January 2026 registration window

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

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!

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