Newspost: New species, crafting overhaul, and grooming

2026-03-26 01:28 AM

This update is a big one! Originally, this was supposed to release about a month ago, but more stuff kept coming up (both stuff that I wanted to add to the update and stuff in real life that prevented me from working on the site).

The grooming system

Pets can now be groomed! There are a variety of grooming supplies that can be purchased at the general store or that can be crafted. If your pets get too unkempt, any charms equipped to them will get tangled up and stop working. Some items keep your pets groomed longer than others, but you always have the option of grooming pets every day if you want.

New item drops

Originally, a few types of pets (but not all) had a chance to drop items every day. These pets also had a chance of giving these items on socialization. However, the fact that most pets didn't have any drops made this frustrating, and also made all pets feel a little too similar. With this update, the system of pet-specific item drops has been completely overhauled.

Now, all pets have two loot tables: one for when they socialize, and another for when they are groomed. For most pets, grooming has a higher chance to produce items, but these items will usually be lower rarity, whereas socialization has a better chance of producing rarer items. Additionally, all pets can produce some sort of essence (usually Prima Materia and Gleaming Essence) on socialization, whereas very few pets can produce essence during grooming.

Two items had to be reworked for compatibility with this update, because they interacted with the old daily drops system. These items are the Thief's Bag and the Flourishing Bonsai. The Thief Bag originally added a variety of items to every pet's daily item pool; now, it instead has a chance of providing a random item for the pet's owner during socialization, in addition to whatever items are produced by the pet or by other items such as the Virtuoso's Flute. The Flourishing Bonsai originally increased the drop rate of daily items and items produced when the pet grows to a new form; the latter effect is unchanged, but the former effect has been replaced so that it now has a random chance to produce one item from the pet's grooming drop table every day.

Crafting overhaul

In order to ensure that every pet had item drops, several new crafting materials have been added, and new crafting recipes have also been added to use them. The old crafting page was getting unwieldy, so the layout has now been changed into a table view. Additionally, crafting recipes are now sorted into several sections, and it is possible to craft multiple copies of the same item in bulk.

New species

There's three of them! Everybody say hello to: the Sneaky Egg, the Chilly Egg, and the Spiky Egg. Each of these three eggs comes from summoning with a specific element. Because the update was taking too long to finish, there aren't any stamps associated with these species yet, but there will be soon. (For the same reason, more potential forms for the Spiky Egg creature will be added at the same time.)

Other tweaks

• A few new messages can appear when socializing with pets, some of which are dependent on the pet's traits
• Pets equipped with a Clarity Charm now provide a message in the room log specifying what factor(s) are influencing which form the pet grows into.
• The logout page has been redesigned because people kept linking to it in their bios as a prank.
• Forums have been expanded! The Q&A forum now supports thread creation, and a separate Dopcom Creechers Discussion forum has been added. Expect more forums to be added in the future as well.
• Various back-end performance improvements

What's next?

April Fools is just around the corner, and the main reason that I rushed to get this update out when I did was to make sure I would have enough time to get everything ready for the holiday. After that, as mentioned before, I'm planning to add several new stamps and add new forms for some of the new species to grow into. Once those loose ends are wrapped up, however, I'm going to take a little break from Dopcom Creechers so that I can work on smaller projects and catch my metaphorical breath. Development will probably resume in june of this year, and when it does, the first priority will be the calendar system.

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