Your house in Mewgenics isn't just a place to store cats between runs. It's the foundation of your entire playthrough, directly influencing breeding outcomes, stray quality, and your cats' combat readiness. Here's the thing: most players treat furniture as decoration, but strategic placement can transform weak kittens into dominant fighters.
This guide breaks down the five house stats, furniture optimization, and NPC progression to help you build the ultimate breeding operation.
Understanding House Stats
Your house operates on five distinct stats that influence everything from breeding success to injury recovery. Each stat serves a specific purpose, and balancing them requires careful furniture selection.
Comfort determines breeding frequency and kitten quantity. High Comfort keeps aggressive cats manageable and increases the odds of multiple kittens per litter. However, crowding your house or letting it get dirty tanks this stat fast.
Stimulation controls genetic inheritance quality. You'll want high Stimulation when breeding cats with desirable abilities, passives, or mutations. This stat ensures offspring actually inherit their parents' best traits rather than random junk.
Health affects injury recovery between runs. If your cats come home battered from combat, solid Health stats mean they'll heal when you pass the day. Without it, injuries persist and weaken your breeding pool.
Mutation increases the chance of random mutations during breeding. While this can produce powerful results, uncontrolled mutations often create problematic cats. Balance this stat carefully based on your breeding goals.
Appeal determines stray cat quality. Higher Appeal brings stronger strays with special abilities and passives to your doorstep. These cats can inject fresh genetics or replace underperformers in your roster.
Tip
Check your house stats before passing each day. If Comfort drops too low, cats will fight instead of breed, potentially killing valuable breeding stock.
Mewgenics House and Furniture Guide
Furniture Placement:
Each furniture piece modifies your house stats in specific ways. The key is understanding which stats you need for your current goals and placing furniture accordingly.
Balancing Comfort and Stimulation
Most furniture follows a trade-off pattern. The Toxic Waste Barrel grants +4 Stimulation but inflicts -2 Comfort. Its rare variant, the Touched Toxic Waste Barrel, doubles these values to +8 Stimulation and -4 Comfort.
For breeding runs focused on passing down specific traits, the Stimulation boost justifies the Comfort penalty. But if you're trying to breed multiple kittens or manage aggressive cats, you'll need Comfort-focused furniture like the Microwave (+1 Comfort) or Newspapers (+1 Comfort).
Utility Furniture
Some furniture provides non-stat benefits. Food Storage increases your maximum food capacity by 40, letting you stockpile resources for longer breeding periods without needing to adventure for supplies.
This becomes critical when you're running a multi-generation breeding project and don't want to interrupt the process with forced runs.
Rare Variants and Upgrade Priorities
Every furniture piece has a rare alternate variant with boosted stats and unique appearance. When shopping at Baby Jack's store on Sundays, prioritize rare variants that align with your current breeding strategy.
If you're building a genetic powerhouse, grab rare Stimulation furniture. If you're managing a crowded house with temperamental cats, invest in rare Comfort pieces.
Warning
Furniture placement directly affects cat behavior. A poorly optimized house can result in dead cats from fights or failed breeding attempts that waste days of progression.
Mewgenics House and Furniture Guide
NPC Progression
Seven NPCs in Boon County accept cat donations in exchange for critical upgrades. Each NPC has specific requirements and provides distinct benefits.
Strategic Donation Planning
Don't randomly donate cats. Retired cats require the most time investment, so reserve them exclusively for Butch and Frank. These two provide the most impactful upgrades: expanded storage lets you hoard powerful items, while house expansion accommodates more breeding pairs.
For the other NPCs, you can generate donations during the House Phase. Let cats age naturally for Tracy, allow fights to produce injured cats for Baby Jack, or breed specifically for mutations to satisfy Dr. Beanies.
Pro tip: Time your donations around Baby Jack's Sunday furniture restock. Stock up gold during the week, then buy out his inventory to maximize house stat gains.
Managing House Capacity and Cat Behavior
House size directly impacts cat behavior. Overcrowding creates negative Comfort, triggering fights that can kill valuable breeding stock or spread diseases.
The Tube System
The tube to the left of your house lets you donate unwanted cats to NPCs. This isn't just about unlocking upgrades; it's essential population control. Cats with weak stats, undesirable disorders, or genetic dead-ends should go straight into the tube.
This prevents them from breeding and polluting your gene pool while simultaneously working toward NPC progression goals.
Disease and Cleanliness
Cats can poop, fall ill, or die in your house. These conditions spread to nearby cats, creating cascading health problems. Regular population management prevents these issues from spiraling out of control.
If you notice a cat consistently starting fights, isolate them in the tube before they kill your best breeders. One aggressive cat can derail weeks of careful genetic planning.
Mewgenics House and Furniture Guide
Daily Routine Optimization
Passing days costs 1 Food per cat. If you can't pay, cats starve and die. This creates a natural pressure to balance breeding projects with adventuring for resources.
Food Economy Management
Stock up on Food Storage furniture early. This lets you run longer breeding cycles without interruption. When you do adventure, prioritize runs that yield food rewards or coins to buy food from vendors.
If you're running low and have non-essential cats, donate them to NPCs before passing the day. This reduces your food cost while providing upgrade progress.
Breeding vs. Adventuring Balance
You don't need to adventure constantly. If you've drafted strong cats with good items, focus on breeding to create superior offspring. Once your current generation ages or sustains too many injuries, send them on a retirement run and start fresh with their offspring.
This cycle lets you compound genetic advantages over multiple generations, as explained in our Mewgenics Guide: Cat Breeding and Combat.
Important
Always check house stats before passing the day. One oversight can result in dead cats from fights or failed breeding attempts that waste precious time.
Stray Cat Integration
Stray cats appear based on your Appeal stat. Higher Appeal brings stronger strays with special abilities and passives that don't exist in your current gene pool.
When to Accept Strays
Accept strays when they offer genetics you lack or when you need fresh bloodlines to avoid inbreeding complications. Some strays reference characters from other media and come with unique trait combinations.
Reject strays if your house is at capacity or if they don't offer meaningful genetic improvements. You can always wait for better options as long as your Appeal stays high.
Stray Quality Scaling
Appeal directly correlates with stray power level. If you're consistently getting weak strays, invest in Appeal-boosting furniture. The Daruma Statue provides +1 Appeal (though it costs -1 Comfort and +1 Stimulation), making it a solid early option.
Mewgenics House and Furniture Guide
Item Storage Strategy
After adventures, items go into storage. If storage is full, items automatically go to trash and are deleted when you pass the day.
Storage Prioritization
Keep items with multiple charges over single-use consumables. The exception is when preparing for major fights like Guillotina house invasions, where consumables can turn the tide.
Balance your storage across equipment types. A storage full of weapons means you can only equip four cats at once, creating bottlenecks. Maintain a mix of weapons, armor, accessories, and consumables.
Pre-Adventure Planning
Before selecting collars for an adventure, review your storage. Build your party around available items rather than choosing cats first. If you have strong elemental gear, draft a Mage. If you're stocked with defensive equipment, bring a Tank.
This ensures you maximize item synergies from the start rather than discovering optimal builds mid-run.
Advanced House Optimization
Once you understand the basics, you can push house optimization to extreme levels.
Genetic Breeding Projects
Use high Stimulation setups to create multi-generation breeding lines focused on specific traits. For example, breed two cats with high Intelligence and Charisma together in a high-Stimulation environment to produce kittens that excel as spellcasters.
Over several generations, you can compound these traits to create cats that start runs with significantly higher stats than normal.
Disorder Management
Some disorders are manageable, others are run-killers. If a cat has a problematic disorder, donate them immediately to prevent it from spreading through breeding. Don't let sentimentality ruin your gene pool.
Mutation Experiments
When you have stable breeding lines established, experiment with Mutation-boosting furniture. Random mutations can produce powerful combinations, but only attempt this when you can afford failures.
Keep mutation experiments isolated from your main breeding population to prevent contamination.
Common House Management Mistakes
Mistake #1: Ignoring house stats. Players focus on combat and forget that house stats directly determine breeding success. Check stats before every day pass.
Mistake #2: Hoarding weak cats. Sentimental attachment to early cats wastes house space and food. Donate underperformers ruthlessly.
Mistake #3: Poor storage management. Letting storage fill with junk means losing valuable items after runs. Curate your storage actively.
Mistake #4: Random NPC donations. Donating retired cats to the wrong NPCs wastes your most valuable resource. Plan donations strategically.
Mistake #5: Overcrowding. Too many cats tanks Comfort, triggering fights and deaths. Maintain population control through the tube system.
Final Thoughts
Your house in Mewgenics is more than a background screen between dungeon runs. It’s a living system that shapes every future cat you’ll ever field in combat. The fighters you rely on tomorrow are decided by the furniture you place today, the strays you accept, and the cats you choose to retire. Treat the house like a long-term strategy game instead of a waiting room, and the results snowball fast.
Success comes from patience and planning rather than luck. A clean, balanced home produces stronger kittens, better mutations, and healthier veterans ready for the next chapter. Ignore it, and even the best combat run can collapse when your breeding pool fills with weak or unstable cats.