August’s OotS is City Beats, along with their Hip Headphones and Streetcorner! This month’s coat was created by Myla and items were a collaboration between Myla and Loon. You can purchase this set in the Out of the Shadows shop through the end of the month!

August’s monthly roundup has been posted and all stickers and prizes have been distributed!

Our monthly Productivi-Day will be held on Saturday, August 15th! We look forward to spending the day productive-ing with you all!

It would seem there is a new addition to the Bag of Wonders: try your luck for a Magical Microphone, made by Myla! Additionally, we have two new item donations for sale in the Marketplace: Birds of a Feather and Barbed Wire!

...is ongoing through 12:01pm ST on August 2nd! There’s still time to have some desert-themed fun and earn yourself some shiny prizes! The prize shop for this event will remain open until August 9th. As a reminder, we are experimenting with a new gem sale system for additional event prizes. You are now able to purchase up to 7 additional scarabs, priced at 3 gems a piece, from the event shop. You’ll have an opportunity to provide feedback on this mechanic and the rest of the event in a feedback survey once we’ve wrapped things up!

Due to their increasingly hectic life outside the Cave, Hush is officially on hiatus and won’t be able to make site art for the next few months. We are hoping that things will calm down and we will once again be able to enjoy new work from them, and will keep you updated of any changes to their status!

After much work, we have completed and released our rules revamp and terms of use update. Aside from general reorganization, we have added context, adjusted wording, and clarified some of our previous rules, as well as changed some of them to better fit our current moderation style. You can find more information about these updates in this announcement.

We are looking to grow our art team and have opened applications for new staff artists! Full details about the application process and what it means to be a part of our staff team can be found in this post. We are very excited to be expanding the team and hope that you will consider applying; if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out!

A few brief updates on behind the scenes work:

• glitch had to spend most of his MC coding hours this month getting the event up and running! He created a new interface to help us with the entries that needed to be checked manually, coded/updated coding to various activities, and created the discovery dig (minesweeper-esque) game from scratch. This month, he plans on getting Gemble up as a nugget-paid game and is going to start work on upgrades to some management abilities for players and continue to chip away at the rest of the marketplace updates.
• Myla finished working on the rules updates and the artist search. She’s continuing to work on some spec sheets and planning for artist and feature-related updates down the line alongside starting up work on the fall event and her other usual work (orders, estimates, etc.).
• Planning work has begun on our fall event! :) We’re very excited about it, and can’t wait until we are able to share more!

Cool City Beats thx Myla and Loon! Planning to use all savings for this OoS Monthly.

Hi everyone,

This is a quick update from Myla and myself. We’ve been without power, internet, or reliable cell service since Monday morning, due to the Derecho that blew through the midwest. We hope to get at least power back within the next few days, though we’re told it could be up to another week from now. Reliable internet service is anybody’s guess. All this to say:

Please expect any processes that rely on us (e.g. Paypal purchases, any requests that involve us specifically, etc.) as well as any processes that require our non-mobile devices (e.g. significant code updates, art Myla is working on, etc.) to be delayed. We expect to be back in fully working order within a week. If things resolve sooner, or if it looks like it will drag on for longer than expected, we’ll update you again.

Stay safe <3

Good news! We now have power, and mobile data has become a lot more reliable over the last few days, so we’re mostly back :)

glitch Myla Can only imagine what you did about your refrigerator w/o power. Anyway — welcome back! I’m sure that’s a huge relief!

Thank you!! We lost most everything in our fridge and freezer but took that as an opportunity to super clean it out, and already have a few things restocked!

Ooof fridge solidarity. Mine broke and I can’t get a new one til Sept bc of the factories were closed. Anyway glad y’all are ok. :D After that storm hit, I definitely had to do the rounds checking in on all my midwest peeps. <3

We’re back online! Woohoo! :)

Yay! Everything OK?

Yep, everything’s picking back nicely :) Thanks for asking!

In other news…

After a fair amount of data analysis, we’ve come up with the following scoring metric for Gemble. Mathematically, it’s a logarithmic function that’d be annoying to type out here, but I suppose the easy way would just be to write out the score table. Things tend to change once people actually start playing a game “for real”, so we may revisit these nugget scorings sometime in the future and adjust them if necessary, but for now nugget scores are as follows:

 

We’ve given it a makeover to match what we did for the Desert event, and also added a little convenience feature, where if you’re playing on a device with a keyboard, you can use the keys 1-6 to select a gem color instead of having to click it :)

Thanks glitch! <3

One new item can be bought for nuggets in the marketplace:

Otherworldly Eyes, made by Hush, donated by Pink Chocolate!

Thank you for the donation <3!

As an update to my long-term toggleability project, I’ve added in giving dras site coats toggleable wings and hair which has been something I’ve wanted to do for awhile now just to make site dras coats a bit more flexible for everyone.

The toggle project/requests page is here, and my project tracker spreadsheet is here. It includes a tab with a record of which dras coats I’ve completed so far (which is just Polished Jade currently)!

Thank you for an excellent new pair of spooky eyes, Pink and Hush! ouo

YES thank you so so much, Myla, that’ll be a really nice change! c:

omg, toggleable dras parts!! I’m very excited about that!

Site dras have all been updated! If anyone finds that I’ve missed something, shoot me an echo <33