Announcements

tl;dr: Sepia calculation has changed after it has emerged that Imagick's sepia function changes the white balance based on what colours the image has, leading to an inconsistent effect when different accessories are applied. For the next week (until 29th October), Sepia filters will resell directly from your inventory for the full purchase price. The new Sepia algorithm is being tested with a brand new filter called Seepier!

Try it in the dressing room | Buy at the Eggschange

There has been a Situation with the Sepia filter. Thanks to some helpful bug reports, I have realised that Imagick's sepia transformations are applied differently for every chicken based on the image's white balance. The same chicken with slightly different accessories or a different flair colour can end up looking completely different with the same sepia filter applied (image 1).

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I don't generally like that there are inconsistent colour transforms for the same filter, so the solution has been to write my own sepia tone algorithm, which applies the same colour transform regardless of the chicken's overall colours.

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HOWEVER, this might mean that your currently Sepia'd chicken appears differently from how it did in the Dressing Room when you bought the filter. As such, for the next week (until 29th October), Sepia filters will resell directly from your inventory for the full purchase price. I hope that this helps, let me know if you have any feedback on the new Sepia appearance!

This new Sepia calculation has been added as the new Seepier filter! Thank you all for your patience!

As a couple of people have hit the coop limit, I've now added the option to:

1. Buy more coop space starting at 800 eggs (increments of 800 for each successive expansion)
2. Buy more roosts starting at 200 eggs each (increments of 200 for each successive roost)

Each coop expansion gets you room for 20 more chickens. Note that you can only buy more coop space if you have 5 free spaces or less in your coop!

Other recent changes:

• In case you missed it, all flair badges can now have their colours customised, and only one Bias badge can be set now.
• Added an actual bot role so my bot user @notabot can have a name icon.
• Fixed blush 50px thumbnail rendering (if you noticed they weren't rendering blush in map sprites, this should be fixed now)
• Invite-related notifications now get cleaned up when they expire.

Show off the outstanding chooks of your coop! You can now set customisable username flair (this link can also be found under your username dropdown). Select up to 5 chickens who have earned flair to display next to your name on your profile, forum posts, and comments. Take a look at the Flair page to see what flair you have available and which chickens are eligible.

Additionally supporters (people who have bought eggs) will also get the option to add an emoji-based flair badge to their names!

Other recent changes:

• Under the hood, I have completely revamped chicken ordering. Most chicken select menus should now show you chickens in the following order: featured roost > unsorted roost > other roosts in sequence. If all went well, you should not see any changes other than the order of menus changing. But if you get 500 errors in random places where you're trying to view a list of chickens, it's probably because of this update—do let me know in a ticket.
• I've built a system for generating smaller versions of chicken thumbnails. You should now see these smaller chicken images in Eggspedition as well as on flair badges. Hopefully this can reduce load time on these images.
• Farmhouse listing descriptions now break words in the middle so that they don't overflow the card.
• Poll results are now hidden from logged out users to prevent using it as a loophole to view the results.

These Cheek eyespots are technically the chicken's ear...but here on Chicken Dot Pet, we've dialed up the blushy energy. Because we can.

Try it in Chickrew | Buy splicer at the Eggschange

EDIT: there is now also a blush accessory! It is a very low opacity version of the blush gene. Try it in the Dressing Room | Buy at the Eggschange

Neckties and bowties are here!

Try them on in the Dressing Room | Buy them at the Eggschange

Other updates

• Nest prices have decreased to increments of 800 eggs. Everyone who has bought any nests will have received a refund on the difference. Check your notifications!
• After many people accidentally double-clicked eggs leading to errors, I have updated the hatch routing so that clicking on an already-hatched egg instead sends you to the hatched chick.
• Better error handling with egg hatching—if anything goes wrong during the hatching process, you just get sent back to the nest page with an error message, instead of removing the egg's parents. Will monitor for how well this fix works.

Roosts, a.k.a. coop tabs, are here! This update adds the Roosts feature - these are tabs that you can organise chickens into! I have been working on this for a few days so I wanted to get it out of the way before addressing the other bugs. You can create roosts at https://chicken.pet/coop/roosts/create and then sort your chickens into them at the new and improved coop sorter.

This is a hefty and pretty complex update, so because of that and the fact that there have been a lot of puzzling bugs cropping up recently, I will now be taking about 5 days to attend to existing bugs before I resume adding any features - thanks for your patience.

Other important updates

• Because of a slew of bugs with daily rewards, I have now added reward logging, and I have reset everyone's dailies so you can collect them again today. If you run into the bug where it says you've already claimed it, please do not send a full report (as it has already been reported a lot).
• Daily reward claim button also now has a double-click guard, just to hopefully rule out any double-click-related errors.
• The pullet pool now spawns chicks slightly faster. The reward for releasing to the pullet pool is now 30 eggs, and the general release reward is now 25 - 40 eggs.

I will now be taking about 5 days to attend to existing bugs before I resume adding any features - thanks for your patience!

A filter that makes the chicken appear as a chick.

Try it at the Dressing Room | Buy it at the Eggschange

This filter has mechanical effects besides altering the chicken's appearance:

• The chicken wearing the filter cannot be bred.
• The filter can't be applied to any chicken that currently has a nest egg.
• You can't equip non-chick accessories on it.
• If it has any existing accessories that chicks can't wear, those will not be displayed. They can be removed from the chicken on the Customise page.

As an aside, I have also changed the pullet pool and farmhouse to generate new chicks at 1am and 1pm (and half as many each time) instead of all at 1am.

Welcome all! We now have 100 members on ChickenPet

You may have noticed that the Eggspedition maps have gotten...really crowded. So I've introduced a few changes:

• Two new maps: Northeast Town and Northeast Outskirts!

• New Forest tiles. They cost 2 steps and feed chickens that walk on them.
• Inactive chickens (>3 days since last activity) are now temporarily hidden from the map.
• When a fed chicken steps on a feeding tile, you receive the seed to your inbox instead.
• Eggspedition rewards now update every 5 minutes (instead of 3).

This feature was popular in voting, so I've finally added it: Internests, a way for two users to breed their chickens with each other's.

How do they work? One user selects the two chickens to be bred—one of their own, and one from another user. The other user must first accept the request, and if all prerequisites are met (same as normal nests), each user receives one Internest egg in their nest boxes! The egg's hatch time is 6 days, and each user receives one chick from the nest.

It's a fairly complex system, so if anything goes wrong, do get in touch via the ticket form! Check out this page for a more detailed rundown of this new mechanic. Happy hatching!

Introducing...chicken pet. (Title drop.)

You can now pet chickens by clicking them on their profile! Petting the chicken will play a sound effect and produce heart particles. You also have a chance of giving the chicken's owner (not yourself) some seed every time you pet them.

Other recent changes:

• Exporting a chicken to the Dressing Room now also imports their existing accessories.
• Added a Trades link to the Friends menu.
• Clucky Clicker yield has been raised to 1-4 seed (average 2.5) per round won.

Hello all, and thank you for playing ChickenPet! We've just opened up the site to 50 new members—a warm welcome to all who have just joined us.

To answer a question I've been asked many times: When will the next slot open be? I'd like to monitor the website for at least 2 weeks to ensure all bugs revealed by the new influx of players have been addressed. If all goes well, I would like to open 25 more slots on 28 September.

Site admin ethos + why we're doing limited opens

Too often have I witnessed cautionary tales where a website grew much faster than its developers anticipated, leading to skyrocketing server costs and frequent site crashes, and much of the userbase being left unhappy.

I would much rather create a high-quality experience for a small number of players than a buggy, poorly-maintained one for more players. But I have also decided not to push cash purchases on players (the option to buy eggs for real money exists, but I don't want to create any paywalls). So this means that I don't currently have the resources to lease server space on the same scale as, say, Flight Rising.

The trade-off I've settled on, for the time being, is to allow new users in at a linear rate. It lets me catch issues in regular cycles, and only accept new users once I'm satisfied that they're resolved. This may change in the future, if the site proves unexpectedly successful. As a person I am given to a "less is more" philosophy, so I am happy for the site to grow slower than it could, if it means existing players have a better time on it!

First of several, probably. This update responds mostly to recent player feedback.

• To minimise the chances of accidentally use modulators in the wrong direction, I've added contextual visual feedback showing the colours surrounding the 2 options:

• The reward for releasing chickens has now been raised to 20-35 eggs, so the average is now 27.5 - slightly higher than the Pullet Pool reward. I will continue balancing this till we have a mix of pullet pool and wild releases that works for the site dynamics.
• Added double click protection on buttons and links that perform significant actions (buying items, hatching eggs, releasing chickens). Previously, the operations were already idempotent, but now you can't accidentally get a 404 error from clicking twice by accident.
• The Pullet Pool will now fill faster based on the number of users on the site (1 more per day for every 10 users).

Thank you to all who submitted their suggestions and bug reports!

Say hello to: Crimson Vermilion Honey Apple Grass Gluppy

Lots of feedback saying that there was too much on the purple side, so I have fleshed out the other portions of the colour wheel.

Three requested features have been added!

• Chicken family trees. Find the link under each chicken's Status menu. This might be useful for checking if two chickens can be bred, or just for fun. Happy to gather feedback about the layout and order of info (I am thinking of moving niblings and piblings (lmao) to the bottom).

• Clucky Clicker. This is a game designed for grinding seed (which can be traded for eggs) when you really need them. The seed gain rate is slow on purpose so that people can't easily make massive fortunes off of it, but you can earn up to 5k seed (= 500 eggs) a day there...if you're really patient.
• Wheel of Hue lottery! This can be seen on the front page. I spent a long time thinking about how to implement an interesting lottery system that wasn't simply generating random numbers, and settled on a sort of "spin the wheel" concept with colours + closest guesses winning. I might revise this in the future based on how it scales with more users. And of course, do report any bugs to me.

Other recent changes (lots of QOL and management stuff):

• Added comments to announcements, as you can see below.
• Added ability to hide/unhide comments on your profiles, and to edit your comments.
• Under the hood, all pings are now attached to users' IDs instead of their names. When you change your name, all pings directed at you up to that point should update to your new name too. It shouldn't behave any different for you (and if it does, that's a bug - let me know).
• You can now search names in the Search feature.
• Added pages for viewing your created threads and subscribed threads.
• Added splicer logs for individual chickens - from this point, they will track when any splicers are used on them. Find it on your chicken's status menu.
• You can now view your username log. There is now also a 1-month cooldown on changing your username.
• Added a Manage blocked users page.
• You can now export Chick Peek previews to Chickrew (suggested by @Neotheatre, thank you!)
• Added a mailing list form to our register page so that we can announce new slots to subscribers.

I think that's that. The base site is ready, minus any debugging for the newest features (particularly family trees and wheel of hue). See you on 15 September!