Greetings fellow ranchers.

I bought monster rancher back in 1997 as a teenager and when I headed off to college I just boxed all my playstation stuff and left it in storage for over a decade. Recently I have been going through my unit and found my old monster rancher (original) game and started poking about with it to see what I had made. Needless to say I got addicted again.

I have been trolling the site for a little while now and I have yet to find a decisive list of how to combine two monsters to have all the same combat moves (you call them tech?) and how to keep their stat lines (skills?) all high. I thought it was all completely random as when I had combined my old S Grade monsters; Ton (a Gali/Monol of 6.8 years) and Malifex (a Dragon of 5.5 years ) and I got Shimmergloom, a Black Dragon (Dragon/Monol) that had all the stats very low, all under 160 but it had seven combat moves in his repertoire.

Then I combined two CD generated Gala’s (Gali/Monol) one with literally an intelligence score of only like 84 points better after a little bit of training, (207 and 301 int) and the resulting Pure Gali had an intelligence of 379! To boot he had an extra fighting move that neither of the previous two had. Funny thing about this is I did this in the first week of October and then saved to try it a year later, same week, same month, to see if I could get a higher intelligence output. According to some of your findings certain weeks will create better gains when combined on so I thought that perhaps the first week of October might be one of these magical months. It yielded the opposite results.
All the stats went down! Further more when I tried the combination in reverse, it yielded the same worthless monster. Lower stats then both of the monsters prior to combining.

I was under the impression prior to finding this site that combining two monsters no matter how high their stats were always resulted in the greater(primary) monster type mix with generic low stats. (EX. Gali/Monol with another Gali/Monol would yield a Gali with generic low stats and only the basic 3 of 4 combat moves). As since the game gives you the illusion that a percentage table is actually used. I soon found out that this was not the case, as some times the combine yielded a Menho (Golem/Gali) and other times a Messiah (Monol/Gali) when on different weeks. The same combine on the same week would always yield the same result, no matter how rare that result was. One time the stats were affected and another they were actually worse than average. And then the combat moves, some were different, some were the same, some had way more. Are these processes completely random? Is there a real pattern to follow? I see that you have labeled certain weeks which yield certain combines, and that sometimes these combines based on how and when the monsters are combined will yield monsters of a certain type with a lot of combat moves.

What about skills?
Is it possible to combine two dragons of four or so years with Power, Intelligence, and Skill all 500+ for example to get a new Dragon with more combat moves than base and all high base skills in those three skills that were worked up in the previous two dragons? If this is possible is there a way to do it reliably? So far everything I do seems to be potluck. The only thing I can rely on is the moves. It seems that if the monster has a lot of moves and he gets combined at almost any age the resulting monster will have more combat moves than otherwise.

Any advice? A link to a previously posted topic would be just as helpful, as currently I can only check these posts at work and have limited internet time because of it. It is a hundred percent likely that this has been covered and I have overlooked it.

Thanks,
Butch.

I'm going to move this post to the MR1 section, so it will have greater visibility.