How to play "Shake Paws"!

"Shake Paws" is a visiting game. The first thing you need to know is that you cannot get lost visiting, because the "My Art" button in the menu will always take you back to your own page, and the "Home" icon in the toolbar will also take you there. Everywhere you go, there is at least one of these ways to get home!

Read on to see how "Shake Paws" can help you:

• Meet other users
• Get lots of free currency
• All with the least clicks possible and no repeat visits!

This is what the top of your own page should look like, except of course it will have your name and icon on it instead of David Weston's. There are many ways to visit another user. The first one is to click one of the "Visitor list" icons just below the toolbar. If you are just beginning the game you may see "User" rather than the time since a visit. In that case, the game is suggesting other users to visit before you have had any visitors. So, you always have someone to visit, even if no-one has visited you yet!

For this example, I will click on Splat's icon.

On Splat's Page (or any other user's page) you will see some icons to the right of their main picture. If you are using a desktop or laptop computer, hover the icons to see a message telling you what the icon does. In the mobile version (which handles phones and tablets) you will have to click a tiny "+" sign to see the message. Either way, the "paw" icon enables you to shake paws with the other player's greeter pet. Just click it!

When you click the icon, you get to see the interaction. Splat's pet is a Leopard Gecko and mine is a Silver Fox. Somehow they have shaken paws without the fox eating the gecko! Each of them receives 1 silver mole. Silver moles are a currency used to buy many things in the Department Store and the Food Shop; more about those later. Basically, you make a click and you get free currency!

You can only shake paws with the same pet once per day, so now we need to find another pet to shake paws with!

Who to visit next? You could click one of Splat's visitor list, but let's try another way. If you hover (desktop) or click the "+" (mobiles) on the icon showing two penguins, the advice tells you "Meet our friends". Click the button to see a selection!

On clicking the "Meet our friends" icon, you will see up to eight different pet icons. Each of these leads to the page of another user. You can now click your way to a PnF mountain of silver (moles!)

In an ideal world, you would be able to visit all the users you want to meet once per day, without keeping lists. You can! To do so, click the "Visit" link in the menu. It will give you several different ways to do so!

On the "Visit" page, you can choose from six different ways to visit pets quickly and simply. Each is reprented here by a button. NPCs; what are they? Just click the "NPCs" button to find out!

NPCs are "non-player characters". They do not belong to any user and they play special roles in the game. They also give special rewards for paw shaking! Let's visit some. To do so, just click the troll's face by the text "Click to visit the NPCs!"

A list of icons now appears in the toolbar! You can only see 10 of them at once, so in this case, when there are 18 icons in total, the toolbar tells you there are also 8 more as yet unseen. To visit a pet, just click one of the icons! You can click any of them, but I will start with the first: a turtle called "Sam".

Clicking takes you to Sam's page. You will now see that 17 icons remain, and Sam's picture has been removed from the list. You are on his page and the game knows it, so it will not suggest that you go back again today. Click the "paw" icon to shake paws with Sam.

Each of the NPCs will give you some Jigsaw Pieces. These can be used to win items from the Mystery Boxes. Currently we have 17 NPCs, so shaking paws with each of them can earn you a lot of jigsaw pieces per day! You can often learn things about the game by visiting their pages, too. You do not have to finish any list of icons in the toolbar. You can get rid of them at any time by clicking the little "CLOSE" button under the troll icon. Let's do that.

When you click the "CLOSE" icon, the toolbar icons disappear. If you do so by accident, just go back to the "Visit" page and load the toolbar icons again; the game remembers which pets you have visited and only shows you the ones you have not shaken paws with today! If you hover (or click if you are using a mobile device) the tiny golden coin in the toolbar, you can see all the currency you have been earning!

What now? If you want to go back to your own page, just click the "My Pets" button in the menu. But how about we visit some real users first? To do so, click the "Visit" button again. This time, let's click "Zoo".

At the time of visiting, there are 824 pets in the Zoo! To put all of them in the toolbar, just click one of the icons on the left! Remember, you do not have to visit all of them, and you can find your way home with the "My Pets" menu button. For 1 golden mole you can use the robot icons to shake paws with 30 users at once! For the moment let's just play manually using the buttons on the left. But wait a minute, what order should you pick?

Click "Most active users first!" for the best chance that those you visit will visit you back. These are the people who play the game a lot. When they visit and shake your greeter pet's paw, you will get a silver mole for doing nothing!

If you want to visit the newest users, to get to know them or see if your friends have joined the game, click "Newest adopters first!".

You also have the option to visit the earliest adopters first.

In each case, clicking the icon loads the toolbar and everything works the same way it did with the NPCs, except you get silver moles instead of jigsaw pieces. Work hard and you are on the way to hundreds of silver moles in one day, with no repeat visits!

The "Visit" tab has other options: "Contacts" (your in-game friends), "Guest Book" (those who you have visited; this retains details for a week), "Check Ins" (those you have already visited) and "Directory", which is an advanced method of getting more control over who you see and how.

One more thing. If you have more than one pet, you can choose which of them is your "Greeter" and which is your "Visitor". To choose, click the "My Pets" button in the toolbar. Here is how it looks with a huge number of pets - you can adopt over 200 at the time of writing! To take a look at a pet's details, just click it. Let's select the Emperor Penguin Chick.

His name is Wobble! To make him my visitor pet, I only need to click the 'Visitor' button above his bio.

Now he is shown as the visitor, and whenever you visit another user, he will do the paw shaking!

QUESTS!

Every few months we have a quest. All you have to do is shake paws as usual and you will get special rewards! There are three results you can get when shaking paws in a quest; an 'episode' win, a 'find', and the everyday shake of paws.

Here is an episode win: your pet has a place in a story unique to it, in which it takes part in the narrative.

If you scroll down from the picture and story text, you will see the prize you have won!

This is a 'find' result; there is no episode or story, but your pet finds an item for you to keep, which is in keeping with the story.

Otherwise you will see the quest banner, but otherwise things carry on as normal.