100, and uses Giant ×3 in its worked example, so a Golden Giant Bear is $240/s × 7.5 = $1,800/s, level with a plain Brr Brr Patapim. Run your own combination through /steal-an-egg-mutation-calculator.

Lake's gate is 900 Speed on both the Biomes page and the Lake zone page, and Forest rewards are large against it. One Brr Brr Patapim (+1k) clears it alone. A Bear (+820) falls 80 short and needs any second egg. Nearly every pair works, and the table lists the cases worth checking. All of these figures ignore whatever Speed you start with and anything you gain on the treadmill, because the wiki gives no starting figure and these sums leave training out, so treat them as the worst case.

The one pair that is uncertain exposes a real conflict in the source. Dog's infobox (rev 2625) lists +460 Speed. The wiki's Forest zone page (rev 2732) prints the same pet at +480. Everything else on the zone page matches the infoboxes. This page uses the infobox, as the rest of the site does, but the difference decides a real case: Chicken plus Dog comes to 880 on the infobox, 20 short, and exactly 900 on the zone page. Neither page says whether exactly 900 is enough to enter. If those are your two hatches, take a third egg rather than test it.

There is a second reason to pass the gate with something spare. The Biomes page warns that bigger eggs slow you down and need even more than the listed figure, and that having enough Speed to enter does not necessarily mean you have enough to return safely with a large egg. Neither page says how much extra to allow, and the habit matters more with every later gate; see /steal-an-egg-speed.

No, but do not throw away a good egg on your way out. The case for leaving Steal an Egg Forest early is simple. Lake's Frog pays +2k Speed on a 15-second egg, which is 8,000 Speed per grow-minute against Chicken's 2,520, and one Frog is worth more Speed than any single Forest egg. Using the same weighted average as above, the average Lake egg is worth $163.89/s and +2,464 Speed against Forest's $40.93/s and +500.5. That Lake figure covers the seven pets on the Drop Rates page, which leaves out Leviathan and sums to 99.43 rather than 100, so we divided by the listed total.

The case for not rushing is in the overlap. Bear's $240/s beats Lake's Frog ($3/s), Duckling ($4/s), Catfish ($12/s) and Turtle ($60/s), and those four make up about 82% of the Lake total on the wiki's Drop Rates page. Even Burrowing Owl at $35/s out-earns three of them. So a Bear or a Patapim already in your pen keeps paying better than most of what you will pick up in your first trips to Lake. Only Trulimero Trulicina ($260/s), Swan ($320/s), Axolotl ($2.8K/s) and Leviathan ($220K/s) pay more than a Bear.

That income is not idle. The wiki's Pets page says income lets you buy higher-level pens, treadmills and trails, which in turn raise your movement speed and unlock later biomes. Prices are set out at /steal-an-egg-treadmills. Weapons are not a reason to stay either: the wiki's Weapons page (rev 2729, written by one editor) lists the Forest Bat at Power ×1 and Extra reach 0, the same as the Starter bat, against ×1.1 and 1.88 for the Lake Bat. It does not explain how a bat is unlocked.

Put together, the Steal an Egg Forest numbers give a plan you can follow without opening this page again. Each step comes from a figure above; the order is our judgement, not something the wiki prescribes.