FAQ

Getting Started

This is a five-minute walkthrough. By the end, you will have an account, a space, and one animal logged with a public profile that anyone can view by scanning its QR code.

1. Sign up

Go to the login page and create an account. Email and password are enough. Herply is currently in open beta.

If you signed up but did not receive the verification email, check spam first, then use the "resend verification" link on the login page.

2. Create a space

A space is your collection. If you breed under one project name, you have one space. If you co-keep with someone else and want a separate collection, you create a second space and switch between them from the top-left dropdown.

Animals, housing, clutches, and sales live inside a space — they don't leak across to a second space if you have one. The genetics catalog (species, traits, loci) is shared, so the calculator and the trait picker behave the same way no matter which space you're in.

3. Add your first animal

From the sidebar, open Animals and click New Animal. The form asks for:

  • Species — pick from the catalog. The dropdown searches names, scientific names, acronyms, and morph aliases.
  • Sex — male, female, or unknown. Unknown is fine for hatchlings.
  • Hatch date — approximate is OK. Used for age and feeding intervals.
  • Traits — the morphs the animal expresses or carries. Visual traits go on the left ("expressed"), confirmed hets on the right. The form will auto-compute a morph string for the public profile.

If the species you keep is missing, the catalog has 36 species today. Long-tail species get traits added when users with those species ask for gaps. The list is in the catalog reference.

4. House it

Open Racks or Cages and create the housing. For tubs, the rack creates them automatically based on its slot count — you do not place tubs manually. Drag your animal into a tub or cage from the housing page.

5. Share the public profile

Each animal has a public profile at /p/[your-space]/[animal-code]. From the animal detail page, the QR button gives you a printable code. Buyers and vets can scan it without an account; they see the morph, hatch date, and any welfare flags that apply (for example, a Spider Ball Python's neurological wobble).

The public profile is intentionally read-only and minimal — it is a buyer-facing card, not an internal log.

What's next

  • The Features section explains how each entity works in detail — including the parts of the lifecycle that are non-obvious (sales reservations, incremental hatching, the rack-tubs invariant).
  • The Genetics section explains what the morph calculator does. If you have ever wondered why the het percentage reads 66% and not 67%, that is the right place.
  • The Catalog section is the reference for every trait, locus, and welfare flag the app knows about.