Pandarine
Passing the torch
For most of development the tenth stage led nowhere. You raised a companion for weeks, it reached Elder, and nothing happened. The loop kept running with no reason left to run it.
What retirement changes
Elder now unlocks Pass the torch: the companion joins the Album as an ancestor and you raise the next generation. Every generation slows the decay of every meter by 5%, down to −30%, and hands on 50 coins, one star and the whole collection.
A lineage is not a prestige counter, then. It genuinely takes less holding together: six generations in, the daily upkeep that fills the opening hours has receded by nearly a third.
- Retiring stays a choice — nothing forces it.
- A companion that died never becomes an ancestor.
- The Album keeps count of the items tried (of about 250), the Goldens, the mini-games beaten, the discovery per category, and the records.
A bonus you can earn by neglecting your companion is not a reward. It is an instruction.
Why an album at all
The catalogue passed 250 items long before there was any way to see what you had actually tried: everything unlocked went back to being a line in a menu. The Album gives that invisible progress somewhere to go, and it is the one screen that outlives the companion it came from.