March comes stomping in from the cold with a beautiful Pastel Star ineki by King:

If you like it, be sure to pick one up from the Out of the Shadows shop before April!

Besides that, we’ve had a lot of exciting updates in the last month:

Valentine’s Day is always special for us here. We saw a hooded wanderer come through and grew an Essence of Love flower for everyone.  In celebration we also offered every existing member a one-time chance to buy 10 gems for $1. We had our breeding raffle in which nine new flowers started growing! The flowers are reaching maturity soon, so don’t forget to check the tree in the next few days!

February also saw the release of a new game, Spellstones. It’s been in playtesting since release, and thanks to the high-score contest we set up, had had quite a lot of play! The contest is now over and so there currently isn’t a reward for playing. That said, we are readying ourselves to take it out of playtesting and have it give nuggets. So expect that soon!

We’ve “slightly” modified the high-scores for our game Echolocation. It now takes play-time into account, so a 24-point board that took 1 minute to complete is ranked above a 24-point board that took 1m30 to complete. This is to give scores a little bit more granularity: as it was, typically we’d see 3-4 different scores on the board, which meant if you weren’t on the scoreboard in the first few days of the month, you don’t get on there at all. We’re excited to fix the Echolocation high-score board so that the competition lasts all month.

We have completely rewritten our BBCode implementation site-wide. This means profiles, pet profiles, echos, forum posts and everything else are affected by this upgrade. You can check out the list of things you can do on the BBCode Guide, as well as how to do them. We made it as backwards-compatible as possible, but one thing that didn’t make the cut (because it wasn’t really bbcode, just something we made up at the time) was floating images: the [img-l] and [img-r] tags. We’re still in the process of trying to come up with a way of working this ability back into our BBCode implementation, so stay tuned ^^

On February 8th we hosted a livestreamed “Ask Me Anything” for all of you on Mycena Cave. We created a page where you could ask your own questions, and vote up other questions, and when the time came we went down the list, answering and talking about them. It was great fun! Probably more fun than any of us expected :D We also recorded it on YouTube, so if you didn’t catch it or if you want to watch it again, you can check it out here! ...and also 16 minutes of fail which apparently got recorded too. Juney wrote up a great summary if you’re more of the reading than the video-watching type.

The end of February sees us through to the end of our Dungeon Diving Rescue event, which was run by two of our moderators, Firkasa and Amaterasu. It proved popular beyond anybody’s expectations, and has got us thinking about how to transform it into something that could be a permanent site addition :)

We’re currently smack dab in the middle of our Choose Your Own Adventure event, a creativity based event centered around… well, choosing your own adventure ;)

Many people have asked if they can watch our artists work on art, letting them see how it’s done. Some artists are willing to stream their art while working on a custom, but of course that limits the viewers to people who buy customs… not ideal. So! With that in mind, Myla has been streaming her work on the upcoming Spring Event banner! So, if you’re interested in that sort of thing, keep an eye on this thread.

March has also seen the addition of several new shop items in Sullie’s Closet and the Leeetle Companions Shop. You should check them out if you haven’t already!

Finally, a quick note about Custom Credit. The rate at which people buy credit for themselves and others is faster than we can create customs, so we’re approaching our limit. Once it’s reached, the custom credit shop will close again until the amount of CC on the site has dropped down to a more reasonable level. We’ve compiled the data on this so that we can be transparent about it (unlike last time when we just announced “fyi it’s closing” and “oh hey it’s open again”), so you can read more details and see the current status on the Custom Credit shop page.

You can now see your incoming and outgoing transfer history! Admittedly, it’s in a stupid place until I can figure out a better place to put it. Head to your profile and click the “Give!” button, as though you were going to transfer something to yourself. There you can see all of your transfers. Unfortunately, we didn’t track anonymity data before January 26, so all transfers prior to that are treated as Anonymous. The page still needs work (e.g. searching, pagination, etc) but it’s all there for you to look at already :)

Some exciting stuff here!

Spellstones had a bit of a rocky road to begin with, with many of you experiencing “state errors”. As it turned out, this ended up being a good thing, as it finally allowed us a way to reliably reproduce a bug that has been plaguing us since we first opened: the session-tracking software would sometimes just randomly log you out (i.e. destroy your session) for no discernible reason. As the bug wasn’t in “our code” and we couldn’t reproduce it reliably, the only fix we could think of was just to default-select the “remember me” option on login, as this would automatically log you in if you weren’t but should have been. The downside is that the server would “forget” things about you when this happened — for example, your cave in game, your spellstones game. However, after Spellstones provided us with a way of reliably reproducing the error, we were able to implement a fix in the session software. And so if you’re wondering, yes, the bug where Cave In! sometimes awards you zero (or very few) nuggets for no reason has been fixed!!!

We’ve just been featured on Virtual Pet List! What this means is that reviews of Mycena Cave are a lot more visible to VPL members. Is there something you want to share about Mycena Cave? Or something you wish you had known before signing up? Those are great reasons to write a review :D

(also, you can totally “like” Mycena Cave on there if you click the “General Information” tab from the reviews page… and I think most VPL members don’t understand this because the “most liked” site has only 3 likes? ...shall we make MC the most liked site on VPL? :D)

We’ve started work on our next game! By “started work” I mean daemon has already sent me a playable demo. It still needs a lot of work before it’s fully featured, but I’m very hopeful we can get this done quickly. We’re targeting this game towards “artsy” people rather than “logicky” people, so for those of you who see Spellstones and Echolocation in your nightmares, this one might be for you :)

Also of note, March 20th will mark the beginning of the Spring Season, which means that our Winter Seasonal Mushroom, the White Wind Mushroom, will be replaced. If you’re planning on getting a White Wind, make sure you buy the mushroom before the 20th!

Finally, some important upcoming dates:

• the CYOA Prompt 2 deadline is coming up quickly at March 3
• the CYOA Prompt 3 begins on March 5
• the CYOA event ends on March 16

after which we’ll have a nice little breather, before gearing up for our Spring Event! So if you’re pining for a clicky-style event, never fear! It will be showing its face before too long. Just… you know, not right away, we need a little bit of normalcy before diving into an event again ^^

yayyyyyy no more state errors 8D;;;

i’m really happy about the CC bar! i hope the “closed until we drop back to 80%” thing works well enough. i’ll be curious to see whether that value is adequate, or if you’ll need to modify that threshold later :>

another new game so soon? ooh im excited!

Man this has been an exciting month. Thanks for the update in BBC! Super excited to have tables available now :D
I’m excited to see what kind of new game is going to come out next hehe <3

Im a bit sad about the CC shop, but I suppose it’s nothing that can be helped. I do love the CC-meter though! x3

I have a question though about CC. What if I have some left over CC from a custom (like $5) and I have no plans for a future custom anytime soon. Would I be allowed to request that the small amount of CC be turned into gems? I can’t remember if this was address/answered somewhere before… <__<

Wow Feb really zooms by. o.o And not just because it’s short, either.

CC question: If you have a bit of CC, can you use that to partially pay for an order and then make up the difference? Or do you need to pay for the whole order in CC?

• If you have 30 CC and your next custom costs $40, then when it is time to pay for it the site will only charge you $10 to pay for your $40 custom.
• If you have 50 CC and your next custom costs $40, then when it is time to pay for it the site won’t charge you anything at all, and after that you will have 10 CC left.

Pirran: I’m not sure I understand, what is it that concerns you?

I thiiink what Pirran is worried about is what a few others seem confused on - correct me if I’m wrong Pirran!

If you have 40CC for example and are buying an 80 dollar custom and the CC shop is closed… it doesn’t mean you’re just out of luck! On ANY custom you’re buying, you always have the option of purchasing it with USD like you would gems. CC only introduces a way for OTHERS to sell it as currency. So for example - my last custom was ~115 I think? I had 75 in CC, so I provided the difference out of pocket in USD. The option to pay the remaining balance comes up when your custom is accepted & final price set! There isn’t a cap on you spending USD for your custom when it is accepted. C: I hope that made sense & was what you were referring to / worried about?

Basically what glitch said, looking back LOL.

Yes, you will always be able to pay for customs with USD, CC, or a mix of both! :)

The purpose of CC, sort of along the lines of what Dove was saying, is to give people who don’t want to spend USD on customs the opportunity to acquire a custom by buying CC from others with nuggets, art, gems, etc.  We have to put a cap on how much CC we release because we can only make customs so fast and so CC drains away very slowly.  It would be irresponsible for us to have huge amounts of CC floating around, waiting to be used and continuing to accumulate. 

(Sort of off-topic, but awhile back I had a nightmare of getting my hands chopped off and everyone was coming to me and angrily shouting “LOOK AT ALL THIS CC I HAVE NOW IT IS USELESSSS RARRWRRgggg.” TnT)

I sound like a broken record, but I’m so thankful for all the work you guys put in to making us happy!
You rock! <3

You successfully bought a male Pastel Star for 10 gems!

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Just a heads up for everyone in the trading forums currently making deals including CC:

No guarantees about when it will open again, so please keep that in mind when you receive offers including CC!

We also have a quick update to Spellstones:
Now as you select tiles, your found words will highlight if they share a prefix with your selection. This should make it a lot easier to tell early on if you’ve already submitted a word :)

i think you broke spellstones, glitch! it’s no longer showing me my score as i play, and it’s also not highlighting words like you indicated it would. xD

i’m using firefox, in case that makes a difference. :>

Ahh~ New BBCode to play with, this ought to amuse me for awhile. ^w^  Although I hope you guys manage to replace the text aligning ability since it really came in handy on site…
Also, something else I noticed was that with the new title ability automatically adds a line space between the Title and the text when the older one gave you the ability to just have the text right under it. Just a bit annoying there since it’s turned all my character bios to chaos,  but not too bad since I can still work around it. Still, I figured I’d let someone know it was doing this. >.<

You can make tables within tables. >_>;; And making an invisible table and making two columns and plopping the image you want right or left in the corresponding column is a nice little way to unbreak all those broken [img-r] and [img-l] things… /may have just done so on her own profile

Edit: I highly recommend doing everything with tables first visible before going =invis. ...or else you’ll have a helluva time like I just did.