Every Cat You'll Land On in Kitty Jump
Six breeds and one paw print. The cats are purely decorative — a block with a Maine Coon on it is exactly as wide as one with a Scottish Fold — but blocks are drawn at random, so you will quickly develop opinions.
How the cat blocks work
Most blocks are painted with one of the patterns below. The pattern is applied as a single image, centred on each face of the block, scaled to fit without stretching. That last part matters more than it sounds: an earlier version tiled the image to fill the face, which turned every cat into a grid of dozens of unreadable little cats. One cat per face, always the right proportions.
The colour underneath is picked at random too, so the same breed can turn up on a mint block, a lavender one or anything else in the palette. The cat keeps its own colours regardless — the block colour only fills the space around it.
The six breeds
Scottish Fold
The giveaway is the ears. A cartilage mutation makes them fold forward and down, so the head reads as a single round shape with almost no ear tips. In the game this is the easiest breed to spot from directly above, because there is nothing sticking out of the silhouette.
Look for: Folded flat ears, an unusually round head, huge round eyes
Real world: The fold is caused by a gene that affects cartilage throughout the body, not just the ears — which is why responsible breeders only ever cross a folded cat with a straight-eared one.
Maine Coon
Big, angular and shaggy. The ears carry little tufts at the tips and the cheeks flare into a ruff, so the face is wider than it is tall. On a block it is the busiest of the six, with the most small details.
Look for: Large pointed ears with tufts, a shaggy ruff around the face
Real world: Maine Coons are among the largest domestic cats, and their ear tufts and thick tail are both cold-weather adaptations from the north-eastern United States.
Ragdoll
This one is drawn as a bicolor Ragdoll: a white inverted V runs up the middle of the face while the cheeks and ears stay blue-grey. It is deliberately the opposite of the Siamese — pale centre, dark edges.
Look for: Bicolor face — a white blaze up the middle, blue-grey on the sides, blue eyes
Real world: Ragdolls are colourpoint cats, which means they are born white and their darker patches develop on the coolest parts of the body — the ears, face and tail.
British Shorthair
Round on round. The cheeks push out past the ears, the eyes are wide circles, and the ears sit low and far apart. If a block has a cat on it that looks slightly surprised and slightly overfed, it is this one.
Look for: A very round face with full cheeks and small, widely set ears
Real world: That dense, plush coat is why the breed is often described as looking like a teddy bear — and why it takes longer to dry after a bath than most cats.
Siamese
The inverse of the Ragdoll: dark in the middle, pale at the edges. The mask covers the nose and spans across the eyes, and the ears match it. Together with the almond-shaped eyes it is the most angular face in the set.
Look for: A dark mask over the centre of the face, almond blue eyes, pale cream body
Real world: Siamese is one of the oldest recognised cat breeds, and the same temperature-sensitive colouring gene is behind several other colourpoint breeds, including the Ragdoll.
Tuxedo
Not a breed — a coat pattern. Black across the top of the head and around the eyes, white over the chin and mouth, split cleanly down the middle. The highest-contrast cat on any block, which makes it the easiest to judge your landing offset against.
Look for: Black face with a white chin and muzzle, bright yellow eyes
Real world: Tuxedo is a bicolor pattern, and because the white patches are not tied to breed, they show up on completely unrelated cats around the world.
The paw print
The seventh pattern is not a cat at all. Paw prints show up on roughly one block in seven, and they are the plainest block decoration in the game — just a big orange pad and four toes. They are also, quietly, the easiest to judge a perfect landing against: the centre pad sits exactly where the centre of the block is.
Does the cat affect how a block plays?
No. Block width and the distance to the next block are the only two things that decide how hard a jump is, and both are rolled independently of the decoration. You cannot learn to recognise a "hard" cat — which is probably for the best, because it means every block has to be read on its actual size.
What the decoration does affect is you. High-contrast cats like the Tuxedo make it easy to see where the centre of a block is, and perfect landings depend on exactly that.