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 this thread, the future development Q&A thread, or the bug reports forum!

Thanks for all your hard work!! :D I'm very excited for all the new stuff, and excited too about forums!! It's gonna be super nice to have the Q&A forums too, I've often gotten stuck on things, or feel like I'm doing something wrong. Very excited to see this site continue to grow :]

So excited for the forums and also the RSS feed! Thanks for all of your work in making this community & this site!

I'm interested to hear what kinds of additional features people want to see in regards to forums. Three things that I definitely want to prioritize are the ability to subscribe to threads so that you'll be notified when someone posts in them, the ability to see all of your own posts in one place, and the ability to embed pets, rooms, and external links in forum posts.

About the economic rebalances, will the new scaling factor affect the break rates for items used inside garden rooms as well?

Yes, the scaling factor will affect garden items such as fountains, sunlamps, and condensers. However, I plan to set it up in a way that crop items produced by the plants in the garden will not contribute to the increased break chance.

ouh that does make me a bit worried abt putting a lot of tea sets in my rooms... especially considering they got nerfed so hard, they'll just be taking up space with not much of a benefit...

That's a good point that I hadn't considered before—I might want to strengthen tea sets a little bit to compensate.

Thanks for the forum and the update ! I wonder how the scaling of items in rooms will impact the gameplay Time to experiment :D

Ohh, the forum is up! :) Thank you for all your hard work!

yippee for forums !! thanks for all the hard work you do with this site; its become a part of my daily routine, at this point (^人^)

yayyyy forums!! :D

"and two new collectable stamps have been added." have these been added to the stamp collection page? they're not showing up for me,,,

so exciting to see the forums here! always makes a site feel more lively. the rebalances seem very good! already got one of the stamps, very curious as to the other one.

@wit Some stamps have secret unlock criteria and don't show up on the collections page until you've found them. I will say, though: both of the new stamps are related to raising specific pets, and both of them are related to annual events.

How general is the code for these forums? Could it be used elsewhere by others if necessary, or is it kinda super bespoke for this site and hard to adapt to other purposes? Not that I'm in a huge hurry to go elsewhere, I just kinda miss forums in general.

There's a few things like account creation and the stamps system that are closely interconnected with the rest of the site, and the moderation tools are more general than they need to be because they also have to account for the non-forum parts of the site, but it absolutely would not be hard to make a version of this that functions as standalone forum software that other people could reuse for unrelated sites. This is actually something I've been wondering myself, whether other people would find it useful if I made the forum code available for use in other projects.

"(...) 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. (...)"

Aww goodbye to my science room... but that's probably for the best LOL. Now what do I do with all my seasoned pans...

edit: Also, did you change something about the Mirror of Solitude? I don't get notifications for items gained by self reflection in my pet rooms anymore.

No, I didn't change anything about how the mirror works, but it only triggers if the pet has socializations remaining at the end of the day, and there's no message if no items are produced.

.....ah. It looks like last night's rollover didn't fully happen because when I reverted the code back to the old item-breaking mechanics at the last moment, I typed something slightly wrong. Well, that's an easy fix!

I've still been getting Mirror of Solitude drops the past three days, but no messages at all (including the rollover that just happened, if you made a fix :0).

Thanks for the hard work! It took me a bit to notice the announcement in the first place, but I do like the idea of having soft limits in rooms in that way...but yeah, I think I put 20 tea sets in every room right now hahaha.

"and there's no message if no items are produced." well i'm getting no messages at all from mirrors rn either, items produced or not. actually, most messages aren't appearing anymore for me. (is that normal? didn't even give me a message when my pet evolved to a new form. or when my items break.)

Okay, I found the problem. In an attempt to speed up rollovers, I rewrote the code so that it would queue up all the messages that needed to be written as part of rollover, and then send them to the database all at once, rather than sending each message to the database separately. However, I apparently neglected the final step of actually sending all the queued messages to the database. This has been fixed and you should see notifications go back to normal starting with tonight's rollover.