Your first year with the Divine Dragon

The weekly loop, in order

Each week gives you a food choice and an action choice. Food decides which stats grow; the action decides what you gain besides stats — money, a skill inspiration, items, or friendship with a villager. Rest is not a free choice: it appears when stamina is too low to do anything else and it consumes the whole week.

That is the whole stamina economy: a five-day week costs 15 to 25 points, a rest recovers far more than a week's spending, and shopping is free. A run that rests every third week is not being cautious, it is losing a third of its feeding opportunities — because resting also means not earning.

Pick a direction in the first month, and mean it

The six stats are not interchangeable: STR feeds physical skills, INT feeds magic, AGI feeds turn order and the Wing tree, and the other three decide how long you survive. Skills scale off specific stats, so a dragon fed evenly is a dragon with no skill that hits properly.

Decide early which of three shapes the run is: physical (Strength, some Agility), magical (Intelligence, some Resilience), or defensive (HP, Vitality, Resilience, with damage coming later). Then buy meals in that family every single week. The category decides the stat; the meal table lists what each one gives.

Spend the meal tiers deliberately

Meals cost 3,000, 6,600, 14,600 G for one, two and three stars. The instinct is to buy the biggest meal you can afford each week. The better rule is the opposite: buy the cheapest meal in the right category you can find almost every week, and save the second tier for when a stat has fallen behind — several two-star meals scale their bonus off exactly that.

You can always borrow from Calico at Happy Cat Sith Loans. You should almost never do it twice in a row. Debt that stays open is the Use Responsibly ending, and it is the only ending that arrives without a boss fight.

The four fights that structure the year

1. June, Week 4 — Cham, Melty or Thunder. The first calamity. Poison punishes low HP; Melty punishes skill spam with cooldown pressure. If you have been feeding one stat and ignoring survivability, this is where it shows.
2. September, Week 4 — Labryn or Noir. More dangerous, and it carries a second deadline: the aura check fires immediately afterwards, in October Week 1. Whatever you have been feeding and however you have been treating Coo, it is settled here.
3. December, Week 4 — Moon, the slumbering calamity. The difficulty wall. Runs that coasted through autumn with cheap meals and no skills arrive here under-levelled.
4. Year 2, March, Week 4 (week 48) — Ouroboros, the final fight, and the trigger for the clear ending. Finish debt-free and the Responsible Adult achievement lands with it.

Three habits that decide the run

• Watch the personality bar without letting it run the run. It never locks. A Wild Coo hits harder and takes more; a Rule Coo runs buffs longer and can equip a fifth skill. Neither is wrong — see the personality guide.
• Feed the stat your skills use. Feeding Strength into a Wing build wastes every meal of the year.
• Do not let debt roll. One loan to reach a two-star meal that fixes a weakness is fine. Two loans is a pattern, and the pattern has an ending named after it.

What to expect from the first clear

The first run rarely produces the aura you were hoping for. That is normal and cheap to correct — a run takes about an hour, the aura is decided by two dials you now know, and the endings branch from there. The most common outcome is Adored at 62.3%, which is what happens when nobody steers. The aura planner tells you which of the six a feeding pattern is heading for before you commit 48 weeks to it.