Update 3.80 Category: general information
Update 3.80
Wait, so they are alive?

Overview

  • 2025 brought two surprises to an aging crab game.
  • First they added not three but SIX new queens after Blood Guardian.
  • Then on April 3 of 2025, update 3.80 made some very significant changes to the Gene Tree.
  • As of this writing we are still incorporating them into the Library and various worksheets, so be patient.
  • School Students read this article after you are done here.

Genes Removed

  • Idle Gold was removed.
  • Chrono Butterfly was removed. No more long butterfly leeches.
  • Frenzy was removed. Say hello to the traffic jams again.
  • Treasure Butterfly (Flitter) was removed. Newbies everywhere can cry with me.
  • Butterfly Shockwave was removed. No great Loss.

Genes Changed

  • Amethyst Strand has had its effect changed.
  • Symbiotic Strand was increased from 2 genes to 3.

Genes Added

  • Amethyst Cloning, Emerald Cloning, and Garnet Cloning, adding more crabs when you tap.
  • Enchanted Wardrobe, increasing the King Crab set dmg bonus.
  • Symbiotic Link, increasing Queen DPS to +Dmg.
  • Focused Beam, increasing the damage Jade Laser does the longer it fires.
  • Flutterwisps, spawning several small white butterflies to attack the reptiles.

Genes Ascension Tiers

  • This is the big change of 3.80 and why a lot of the above changes were made.
  • When you fill up your Gene Tree, you have the option to Ascend the tree.
  • Full details are in this library article
  • Read that article so I don't have to repeat everything here.

Other Stuff

  • Opportunities to spend real money were added to the daily Login reward and seasonal event collections.
  • Opportunities to spend pearls by adding Daily offers in the shop.

Commentary

To be honest, nobody expected this game to be updated after almost 7 years of minor updates. So to say this was a surprise is a bit of an understatement. The changes to the Gene Tree are simply huge, and will profoundly increase the power of players that are able to invest the time to farm the genes needed to fully Ascend.

Removing Frenzy was 100% a mistake. It was making up for a flaw in the game design, namely the speed difference between the different colours of crab. At lower distances, Amethyst and Emerald crabs might be killing the reptiles before the slower Garnet crabs can get up the screen. The net effect is a "traffic jam" of hundreds or thousands of crabs on your screen which can be bad for older phones. Frenzy took care of this problem by making even the Garnet crabs speedy enough to go off the screen.

Removing Treasure Butterfly and making it into a Gene Ascension reward is bad for new players. This was the number one gene to get, as the added pearls and occasional gem were SO VERY HELPFUL to new players. Now they must obtain 607 genes in order to get Flitter to drop his goodies again.

The reason for removing some of these and changing Flitter made sense -- they could not think of ways to scale them up as the tree gets more powerful. I get that. But I think they should have made other changes too, like adding the Frenzy speed buff to the first tier of Ascension alongside Flitter's buff.

Adding Symbiotic Link was a welcome addition, as increasing Queen DPS to +Dmg is a major part of your damage calculation and there simply aren't many ways to do increase it. The maximum prior to this update was 10.5% + any Evolution Gild you happened to have installed. With 5 Symbiotic Links (replacing Idle Gold's positions), this alone adds 1.25% just on the base tree. This is significant.

Adding Enchanted Wardrobe coupled with some of the ascension buffs make your Land of Reptiles efforts into a powerful multiplier of your main game - ridiculously powerful in the later game.

Flutterwisps instead of Shockwave is a nice improvement in that the little wisps it spawn not only do more damage than shockwave did, but they can crit -- which is huge compared to Shockwave which could not crit. The downside is as you Ascend your gene tree, more and more wisps spawn per yellow butterfly, and they do not all attack the reptile at once -- your screen can get cluttered with these things if you have a Wonder Wasp butterfly swarm.

Anyway, does this mean more updates are coming? Who knows. For now though there's lots new to play with and lots more math for me to figure out.