Kamaeru: A Frog Refuge - 10 Beginner's Tips

Kamaeru: A Frog Refuge is a precious indie farming sim with a far larger ecological conscience, asking you to balance the biodiversity and carbon footprint of a few different biomes as you built up the titular Refuge with your childhood best friend, Axel.

Kamaeru: A Frog Refuge Review - Hop Into This Blissfully Biodiverse Cozy Game

Kamaeru: A Frog Refuge is like Stardew Valley meets Animal Crossing meets Frog Fractions. Yes, it sounds like an odd combo, but I swear it works.

You’ll still be doing plenty of the usual farming sim things – growing plants, processing them into goods you can sell, the like – but along the way, you’ll photograph and befriend about 500 different rainbow frogs of a variety of species. If you’re trying to make your best leap forward into this adorable game, we’ve got you covered.

Different Markings Around Frogs Mean Different Things

When you begin playing Kamaeru: A Frog Refuge, it’s so easy to get overwhelmed by all the cute new friends popping up here, there, and everywhere around you! It’s not long into the game until you’re introduced to the Frogedex, Cleo’s photo album and log of all the frogs she has or will see.

But as you collect more and more frogs, you’ll start seeing familiar froggy faces before too long. As you befriend frogs by feeding them bugs, they’ll appear with pink hearts around them so you can see you’ve already befriended them. Conversely, if there’s a frog that appears that you haven’t befriended or photographed, it’ll have thin black lines around its head to alert you to the new pal.

Feed A Frog Right Away If You Have The Right Bugs

You befriend frogs by feeding them four bugs in total in Kamaeru: A Frog Refuge, with each species of frog asking for different bugs in different quantities before you can call them your friend. If you interact with the frog when you see it in the overworld, you’ll have the option to go to the “food” tab on the top of your notebook.

Here, you’ll see what kind of bugs that frog would like to eat, and the bar at the bottom gives you the option to feed all four bugs to the frog as soon as you can. If you have all four, one button takes care of the process for you. That said, if you don’t have all the bugs, you can choose to either give the frog what you do have and hope it hops back later, or photograph frogs you can’t feed yet to remember you’re in the process of befriending them.

Rarer Frogs Require More Effort To Get Them To Spawn

You’ll continuously make efforts to improve the biomes through the addition of ponds and plants, as well as the Refuge itself with new furniture and additional space. Be diligent about adding new things often, and the rarer bugs and frogs don’t begin spawning until you’ve spruced up the place a bit.

Use the icons in the top right corner of the Refuge shop when buying Frog Furniture to see what that piece of furniture impacts about the space. Some of the nicer, more expensive furniture is the key to attracting rarer species.

If you place bugs the rarer frogs like onto Frog Furniture placed at the Refuge, you have a much higher chance of those frogs spawning onto that piece of furniture than normal.

Buy New Blueprints ASAP

As you earn more reputation points (the green heart icon), you’ll level up the Refuge and, as a perk, unlock access to new blueprints in your different biomes. What you have available when you first enter a new biome is fairly limited by your current level, but continue improving the new area with what you have and check the shop as you level up to buy new blueprints as soon as they become available.

Kamaeru: A Frog Refuge PAX East Preview - Save The Ecosystem, Save The Frogs

The completionist in me is absolutely going to fill my Frog Journal.

You can then use them to continue building up the area, attracting new frogs and bugs, growing your biodiversity score, and more. Look for them in the "Tech" tab at the shelter in the biomes.

New items function the same as older ones - ponds are different shapes and plants are sold in easy-to-place multiples - but they add more customization options for your biome as you continue to grow, so if style and variety is your game, then buy new upgrades and place them to spice things up.

Keep Your Helpers Busy Catching Bugs

As your Refuge grows in scale, you’ll attract the attention of plenty of helping hands, capable of assisting in the maintenance and growth of the Refuge with their unique skills. Once their buildings are installed and they’re made their entrance, though, there’s more to do than just man the buildings.

By clicking on the shed in the biomes where you buy your blueprints and check your bioscore, your last tab at the top says “Helpers.” Here, for a small fee, you can ask your helpers in each biome to hunt one of two types of bugs.

Each helper has two types of bugs they can find, and though each helper has a different pay rate (with the one that finds rarer bugs costing more), you can choose either type of bug that helper can find for the flat fee of their usual pay. You’ll find plenty of bugs spawning in the ponds across your biomes naturally, but enlisting the assistance of your helpers is a surefire way to keep your bug jars stocked.

When they're finished collecting, you'll see a sign with a bug net outside the shed to let you know.

Watch Your Biomes' Scores Closely

When you first begin decorating the wetland biome at the start of Kamaeru: A Frog Refuge, it’s easy to lean into the plan of trying to hurry along and expand the Refuge. After all, those updates aren’t free, and the more plants you buy, the more you can turn those plants into, the more you can sell to buy more plants and furniture.

But don’t get too ahead of yourself – or the depleted biome. The goal of the game is making sure the biome is balanced, and you do that with biodiversity. For each one of any type of plant or pond you place, place one of each of the others when you can afford to. The closer to 100 your bioscore is, the better things are for the environment and your frog friends.

Any plants you place must be in a tile adjacent to water or they won't grow, so watch for the icon with the crossed-out water droplet above plants after placing them.

Process Ingredients In Larger Quantities To Save Time

As charming as Kamaeru: A Frog Refuge is, the minigames when processing your goods from the different biomes can be a bit repetitive. It’s an awesome touch that you can earn extra portions of whatever you’re refining, but the minigame is the same no matter how many times you play it.

Kamaeru: A Frog Refuge Could Be My Comfort Cosy Game Of 2024

I'm so ready to hop right into Kamaeru: A Frog Refuge.

That said, refine products into sellable goods in batches to reduce time spent on them. When the sun sets, harvest all your goods with the click of a button and process them all in one go at the end of the day. You can then head back to the Refuge and sell the items in bulk as well, bringing in chunks of money all at once – great for tomorrow’s decorating!

But speaking of tomorrow...

You Don't Have To End The Day When Night Falls

As soon as it’s 21:00 on the clock (9PM, on the 24-hour clock), the sun will have set on the biomes you’re restoring and the cute little froggies within. When this happens every night, you’ll see a button at the top of the screen with a grayed out bed icon, and you can click it to head to sleep for the night to pass time until the following morning. The light will have returned and plants will be ready for harvest again.

That said, if you’d rather, you can stay up at night to keep finding new frogs and catching bugs. The biomes and the Refuge don’t quiet down for the night just because Cleo is in bed! Just because you can go to bed never means you have to, if you’d rather stay up with your camera.

Play The Breeding Game If You're Struggling To Catch Rare Frogs

Not only do the rare frogs not spawn until you’ve begun improving each biome, but even once they do appear on screen, they’ll be asking for some of the rarer bugs from each biome as well. Especially in the earliest days of the game, it’s frustrating but not uncommon to watch a new frog with a sweet pattern fade away off the screen.

That said, you can visit the breeder, Anabelle, to try breeding new frogs. You’ll choose two frogs (with rarer species costing more to breed) and then play tic-tac-toe against nature (the computer) to decide the species and two colors of the frog.

If you’re trying to breed a rarer frog and only have one of them befriended, you can breed the rare frog with another species of frog that has the coloration you’d like and try your best to get the breed you want. If you play for a frog’s species before its color, you stand a better chance at getting the species you need.

Just make sure you also feed the frogs you've bred, since they're not your friends until you feed them - they're simply logged to the Frogedex.

Expand Your Biomes, Then Expand The Refuge

When you begin playing Kamaeru: A Frog Refuge, the titular refuge isn’t much to behold: Axel has a small plot of land, some very basic Frog Furniture for sale at the shop, and that’s about it. You can buy adjacent plots of land from the town to expand the area and develop more area to place Frog Furniture for your friends, but it doesn’t come cheap.

As you begin to make money in the game, reinvest what you’re earning back into the biomes to keep boosting your bioscores. Since each piece of water or plant life costs money to place but produces additional raw goods that you can then process and sell, it’s better to expand the biomes first.

Though it’s nice to have more space, and the money to do so will come eventually, it’s most effective to keep the Refuge small at first until you’ve built up the current biome. Once you’re comfortable with your bioscore and earnings, then it’s time to start saving to expand the Refuge (and for more furniture to put in the new space!).

8 Best Games To Play When You're Burnt Out

Don't have the energy to pour hundreds of hours into gaming? Check out these excellent short games.