I love Flight Rising. There also used to be a huge FR:TBT market on here. At first glance FR looks like a breeding game, and it is, but that's not the only way to play it. I don't. You'll have the most success playing with the Coliseum. It's a very simple battle system and there's really only a couple of builds for stats that help you, your dragon is either a physical or magical attacker. But defense really doesn't matter, like, at all. And you can always reset your stats and do things differently.
Once you have one fully leveled dragon you can start exalting. This is where the most treasure lies. You have your Level 25 dragon, you add two Level 1 dragons to your team and you go into the Mire level (there's a specific Mire stat build that allows you to do this with one dragon). You fight a couple of fights to level up the low dragons. Usually going to Level 7 with them is the most common strategy because once you exalt them (= send them to their deity to serve them aka "erasing" them from the game) you get over 10,000 treasure for them. At the end of the week, the flight that exalted the most dragon wins the Dominance and all it does is basically give you discounts for the shop and discounts to expand your lair with more slots for more dragons.
As I already mentioned a lot of people don't do the breeding thing. There's such a thing as First Generation dragons. They don't have parents and they don't have offspring (unless you breed them). They're basically blank slates and seen as high value because of their clean lineage box. The first two dragons you get for signing up are First Generation as they don't come from another dragon, but you're most likely to breed them together as the game kinda expects you to.
If someone is not a breeder, they're most likely a First Gen player. That means collecting First Generation dragon and making them pretty without them being breeding successes.
Every dragon has a color and three different genes (primary = body, secondary = wings, tertiary = extras, if your gene is basic that means it's just a solid color and for the tert color that means you don't see that color at all). When you breed two dragons, they pass down colors and genes. They can have either or gene from their parents and the colors are picked between the spectrum of the two parents. If you have a black/black/black mother and father, the offspring will always be black/black/black. Now if you have a black/black/black mother and a beige/beige/beige father, those colors are pretty much on two different ends of the spectrum and that means the colors can be anything between those two colors. So the offspring can be red/blue/yellow. It could also be black/black/black! Or black/beige/yellow. Oh, and there's also different breeds. When you signed up you could pick between 4 breeds. They are common breeds. There are also rare breeds like the Wildclaw. They can't be born normally, there's a Wildclaw scroll that shows up maybe once a year in the store and costs 2000 Gems, so in theory they are pretty rare. But if you breed two Wildclaws the offspring will always be a Wildclaw, so you can easily find them in the Auction House being sold by other people if you find them pretty and just want a pretty dragon. But if you breed a common dragon type like, say, Fae with a Wildclaw, I think the offspring has like a 75% chance of being a Fae and a 25% chance of being a Wildclaw. I'm not too sure about the numbers, but you're always more likely to get the more common breed. Same with genes. As I've hinted, there's a Basic gene which basically is no gene at all. Dragons start off with the Basic gene which means it has just the color. You can have swirls, you can have stripes, you can have a lot of different patterns. With the tertiary genes you can add fireflies, a colorful belly, your tertiary color can stain the entire dragon so it can lighten or darken the other colors. There's also a differentiation between regular dragons and ancient dragons. You can only breed regular dragons with regular dragons and for ancient dragons they can only breed with the same species, not even all other ancient dragons. Ancient dragons also have their seperate genes, but some of them are also like regular genes. So there's like Tertiary Gene: Stained and Tertiary Gene: Stained (Aether) for one specific ancient breed.
Aside from breeding, there are also eggs that also give you a dragon. If you hatch an egg (item), you will instantly get a First Generation dragon. Non-breeders love to hatch dragons via the item and try to make them as pretty as possible. If you have an Arcane Egg it will hatch an Arcane dragon which means it will have Arcane eyes which happen to be pink. Some breeds also have their own eggs, like Nocturne and Bogsneak. If you hatch them, their "flight" (=clan) will be randomized, so their eye color will be random basically. As they are First Generation which are always randomized, if you have one that has the same color three times like Blue/Blue/Blue they are incredibly rare and incredibly valuable. A pretty color can make you instantly richer than 99% of players. There is also an item that randomizes the color of a dragon. It's basically like hatching an egg (item) without creating a new dragon. People usually buy it for their "progens" which are the first two dragons the site gives you. Progenitors.
Once you have a dragon with pretty colors you like, you either have to change their genes or if they were already bred properly as well all that's left to do if buy clothes for them. Well you don't have to do that, but there's certainely apparel that can enhance their look. There's also "skins" and "accents". A skin is basically how it sounds like, it will change most of the dragon's appearance and is worn like a piece of clothing, though you can only wear one. Accents are the same, though they only cover a small portion of the dragon. They are most commonly released with festivals that celebrate each individual flight. They happen within the last week of a month. There are 11 clans aka flights and since there are 12 months we also get the Night of the Nocturne in December. During that time Nocturne eggs drop plenty and due to hatching eggs will always be above 200 gems at the very least it's definitely the most profitable time of the year. You can also gamble and hatch the eggs yourself hoping for a X/X/X match, but they are incredibly rare. As of my post, there are 396 first gen dragons that have the same color thrice. Out of 9.200.000 dragons and 1.600.000 first gen dragons. They are incredibly rare. But your chance of hatching one of them are the same as everybody else's.
So, uh, I hope this sounds interesting to you? If not, sorry for the long post.
There's also Subeta which is basically a knockoff Neopets. It was more fun when it was still active but it still exists I guess? It's certainely something to do.
