New species, crafting overhaul, and grooming

2026-03-26 01:28 AM

This update is a big one! Originally, this was supposed to release about a month ago, but more stuff kept coming up (both stuff that I wanted to add to the update and stuff in real life that prevented me from working on the site).

The grooming system

Pets can now be groomed! There are a variety of grooming supplies that can be purchased at the general store or that can be crafted. If your pets get too unkempt, any charms equipped to them will get tangled up and stop working. Some items keep your pets groomed longer than others, but you always have the option of grooming pets every day if you want.

New item drops

Originally, a few types of pets (but not all) had a chance to drop items every day. These pets also had a chance of giving these items on socialization. However, the fact that most pets didn't have any drops made this frustrating, and also made all pets feel a little too similar. With this update, the system of pet-specific item drops has been completely overhauled.

Now, all pets have two loot tables: one for when they socialize, and another for when they are groomed. For most pets, grooming has a higher chance to produce items, but these items will usually be lower rarity, whereas socialization has a better chance of producing rarer items. Additionally, all pets can produce some sort of essence (usually Prima Materia and Gleaming Essence) on socialization, whereas very few pets can produce essence during grooming.

Two items had to be reworked for compatibility with this update, because they interacted with the old daily drops system. These items are the Thief's Bag and the Flourishing Bonsai. The Thief Bag originally added a variety of items to every pet's daily item pool; now, it instead has a chance of providing a random item for the pet's owner during socialization, in addition to whatever items are produced by the pet or by other items such as the Virtuoso's Flute. The Flourishing Bonsai originally increased the drop rate of daily items and items produced when the pet grows to a new form; the latter effect is unchanged, but the former effect has been replaced so that it now has a random chance to produce one item from the pet's grooming drop table every day.

Crafting overhaul

In order to ensure that every pet had item drops, several new crafting materials have been added, and new crafting recipes have also been added to use them. The old crafting page was getting unwieldy, so the layout has now been changed into a table view. Additionally, crafting recipes are now sorted into several sections, and it is possible to craft multiple copies of the same item in bulk.

New species

There's three of them! Everybody say hello to: the Sneaky Egg, the Chilly Egg, and the Spiky Egg. Each of these three eggs comes from summoning with a specific element. Because the update was taking too long to finish, there aren't any stamps associated with these species yet, but there will be soon. (For the same reason, more potential forms for the Spiky Egg creature will be added at the same time.)

Other tweaks

• A few new messages can appear when socializing with pets, some of which are dependent on the pet's traits
• Pets equipped with a Clarity Charm now provide a message in the room log specifying what factor(s) are influencing which form the pet grows into.
• The logout page has been redesigned because people kept linking to it in their bios as a prank.
• Forums have been expanded! The Q&A forum now supports thread creation, and a separate Dopcom Creechers Discussion forum has been added. Expect more forums to be added in the future as well.
• Various back-end performance improvements

What's next?

April Fools is just around the corner, and the main reason that I rushed to get this update out when I did was to make sure I would have enough time to get everything ready for the holiday. After that, as mentioned before, I'm planning to add several new stamps and add new forms for some of the new species to grow into. Once those loose ends are wrapped up, however, I'm going to take a little break from Dopcom Creechers so that I can work on smaller projects and catch my metaphorical breath. Development will probably resume in june of this year, and when it does, the first priority will be the calendar system.

Discuss this update in the forum

January 2026 registration window

2026-01-17 12:05 AM

Welcome to Dopcom Creechers! Today is the beginning of beta registration window #4. Signups will be open from the time of this announcement until around noon EST on monday, january 26th.

Be sure to check the getting started guide and the rest of the information section; there's a lot of good information there to help you get started. If you encounter any bugs or have any other feedback on the site, don't hesitate to post about it in the forums or email creechers@dopcom.net. Note that forum posts by new users may be held for moderation.

Dopcom Creechers has been in beta for about a year now, but it's a single-developer project and I have a day job separate from it, so you should expect things to still be a little rough around the edges in places. The site is intended to be fairly slow-paced, focusing on a playstyle where people check in for a few minutes each day.

There's a fairly sizable content update in the works now that forums are up and running! The main attractions of this planned update are three new species and a new system for grooming your pets. Obtaining crafting materials from your pets will be tied to the grooming mechanic going forwards—the best way to collect fur from your pets is to brush them! This will also introduce several new crafting materials, along with recipes to use them in such as decorative furniture and grooming equipment. I can't say for sure when this will be ready, but most likely some time in early to mid march.

Discuss this update in the forum

New features for forums + item breaking overhaul

2026-01-12 12:11 PM

All user-editable text (bios, room descriptions, forum posts, etc) can now contain pets using the [pet] bbcode, and can also contain links! Please use this new power responsibly.

Also, it is now possible to subscribe to forum threads! When there are new posts in a subscribed thread, a notification icon will appear next to the forums link in the top bar. A similar notification will appear if someone writes your username with an at sign.

The item-breaking mechanic has also been overhauled, as mentioned in the previous announcement. Increasing the number of items in the room will now also increase the chance of any item breaking, but if there are 12 or fewer non-essence items in a room (or a few more if there is also bubble wrap) then artifacts will not break. Crafted items such as fluff balls and plush friends still use the old breaking mechanics. A warning banner will appear when a room contains too many items.

The next registration window starts on saturday the 17th and will run through sunday the 25th. Tell your friends!

Next on the agenda after this:

• Three new pet species (artwork for these is about 80% done)
• Pet grooming system
• Expansion of items dropped by pets and crafting
• Calendar system with several minor holidays

Discuss this update in the forum

Forums are here!

2025-12-23 08:13 PM

This is something that I'm very excited about, and I know many of you are too: Dopcom Creechers finally has its own forum! Early in the site's development, I had said that I was not planning to add forums, because most existing forum software is technologically incompatible with the rest of the site and writing new forum software from scratch would be too hard. However, it turned out that writing new code was significantly easier than I anticipated, and so we have forums now! They're a little barebones now, but more features will be added soon.

That said, we currently have very limited moderation staff, and so some concessions have been made for ease of moderation. The forums are broken into four sections: announcements, questions and answers, bug reports, and trading. All users can create new threads in the bug reports and trading sections, but the Q&A section is currently limited to only contain a few specific megathreads (although this will change eventually). Starting with this one, all newsposts from the front page will also have corresponding forum threads to discuss the new updates to the site.

Renaming rooms

Another feature people have been asking for: rooms can now be renamed! Sort of. A new material called Dark Ink can now be summoned using the aspect of Void, and by spending Dark Ink and Astral Bricks, you can generate a new random name for a room. Or, if you're lucky, you may find a Scroll of Greater Renaming for sale at the Curio Shop for 50 tickets, which will give your room a more complex style of name. More types of renaming scrolls are planned to be added in the future, along with the ability to reroll a single word in a room's name while keeping the rest of the name unchanged.

Economic rebalances

The amount of essence produced when releasing pets into the wild used to be partially RNG-based; now, there is no randomness, but there are diminishing returns for extremely powerful pets, so you shouldn't expect to get more than about 200 of any one type of essence from any given pet. Players who are releasing low-to-moderate power pets should see more essence on average, due to the removal of the randomization, while also making it much harder for powergamers to break the economy (which has been a problem in the past).

Another economic rebalance that was planned for this update, but has been postponed, is to rework how items break. I want players who have only a few items to be able to use those items without worrying about those items breaking, but I also want to prevent the snowballing effect where players have been using hundreds of artifacts to make their pets stronger, releasing those pets for tens of thousands of essence, and then summoning hundreds or thousands more artifacts. To this end, a scaling factor is going to be added on break rates, where the chance of tier 5 summoned artifacts breaking will be based on the number of items in the room. Users with less than about 30 or 40 items per room will find that they break less often, whereas users with more than this many will find them breaking more often. This will only count functional items, not essence and materials that are produced from socialization or daily drops. This will probably go live in early january, since it's taking longer than expected to figure out the math to make it work as intended.

Miscellaneous changes

In addition to all of the above, there is now a RSS feed for site announcements, and two new collectable stamps have been added.

The next things planned after this are three new species of pets and more features for forums. If you have any questions about this update, post them in the associated announcement thread, the future development Q&A thread, or the bug reports forum!

Halloween 2025 & Stamp Collection

2025-10-20 01:43 AM

It's halloween!

From now through november 9th, the site will have a new spooky color palette, and you will be able to visit a haunted farmers' market in the Town Square where you can buy pumpkin seeds to plant in your garden, then trade the pumpkins for various festive decorations and other things.

(Note that some of the artwork for this update was a little bit rushed, and may undergo revisions over the next few days.)

This update also marks the release of the stamp collection system! I've had all the code completed for this for a while, but I was waiting on a lot of artwork. There's over 30 stamps that you can unlock and use to decorate your profile and your room descriptions, and more will be added regularly. You will also earn a few dopcoins for each stamp you unlock! A complete list of stamps you've unlocked can be found in your user profile.

Some stamps require you to raise a specific pet form. If you have already raised the required pet, you can collect the stamp by viewing the corresponding pet room or scrapbook page.

There was far too much for me to draw for this update, so expect the next few updates to involve less graphics. The next priority will be forums, although I do want to add new species sooner rather than later. I can't say when either of those things will be done, though.