Welcome to June!

In addition to the continuation of the Seashell Soirée and its prompts, scavenger hunt, and shop…  We have some exciting news for this month, as well as further updates from that Discord poll.  First up…

Happy Pride!

If you hadn’t noticed with the two sets of lesbian Royals, we love queerness here.  While we don’t have too much planned for this year’s Pride, we still want to give it a shoutout.  There will be some designs available for purchase this month, as well as a free Pride Raffle (pictured above).  Additionally, there are some new borders in the shop…

New Items, New Collection, & New Shops

As you might have noticed, there are books now!  The information from them - our lore - can be found in the Library.  We hope this makes for an easier reading experience than the original long page, and that you all enjoy the new collection and award.

We had originally wanted books to stay in the Aerius Archives, however, due to difficulties related to the paypal shop, we will be creating a bookstore that to handle selling the books for user’s crystals, which we will announce once it is ready.

Additionally, we’re embarking on plans to build a paypal subscriber shop on site to help fund website related costs.  This includes server space (the lowest tier plan, what we are presently on, costs about $235 every three years), commissioning artists for pets (averaging roughly $60 every two months), domain registration ($20 per year), and being able to buy certain Lorekeeper extensions that could bring fun features to the website.  This might not sound like a ton if you have a job, but most of the mod team do not for reasons ranging from health to school to issues related to immigration stuff.  We’re managing right now, but we could do more with this idea.  We are not yet sure when this shop will laucnh but we will let you know!

You will not be required to buy these, these will just give those who buy them fun bonuses as thanks for their support of the website.  We also request that if you are in a difficult financial situation, you prioritize your needs, not ours - a website is fun, but it has no comparison to food and shelter.  Please be responsible.

New Traits & Organizational Tweaks

You might have noticed - whether from the Discord announcement of it or just browsing our traits to make MYOs - but several new traits have been added, and trait categories have been condensed.  Arboreal covers Swamp, Forest, and Rainforest.  Aqueous covers Abyss and Ocean.  Regolian covers Desert, Mountain, and Volcanic.  Cryan covers Arctic and Tundra.  Nephian covers Air Day and Air Night (formerly labeled as Skylands).  Empyrian covers Crystal, Delta, and Hyperspace.  Faerie covers Fairy and Flower.

Draphibians have also been condensed with Gextro into the new Companions masterlist, and all their IDs now begin with CMP.

You might wonder why we’ve done these organizational changes, and that is because…

Lockettes Are Coming

After the feedback form on Discord, merging the Lockette and Dextroluma servers into one (now named “Aerius & Maquette”), and a lot of analysis of things like costs (server storage is pricy), the mod team’s time (we’d basically be doing an event every month and we’d all burn out fast), lore (already pretty connected), the difficulties of managing two websites (did you know it’s possible to push a change to the wrong site?  I have a new nightmare!) and of course what people said during the survey, we have decided we will be adding Lockettes to the site (and later on, Dexettes as well).

This was a difficult decision to make, as we had originally planned on separate sites when we first started out, but we’ve come around to it and are now excited to begin bringing Lockettes to the site.

There are some changes to Lockettes coming that were already in the works - lore rewrites, tweaks to their traits, etc.  The first of these changes you get early - The Heartlands is being renamed to Maquette, and is now its own dimension rather than part of Earth.  A maquette is “a scale model or rough draft of an unfinished sculpture”, and we chose the name to pertain to coming lore relating to Lockette culture and how they view the dimension they inhabit.  The term ‘The Heartlands’ is still going to be used, though - it’s a common way Lockettes refer to the heart-shaped lake in the center of their dimension where they manifest.

What changes does this mean for the site?

Well, nothing right away.  We’re looking at potential new URLs, but aren’t sure we would be able to change it, especially since most lockette and dexette related urls that end in a .com are already claimed.

We’ll be working on some different site themes - a unified one and a lockette themed one, and a new mascot, since, as we announced prior, we’ll be retiring the old one.

In time, you’ll see Lockettes added to the species dropdowns, and their traits begin to appear on site.  We’ll be finding ways to bring Lockettes into shops, to try to avoid having too many of them, and so it’s easy for everyone to know where to go.  We’ll start doing Lockette approvals and adopts on site, and adding their items and your (and our) Lockettes.

The currencies will remain the same - crystals is the dominant currency of both species, as Lockettes are just as big a fan of shiny things as Dextroluma.  (Practically speaking, crystals fit in a pouch a lot better than keys, and don’t get caught on each other to the same degree).  Like when Dextroluma were added to the site, the current Lockette currency will not transfer over to the site, but will be part of the raffle that we swear is coming Eventually.  (We keep adding more projects to our long to-do-list because we all LOVE doing too many things at one time).

We don’t yet have a strong timeline on when these changes will be taking place on site, but we’ll let you all know as things happen.  We love you all and want the best for these species and this community.

You are welcome to express your thoughts and feelings in the Discord server or comments here, and to ask questions and give suggestions as desired.  We know merging the servers is a really big change, and the idea of having both the species on one site is an even bigger change, which can be a lot to process.  All we ask is that you are all respectful in your words and conduct to your fellow members and our team.