The short version
The October 10 update was announced as "Mounts are coming. Ride your pets", and that's exactly what it delivered, plus a surprise nobody saw coming: a racing event that replaced Dr. Scramble's boss fights. In one evening, Steal an Egg got:
- Mounts. Any pet can become a rideable mount with a shooting star.
- The Star Handler, a new NPC who sells stars (five a week) and explains the free star drop event.
- Races every 30 minutes, with items, trophies and a shop.
- The Nitro mutation, a new 10% roll bought with trophies.
- Five racer pets, unlocked by winning races.
- A Halloween Part One teaser for the following week.
Here's how the night went and what each piece means for your account.
The launch admin abuse
As usual, the update arrived with an admin abuse. The developer known to the community as Ben switched on 4x admin treadmills, later 8x (we saw 279 million speed per step), plus 2x egg luck and 2x mutation boosts. Mini games followed:
- Red Light Green Light with a Gorilla King egg waiting in the Enchanted Forest. You had to carry it back to spawn before night. We made it, and ours hatched at about $3.5 billion.
- A T-Rex run for a silver Oni Tiger egg.
- Plenty of spawned secrets and eternals: Starry Foxes, Pegasuses, Celestial Sun Lions, Gorilla Kings and even Parasite-mutated Gorilla Kings, which shouldn't normally exist.
A useful lesson from that night: camp at the end of the map when a new day starts. Mini games don't teleport you back, and the best eggs spawn in the last biomes. And when a Red Light Green Light prize is done, you can go back and grab any eggs you ignored. Also, if the game says your egg inventory is full, sell or place eggs before the next spawn, or you won't be able to pick anything up.
One more thing worth knowing: divines spawned during admin events don't appear for everyone. Two of us in the same event got different eggs.
The cutscene and the race
At the end of the countdown, a cutscene showed Ben and Brocodile racing on their pets. Then the whole server was dropped onto a racetrack. Everyone raced on an Ostrich, items flew everywhere, and the winners got a rainbow Ostrich pet. Our full breakdown of the event, items, trophies and shop is in the racing guide.
After everyone finished, a second cutscene showed Ben and Brocodile fighting over the trophy, the sky turning red and a haunted castle with a banshee: the teaser for Halloween Part One, scheduled for the following week.
Mounts and shooting stars
The headline feature took a little while to understand. You need a shooting star to turn a pet into a mount. Stars fall for free during a rare night-time star drop, or you buy them from the Star Handler for roughly 240 to 400 Robux each, five per week, resetting on Saturdays. Feed the star to a pet in your pen and it becomes a mount, permanently.
Mounts don't make you faster in any test we ran, but they do make you immune to traps while you carry an egg, which is a real advantage in busy servers. All the details are in our mounts guide.
Nitro: another 10% mutation
The race shop added Nitro, a mutation bought with trophies. Like Scrambled, each use is roughly a 10% roll on a placed egg, and it stacks with Scrambled and Enchanted. The community reaction was mixed: a lot of players, us included, prefer the guaranteed Enchanted Essence to another gamble. Still, a three-mutation egg is how pets reach the hundreds of billions: one admin-abuse egg worth $22 billion before mutations hatched at $283 billion per second with Scrambled, Enchanted and Nitro.
What left the game
- Dr. Scramble's shop closed with the update. Scrambled potions you already own still work; the lab building stayed.
- Boss Mastery ended with the lab week, so the Pink Dragon Experiment is no longer earnable.
- Rift Shards for the Fractured mutation are no longer obtainable either.
If you were sitting on a stack of Scrambled potions, now is the time to use them on your heaviest eggs. Our mutation strategy guide explains which eggs deserve them.
Two corrections we made after this update
New footage around the update also changed two things we had written:
- The Spirit World Guardian is a two-player ritual. Each player places one Royal Sky Whale and one Celestial Sun Lion in the Enchanted Tree, and both get a Guardian egg. You can't do it alone with two of each. The Guardian page is updated.
- The Fuse Machine rewards big inputs. Three Pegasuses over 500,000 kg each fused into a 4.7 million kg egg worth $18 billion per second. Small inputs mostly give small outputs. The fusion guide is updated.
Our verdict
This was a "small" update by the developers' own standards, but it changed how the game feels. Races give new and returning players something fun to do every half hour that doesn't depend on speed, and mounts finally let you show off the divine you spent a week hunting. The paid stars are the weak point, though the weekly limit keeps it from turning pay-to-win.
The developers have said the next two or three updates will be their biggest yet, starting with Halloween. We'll recap each one here on the blog.