Hello everyone, 2024 was a rough year for a lot of folks (us included) and we know even just as far as the species goes, 2024 was just as rough. Heading into 2025, we have a lot of big plans and updates that we'd like to do over the course of this year. 

I hope 2025 treats everyone well, and here's to the new year! Thank you as always for sticking with us.

Staff Updates

First things first off the bat, we have several members on staff who are going into retirement soon (after some tasks are finished up,) or have already gone into retirement. We wish everyone well, and hope to continue to see them around the community. Thank you everyone for all your hard work for your time with us!

Following this, we are looking to open staff applications next month in Feburary.

I know it's always a topic people ask about, especially if there's a  lot of staff changes ongoing at the time. We are looking to restructure staff a bit as a whole (like assigning specfic tasks and being split into groups) to make the job a bit more streamlined for everyone involved, which will help to benefit the community by having more dedicated focus groups. 

Birthday Gifts

User's now get a special birthday box gifted to them on the first of their birthday month, due to the Lorekeeper birthday rewards extension by CH3RVB and Moif! 

 This extension  also allows users to set their birthday display to be visible to members only, or only display the month. Birthday gifts are an automatic feature and will be granted to ALL accounts that have their birthday set to some level of visbility (public or sitewise.)

Due to this, if you have your account's birthday settings private you will not get the gift. They have to be visible to some degree!

Anyone born in January who did not have their birthday visible and missed the gift, may send in a report or a message a staff member on discord to get their gift- due to the suddenness of this update, however, in the future we will not grant gifts to any users who miss it!



Birthday Boxes are set and will include a prize of 500 sanddollars, a rare treat, as well as a birthday cupcake collectable item for the current year.

Archie's emporium updates

Archie's shop is finally getting his long-awaited return and overhaul!

He will now be running a shop that takes starfish and sanddollars as currency, and he'll still continue to sell runestones as he did so previously- along with a plethora of new merchandise and items!  He has also gained a new and updated banner for his shop.
These items prices have been set to reflect the current state of our Starfish and Sand Dollar economy and are subject to be changed in the future as it evens out.

Archie's will have a rotating stock of items, and will restock at the first every month! 
Items are a monthly limit per user, and not first-come-first-serve.

Here's some of the new items you will be seeing in there! 

Multiplier Statue

A small statue that can fit in the palm of your paw!
It is imbued with the power to grant your character any one of the following traits.

• Multiple Heads
• Multiple Eyes
• Multiple Ears
• Multiple Legs
• Multiple Tails
• Seraph Wings

Only one trait can be used from the list above. 

Sand Sculpting Kit

"Hey look, a kit for making sand sculptures! I wonder what we could do with this..."

Gives your character the Shaped Sand trait!
Shaped Sand comes in several different styles, refer to it's trait description to see everything currently available. 

The sand sculpting kit will only provide one kind of shaped sand to add to your character.
Any addtional kinds of shaped sand will need another kit, or legendary treat.

Self-Breed Restoration Slot

This ticket grants the ability to add one additional self-breed slot to a character of your choice!
You can attach this item when submitting a self-breed design for approval, just make sure to mention which parent the item is being used for. 

Scratch Tickets

Purchase at your own discretion, items will not be re-rolled or refunded after purchase.
Make sure you are okay and comfortable with the fact that you might end up with an item you won't like and/or use!
Scratch tickets are purchased with fake on-site currency and are entirely just for fun.

Rare ticket will give you a random rare trait
Legendary ticket will give you a random legendary trait
Mythical ticket will give you anything from a random legendary trait, species potion, or a mythical trait.

You can only will one prize per ticket!

monthly starfish raffle

https://waterdogworld.com/character/MOD-8217


This month's starfish raffle design is by GREML0RD !

You can enter for this raffle design by purchasing this month's ticket over in Archie's Emporium under the "Raffle Tickets" tab for 25 starfish each!
Raffle Tickets for starfish designs will now be purchaseable at Archie's instead of the Sand Shop!

Last Month's winner has been rolled and the winner is PeachTea congratulations!

Tide Pool updates

Following the latest discussions around the tide pool, and staff's own discussions on it, we've decided on some changes to the shop going forward.

Of course, if things don't work we can always make more changes later! Don't ever consider anything here 100% permanent, we want to try different things and solutions to try and make the community experience better, and if something we do doesn't work it can always be changed in the future.

The free prompt submission limit will be lowered from 3 per month, to 2. 
Starfish output rates have been raised accordingly for this!

We will be opening up another prompt for the tide pool alongside this change, for people who want to be able to use their own items and design just for the fun of it. This was something that was widely requested when the tide pool first opened up by members of the community, and we want to make it happen.

The first submission will reward starfish per month, but each submission afterwards will not. This prompt has a limit of 3 submissions per month.

No-Item Prompt

This prompt does not require items of any kind to submit to it.
Prompt limits are set to 2 a month per user, and will reward you with 35 starfish each. 
Dogs only, up to 1 rare trait- no legendary or mythical.
https://waterdogworld.com/prompts/86 

Items Required Prompt 

This prompt requires items to be submitted with the design! This prompt will reward only the first submission per month, based on the above pricing guidelines!
This prompt is good for users who like to design and want to use any items they might have, but don't want them for themselves.
https://waterdogworld.com/prompts/113 

monthly prompt

The prompt this month is focused entirely on New Years Celebrations, or New Years Resolutions!
Does your character do anything specific to celebrate, or anything they want to do this year? 
Draw or write about it! 
Writing must be at least 500 words.

You can find the monthly prompt located here - https://waterdogworld.com/prompts/112 

Species hiatus

We wanted to announce that starting next month, there will be a planned species hiatus from Feburary - April.
We wanted to give you guys a month's notice heads up in advance, to help plan everything out accordingly.

During this time we will be focusing on hiring and training new staff members, continuing our work on the masterlist updates, art and site asset updates, and giving more time to focus on coding and overall site updates and improvements.
Ideally, we would like to upgrade our site's lorekeeper version to v3, as well as looking into several site extensions and QOL updates.

During this hiatus, we will be closing down several aspects of the website, which include
- MYO Submissions
- Tide Pool Submissions
- Prompt Submissions
- Site Events (such as Easter)

Design Updates will still be allowed over this timeframe!

The hiatus could possibly be shorter than planned if everything continues to go smoothly and we end up getting done what we have planned beforehand, but for now the deadline we're looking at is April.

We understand this is rather upsetting news, and is quite a bit of a break from a lot of aspects to the species, but ultimately things are a bit messy and disorganized, and we want to take more time to be able to focus strictly on taking care of everything that we need to. We aim to bring a better experience to the community and this is going to be our first step into doing so.

Any artwork created over the duration of the hiatus is welcome to be submitted to the sand bank after the hiatus is up! 
re-working the sand bank is one of our priorites over the hiatus, and to create a higher reward output for submitted artwork.

*NEW* Site themes have been updated

The waterdog month 2023, valentines, halloween, and winter themes have been given a new look with the new year! 

While we'd like them to be perfect it's likely a few values were missed accross the four themes so a thread in the discord server has been created to share screenshots so anything can be fixed asap.