Animal Jam – Beginner’s Guide

This guide is all about getting started in Animal Jam – Play Wild! It will cover everything you need to know for starting the game. Including how to get started, clothing items, decorating your den, earning gems, and more!

Signing Up and Entering the Game

All credit goes to Asteralium!

When you first open up Play Wild, you’ll need to make a new account. You can use an account from animaljam.com if you already have one if you like. This will transfer over your username. Click the button on screen, and then choose an animal.

Personally, I’d recommend the bunny or the wolf. The monkey is neat, but items don’t fit as well on it as other animals. After this, you’ll need to pick a name for the animal. This doesn’t matter at all, so I just recommend pushing random until you get something funny.

Next up is going through the tutorial. If you’re a first time player I’d recommend going through it because it’s not that long. I won’t be explaining what this tutorial tells you, so if you skip it and don’t know what to do it’s your fault.

After you leave the tutorial area you’ll be given a prompt of what you want to do next. All of these are soild options, but we will be going to our den so we can mess around with buttons and settings. Peck the bunny will then tell you what a den is (Fun fact: It’s your house) and you’ll be plopped into the land of Jamaa with no more guideance on what to do.

At this point, I’d recommend going and creating an account. The simplest way to do this is to click up in the top left on either of the greyed out buttons, and then make the account. The game will want to know your gender (which doesn’t have an other option and that bugs me), birthday, and email, and you’ll get to choose a username and password. It’s standard signup affair.

Game Settings

Normal Settings

You may have already figured this out by now, but Play Wild’s default settings aren’t the best. That why we’re going to be changing them immediately. You can open the settings menu by clicking the gear in the top right corner.

Here are a few personal recommendations:

• Adjust music and effects accordingly. Hearing loss is a big issue in the gaming community and I don’t want you to loose it to the sounds of Coral Canyons.
• Turn off all of the request/invite settings. These pop-ups are annoying to me, and I just turn them on when I want them to show up.
• I keep my den unlocked so people can visit and see all the work I’ve put into it. Locking it can be useful if you don’t want strangers in your house though.
• Please, please please please, change the settings so that you see usernames and not the animal names. People change animals all the time and usernames don’t change. Turn this on for nametags and chat bubbles so you can see what’s going on.
• I like windowed mode, so I’m using that, and 1600×900 resolution. This is really only so I can get screenshots though.

Manage Account Settings

For the sake of getting this guide out quicker, I’m going to be skipping this. There’s many more settings and custom options you can acess through these partenal controls. I’ll be adding a section about it at a later date.

Codes

This is also the place where you can enter codes. For more about that, and how to get a bunch of free prizes, see my other guide specifically about them.

Changing How Your Animal Looks

Now that we’re in the game, know how to move, and maybe have a slight idea as to what’s happening, it’s time to change how our animal looks. The tutorial already went over some of this though. To put items on your animal, you click on the items in your inventory. You can also go shopping for new clothing items, which is the menu that you would’ve been brought to eariler if you didn’t go to your den.

There’s also an option to change animals, sort your items, search for items, and recycle items. There’s nothing here (besides recycling items) that will make some sort of permanent change. So I incourage you to explore and push all the buttons.

There’s usually new items coming into stores every day, so I recommend coming on and always checking to see what’s new. Items also go on clearance, and leave stores. There will be a warning that lasts a few days on each item that’s leaving, so make sure to stock up if you like the item! Trading other players for certain colors later on is a pain.

Decorating Your Den

You can open the den editing menu by clicking the button with the book on the table. The buttom with the houses and arrows lets you switch to different kinds of dens. The globe, as you’ve already probably figured out, takes you to different lands. You can click items into the den just like how you put on clothing items. Move them around by dragging them around with the mouse, as well as rotate them. It’s all very similar to the clothing menu, because it can sort item by type, search for items, buy new items, and recycle items.

Earning Gems

In order to fuel your den decorating and fashion design hunger, you’re going to need gems. How do you do that? Well, there’s many ways!

Daily Treasure Hunt

For every unique animal that you own, you’ll be able to do a daily treasure hunt. You’re given 5 keys to unlock boxes, and you’ll end up gaining alot of gems. You can also win exclusive items through the hunts. To get to this menu, click on the map in the activity bar at the top of the screen.

Mini Games

There’s good variety of mini games that you can play in Play Wild! Most of these games will award you gems depending on how you do. It can sometimes be a little slow, but if you find one you really like, its a good way to rake in the dough. If you have a buddy that needs gems, you can partner up and play some buddy games, which have good payouts as well.

Recycling Items

If you have any old items you don’t use anymore, you can recycle them to get gems. However, I don’t recommend doing this, because theres a chance you might need that item someday, or it’ll become rare.

Leveling Up

You can do tasks around Jamaa to level up, and gems are some of the rewards you’ll receive. It’s a bit too complex to go over in this guide though. Be on the look out for a special guide all about levels.

Other Activities

Parties and Animal Bases

By clicking on the party icon in the activites bar, you can open up the schedule for all the parties happening in the game for a few hours in advance. These parties usually are pretty interesting to see because of their unique room designs, and exclusive items.

For some of the older animals in Play Wild, they will have special secret bases that only they can enter. You can see all of these on the world map. These bases also sell exclusive items themed to each animal, as well as arcade machines.

Buddies and Jam-a-grams

Since this is a multiplayer, social game, there’s a friends list in the form of buddies. Buddies is a list of players you’ve sent requests to, and you can see when they are online. There’s also a mail system called Jam-a-grams. These features are pretty self explainatory.

Trading

A really large portion of the Play Wild community likes to trade their items. Every player has a trade list on their player card. You can offer up some of your items for theirs and hope they accept! If you want to add items to your trade list, the button for it is near the bottom middle, the one with two arrows.

Some items are very rare and sought after.

Explore

There are so many interesting little secrets to find around the game, and I really encourage you to go out there, and run around for a while and try and find every little thing you can. There’s shops that don’t show up on maps or in menus, hidden factoids about animals, and just little silly visual things.

Animal Jam Archives

This guide is part of a series the Animal Jam Archives is making to help new jammers in AJ – Play Wild! You can visit our website by clicking here, which has lots of Animal Jam art and assets for you to use when working on editing projects.