- Limited Edition Egg Rexies are available on Krafties Island, with a brand new Hyper Hatch spell!
- Zoril Eggs – Hatch new Zoril coated Hopsters and Munkles!
- Divine Egg Timer Artifacts are here! – Earn them from Stinkopolis quests and in NPC shops!
- Stinkopolis Adventures! Earn Hatchable Zoril Eggs, Divine Egg Timers, Eggcelerators, and more for sending your pets off on quests in this stinky new destination!
- Revisiting the Festival of Fish!
- Krafties 2025 Goals!
- A peek behind the dev curtain!
Humpty-Dumpty etc!
New Limited Edition Egg Rexies!
Limited Edition Egg Rexies are available now! These new friends are here to serve a hot and steaming whooping, egg style! With an assortment of egg based spells, these crafty little friends are looking to crack down on any foes you encounter in the world of Krafties. They’re only available for a limited time though, so get them while they’re here!
Each creature has a +5 for each natural stat, and all are level 1. They have a special Egg Soul complete with unique spells not found on any other element. The vendor is in front of the main store and will only be available from January 27th through February 10th. They are available in two coated varieties, White and Brown, at separate vendors. Each Egg Rexie is embued with a completely random eye color, from the possible colors White, Yellow, Red, Pink, Purple, Green, Blue, and Orange. They are priced at L$2,499.
All new Egg Rexies come with the “Tender” trait, allowing them to hatch equipped eggs at an increased rate.
Additionally, all Egg creatures have been endowed with a completely new, handy dandy utility spell: Hyper Hatch! Once per day, this creature may cast Hyper Hatch to accelerate the time-to-hatch on a single Hatchable Egg they hold. The amount of time accelerated is determined by their overall level, so more powerful Egg type creatures will have an upper hand in hatching!
Here’s to another eggcellent Krafties celebration! Have fun!
Hatchable Zoril Eggs Are Here!
Brand new Zoril eggs, which can be hatched into three separate Zoril coated species! While Zoril Pandaires have been coming into our world for a while now, their Munkle and Hopster coated friends are completely new to the world of Krafties! Hatchable Zoril Eggs can be obtained from Stinkopolis quests, the Spinner, or dropped from Zoril coated Hopsters, Munkles, and Pandaires rarely spawned in-world.
Stinkopolis Adventures, And A New Artifact: Divine Egg Timers
A new ‘Adventures’ quest arc is available now for a short time, packed with some pungent new goodies!
Welcome to Stinkopolis, the city where every street corner is a whiff of adventure! From the moment you step into this bustling metropolis, your nose will be dancing with delight and dismay as you navigate through clouds of cheese, coffee, and even a hint of pickled peppers. And holy moly, these residents are obsessed with eggs! Just ask them about their "Divine Egg Timers" or "Eggcelerators." Get ready to hatch some fun by sending your pets on quests to find rare "Hatchable Zoril Eggs," all while avoiding the city’s legendary stink clouds!
Earn Hatchable Zoril Eggs, Divine Egg Timer Artifacts, and other goodies!
Access Stinkopolis from the “Adventures” section of your Krafties Web Apps. These new adventures may appear when ‘Message In A Bottle’ items are used, along with any other standard method used to obtain Adventures. Stinkopolis is open to all players during the Egg-citing event, so don’t wait to send your pets off to experience all the amazing sights, sounds, and… smells…
DIVINE EGG TIMER ARTIFACTS
A holy relic! A pet equipped with this artifact hatches Hatchable Eggs at an increased rate. Currently, these artifacts can be obtained via Stinkopolis quests, along with rare trades found from NPC Shopkeepers.
Developer Musings: Festival Of Fish And The Pouch Of Wormkeeping (“secret” events)
Recently, Kraties had a sort of “stealth” event. It was communicated through messages that display on the HUD, and briefly in group chat, but by and large this small event was intended to accomplish a few things. First, I hope it acts as a small boon to avid players who hang around between *major* events that happen in Krafties – something not too big, but just nice enough to reward those paying extra close attention. Second, it was me experimenting with some new ways to integrate some of our many disparate systems through the interplay of different items – this time around namely fishing and NPC trades. This is something that Krafties will be doing a better and better job of as time goes by, as I’m making an intentional push to bring the entire experience together in stronger ways. Third, doing smaller events in this manner is a HUGE mental load taken from me as a developer. No lengthy blog post, no promotional images, no big fanfare and an influx of edge cases that are reported all at once. Just short and sweet events with new item descriptions baked into gameplay.
This will be touched on in the below section in more detail, but by and large this is a mentality that I hope to continue with this year: not letting “perfect” get in the way of “good”. There are SO many new artifacts, items, traits, and other pieces of content that I find myself sitting on due to wanting to release new content and systems as big, cohesive events that will generate lots of excitement all at once. Unfortunately, this means that many times I create a new type of item or other piece of content that would really enhance Krafties in some way, but it gets pushed back or scrapped because the overarching BIG release it is tied to keeps getting bigger and bigger in scope, there’s resistance to some piece of it, or other factors get in the way.
NO LONGER! I count the Festival of Fish mini-event, and the introduction of the new Pouch of Wormkeeping Artifact, as a success. For a short time, players were given access to this new artifact with increased odds of encountering it in the world of Krafties. Now, this artifact isn’t going away, but it will pop up less frequently, and players who would like to obtain it will have to put in a bit more work and have a bit more patience.
Personally, I am excited to experiment with this approach more, and hope that an influx of many smaller events might generate just as much excitement from players as our grand celebrations do! If so, I have A LOT of new stuff to show you!
Krafties 2025 Goals – A New Mentality
I’ll start off with this. 2024 was rough, both for myself and for Krafties. Unfortunately, the fact that Krafties suffers when things in my life take a turn can’t be avoided. I can’t help but think about how my role in this world is bizarre. Essentially, I’m an independent game developer that designs, codes, runs, and administrates a large-scale persistent MMO that has been built out and invested in for over 10 years, serving a loyal player-base that I couldn’t be more grateful for. With that being said, I’ll pull the curtain back a bit and say that in order to keep Krafties running it takes a ridiculous amount of work that, to most, would seem like much more trouble than it’s worth. Krafties is entirely built on my passion for silly little fantasy creatures that I’ve had since I was a child, and a duty I feel to our long-time players who have been along for so much of this journey.
I’d like to approach 2025 with a fresh new mentality, and state some intentional improvements I’ll be pursuing this year.
IMPROVE SUPPORT
I’ll try to keep this short and simple. We are currently backlogged with support requests, and that’s on me. There were some big changes in terms of how admin stuff is handled last year, and things unfortunately will take a bit longer to smoothen out. This month, I set aside a large chunk of time to try and tackle this issue in a way that I hope will pay dividends moving forward, which some players have experienced via our new automated helper agent KraftiesHelper. This bot-based system is intended to help me separate out admin work from other types of Krafties work while staying sane. In an ideal world, it wouldn’t completely drain me to interact with our players on a day-to-day basis, but unfortunately I need to establish systems and boundaries in these ways in order to try and keep some semblance of mental clarity. I hope that none of our players take this personally, but whenever I expose myself directly to inundations of support type communications, I’m not exaggerating when I say that it wipes out every bit of energy I have to do any other work in Krafties. This means no new content or technical fixes, and in that world… Krafties does not survive.
With all of that said, a good chunk of ticket delays could be avoided on the player side of things! When filing, please be sure to include your SECOND LIFE NAME (the one that you log in with), and AS MUCH information on your pets/items as you have available, including IDs. It’s not ideal, but when a ticket is encountered that is missing information it gets backlogged in favor of tickets that can be resolved with all supplied information included in one place.
BE LESS “PRECIOUS” ABOUT CONTENT RELEASES AND POWER CREEP
I touched on this in the “Developer Musings: Festival Of Fish And The Pouch Of Wormkeeping” section above, but will expand on things here.
Take a look at the image to the left. See all those items? I’ve had these assets for…. 5 years now? At first, this started as a small-ish cooking/crafting addition. Then, it got tacked on to a planting and gardening feature that I think would be AWESOME to have in Krafties. That, then, became an overly complicated and convoluted system that… is on the backburner.
This isn’t an isolated incident. In another example, what began as a small series of rings players can collect as artifacts, which are equipped to pets and give them the ability to cast elemental spells from any other element (allowing for some interesting builds and combos), turned into a ring for EVERY SPELL IN THE GAME, tied to boss battles for EVERY ELEMENT IN THE GAME. Yeah.. that’s still in the works.
However, with this new mentality, you’re going to see these rings. Even if it’s only one element. Even if it’s only one spell. You will see a ring SOON.
And… don’t even get me started on robots…
There are some notions that I will be actively stomping out of my development philosophy. For instance: “I can’t just release items that work for one element, I have to enhance ALL elements at once.” – This, while a noble pursuit, forces me to withhold exciting content that a lot of players will benefit from, and only gets harder and harder to uphold as the number of elements in the game grows. Similarly, EVERY species? Let’s shoot for ANY species.
Along this vein of “preciousness”, I have similarly been much too conservative when considering “power creep”. I have favored stability over newness, and I believe that this has forced my hand in creating new classes of content that aren’t as exciting as they could be. No, I don’t want to completely unbalance a game that has worked well for 10+ years, but I think I can throw a bit more caution to the wind. In a way, I’m attempting to remain loyal to a class of players that don’t really exist. If a player leaves for three years and comes back, up until this point I have worked to ensure that the base power afforded to them based on their existing creatures and resources will remain more or less competitive. That’s well and good for that player, but what about the players that are here now? I’m beginning to see that not only is this strict adherence not necessary, it may be actively detrimental.
To summarize: More Stuff. Cooler Stuff. Better Stuff.
OTHER THINGS OFF THE TOP OF MY HEAD
- Make battling more rewarding
- Have at least ONE extra coat for EVERY species in the compendium
- A new strategy for creating and releasing species.
- A BIG content release that completely redefines how Krafties feels for day-to-day players. This would involve introducing a slew of new content and spawns across the board all at once, and integrating a cohesive theme across different areas of the game in a lasting fashion, not just a single one-off event.
- Finding a better balance between limited, time-gated content and introducing new content that players can join in and participate at their leisure, keeping Krafties feeling fresh without time pressure. Create higher friction pathways to get older content that is in the compendium or released during events.
- Revising Krafties monitization model. Limited Edition releases as a primary source of income works to some degree, but in general I’m seeing that this needs to be visited with intention. Compared to almost ANY other modern game, Krafties monetization is archaic, and the secondary market makes things very complicated.
A Peek Behind The Curtain
It’s not all fun and games round there here parts, and I’d like to showcase some of the more “behind the scenes” work that has gone into Krafties recently. ALL of the following items have been completed since the time of our last content release in December, just about one month exactly. While most things on this list aren’t interesting by any means, I want to show some of the care and effort that goes into streamlining the Krafties experience for players in many small ways that they might not notice, along with the work undertaken that keeps the technical side of things (more or less) stable.
- [X] Add “Content drop” date to HUD display
- [X] Move Adventures quest description to top when quest is completed (on bottom now and kind of confusing)
- [X] Prevent duplicate Adventures from appearing for players
- [X] Block 0 effect amounts in effect displays (Krafties sim battle effects)
- [X] Add minus sign to debuff effects (Krafties sim battle effects)
- [X] Add minus sign to damage effects (Krafties sim battle effects)
- [X] Add plus sign to heal effects (Krafties sim battle effects)
- [X] Creature images getting double injected in synthesis menu
- [X] Add museum, and 10 other environments, to Adventure destinations
- [X] Clicking on an equipped item in equipment section of app should show item info as well
- [X] Allow unbondeds to be searched based on coat
- [X] Allow bondeds to be searched based on coat
- [X] Show item descriptions when shopping in market app
- [X] Add simple visual mutation particle effect
- [X] Remove Cheer Credits from HUD menu
- [X] Add item name and description to equipment menu
- [X] Add information to equipment display main area, stating that (Artifact) items break upon transfer
- [X] Fishing not taking no transfer worms
- [X] Adventures not taking no transfer tokens
- [X] Feeding fish does not take no transfer worms
- [X] Change traits display to match powerup slots display in app (0/4)
- [X] Click on traits to see what they do
- [X] Click on powerup items to see what they do
- [X] Add unbonded search filter to synthesis menu
- [X] Change font in fishing app?
- [X] Create heal spinny numbers (Krafties sim battle effects)
- [X] Create buff spinny numbers (Krafties sim battle effects)
- [X] Create debuff spinny numbers (Krafties sim battle effects)
- [X] Separate buff vs debuff effect objects (Krafties sim battle effects)
- [X] Multiple effect display objects of each type to reduce delay between effect (Krafties sim battle effects)
- [X] Home app: Egg timers not going down, equipment not updating in real time, etc.
- [X] Add margins between quest types in Adventures menu
- [X] Fix loading wheel in creature compendium
- [X] Loading in unbonded menu shows when it shouldn’t? (After egg hatch, etc)
- [X] Allow players to use Message In A Bottle items from adventures screen
- [X] Clicking on HUD face results in blank screen? Can we at least reload main menu?
- [X] Sometimes app isn’t loading creature correctly?
- [X] Patch NPC shops not loading
- [X] Move adventure background images to a separate backup folder (not overwriting stuff and whatnot)
- [X] Allow players to see WHICH items are in their powerup slots
- [X] Make market searching algorithm smarter (allow any substrings)
- [X] Drastically improve NPC name generation
- [X] Change fish image size in fishing app to be based on size-to-tank ratio, as opposed to size-to-fish max ratio
- [X] Remove extra alchemy xp in coal description
- [X] Add Fishing Level to player profile in app
- [X] Open inventory from npc app
- [X] Transfer lock items from Spinner
- [X] Add transfer locked icon to spinner items
- [X] Mega boost fish fillet asking chances in trade app
- [X] Make it so asking and offers in trades cannot be for same item type
- [X] Change NPC frontend code to show item descriptions
- [X] Fishing center ‘prepare’ notifications are lasting too long
- Pouch of Wormkeeping Artifact
– [X] Create image
– [X] Upload image
– [X] Add to database
– [X] Add to frontend
– [X] Add code to backend to increase worm drops
– [X] Add code to backend (other maybe?)
– [X] Ensure that it will function correctly in backend (check a few places)
– [X] Add conditional code that will add the pouch to some trades for fish fillets
– [X] Test
– [X] Add NPC shop messages about Festival of Fish
– [X] Remove Low Grade fillets from artifact trades - [X] Auric Energy Core glitch
- [X] Nerf Gingebread preheat (Accidentally way overtuned)
- [X] AI Ticket helper
- [X] Add Gingerbread cookies to shops temporarily
- [X] Vampires with winter or pollen affinities not getting first spells when bonded
- [X] Make loot drop text look nicer (like with fishing)
- Display player levels on HUD face
– [X] Fishing Level
– [X] Mining Level
– [X] Enchant Level
– [X] Add daily xp
– [X] Add weekly xp
– [X] Add monthly xp
– [X] Add to date xp
Have fun!
