Announcements

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!

I've been busy getting the last few "nice to have but not crucial" features finished up in preparation of the big open day!

• POLLS. You can now create polls on your polls page (you can find the link under your username) and embed it anywhere with the syntax [poll=ID]. Someone help me come up with a "pollo"/"poll" pun
• Introducing the Bling and Washed Out filters (modelled by my local version of Anchicken):

• Most regular splicers have now been lowered to 150 eggs each! Check them out at the Eggschange.
• You can now buy new nest slots for 1000 -> 2000 -> 3000 -> 4000 eggs (Suggested by @neotheatre, thank you!)
• The USD egg packs are now 300 eggs for $2 and 1500 eggs for $10. After recent changes which make eggs easier to get on the site, I have scaled the egg pack value to make them worth what I feel they are worth.
• Dashboard now shows recent dev tracker items.
• Ownership logs are now available on the respective chickens' profiles! (You can only see it if you're the chicken's owner)

Launch should be going ahead with the 15 September date! This will be based on my time zone, so it could be opening slightly earlier for you. If everyone on the pinglist joins, we're going to fill 50 slots easily 😳 I may have to open more...once I'm sure that the site won't crash under the load!

Thanks for your patience around the site's brief downtime. This evening, I pushed out two pretty major changes: Added achievements, and added live previews of splicer and modulator effects in the "Use" panel (thanks @phytodragon for the suggestion!) Some achievements have been issued based on the current state of each user's coop, and more may be added later.

Quick explainer about the downtime: To make the achievements work, I had to completely rework how filters are stored in the backend (I know, it doesn't sound related, but it is). Migrating the database...did not go the way it did in my dev environment, and I had to fix a few entries in the DB by hand.

It should all run smoothly now; the back-end should structure all future database entries correctly. But if you're noticing anything weird with your chickens' filters (and very importantly, if any of your filters don't reappear in your inventory after you remove them from your chicken), please send a bug report and I will make sure you get the item back.

This change might have introduced new bugs, but it should be the last big thing I do before the open beta launch!

Hi all! So, I feel like we're basically almost there. These past few days, I've really only tweaked the styling and presentation of the website, and I think I'm ready to go into full debug mode. But before that...

We have updated our Terms of Service!

Please read them again, particularly the new sections labelled Content Filtering and Usage Rights. The site's profanity filter has been made stricter, and chicken names are now filtered for partial word matches. I am just keeping in mind the future potential userbase. Thanks for your understanding

ANYWAY...now that we're here...I have made a shareable introductory page for ChickenPet! Whenever the time comes to promo the site, I will be directing people here (if I'm not just pasting its exact text into a post).

Aside from that, some important recent changes:

• Added auto alt text generation for chicken sprites and emotes
• Chicken breeding menu now only shows chickens who are not on cooldown
• Turned off the over-informative error messages now that we will soon be opening the site up beyond the circle of trust.

A huge huge thank you to everyone on the site who's been trying things out and sending in bug reports. You've truly helped make it what it is today! Now I'll be focusing on clicking around and seeing if I can make any bugs happen—if you want to do the same, feel free to do so (if you find anything, send me a tickets/make a post in the bug reports thread/ping me in the server).

I've cleaned the dashboard to only have buttons with "daily relevance". Everything else can be accessed from the nav bar which appears on every page. I'm just testing things out, so if lots of people prefer the old layout, it can be changed back!

Also, behold: new banner

For a brief time yesterday, you could pick up Pullet Pool chicks for eggs. I was testing ways for people to buy chickens without trading in the forum. I quickly realised adding the egg-buy option defeated the intended purpose of the Pullet Pool (helping early players expand their gene pool).

Instead, I've added a marketplace feature—the Farmhouse! Anyone can list their chickens for purchase. Name your price, add an optional message, and see if anyone bites. I'm planning on automatically clearing listings that are >10 days old, but this has not been implemented yet.

Also, check out the brand new Search page. Look up chickens by genes, status, and ownership. Very proud of the layout work on it; it wasn't easy condensing that much info into one form! It's still being worked on, and I might add name search + ability to sort chickens by stats at a later time.

Other than that:

• All Splicers now have thumbnails (satisfying.)
• Pullet pool now regenerates one chick at 1am daily, if there are fewer than 5 currently in the pool
• Tiny Eggspedition changes: Walking onto a tile next to another chicken costs 0 steps. And, you can't walk onto tiles that already have a chicken.
• Some site-wide styling changes.

At this point, the dashboard is starting to feel a bit cluttered to me. Do you also think so? And do you think that any of the buttons could be named better? Let me know in the site discussion forum!

I'm happy to present three features that have been requested a lot:

• You can now add image backgrounds to chicken cards. The upload button can be found on the chicken's profile.
• Dressing room: Now you can preview cosmetic items (filters and accessories) on chickens before buying them. Hopefully this averts some buyer's regret.
• Chick Peek: Preview the offspring possibilities of two chickens before committing to a nest! You can also use it on chickens you don't own, just in case you were thinking of buying one...

Under the hood there have been lots of changes with chicken thumbnail generation, the behaviour should remain the same, so if you notice anything being weird with chickens' images, that's probably because of those changes.