Newspost: Furniture update & public beta

Today is a momentous occasion for two reasons. First of all: furniture! It's now possible to decorate your pet's room with a wide variety of cute little decorations. Most of these are summoned or can be bought at the general store, but there's a few hidden ones here and there that come from other sources. Every pet room has a ceiling slot, a floor slot, two wall slots, and five shelf slots, and there are over 30 different furniture items available.

And the second reason: public beta! Dopcom Creechers had a private soft-launch in october of 2024, but the site is in a state now where I want to get playtest feedback from a wider audience. So, for all of you coming from Pixel Cat's End or any of the other sites I posted the signup link, welcome in! Dopcom is pretty slow-paced so far, but I have huge plans for it going forward. Be sure to check the getting started guide if you haven't alredy.

Besides furniture, this update comes with a lot of small improvements and quality-of-life fixes. Some of these include:

• Many items didn't have sprites yet. Those have now been drawn!
• There's a dark mode now! It can be toggled using a button in the header on any page.
• The random pet button is now guaranteed to give you a pet you can socialize with if possible.
• The general store now shows item descriptions and has a better UI overall, and the summoning circle now shows how much of each essence is in your inventory.
• Some foods that boost affinities can now grow rarely from normal fruit and vegetable seeds, in order to make it easier to get affinity to certain aspects that had historically been more difficult. These items have also been made tier-4 cooking ingredients, although no recipes use them yet.
• You can now continue feeding pets that are fully-grown to give them affinities, although they won't gain any additional power
• Fluff balls were too weak before, so now they give power on social rather than growth. The previous Lightning Ball item that used to give power on social has been replaced with a new Tuning Fork item that increases the chances of obtaining gleaming essence.
• Passwords can now be changed by clicking "Account Settings" in the header.
• There have also been minor tweaks and rebalances to the growth of certain pets, and various other small quality-of-life changes.

With all of this completed, the next thing to think about is a certain holiday coming up in a couple of weeks...

The other big changes coming up will be:

• Adding direct trades (a feature I've wanted to add but haven't had time for since the site's inception)
• Three new species of pet that can come from summoning
• A Curio Shop in the town square, where you can exchange furniture items
• More cooking recipes

So, thank you to all my alpha testers, and welcome in to all my new beta players!