Hello Hello! Its been a bit since a proper update, but now that the October prepwork is nearing its completion, we can take a moment to send out some news. Please take your time reading through this news bulletin, as theres a decent amount we'd like to cover.

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New Staffing, the October Event itself, and the Orb of Night Festival held in the Magic Soul Biome

 Throughout this time we've had staff applications open for users to apply to, and for us to see who would be best fit for the positions we offered, as we're looking to expand the team. After careful deliberation among the entire team, the staffing brought on were Wren, Terabitten, and Cybermoon. Our in training mods will be handling some Inktober submissions for this year as their first wave of training, and the MYO mod will be trained by our MYO admin. We welcome them to the staffing, and look forward to this new team growth as we develope scarfoxes!

The Cirque De Anima Event has been in preperation on and off since last year, and was originally gonna be released in October 2022. We left it to the community vote to decide on if we should push through and do the event after coming off our hiatus not refreshed, or hold off and look to hire more staffing and come back to the event next year. The community voted to hold off and look into staffing and develope the event more, and we've kept to the vote to the best of our abilities.

To be fairly transparent, the event itself had alot of twists and turns to develop. From expanding from the past orb of night festival prompts, we moved to flesh out some lore, and took on a bit of a challenge, a new specialty biome for this event.

The Magic Soul biome was tricky from start to finish, as it started with some rough topography, which had us learn about developing how simplistic or complex certain areas are, how it may be viewed on a 3d plane, and preparing it for more interesting ideas and concepts in the future. We are extremely proud and thankful to our team for helping out as much as they did, and for a fair amount of staffing banding together to really get things moving, coordinated, and finished before October 1st.

Heres a list of what you can check out with this event!

-the new NPC for this event, The Ringmaster (made by Benaberry)
-new biome information to read up on and check out (written and cleaned up by Dragon and Darci)
-main biome artwork made by Nocti0bake, external tent biome artwork by Dragon
-a new lore prompt (written by darci), alongside the orb of nights festival for this biome (banner and editing by Dragon and Darci), and a new foxtober (information, artwork, and writing by Darci)
-new badge for this event, the Moon Laurel Badge (badge by Darci)
-new pets (designs by LokiDokiArts, information by Dragon, named by Dragon and new staffing, with a silly snippet from one of our discord members for Boopy)

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New Traits, Trait Formatting, and Future Plans for the Trait Encyclopedia

Before the community vote as well, we had prepared some unstable traits to further develop options for said tier, and created the Unstable potion, a way for members to gain access to unstable traits beyond an Unstable MYO. When the potion was prepared, we had a set up list of unstable traits to go alongside it beyond the ones on site before this update (corrupted wisps, container head, and the recently added black halo). Thanks to taking our time, we were able to reconveine on many occassions and develope things more clearly than ever before.

Beyond adding in the traits as just an image and title, we were able to develop a new framework of information on site for the new unstable traits coming in, alongside a new base template for imadry, color coding the images, and some trait mixture visual examples on a few of them! We plan to let this sit for 30 days, and see how the community feels about the information given, if theres areas we can improve, and things we could adjust. 


Unstable Potion

New Traits:
2D Ears
Body Zippers
Braided | Knotted Limbs
Color Drain
Cross Mouth
Mirrored Head
Void Head
Unhinged

If all goes well with how this new trait layout sits, we plan to do this for the rest of the traits on the encyclopedia. 

We are looking to have information updated for some trait tiers (as in the traits involved in that tier, so common traits would be a tier we'd like to focus on and cover in the same format as done for the new unstable traits) over the course of 2024, as finding the time for meetings between MYO admin and owner can be tricky, alongside letting thoughts and information sit and steep to make sure we dont move forward with an inaccurate depiction or ideas on how a trait can work, what it affects, and everything else noted above. We thank you for your patience and time as we slowly but surely chip away at this large task.

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Small QnA

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"why does this need to be done?"

The site itself (primarily here, the encyclopedia) should be the source of information for people to reference for alot of their questions beyond MYO staffing when looking for transparent information on a trait. This information update also needed to happen due to the complexities of certain unstable traits such as braided/knotted limbs, mirror heads, and other traits revelaed this month.  Due to the limited amount of MYO staffing as well, and our admin having a fair amount of health concerns to where we dont want to wear them out, we feel this is a good step towards benefitting the community and the species, and helps have a source of reliable informaton in regards to the scarfox species traits. 

"Are unstable traits the only new traits that will come to the realm?"

For october yes as our first focus was to give the unstable tier more options to contrast mystic hollow and other tiers, but we do have traits in the works for lower tiers of the species that may not have been possible before! These ideas are being fleshed out as deeply as we possibly can, and we're constantly thinking over what mixture of traits could give this effect instead of a new trait, is it different enough to qualify as a new trait, and where it sits with the cans and cants of the scarfox species anatomy and lore.

If you have trait suggestions or ideas, please dm them to Dragon-Eternal and she will place them in the staffings suggestion channel to check through and manage! 

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The Magic Soul Biome

This biome was something a bit off the cuff from your standard biome, and felt like a fun alternative place to the wind valley and the hidden gardens. This also gave us a nice opportunity to play around with something more freeform and abstract compared to the usual biomes living environments while other biomes are in development (such as the sea palace). This biome is noted as being a pop up biome, a form of biome that behaves like a moving island, and can only be found with the aid of our NPCs Alta and Astral. While it looks fun and bright, the biome is completely synthetic down to its dirt, and is held within an enormous tent in and of itself! Its tall walls seem to serve a purpose though, as the Deep Mist appears held back by it. Whats to come in this biome is unclear, but we hope this twist to your classic biome is something interesting to check out and have your fox interact in. We hope you look forward to whats to come during the month of october, while we celebrate the orb of nights festival in the Magic Soul biome, and for future events we may hold that your fox may experience there! 

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Behind the Scenes Work

Some of our primary focuses after finishing up the october lore and such is the trait information update, lore development for future events, the realms biomes, new prompts with existing NPC's to help develop characteristics and lore bits with you, the traveling merchant, updating the site and utilizing areas better like the encyclopedia, creating visual guides for things like prompt submissions, and MYO submissions, and other tidbits we've been chipping away at. We appreciate your patience as we do our best to balance species work with irl work /gen

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Update about our Coder

While we have been getting reports on certain areas of the site not functioning right among other things, we have not heard from our coder since August. We currently have no clue what has happened, but we are hoping whatever is going on with our coder can end smoothly with no problems, and that we can get in contact with him as soon as possible in regards to not just the website, but he himself as a person, as hes an important member of our team /gen

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I believe that about covers alot of the current development we've been going at, if theres any questions or concerns feel free to ask below! Once again we thank you for your patience and understanding during this timeframe, and we hope to keep moving forward as best as we can with Scarfoxes! Take care!