What each Form means

A Form is how far a pet has been pushed. Basic, Golden, Rainbow, Astral, Nova. Most pets hatch Basic, but not all of them: an egg can hand you a Golden, a Rainbow or an Astral outright, on its own roll, at the rates on the hatching page.

The species never changes when a Form does. A Golden Nutfern is still a Nutfern. What changes is how hard it mines, what it is worth, and how much work went into it.

One pet, many layers

Species

Nutfern: World 1, Common

Form ladder

Normal → Golden → Rainbow → Astral → Nova

Size tier

Base (×1), Big (×2), Giant (×4), Titan (×8)

Shiny

Any form: 0.5% (Shiny)

Apex

Apex is the top tier of the premium eggs, not a form of this species.

Form is one layer of six

A pet is a stack of separate answers, and Form is only one of them. The species says which creature it is. The rarity says how hard it was to find. The Form says how much work is in it. Shiny is a coat on top of that. Size says how big it came out. A Zodiac sign rides along as a name that contract boards can ask for.

Every one of those layers is decided by its own roll, so a Titan Shiny Golden Common is a perfectly ordinary sentence in this game. The pet anatomy page walks one creature through all of them.

What each Form multiplies

A Form multiplies two different things: the mining power the pet contributes, and the weight it carries on your net worth. The two are not the same number, and the gap widens sharply at the top.

Which Forms you roll and which you build

Golden, Rainbow and Astral come both ways. An egg can roll them, and the Evolution Hub can build them out of copies of a pet you already own. Nova only ever comes from the machine.

The order is enforced by the server, not just hidden in the menu. A Rainbow only ever comes from Goldens, an Astral only from Rainbows, a Nova only from Astrals. How likely a fusion is to succeed depends only on how many copies you load, and that ladder lives on the crafting page.

Nova breaks the pattern

Every other machine reaches a guarantee at six copies. The Nova Machine never does. It always takes exactly 6 Astral pets, it starts at 50%, and the Nova Forge nodes in the Supernova tree push it no further than 80%.

So a Nova fusion can fail on a full load, and a failed Nova gives nothing back. The six Astral pets are simply gone.

What carries up the ladder and what does not

Shiny carries. Fuse a Shiny pet and the result is Shiny too, on every rung, with no roll. If your source is not Shiny, the crafted pet has no shine chance at all unless you own the Shiny Pet Craft research.

Size does not carry. A crafted pet rolls its own size from scratch, so feeding a Giant copy into a machine does not hand that size up. The game asks you to confirm before it eats a sized copy, because that really is the end of it.