Announcements

The shopkeeper's bank surpassed 1 million eggs on Christmas day. That's right—at the time of writing, she possesses 77.5% of the total currency eggs on the site.

Word has gotten out about the obscene wealth hiding in her coffers. Some chickens are eager to nick a few (surely she doesn't count her eggs every night). Others think they should be redistributed to the masses. Introducing...

Heists.

Yes, you can now steal eggs from Mum—but it will take a little skill, and a lot of luck. Assemble a heist team from your coop's chickens! Heists get harder the more eggs you're stealing. And be careful—each time you fail a heist, Mum will mark up shop prices by 5% until the end of the day.

The Heist minigame can be accessed either through the Games men or via the link under Mum's image in the Eggschange. Or through the links on this announcement. Check it out! You can read more about the mechanics on the Heist page, as well as the game's own info page.

The game is in its early stages, so if you find bugs, do report them in a ticket!

The intended narrative flavouring of the Release feature was that the released chickens were off somewhere, travelling the world, but it appears (from discussion) like previous UI choices made it seem like they had died. I've made some changes to make the intent clearer!

• Released chickens now show in offspring lists as a bindle icon, so it looks less like a chicken died
• The release screen has been spruced up with an image of the chicken carrying their luggage. (I do want to note that they will lose all their accessories and filters in this image, as those are returned to your inventory.)
• For chickens who have been released after the genotype archival update, you can also view their travelling image anytime (via clickable links under their parents' profiles and in family trees). Example Note that this image is generated on demand and is only kept on the server for up to an hour, so hotlinks won't work for long. (This is so free chicken images are taking up less space on the server minute to minute)

In other news...

• Coop expansion prices have been lowered to 700 each! Everyone who has already bought expansions would have received a refund on the difference.

As you may have noticed, the number of occupants in the Pullet Pool has been increasing steadily almost every day. I've recently taken a few measures to unclog the pool and making other "offloading" options more viable. Please be aware of these changes, as they may affect your decisions!

1. Chickens in the Pullet Pool will now be released by the system after they've been in there for 30 days. The logic for this is that 30 days in the pool (4 chicket cycles) is indicative that they aren't going to be picked up, and could otherwise end up stuck there indefinitely while newer releases show up.
2. The reward for full releases has now been raised to 50-60 eggs. From talking to people, I have learned that full release is strongly dispreferred by many. To make it feel slightly more viable for those whose decision is based on egg rewards, I have raised the release reward so it's almost always higher than pooling.
3. I changed the default Pullet Pool sort order to earliest - latest. It simply makes more sense for chickens that have been there longer to be the first to be considered for picking. Like Farmhouse sorting, your sorting preference autosaves when changed, so you can toggle this back to latest - earliest if you prefer.
4. Now, when chickens are released, their genotype is stored as a string (similar to what you see at the end of Chickrew morph links) that allows their original appearance to be recreated. Currently it's not accessible by anyone other than admins, but I may add the ability to retrieve the chicken's appearance at a later date.
5. [ADDED] One more change I've just made—I've doubled the likelihood of getting a chicket from the daily rewards. Hoping that this gives people more choice/manoeuvreability.

Thanks for your understanding! I'm open to discussion; I would like to know if you feel like any of these changes are terrible ideas (or if you think they're good ideas even). Any suggestions and thoughts can be sent in the Site suggestions forum.

Starting this month, we're donating a small part of the site's earnings to charity! I've put up an info page about our two supported charities and donation plan on this page.

The short version: If we earn AU$1500 or more in a month, we'll donate to SRS (a rural disability and aged care support charity), which lets us name a chicken with a sponsorship cert. People who bought eggs that month get to throw a name suggestion into the pool, and one name is raffled from the pool to be entered on the cert.

Check out our log of past charity chicken names! As of this announcement, we've donated once and named one chicken

Saint Chickolas has visited every Secret Santa participant's inbox and delivered their giftee's wishlist! I forgot to ask for block lists, so I used the on-site block list, but let me know if you have received a person you would rather not trade with and I will swap you around. And of course, let me know if you have not received one.

By popular demand...signups are open for the ChickenPet-themed Secret Santa—just read the rules and fill this form! The form will close on 7 December UCT, and assignments will be sent by the end of the day via this site's messaging feature.

The new gene set is here!

Try the new genes in Chickrew | Get the splicers at the Eggschange

Chuffed body Puff comb Pompom tail

As part of this update, accessory positioning has been revamped! Relevant accessories will now reposition (and sometimes resize) based on the chicken's comb shape, body shape, and other features.

Cluckulator, a breeding calculator

I started writing a breeding guide, then realised I could help people skip the math by making a tool that does it for you. Use the Cluckulator to:

• Calculate mate colours needed to produce the desired offspring colour
• View the full range of offspring colour possibilities for a given pair

Feature is still being tested!

(Yes, I'm still on vacation! I just needed something relaxing to do while I recovering from walking too hard lol)

16/11/2024 update: The answer has been found by @Azu! The gene name is Chuffed. GOOD WORK...everyone will be getting genes sometime on or after the 26th of November!

I will be on vacation until the 26th of November! Expect fewer updates (or even none). When I'm back, I'll be releasing 3 brand new feature genes. Here's the catch: I will only release them if someone correctly guesses the name of the new body gene before I'm back.

Hints:

1. It's a real word.
2. It starts with "ch". Surprise surprise.
3. It has one syllable.

Guess in the comments of this announcement! I will let you know when the word has been found (there may be a delay though). If somehow no one's got it by the time I come back from vacation, I'll start adding hints.

Rules:

1. One guess per person per UCT day. Keep it fun for everyone!
2. It has to be the exact word and not 1-2 letters off—there's not a lot of one-syllable words starting with "ch" so you should get it via numbers alone!

Pages are here! Every user can create up to 5 HTML/Markdown-formatted pages, linked directly from your profile. Chicken embeds, polls and user @ tags work there. Head over to your profile to create your first page.

As a side note, we will be opening the site to more users on 11/11 at 11am (make a wish...). There will also be an email-only open at an unspecified time before that.

Other recent changes:

• The new icon in the top right corner is a link that takes you straight to your profile. It uses the first flair badge in your badge ribbon.
• I've been fixing up nest hatching on the back-end, in an effort to deal with the pesky bug that causes eggs to lose their parents seemingly at random. I still have not figured out what is causing it, but I have tightened up the hatching mechanics, fingers crossed that that fixes it. please send a ticket if it happens to you.
• Released chickens now show up with their ID number in lists of relatives, instead of their name.

Halloween is my favourite not-holiday!

New accessories

Cape

Horns

Veil

New filters

Penumbra
(darkens chicken)

Will-o'-the-wisp
(flame overlay)

Try them at the Dressing Room | Buy at the Eggschange

As a reminder (since the previous announcement wasn't up for very long), trades have changed: currency is now deducted when the carton is created! Read Announcement#30 for more information.

Other recent changes

• Added forum search (check Forums to give it a spin)
• There's now a Recent Threads feed that aggregates threads with recent activity from all forums from the past 24 hours.
• Added guest block and notification badge toggles to Settings page
• You can now reply threads without bumping them. Simply check the "Don't bump" checkbox.

I just pulled the new trade system changes into the site after testing them for a few days!

Important: this update changes how trades work. Now, when you start a new trade or add a carton to a new trade, all currency (eggs, seed and chickets) will be deducted from your account immediately. This is to reduce the memory work needed to track every pending trade and keep your egg amount in your account above that until every trade is accepted (previously, a trade would simply fail with an alert if either member had insufficient funds to complete it).

Pre-existing trades have not been migrated to this system, and it will be noted in an alert above the trade if it has not been migrated yet.

This feature has been reasonably well tested, but there is nevertheless the possibility that something will break for you. If you lose any currency from a trade, please let me know in a ticket under the Refund Request category!

Other recent changes:

• There is now a search box to start a trade with any user from you trades page.
• Updated the Clucky Clicker script to block all clicking between when the previous round is solved until when the new batch of chicks is loaded. This hopefully prevents all the bugs associated with clicking during the load time.
• The Toyhouse world is now linked in the footer!
• Fixed the sanitiser to handle certain blocked elements without erroring out.
• Debugged retrieving user's "next username change" timestamp on the settings page
• Your chicken can now only pick up seeds from forests if stepping onto the forest tile cost you steps.

Hello to those who have just joined us! Let me welcome you with a classic ChickenPet experience...a new feature that will probably create bugs in parts of the site I forgot to check.

Wall of Fame

Show off your loreworthy chickens on the brand new Wall of Fame! Each user can feature one chicken, for any reason, be that because the chicken created site drama, has fun stories attached, or just because they're your fave and you want people to perceive them. The list is randomised every 10 minutes, so everyone gets their fair share of screentime.

I hope you (continue to) have fun on ChickenPet, and I can't wait to see what players do with this new feature!

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. 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.