Habitica is a great app right out of the box (if we do say so ourselves!), but there’s always room for personalization. This month we’ve been asking people in the Use Case Spotlights Guild to share how they customize Habitica to create game mechanics that increase their motivation. If you’re interested in learning about how to create a Mana Potion or skip forward in time, here are some titbits other users shared about how they make Habitica more rewarding and fun!
To start with, shanaqui shared how they use the Fix Character Values feature in conjunction with custom Rewards:
Most of my customisation of Habitica uses Fix Character Values (in Settings). The most motivating thing for me is using skills (especially Tools of the Trade, when I’m a Rogue), so I have a 50 gold reward that lets me buy 25 mana to use my skills. I do also trade experience for mana, so that as a Mage I can cast lots of skills for my party without levelling up too fast.
Dewines has another tip on using Fix Character Values for good, to “loan” yourself gold for seasonal items! (There’s still time to take advantage of this in the Winter Wonderland festivities…)
I haven’t done much of this recently, but when I was new to Habitica and didn’t always have enough gold to buy seasonal outfits, I would set up a “bank” using FCV and give myself a “loan”. I used a Reward to make a note of how much I’d borrowed and then when I could afford a repayment, I could click the Reward which would deduct 50 or 100 gold (or whatever you want to set as the repayment rate). I would than edit the extra notes on the Reward to record the new value of the “loan”.
Meanwhile, MaybeSteveRogers gets round the fact that overdue To-Dos don’t damage you by using Habits:
I punish myself for missing due dates on To-Dos with a negative-only Habit set to ‘hard’ difficulty. Every day I go past a deadline, I have to click it X amount of times for each due date I’m missing. An easy or trivial To-Do means I have to click the negative Habit once, a medium difficulty = twice, and a hard difficulty one = three clicks of the negative Habit. Even with only one click a day, the Habit slowly turns more and more orange. If I’m missing hard To-Dos, the damage can quickly become devastating.
Finally, etherfly shared an amazing Collection Quest modification that soothed some of the frustrations of a low Perception stat!
Being a warrior in a small party without rogues, I was quite discouraged by collection quests (especially with the item overflow glitch), so I created a special habit “Rage: Reveal All”, that had a “rage bar” from 0 to 100 associated with it. Rage would fill a little every time when I:
- completed a task and didn’t get a quest item, depending on task difficulty;
- had items go over the maximum.
When the rage bar was full, I’d reset it and activate the habit a number of times to make decent progress on the quest. All other rewards – EXP, gold and mana – I rolled back using FCV.
There were some other great suggestions in the Guild, so don’t forget to check it out to see them! And don’t forget, if you participate in next month’s discussion, you could be featured in the next Use Case Spotlight blog post, as well…
