Added September 2023
This is a guide was created to make it easier for players to understand the most basic loop of monster improvement and how to increase their monster's values until such a time as we can implement a better tutorialization process within the game.

Is This Still Up To Date?
Even though the guide is relatively old, the systems involved were some of the very first we refined in the game and got to a state we were happy with, long before we brought the game to steam. With this in mind it is unlikely to ever experience major changes on the most basic form, especially this late into development, though new systems or adjustments may end up being created in time, and depending on how complicated those are sections may be added to this guide to help parse them until the aforementioned tutorialization is complete.

How Important Is This to Gameplay?
Players should understand that these systems are not critical to completing the game as it exists right now. Monsters can be significantly more powerful than the player character and the NPC party members, but require much more work to make them so, often require multiple generations of monsters. That said, we intend to add more and more difficult encounters that will eventually require the players to involve their monsters.

Is there some way to speed the breeding process up?
We intend to add systems that will increase player control and speed up this process in return for the investment of vast amounts of resources (especially monster essence and monster byproducts)

Why can't I breed these two monsters together?
Due to legal requirements both on steam and on other platforms, incest is strictly prohibited from being permitted in a game with pornographic content. The most likely reason is that your two monsters share an ancestor within the last 3 generations (Parents, Grandparents, or Great Grandparents).

Alternatives:
1)One of the monsters is working, go to the job board and remove them from their job to open them up to breeding.
2) One of the monsters is pregnant, wait until they have lain their egg.
3) One of the monsters is tired from having been milked or bred already, wait until the following morning.

The most essential thing to understand about the way Farming in Cloud Meadow works is that this is not like farming in games such as Stardew Valley and Harvest Moon. In those games, you farm crops for ingredients in food and to sell them in their raw state at as high a quality as possible as more or less the end goal, in Cloud Meadow, it is part of the process of raising your monsters.

While at the moment the system is in a very bare-bones state, eventually, the goal is to make it so that the player only has to plant the crops and then he can allow his monsters to take over from there, with the storage system automatically distributing crops harvested by monsters into the mill to be refined, to the food bin(and eventually silo once that is implemented) to be distributed to your monsters, thus automatically raising your stats.

On the other side of this process is the breeding of monsters, the improvement of attributes in order to give monsters better stats, better abilities, and better graduation reward values. In the end, you should be making the vast majority of your money from graduating monsters, rather than from selling crops or eggs, though both are nice methods of padding your income.

For the moment, the most basic form of this gameplay loop has been enabled in the game, with the ability to set up fields, pastures, and training grounds, as well as having the foodbin available.

Update: August 2021
Farming has been enormously simplified, tending was removed, plants live or die based on weather and if they are watered. More intricacies are planned for the future, but should be more transparent. For the time being all you need to know about farming is that you can generally massively farm up excess crops, then refine them to produce higher quality seeds, which in turn lead to higher quality plants.

Update: September 2023
On Breeding Traits
Monster Raising is a process between breeding monsters, feeding them crops, and training them.

Monster Breeding is simple, check the traits of your monsters. There are 3 types, 4 rarities, and 5 grades. This will tell you everything you need to know about how a trait can be passed on.

The types are:

• Species Only: those that can only be inherited by children who share the same species as a parent.
  
• Bloodline: those that can only originate in the wild in one species, but can be passed on to children of any species.
  
• Universal: those that can crop up in any species and be passed onto children of any species.

The rarities are:

• Copper: Common traits, these will appear randomly quite often, and are easy to pass on.
  
• Silver: Uncommon traits, these will appear randomly with with some infrequency, and are relatively difficult to pass on.
  
• Gold: Rare traits, these will appear randomly very infrequently, and are difficult to pass on.
  
• Rusted: Negative traits, which are relatively easy to pass on, but won't pop up randomly unless Magic Saturation is too low.

The grades are based on I-V, roman numerals. Each grade will multiply the values as described in the trait description by the number of the grade.

You should pair monsters who share the same traits at the same grade, as this will drastically increase the chances of not only the monsters passing on those traits, but in increasing their grade.

On Magic Saturation
Monsters have a permanent value, set at birth, called Magic Saturation. This is an easily viewed trait on their stats page, taking the form of a bar that has a collar on one end, and a snarling mouth on the other. The lower Magic Saturation is, the higher the graduation value of the monster, and importantly, the more likely they are to have degraded traits, or even develop new negative traits. The higher Magic Saturation is, the more likely they are to develop rare, or improved traits randomly, but if it gets too low, they will hatch as a hostile monster and attack and damage your farm.

Magic Saturation can be manipulated by breeding monsters of the same species (which will increase the value in the children), breeding monsters of different species (which will decrease the value in the children), or by breeding them with the protagonist (which will majorly decrease the value in the children). Mostly though, a good rule of thumb is that a child's Magic Saturation, absent other factors, will be in the ballpark range of the average of the parent's Magic Saturation.

On Stats
Monster stats, unlike the protagonist's or the NPC companion's stats, can only be increased through feeding them. Each monster can get one stat increasing meal a day. This is why meals are much more effective than feeding them raw crops, as these allow them to increase multiple stats at once. Monsters who have not been fed personally by the player or served from the Silo will eat a random crop stored in the Food Bin.

Loyalty
Monster Loyalty is a hidden stat. It can be inferred by petting a monster, and seeing the number of hearts released from their head. The more hearts released, the happier and more loyal the monster is with you.

Monster Loyalty is increased by petting them, personally feeding them, personally breeding them, or bringing them with you in your party into the dungeon.

Monster Loyalty is decreased by allowing a monster to go a day without being fed, or overworking them.

When a monster is disloyal, then you will see them release black hearts from their head upon being petted.

If Monster Loyalty is above a certain value, it will begin to decrease below that value for every day you do not personally interact with that monster in some manner.

Monster Loyalty serves as a method to automatically churn monsters who are unimportant to you. One year after they hatch, if a monster is below 100% Loyalty, they will graduate on midnight of the night of their first birthday. Monsters who graduate will result in a graduation reward equal to their value being granted to you.

Monsters who become too disloyal will flee your farm and report your neglect to the Union, who will fine you the graduation value of the monster.

Graduation
As described above, Graduation occurs on the first birthday of a monster. Monsters who are at 100% loyalty at this point will remain with you provided that you go to Montalvo on the day of their graduation and witness it. If you do not, they will think you do not care for them as much as they care for you and leave as normal at midnight.

Graduation Value is determined by several factors. The level of the monster, the value of their various attributes, the skill points invested into their skills, the grade, number, and rarity of their traits, and their domesticity level all play a role in how valuable a monster is, and a very valuable monster can net a canny Frontiersman many tens of thousands of krona, making them an incredibly valuable investment.

It is important to realize that I deliberately skimmed a lot of this content, as we are hoping the players will explore, experiment, and look into the details as they exist. I have not provided hard numbers except in a very few cases because of this. I hope this guide will eventually become obsolete, and allow players of a more exploratory mind, as we progress in development, to fill in the details for other players.