Forums are here!

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

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.

September 2025 beta registration window! Also, shop search!

Tonight marks the beginning of our third open registration window! Welcome in, everybody!

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 email creechers@dopcom.net.

Additionally, tonight a feature is being added that many users have been asking for since the initial release of the site: you can now search for user shops selling a specific item! The search is text-based, and you can look for trades based on the item being requested or being sold. In theory, trades that are out of stock should not show up in results, but some shops that have been out of stock for a sufficiently long time may not be properly marked as such.

There's also a few minor bugfixes in this update, and a rebalance to summoning that should result in players getting more eggs from medium-size summonings on average.

Looking ahead: the collectable stamp system is effectively done, although I need to draw a lot more art for it, so you should hopefully see that some time in october. The Halloween event is also coming up, though, and that will likewise require a lot of art, but hopefully I'll be able to get all that done in time. After Halloween and stamps, some of the next few features you can look forward to are:

• Three new species of pets (yes, I know that I've been promising these for a while—they're almost here! One of them is fully drawn, but new species require a lot of artwork, and so they're competing for development time against things like the stamp system.)
• An overhaul to how pets drop items
• Forums

Weather, private trades, and scrapbook tweaks

There's a bunch of things in this update, so I'll break this into sections.

1. Private trades

This is a feature that's been promised since january, but it kept getting postponed and delayed for various reasons. But it's finally here!

So how does it work? Like most things in Dopcom, private trades are tied to a specific room. On the edit trades page for item rooms, there's now a new section where you can configure whether you want to receive private trades in each room. By default, all item rooms are set so that only people on your friends list can send private trades, but you can also remove this restriction and let anyone send trades, or you can disable private trades entirely.

When you send a private trade, the items that you offer will be "locked" in the trade until it is finalized. If the recipient accepts the trade, they will get those items and you will get the items you requested from the room, but if they decline it (or if you cancel the offer) the items will go back to you. You can view all of your outstanding trades in the trades page that has been newly added to the site header, or from your user profile.

2. Weather

It's raining! Or maybe it's snowing. Or maybe it's some other weather—I didn't check what the weather was going to be on the day this newspost went up. But the weather system has been implemented!

Currently, the daily weather affects gardening, summoning, pets, and random events. Every weather type has an associated aspect; all summons will include a little bit of that aspect even if you don't add any, and all pets will gain a tiny amount of affinity to that aspect each day. (If you don't want this affinity gain on your pets, you can equip them with an Umbrella Charm, which is an uncommon item that can be found from Air-aligned summons.) The effect on gardens is similar to the effects of existing gardening artifacts: sun makes crops grow faster, and rain or storms make them produce more. However, if it's foggy, snowy, or storming, crops will also grow slower. There's also a new summonable artifact that has a chance of producing essence associated with the weather every day. Each weather condition also has exclusive random events.

3. Scrapbook tweaks

Scrapbook pets can now have editable descriptions just like rooms can. Additionally, there was a bug preventing scrapbooks from being viewed while logged out, which has now been fixed, and there is also a new "showcase" tab on the scrapbook for your favorite pets. Released pet pages now have a button to add or remove that pet from the showcase, so that you can show off your favorite pets more easily.

4. New recipes

There are new recipes that use the tier 4 elemental ingredients that rarely grow from normal seeds! Each ingredient is used in one meal that provides a large amount of the assoicated aspect, and some are used in another meal that does something more unusual... (All four were supposed to have two recipes, but some of the recipes are still being worked on and I didn't want to delay the update any further just because of them.)

5. Quality of life improvements

• Trades can be reorganized within a room, something that all of my alpha testers have been pestering me to add for months
• A "return all items to inventory starting at this one" button has been added so that you can now clean your pet rooms and harvest your gardens more easily
• You can plant an entire garden with one button rather than having to plant a seed in each slot separately
• Room descriptions and user bios can be previewed
• Trades that are out of stock are hidden from the global trades list
• The user profile has a new "reminders" section, which lists daily events that might be otherwise forgotten (such as summoning omens from random events, or whether the Wishing Well has been used)
• There is now a News Archive section linked on the front page, to make older newsposts available
• Friends list and scrapbook are now linked directly on the page header
• Embed codes for empty rooms now point to a placeholder image rather than breaking

What's next

Summer is ending, meaning that I have to go back to my teaching job, which may impact the pace of the next few updates. But the current plan is that the next update will happen in early october and will add collectable stamps hidden around the site that you can decorate your user profile with, three new species of pet, and a new and improved halloween event.

After the october update, I will need a break from drawing things for a while, so I'm tentatively planning to focus on adding some (extremely simplified) forums this winter. Other major updates that are a little further out include the in-game calendar system, and modifications to how pets drop items.

The next registration window will be in september, once any bugs introduced by all of this update's many changes are fixed.

June 2025 beta registration window

The second beta registration window for Dopcom Creechers opens tonight! To everyone joining the site, welcome in and I hope you enjoy your time here!

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 email creechers@dopcom.net.

To ensure that Dopcom Creechers stays a safe and friendly place for everyone, all user bios and room descriptions made by users who have joined in the past 7 days are held for moderation. Our moderation team aims to review posts in a timely manner, but please allow up to twelve hours for posts to become visible.

The site is still under development. Some features that you can expect to see in the next few updates are:

• Private trades between users
• Calendar and weather system
• Three new species of pets
• Modifications to how creatures drop items