on tumblr i got asked about wanting to try hexing and if it was hard to learn. below is my response.
hi there!! first of all, you do not know how happy you've just made me. second, i think it's not too difficult so long as you start small and work your way up to doing more complex things? the amount of stuff people are able to pull off in this game is honestly baffling in a good way, so i feel like it's pretty important to understand the "basics" of editing a breedfile, like how to use addballz in a way that animates consistently with the rest of the pet, collapsing variations and working with base data, what colors are texturable, and just like basic troubleshooting stuff.
to get started, i'd recommend these two guides:
these are 101 tutorials for pets workshop and LNZ pro, the two main programs people tend to use for hexing petz. personally when i was starting out i used pets workshop almost exclusively cause i found LNZ pro really overwhelming haha.
pets workshop has no undo button so save frequently and make backups of the file you're working on! you'll also probably want to open your file in the adoption center in the actual game semi-frequently to make sure it is animating how you want it to and isn't corrupted.
i think petz hexing is as hard as you make it in a way, there's a very high ceiling for what you can do so you can start with something very simple and learn what the programs do and then just... keep going! keep trying new things and rely on the collective knowledge of the hexing community to see what can be done and how you might be able to do it. there's a lot of very fantastic and in depth tutorials for specifics out there too, so once you feel like you understand how to edit a file you can seek out things more specific to what you might want to achieve. i wish you luck!!