It may be just me complaining, but I have a feeling Butterflies are flying way too high. It's impossible to reach them jumping and they move a bit too fast for effective use of spinach.
Anyone feeling same way?
You can click on them with your mouse and interact with them if they're too high to reach. A little bubble appears above them with a picture of the lotion or whatever else.
Mhmm, what PandaMan said. Also if they're too high from the ground, it often means that you can reach them when they get to the top of a hill or a platform. You'll always be able to reach them from something, because I've never seen them fly high on a screen with no hills or platforms (I think their height is determined by the highest ground that isn't a floating platform).
Hovering over the Butterfly, Batterflies, Pig, Chicken or Tree will show little bubbles depending on the tree or animal. Trees and Pigs - Broken Heart (they want to be petted), Trees - Water Droplet (they want to be watered), Butterflies - The word "Massage" (they want be massaged and if you massage one they will tend to flutter closer to you for a short while), Butterflies - Milk Container (they want to be milked), Batterflies - I think they have something but I don't remember what it was. Pigs - Meat symbol (they want to be Nibbled). After you click on the balloon it changes to a confirmation balloon and clicking it will cause the action to occur.
They can occasionally be flying too high to be reached even by jumping, but thankfully, they move around a lot. When they're unreachable, I stand and wait. Eventually, they come back down, and it doesn't really take a lot of waiting.
Between lag and lack of coordination, I'm horrible at milking wild butterflies. I just work on my skills until I can use the milkers at my house and buy milk at auction until then.
Hovering used to work for me w/butterflies, but since the game was reset I lost that ability. Once I was able to jump and catch their attention to massage I was able to hover w/the mouse and use the milk icon. Now that I have a high enough AK skill level that I don't have to massage I do get the milk icon while hovering. I tried different browsers and had the same result, so figured it was something about my specific hardware/software configuration.
I have not had any significant problems with hovering. I've seen some object interactions issues when a butterfly hovers over a tree or similar situation, but I've used both Adobe Flash 10 & 11, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Internet Explorer, and where possible, I have run them under both Windows 7 x64 and Ubuntu Linux. I'd try a Mac OS X too, but my current hardware didn't have the necessary CPU feature to install it. I even have a couple of other browsers I probably should have tried. This has been the case both before and after the reset. I entered into an agreement as a beta tester to evaluate and report problems with the game and I have seen nothing that has reduced my obligation to do so since the public release. I continue to evaluate, test, and report issues to the best of my ability. If you are having problems with hovering, please report it as a bug.
I love how high they fly. One of my favorite aspects of Glitch is the platforming (as mild as it is), and trying to find the right perch to leap from and snag a butterfly mid-flight is fantastic.
Good point, @Zedric. I've been doing it too since my skill level prevents me from getting the "Massage" option on mouse over (I only get the Milk balloon). I've been playing around that way to get my 2 massages in with Butterflies to eventually earn the Achievement Badge.
I must admit I found it extremely difficult to get milk from butterflies in groddle meadow / forest when I started, not helped by the fact it was just after reset when there were hardly any around. I found it quite off-putting and it's a lot easier now I don't need to massage them anymore.
I can recommend checking out the butterflies in Alakol - it's flatter so they don't tend to fly so high which means less hanging about.
Hovering doesn't work on butterflies once you have the ability to name them -- you have to catch them and massage them, then you'll get the hovering milk icon. You then have to catch them AGAIN if you want to sing to them.
I had my first butterfly transcendence today. I thought it was pretty cool.
The best way to get them is to jump at the butterfly and click enter. That will pop open the menu, and then you can pick 'massage' off of it. Butterflies tend to fly to you after they've been massaged.
As geekybird points out, some streets make for better butterfly chasing than others. Areas that are flat are much easier to catch them in. So are multi-level streets where you can dive on them from above. The Groddle regions are probably the most tricky, imo.
Butterflies were WAY harder to catch a few months ago, and seem much easier now. I almost never miss them anymore as long as I'm using my keyboard.
I've actually been having more trouble with too high butterflies in the last week than I had since reset or even at the end of beta. The most trouble I have is flat places where they hover just above jumping high so you have to spinach jump if you want to grab them. I find it a pain using the mouse since they keep moving and then the mouse is off.