Newspost: 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, 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.