The Wibble Wobble Crank-a-Kai may seem completely random at first. Most people who have played Wib Wob will agree that cranking can be a frustrating experience due to it seemingly being completely up to luck; however, there are ways to manipulate what the crank gives. Doing so requires an understanding of how the Crank-a-Kai works.
Unlike cranks in the 3DS games, cranks in Wib Wob are not predetermined. Due to the constant updates to Wib Wob's Crank-a-Kai from new Events and updates, this would be impossible. As a result, Wib Wob has a way of determining what a crank gives the moment it is performed. This process of result determination will be referred to as “rolling,” because the reliance on random numbers for a result is akin to rolling a dice.
The crank system was created in a specific way to make adding and subtracting Yo-kai from the crank's pool, or set of available Yo-kai, an easy task. Instead of each Yo-kai having an individual probability of being cranked, there are set tiers of Rarity. Certain Yo-kai are placed in each tier, with higher Ranks being rarer than lower ones, with a few exceptions. While NHN has neglected to give any official response on rarities, they have been estimated to be as follows:
Altogether, there appear to be 13 rarity tiers; however, this is all speculation. Crank results are, of course, still left up to chance, so it is difficult to tell the exact rarity of a Yo-kai.
Once a crank is initiated, the game begins rolling to decide the result. The rolling process consists of multiple rolls, from 12 to 14 depending on if there are any Tier 0 or Tier 13 Yo-kai available in the crank. The game begins its first roll for the lowest Rarity available. In most cases, this will be Tier 12, which is confirmed to contain Copperled, Cynake, and Illoo.
A roll has three possible outcomes: Proceed, Stop, and Fail. The simplest of these results is the Stop result. If a Stop is rolled, the current Rarity Tier is decided as the result's. A final roll is then performed to determine which Yo-kai out of that Rarity Tier will be pulled. The probability of each Yo-kai in a tier being pulled is equal.
For example, in the current Crank-a-Kai, if the result of the first Rarity roll is a Stop, the game chooses Tier 12 as the Rarity of the cranked Yo-kai. Then, it performs a final roll to decide whether Illoo, Cynake, or Copperled is pulled. All three of them have an equal 33% chance of being chosen, regardless of Soultimate Level.
While the previous example considered the first roll as a Stop, there are two other possibilities it could be: Proceed and Fail. If the result of a roll on Tier 12 is Proceed, the game then performs another roll for Tier 11. If that roll's result is Proceed, a roll is performed for Tier 10, and so on until the final Tier is reached. Currently, that Tier is Tier 1, but during the Halloween Event, Whismellowman was in his own rarity tier. Even players with a completely MAXed Crank-a-Kai needed to crank hundreds of times to pull him once.
If a Tier is the highest possible, such as Tier 1 in the current Crank-a-Kai, it looses the Proceed possibility. Only Stop and Fail are possible results of the penultimate roll. Failure is always a possibility for any roll except the last, and a Failed roll causes an Exporb to be cranked. Before this can happen, a final roll must be performed. Unlike Yo-kai, Mega Exporbs and Holy Exporbs have different probabilities of being cranked. Mega Exporbs are around 20% more common than Holy Exporbs, but the exact probabilities of pulling either are unknown.
As the Rarity of a pull increases, the chance of the next roll being a Fail increases as well. This causes the chance of the next roll being a Stop or Proceed to decrease. While this may seem to make pulling high Rank Yo-kai an impossible task, there is a way to manipulate these odds.
When 35 of the same Yo-kai have been befriended, that Yo-kai's Soultimate Level advances to Level 7. This process is simply referred to as MAXing a Yo-kai, because the game ditches EXP count in favor of a simple “MAX” on the EXP bar once Soultimate Level 7 has been reached. A Yo-kai's Soultimate Level can not be increased past Level 7. This means they can not be befriended anymore. When all Yo-kai available in the Crank-a-Kai have been MAXed, the player has a MAXed Crank-a-Kai.
If a Yo-kai can not be befriended, this also means they can not be cranked, which gives MAXing a Yo-kai on of two results: If there are other Yo-kai in its Rarity Tier that are not MAXed, the chance of pulling them increases during a Stop roll on that Tier. For example, if only Cynake is MAXed and the Tier 12 roll is a Stop, then Illoo and Copperled both have a 50% chance of being pulled rather than the 33% chance they had when Cynake was able to be pulled too.
If there are no other Yo-kai in the newly MAXed Yo-kai's Rarity Tier, that Tier no longer gets a roll. If Illoo, Cynake, and Copperled are all MAXed, then the first roll performed during a crank is for Tier 11. While Thornynan and Baddinyan have very low initial chances of being pulled at first, MAXing all Tier 12 and 11 Yo-kai makes pulling them an easy task.
There is one other catch to the Rarity of a Yo-kai: If a Yo-kai that is a Legend Seal is pulled, they drop down to the next most common Tier. Although Peppillon is one of the most rare Yo-kai in the game, he becomes as common as Kyubi after being pulled once. This makes MAXing Snartle and Venoct a much more frustrating experience given how useful they are compared to Kyubi and Peppillon.
The end goal of cranking the Crank-a-Kai is to pull Soul Secrets. While it may be tempting to fuse a newly pulled Jibanyan A or Komasan A into a more powerful Jibanyan S, this is actually a poor idea. Jibanyan S and Komasan S are both more rare than Soul Secrets, meaning they have no effect of the probability of pulling a Soul Secrets because the probability of Passing the Tier 2 roll is replaced by entirely by Failure once Jibanyan S and Komasan S are MAXed. Once all Yo-kai at Tiers 3 and below are MAXed, the probability of pulling a Soul Secrets has been determined to be a concrete 10%.
This only changes during double chance Events. When these Events take place, the chance of that Rarity Tier's roll being a Stop doubles, decreasing the chance of Failure. This can be seen most clearly when players with a MAXed crank perform Y-Money cranks during 2x Soul Secrets chance Events; they end up pulling Soul Secrets around 20% of the time.
Only one other percentage is known: With a MAXed Crank-a-Kai, the Yo-kai Illuminoct has a 1.5% chance of being pulled. While Darkyubi was found to be exactly as common as the Seal Yo-kai Demuncher by Sprindale Data Sciences Member Robbett, Illuminoct stands out as being exceptionally Rare for an Event S-Rank. When asked about Robbett's calculated 1.5% chance of pulling Illuminoct, Community Manager Carlos said that it sounds “about right” because NHN uses that probability for pulls of a similar Rarity in their other games.
Players looking to pull higher Rank Yo-kai may be tempted to try to befriend Yo-kai at the lowest Rarity Tier they have available in their cranks, but this is not beneficial. Befriending any Yo-kai in the Crank-a-Kai can be valued at exactly 3000 Y-Money. Yo-kai of Ranks B and above have vastly decreased chances of being befriended; these Yo-kai require many clearings of their Stages to be befriended a single time, even with Food, which would decrease profit. The Crank-a-Kai can be MAXed much faster by buckling down and grinding Y-Money, even though it may feel less productive.
Crank-a-Kai Coins work exactly the same way as Y-Money cranks, but they have different pools of Yo-kai to pull from. They generally follow the same rules: Yo-kai with higher Ranks have higher Rarity, with fan popularity playing a small role in the cases of Jibanyan A and Komasan A. In the case of Crank-a-Kai Coins, which have some unique pulls such as Casanuva, MAXing every other Yo-kai in them to guarantee a certain pull is a great idea.
Casanuva can not be befriended by normal means. He is only available once through a Mission Reward. While is not very useful due to the way that befriending works, players looking to MAX him anyway should turn to the Cheerful Coin. After MAXing every other Yo-kai available in it, every Cheerful Coin will give out a Casanuva. This can be applied to other Coins to get similarly rare Yo-kai, such as Signiton from the Yellow Coin G.
In conclusion, there is still little strategy in relation to trying to pull a certain Yo-kai from the Crank-a-Kai; however, it boosts morale to know that pulling 35 Beetler is not as useless as it seems. Although it may seem like a waste of Y-Money at first, having the ability to pull any new Event Yo-kai such as Kyubi Awoken in a few cranks in the near future makes the constant Goruma a little less painful.
Special thanks to Sprindale Data Sciences member Robbett for gathering a majority of the precise data and calculations used in this article.