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Managing Your Collection: Box, Locking and Releasing
How to keep the Aniimo worth keeping, get something back for the ones you don't, and set up your box so a careless tap never costs you a good catch.
The short version
- Two Aniimo of the same species can be worth very different amounts, because potential varies between individuals
- Check Alpha status, weather or special forms, and potential grade before you register or release anything at camp
- The inventory filters by potential grade, Alpha status and Prismana status, so you can find your best copies without scrolling
- Lock anything valuable, and read your auto-release settings before they act on your behalf
- Releasing gives rewards back, including a refund of experience gems
- Storage capacity goes up through character upgrades, and Aniimo can be traded with other Pathfinders
Catching is the easy part. Within a few hours you will have more Aniimo than you can hold in your head, and most of them will be duplicates of things you already own.
The problem is that duplicates are not really duplicates. Two Aniimo of the same species can carry different value because their potential varies. So the question stops being "do I have one of these" and becomes "is this one better than the one I have".
Everything below is about answering that question quickly, and about making sure the answer never gets thrown away by accident.
Why you keep catching things you already own
Potential varies between individuals of the same species, and that variation changes what an Aniimo is worth. One copy is a placeholder. The next one might be the one you actually build around.
That is only the first axis. Collection goals stretch well past owning a single copy of each species: better potential, different traits, sparkling versions, alternate forms, and Prismana forms are all separate reasons to keep catching something you have already registered.
So treat a full roster as a starting point, not a finish line. The catches that matter are the upgrades.
Check the Aniimo before camp decides for you
At camp you register or release. Both are decisions, and both deserve a look first.
Three things are worth inspecting every time: whether the Aniimo is an Alpha, whether it is a weather or special form, and what its potential grade is. Any one of those can turn an ordinary catch into a keeper, and none of them are obvious if you are clicking through at speed.
The cost of skipping the check is asymmetric. Registering something mediocre wastes a slot you can clear later. Releasing something rare does not come back.
Filters and locks are the actual management tools
The inventory filters by potential grade, Alpha status and Prismana status. That is exactly the set of questions you ask when you are trying to work out which copy of a species to keep, so use it instead of scrolling. Filter down, compare, decide.
Once you know which Aniimo matter, organise them and lock them. Releases can happen straight from the inventory, and a lock is what stops a fast tap from turning a good catch into a handful of gems.
Locking is cheap and takes seconds. Do it when you notice the Aniimo is good, not later when you are clearing space in a hurry.
Auto-release is the setting that will bite you
Auto-release runs on rules you set, which means it acts without asking. Check those settings carefully, because the whole point of them is to remove Aniimo you have not personally looked at.
Read them once, properly, and make sure you understand what they cover. Then lock your valuable Aniimo as a second layer. Between a lock and settings you actually understand, unintended loss stops being a thing that happens to you.
Releasing pays, and storage grows
Releasing captured or stored Aniimo gives rewards, including a refund of experience gems. So clearing out the surplus is not pure deletion. You get something back, and those gems go into the Aniimo you are keeping.
Storage capacity also increases through character upgrades, which changes the pressure. If you are constantly full, the fix might be an upgrade rather than a purge. Sort out capacity first, and you can afford to hold onto borderline catches until you have something better to compare them against.
Presets and trading
Preset team configurations can be given custom names, which is worth doing the moment you have more than one setup. A named preset tells you what it is for at a glance.
Aniimo can also be traded with other Pathfinders. That gives a surplus copy somewhere to go other than release, so before you clear out a rare form or a high-potential duplicate, consider whether it is worth more to someone else than it is as gems.
Where to start
Before you go on a long catching run, do three things: raise your storage through character upgrades, lock everything you would be upset to lose, and read your auto-release settings once so you know exactly what they throw away.
Questions this answers
Each of these is answered on its own page, with the sources behind it.
Built from 9 facts gathered before launch, each checked against the sources it came from. How we know this, and who we learned it from.