Hooray, hooray!

We launched our new OotS, made by Myla! I’m looking forward to lots of friendly bluebirds flitting about the Cave:

Now, onto the updates that occurred last month, at the beginning of this month, and will be occurring later this month:

The Spring Swarm Extravaganza took place!  The residents were busy running in and out of the Cave, collecting bug droppings beads, making jewelry, sending jewelry, receiving tokens, and getting prizes.  It was all quite exciting and successful; Professor Mariel now has plenty of funding to do a number of different experiments on the magic bugs.  Thanks for your help!  We concluded the event with two raffles, giving out some left over chrysalises and 13 sprouts!  We definitely went out of the spring sprout season with a bang.

We held four Cave Challenges this month.  Grids, The Infinite Cavern, The Return Home, A Story of Control and Space, and the currently on-going Mycena Cave Cuisine Competition.

If you are interested in participating in the Mycena Cave Cuisine Competition, be sure to submit your entry by May 3rd, 23:59 Server Time.  Cave Staff is VERY excited to start cooking up and taking a look at your recipes! :)

Who’s That Custom?! wrapped up in early April, and prizes of nuggets and gems were given out.  We also raffled some Glowing Changingshrooms between participants who got all of the answers correct.

The shops stocked a few new items during the month of May.  Leetle Companions received some new leetle ones, and Sullie hunted down a new item for her shop as well!

BRB to swim around in all of our new friends!

This morning, the Magic Puddle got a revamp.  Searching for items is a lot easier (start typing the item and the item you’re looking for will pop right up), and removing items should be faster as well.  Thanks, glitch!

A Mushroom Migration took place this afternoon. The consumable mushrooms that were for sale in the Out of the Shadows (Lone Mushroom, Blushroom & Petrified Mushroom) have hopped over to Fungimental Magic.  You can now buy these mushrooms with nuggets, and the price of the Blushroom has been lowered significantly. 

In addition, a new consumable mushroom has appeared in Fungimental Magic, the Mushroom of Forgetting.  This new mushroom goes along with the changes to the Family Connection (see section below for more details) and, if fed to a child, will break apart the parent-child bond and make the parent and child both forget about their previous connection to one another.  Use it wisely!

Also, there has been a little update to the shop item images.  You can mouse over an item to see the item’s description, rather than having to search for it in the item listing.

Mid-April, we announced changes to Mycenian family connections.  We introduced changes to connection vocabulary, viewable at the Sacred Tree.

There are a few new developments which we have just put into place:

We implemented kinnen; genesses and their charges can perform kinnen at the Sacred Tree to create a parent-child bond.  The account who owns the child is charged 3 gems at the end of the kinnen process. To break this bond, a child must consume a Mushroom of Forgetting.

Excitingly, We have created the single Mycenian geness!  A lot of you were disappointed that Cave residents could not be single parents.  A Mycenian can now choose to press their forehead to the Sacred Tree in order to create a geness that includes just one individual.  A Mycenian might choose to do this if they wish to become a parent without any partner(s), or perhaps as a commitment to solitude (though other Mycenians can be added to the geness at any point).  A geness with just one individual is eligible to obtain sprouts via raffle or the sprout queue.  Resulting sprouts will still be unique and the sprout will be the same species & type as the parent.

Mid-May we will be launching sprouts for USD/Custom Credit.  We will start out by having sign-ups for a test sprout queue with six available slots.  The spots for the six slots will most likely be first-come-first-serve, but we are still working out the details and will release more information in the next coming weeks.

Chapter 5 of the Mycena Cave story has been written and is entitled “Buried Treasure.”  Take the time to read through this chapter; it is an excellent read.  Thanks, Prose!

In order to reduce queue wait times and to prepare for the selling of sprouts, we are adding more artists to the team.  For more information, head over here.  Artists have until May 4th at 23:59 ST to submit a Round One Application!

There were a few updates in April concerning forums, accounts, and echoes.  Changing your username can only occur once every 60 days.  Read more about that update here! The forum history filter is now collapsible so that you don’t have to scroll past the ginormous filter box while browsing.  In addition, echo search is up.  I’ve already used it about a kazillion times!  Finally, Chinese characters are supported.  I will refrain from using any since I would probably say something I didn’t intend to, haha.

Forum search is on its way to completion, so that will go up in May. :)  In addition, we’re due for a rules update.  We will put most of the changes and additions up for a vote so that you can have input in shaping our community!  Please keep your eyes open for that; we’ll be posting that thread before too long.

I hope everyone has an excellent May!  Thanks for making our community so amazing!!

We have created the single Mycenian geness!Myla

EEEEE. This is so exciting. Thank you all so much for being so open to listening to your players. <3

I’m also completely amped to see the first new sprouts. Once I’m out of the custom queue I’ll definitely be lining up for the sprouts queue!

*has nothing to add to the conversation, just leaves this image*

I am really excited about the single parent geness! I know a lot of people had concerns about that, and it’s really cool that it’s been addressed.

Also, the move for the shrooms and making blushrooms cheaper is fantastic. I’m loving this whole update so much!

So many updates, you guys are amazing. >w<
I should start saving up for the babies… *w*

Yay! Love the updates!

Side note: I personally would enjoy and appreciate the site allowing Japanese, Russian, Hindu and Faris characters too.

Side note: I personally would enjoy and appreciate the site allowing Japanese, Russian, Hindu and Faris characters too.Saeta Inoue

The change was us upgrading all of our tables to full UTF-8, not anything about Chinese characters specifically. So give ‘em a try, see if they work :)

You cannot propose to a child

I tried to have my geness propose to Haikai and got this error. Can this please be changed? Me and Frey don’t want to grow up our EoL babies because it makes more sense story wise for them to actually be sprouts.

Thank goodness for the 60-day limit on name changes. I had a horrible phase of going through ten usernames or something, but now that this restriction is in place, it’s probably not going to happen anytime soon.

Also, BLUEBIRDS, YEAH.

Good work as always, staff.

EDIT: Just noticed that the mushrooms are now all for nuggets. That’s a bit disappointing, but I’ll learn to roll with it.

It’s a relief to see the mushrooms transferred to the fungimental shop… I had bought a couple cheap ones a while back when there was a surplus in the economy (from the light in the darkness, ect), but it’s nice to know I won’t have to be so worried about using the few I have left now. ^^ I always thought five gems was a bit steep.

Also, the shroom of forgetting freaks me out. Is the brain part of the mushroom? They have to eat a brain-lookin’-thing? D8> Hopefully they also forget having to ever eat the thing. XD Unless the mushroom goes up in their brain and… the image is a demonstration of it at work… 0_0

Angsty Teen: I hate you, mom! I want out of this stupid family!
Mom: ... Really… -shoves brainshroom at-
Teen: ... ._. ... Actually, I love you, mom. I’m going to be good and do my homework now.

I… was not weirded out by those brainshrooms until Pooka mentioned that and now… They seem gross, aha. Oh dear, what if the mushroom is the only part, and the brain’s just its food?? A parasitic mushroom? I wonder whose brain that is…
I’m really glad about the price decrease and the move though. That finally has convinced me to give Maighal a Blushroom, lol.

Although I’d like to point out that Out of the Shadows still has the shrooms listed in the graphic by the forever coats. Are those going to be changed? (I know they just changed over, but I thought I’d mention it.)

My fear happens to be seeing organs outside of a body so the forgetting shroom was no me gusta from the start, but now I know not to scroll down when I visit the fungimental store~ I have a really weird fear.

Also, I just realized the irony of the fact that now we will have to feed a lone shroom to a geness of one to break it off.

I tried to have my geness propose to Haikai and got this error. Can this please be changed? Me and Frey don’t want to grow up our EoL babies because it makes more sense story wise for them to actually be sprouts.Yoshi

This is the way it is because babies cannot eat things, and so allowing you to perform Kinnen with a sprout would get you into a situation where you cannot undo it without growing the pet first (which itself is an action that cannot be undone). That said, it’s really a judgement call so this is something we can consider.

Although I’d like to point out that Out of the Shadows still has the shrooms listed in the graphic by the forever coats. Are those going to be changed? (I know they just changed over, but I thought I’d mention it.)raus

Yep, that graphic still needs to be updated :)

Incidentally, while the interface hasn’t yet changed to support it, it is already technically possible to form a single-pet geness. Just put the proposing pet’s own ID into who to propose to, i.e. have it propose to itself.

It’ll look a little weird because you’ll have to choose to accept or reject your pet’s proposal to itself, which is not technically correct canon-wise (a solitary geness is a promise to the Sacred Tree that you are able to care for another, not a promise to yourself). But no sense in making you wait while I figure out how best to reflect this on the website, so for now just have your single pets propose to themselves and understand that what’s actually happening is a promise to the Tree, and at least this process will get you to the end-result before I get the interface updated :)

For those of you who will form solitary genesses, note that a solitary genesses is considered to be geness like any other: in particular, pets in a (solitary or otherwise) geness cannot themselves be proposed to, although of course the geness can propose to any other non-geness’d pet. But, for example if two pets that are both in a solitary geness want to get together, one of them will have to eat a lone mushroom to break their bond with the Tree and then be proposed to by the other. If both solitary genesses are parents, then this gets trickier because you can’t eat a Lone Mushroom while you have children. This is nothing new, exactly… it’s just some thing that bears thinking about so that it doesn’t catch you by surprise down the line.