This isn't going to be the flashiest update in the world, but it is a lot of stuff, so buckle up.

The Ad Revolution

I have decided to discontinue working with an actual ad network, so feel free to whitelist the site in your adblocker. I will spare you my laundry list of complaints about google adsense, just know that it was a lot of hassle and very little pay.

The tl;dr is that google punishes you very heavily for not going along with all of their tracking and experimental features, so even though you all have been seeing nearly 100k ads a day, I have not yet seen a single dollar of it. In addition to this, the activity spike during the registration window would have had them having to pay me a whole $2 (for the entire weekend), which is apparently suspicious, so they gave me a 30 day account suspension.

All of this is just not really worth it, so I've devised an alternate funding plan, because quite honestly it can't be worse than what I was doing before when it comes to ads.

Trade Offer

I get: $4

You get: The opportunity to put whatever your heart desires (with some rules) in the ad section on the bottom of the page for 30 days (additional 30 day blocks are only $3). We are putting ads back into the hands of the people, and I'd like to use the space for you all to show off some of the cool things you've been working on, share pictures of your cats, or even show your creativity in meme generation (or Brain Josh roleplay).

To view the detailed guidelines on what is and isn't allowed, visit the new Promotions Policy article. After you've done this, requests can be submitted on ko-fi.

Note: If you've donated more than $4 to the ko-fi recently (no cut-off date, just use your best discretion), you may send me a direct message on ko-fi with an image and link and I will retroactively allow you to submit some content.

If even one (1) person takes me up on this offer, this will be more profitable than adsense was. In the meantime, please enjoy some pictures of my beloved kitty cat.


Finances Insight

I thought I would give you all a little insight into where your money actually goes when you do things like the above or otherwise donate. I've sort of budgeted the expenses for the site into two categories: Maintenance and Improvements.

Maintenance costs are the things that are necessary for the site to pay in order to actually stay live, even if they are coming out of pocket. About 50% of the maintenance costs are business operational costs (government, legal, taxes, and registration fees). 30% is server/hosting, and 20% is administrative costs (things I use to make my life easier, paying Naja to help with the odds and ends, and so on). The site takes, roughly, $2k USD a year to maintain, and thanks to some very very lovely donors, this is just about covered for the year. Every time I improve the server, this cost goes up and the server pie slice grows a little larger.

Improvement costs are what happens if I get extra money beyond what I need to maintain the site. This will go into things like music, additional art (like new clothing/decor), and writing (like new scenarios)! Money beyond maintenance costs goes directly into things that will add additional content for users, and can be used to speed up the development of the site beyond what just one person (me) can do. It also means I can seek out people who have skills that I don't personally have. Up until now, this has not been something I've been able put money into.


Assorted Changes

A lot of this update is back-end, but there are still some pretty significant changes you might notice:

- Mayors are now back to boosting themselves! (But their boosts don't count towards the boost values.) Cats for sale or trade now no longer get the boosts (they can't use them anyway).-

- Cat pages now have a button to view the base stats.

- Cats can now generate with all possible combinations of pronouns.

- Nestor now keeps track of how long it's been since they've offered you a cat. If you haven't been offered a cat in the last week, you will be guaranteed a cat. No more terrible RNG keeping you catless for weeks on end. This also means that if you are a user who only checks in a couple times a week, you are still guaranteed at least one cat a week.

Because Nestor just now started counting, the next time you visit the meeting grounds, you are guaranteed to get a cat.

- Adult cats can now be accepted directly to traveling when Nestor offers them.

- As of the next restock, Whiskers will start stocking an additional 4 "rare" tier items. When all those winter flowers and vegetables were added, it really watered down the odds to get some of the more useful rare items like sunflowers. Additional stock should help with this.

- Genetic string is now easier to read

- It's possible that I made other changes and totally forgot about them when writing this update post.


Adventuring Changes

- All of the animations for adventuring were stripped from the site and then put back in. It was a truly torturous ordeal, rated 0/10. In most cases, this means that a lot of the prior issues with speed and timing are fixed. However, it is also possible (likely) that some things are broken in new and never-before-seen ways, so if things look strange, please stop by the bug forum.

With this, you can now go to account settings and set a text typing speed separate from animations. The higher the number, the slower the text. You can also set the speed to "0" to disable the typing effect. This page is linked on the adventuring page at the very bottom as well so you can jump to it from there.

Even if you don't change the typing speed, you might notice it's a lot faster now. Turns out, gutting the animations and redoing them cleared up a lot of lag, so your browser might be a lot happier about this whole thing.

- Between the battle map and the list of cats, there is now a monster info field which shows you the level, class, and harmony of each monster.

- The bottom information is set on a slight delay so that it shouldn't "spoil" the results before they happen. This currently leads to an effect where if you go faster, sometimes the monsters don't disappear by the time you get back to the between encounters menu. They catch up after a few seconds.


Bug Fixes

- If you have a lot of scenes, they no longer escape off the side of the page

- Fixed issue where all cats appeared to have the mayor's trinket

- Fixed issue where looking at other peoples' cats made them appear to have your mayor's bonuses instead of your own

- Userpage side panel is no longer squished if you have columns in your profile

- Fixed issue where mayor bonus wasn't being applied consistently in gathering

- Mayor bonus is now included on the change jobs page

- Mayors getting their own bonuses was causing some issues, so this has been temporarily removed until the next update

- Mayor is no longer being included in the catpacity in social scenarios

- Character limit for sales receipts is longer now so it shouldn't crash the page when you try to sell too many items at once

- Added a note to the market under buildings that buying/selling a building cannot lock or unlock an occupation to prevent new players from attempting to buy craft stations to unlock the craft.

- Scenes posted in forums are no longer displaying with all of the items shifted downwards by 19px

- Columns code is no longer resizing images to ant size when there is text

- Job change page now includes trinkets and mayor boosts

- Fixed issue where pagination wasn't stopping at the last scene

- Mayor personality bonuses and shift enable/disable was fixed on a number of pages

- It is no longer possible to accidentally skip making a starter squad

- Hide is now properly using perception instead of strength

- Double shot should no longer attack an already-defeated enemy. It should also now use only one bolt.

- Urls with certain characters no longer get eaten by the redirect page

- Fixed an issue where cats weren't generating with it/its pronouns

- Adventuring typing and timing have been rewritten completely


What's next?

- Village Lodge part 2

- Students & Mentors

Sending straight to travelling my beloved.... the best part of this update

i've always loved user-made ads, so happy to see them here!

neat! :D

never in my life have I been so excited for an “ad” update

blesstor nestor and goodbye to that nonsense whiskers was pulling for over a week

hope you get offers for ads!

BLESS so many qol updates, thank you for everything

I would be more than happy to donate $4 every once in a while to this site. You guys are doing an excellent job!

Sorry about the google ads, never knew it was THAT bad

All these updates sound awesome! I've only just started playing but I'm already hooked!

That adsense thing is ridiculous! I hope user-made ads take off, it'll be fun to see what everyone does with the space