New player pet/crew choices?

[Bigheaded]

Recently started this, just looking for opinions on which pet you'd suggest for fastest progression. This in general is collecting gold fastest from what i can tell.

Bear in mind i am new and have 3 current limitations:
1. Pet should be max of 9*, i have no way of reaching 13* yet
2. Currently only able to use 1 pet at a time, 20 bond away from getting 2.
3. Not running a clicker but active clicking is doable for short periods at a time.

to me there's only a few ways of looking at it:
maximise seagulls
maximise active catch
maximise afk
maximise chests
maximise silver
Get all pets to 3 bond to unlock 2 pets active at a time.

I'm already throwing the afk idea out the window, from personal experience i can gain 60 hours of offline progress in about 15 minutes of active playing.

i've tried maximising chests but the RNG is just so bad on them that i'm unconvinced, seemed strong very early on though but shields are also a limiting factor.

Currently i'm maximising silver with wolf then moving to active catch with mouse then ascend when i get significant progress. rinse and repeat.
This lead to half my crew being +silver and half +active catch.

I've not played around with boosting seagulls much and i can see there is potential there though.
I'm also not sure when to rush to get 2x pets active at a time. as getting 20 bond is 10 pets needing ~4 hours each which is pretty doable

Just curious what crew bonus/pet you guys would run if you were forced to reset so only had 1 pet

[OZI]

Before the first rebirth and with only 1 pet I recommen to change the pet:
After ascension choose a pet wit +silver and went as high as you can with the buildings and silver-upgrades. After 4h change the pet to either +chest (if you have enough chests) or +seagulls (if you want to save the chests for later game, recommened) and earn as much gold as you can for another 4h. Then ascend and start with +silver again....(of course only for active players... as you said, offline idle is worth nothing...)

[Bigheaded]

Wow fast response, how many chests is "enough chests"?
Personally i just use up the chests as they come seeing you get one every 10 minutes if you're below max, which can be pretty significant. Saving a big stack would mean you would not receive those.
Currently comparing 6 chests to 58 seagulls per hour

Also for the seagull route, which pet would you suggest? bear in mind i currently have a max of 3 auto seagulls without pet bonuses.
Due to this i'm thinking parrot > chicken as you need the +4x effect to make the most of them. Not sure if any others are worth considering

[OZI]

^^
after 279 rebirths I have atm 2548 chests on store (and more than 3200 shields)... not enough time to play them all down. I use some at the beginning of a rebirth, if the ascension is full and I'm collecting gold for totems then I use seagulls-

At the beginning of the game the snake is a good choice if you have opened already 3 skills for it. Then you will get silver+ and seagull+. Later parrot and chicken are better, yes. I have maxed out (15 bindings and 15 stars) 7 pets; dog, cat, chicken, parrot (was the first max), mouse, pig and snake.
If you have 3 pet-slots and enoug time to store all seagulls for the parrot then chosse it, large swarms of seagulls are worth the most. (and then of course seagulls+ with the other pets).

Atm I'm using (5 slots) parrot, chicken, pig, dog and mouse (2 seagulls+, 2 chests+ and the mouse is better than I thought ;)

[Bigheaded]

Tried snake it just doesn't match up to doing 4 hours with wolf and then x hours with a gold gain specific pet. Seems like a solid choice for those who don't want to change pet and to use just the same one. Pig similar to snake was a viable option and was what i used first seeing it was my first 8 star and steamrolled the first few days.

Tried chicken, found the RNG on the seagulls worse than the consistency of active catch from mouse for my current playstyle. I can certainly see why seagulls are liked though, preferred strategies involving them over chests,

Currently heading towards getting 3 bond with each pet to get access to using 2 pets at a time. Going forward being able to gain twice as much bond per hour as well as having the active effects of 2 pets should eventually outperform any short term gain from using optimal gold gaining strategies. Didn't see any way to reduce the bonding time.

[OZI]

With the rebirth-upgrades you will get upgrades to reduce the bonding time. And if you get the 4. slot's upgrade in the rebirth tree slot 2 and 3 will be opened automatically (hope this is still true, at least at the beginning of the game it worked this way)
And yes, if you got a lucky egg with a high-star-pet I would use that.