GROVE GATHERING

• You've discovered a mysterious Grove on the outskirts of the 3's Forest. The treasures found here appear to have peculiar qualities.
• Encounter gatherables at random around the site and gain event currency upon clicking them.
• You can water the plants found on other participants' profiles every 3 minutes for 1 grove bud, which can be turned into event currency.
• Once your own plant is fully grown, you can harvest it for 2-5 grove buds and grow a new plant!

To access the event quest, visit the new seasonal area - the Grove! Go to the World Map and find it just east of 3's Forest.

• Speak to Cro at the Grove to begin the seasonal quest "An Unfamiliar Path"
• There are 3 quests in total to be unlocked in succession, as well as 1 currency exchange quest to help change Grove Buds into Grove Treasure.
• The repeatable quest can be completed 5 times a day, and the currency exchange quest can be completed 10 times a day.
• Clue - Take note of the paths you take and when you take them.

• The Grove Goods Shop will open on the second day of the event on October 22nd at 12AM DVT.
• The shop will be open until November 17th at 11:59PM DVT.
• Shop stock will include all seasonal fall clothing, totems, and more!
• All items should be affordable with about 1 week's worth of regular activity (completing quests, harvesting/watering plants).

WAYS TO OBTAIN GROVE TREASURE 
Grove Treasures are the currency for the Fall Event Shop and will be obtainable in the following ways:

• Doing the seasonal event quests
• Collecting randomly appearing gatherables throughout the site
• Watering the plants of event participants
• Harvesting your fully grown plant on your profile
• Random Encounters
• Random Item Alchemy
• Adventuring Rewards
• Playing 3's Forest Cleanup

GROVE BUDS & GROVE TRUNKS

• 5 Grove Buds can be alchemized into 1 Grove Treasure.
• 5 Grove Treasure can be alchemized into 1 Grove Trunk.
• Grove Buds → Grove Treasure → Grove Trunk
• These are obtained around the site through mechanics seen above.

UPCOMING FALL EVENT INFO
Here are some details on the upcoming Fall Event!

• Participants will be able to encounter gatherables at random around the site and gain rewards upon clicking them.
• You will also be able to water plants on other participants' profiles every 3 minutes.
• Once your own plant is fully grown, you can harvest it for additional currency and grow a new plant!
• This is our first event of this type so we'll be looking carefully at feedback and are looking forward to improving on it.
• We'll be making a conclusions news post after the event ends which will include future plans for improvement for the next event of the same type!

SEASONAL MAP, NPC, QUEST, SHOP

• There will be a special seasonal mini town available to be visited during the event!
• A new seasonal NPC also inhabits this new area, with a set of event quests which can be completed for seasonal rewards.
• The new seasonal town along with its NPC will disappear once the event ends, to return annually.
• An event shop will become accessible at 12AM on October 22nd, stocked with all seasonal items for fall.
• Event currency will be earned through the Gathering Event, Seasonal Event Quests, and various site mechanics.

There will be an Avatar Contest and a Creativity Prompt contest held during the event!

• Every month, Pai and Oran from Peddler's Port will have different sets of items in their shops that will retire at the end of the month to be replaced by new stock.
• These items are obtained from far away lands and follow the theme of the land they visited each month.
• All retired items from Monthly Shops will eventually be able to be obtained very rarely from Grandma Agnes later on.
  

WHAT WE'RE WORKING ON
Here's a look into what we're currently prioritizing, among other smaller bug and QoL fixes!

AUTUMN EVENT
We're hard at work on our upcoming October Autumn Event! This event will be our official third event type and will contain the following things:

• Brand new Gathering & Growing event type
• New Seasonal Mini Map
• New Seasonal NPC
• New Seasonal Event Quests
• Event Shop with Clothing, Items, etc
• Forum Contest Threads
  

The event will begin around the middle of October, an exact start time and further details will be posted closer to the start date!

WISHING WELL SEPTEMBER STREAMA status post with a link to the stream will be posted when it begins!
We'll be working on a new batch of wishes from the Wishing Well thread. Hope to see you there!

BETA CHANGELOG & ROADMAP THREAD
While we're working on our Official Roadmap Thread and Beta Changelog, here's a sneak peek at a few things we'll be prioritizing in our Roadmap!

Daily Quest Rebalancing

• Reduce clicks on daily repeatable quests by lowering the number of times you can do them per day
• Condense quest dialogue
• Raise individual quest rewards
• Streamline tasks and quest setup
• Roll-out would be town by town in between other updates
  

Recipes & Reward Pools
We're also planning to rebalance the way certain RNG item pools work. Currently, recipe items take up a large amount of the drop rate on several reward pools on site. We're planning to move all recipes to a dedicated NPC shop, and updating each reward pool with more desirable items. We're also working on ideas for shops and NPC's that would allow you to recycle your superfluous items for special rewards.

NICO'S ATELIER UPDATE
One of our new artist team's first projects is to work on a large Nico's update with many items that have been requested by our community. We're looking forward to releasing this update some time next month if all goes well!

We've made the following changes to the Terms of Service and Rules of Conduct. This will require users to re-sign the Terms of Service across the site! All rule adjustments were made for better clarity and to stay up to date with the development of our community.

TERMS OF SERVICE UPDATES

Adoptables/Closed Species Definition Update
Under section III. User Conduct, Clause 9. “Cross-site Trading” - 2. Genres of games with which cross-site trading is not permitted, we've elaborated on what an Adoptable and “closed species” community includes:
Adoptable and “closed species” adoptable communities that have their own game-like elements, currency, or assets which can be traded outside of the community.

VPN Rule Update
We've removed the no VPN rule to adjust to the fact that VPN's have become more and more essential to daily life for many in recent years. Rather than a blanket ban on VPN's, we've added an FAQ disclaimer for their usage:

Q: Can Dappervolk be accessed while using a VPN?
A: Users may use a VPN when accessing the site at their own risk. Usage may cause IP-related overlaps with others users due to how many service providers distribute IPs to their users. As it is difficult to detect VPN usage, this could result in investigation or account actions being taken due to how account interaction may appear to Staff. 

RULES OF CONDUCT UPDATES

Referral Bribery
We've added a section to describe our stance on referral bribery which occurs off-site.

Scamming
We've updated our rules on Scamming and expanded it into a section of its own for better clarity.
FORUM SECTION GUIDELINE UPDATES
We've added new rules & guideline threads stickied to the top of each new subforum:

Roleplay Content Guidelines
Events Forum Rules & Guidelines
Hangouts Rules & Guidelines
Customs Rules & Guidelines
Offsite Trades Rules & Guidelines
Art Posts Rules & Guidelines
Writing Commissions Rules & Guidelines
RP Classifieds Rules & Guidelines

We also updated the following existing forum stickies to stay in line with the updated content:

DV & Lore Rules & Guidelines
Tradesmarket Rules & Guidelines
Art Commissions Rules & Guidelines
RP & Writing Rules & Guidelines

• Every month, Pai and Oran from Peddler's Port will have different sets of items in their shops that will retire at the end of the month to be replaced by new stock.
• These items are obtained from far away lands and follow the theme of the land they visited each month.
• All retired items from Monthly Shops will eventually be able to be obtained very rarely from Grandma Agnes later on.

• The recipe for this seasonal pet's hatching item is unlocked by default, the ingredients are in Pai, Agnes, and Oran's shop Bonus Prize pools.
• This Seasonal Pet will remain in the shops for 3 months and rotate out at the end of November to be replaced by a new pet.
• Seasonal pets will be obtainable annually on a rotation! The items the seasonal pets hatch from can be alchemized at any time of year as long as you have the shards.
• The item alchemy recipe for the hatching item is automatically unlocked for all users, you can view it in your item alchemy page.

WHAT WE'RE WORKING ON
Here's a look into what we're currently prioritizing, among other smaller bug and QoL fixes!

WISHING WELL SEPTEMBER STREAMA status post with a link to the stream will be posted when it begins!
We'll be working on a new batch of wishes from the Wishing Well thread. Hope to see you there!

AUTUMN EVENT
We're diligently at work on our Autumn event planned for October! We'll update with more info when we're ready. Looking forward to a brand new event type!

RULES UPDATE & FORUM EXPANSION
We're now in the process of finalizing some updates, elaborations, and additions to our Terms of Service, Rules of Conduct, and various forum guideline stickies so that they more completely cover various questions and issues that have come up over the past year. We'll be adding some expansions of forum categories and subforums with this upcoming update, aiming for it to go out this month!

ARTIST HIRING
We've finalized our artist team now and are in the process of getting everyone set up. We'll be doing lots of training starting this month in order to help our team adapt to Dappervolk's style and help boost our asset creation in the future. An update will be going up once we get our team situated with artist roles on site. Thank you so much to everyone who applied!

BETA CHANGELOG & ROADMAP THREAD
These items are still on our to-do list, and will remain here until they are complete!

CUSTOM MAKER DROP BUG
Recently, a large number of custom makers dropped in one day, much more than should be possible. After taking some time to investigate this, we found a bug within the probability system when coupled with the luck stat. This issue didn't previously appear due to a combination of less spins being made in one day and less luck available to be equipped.

We've now fixed the bug so the drop rate should be back to normal again. There will not be any removal of custom makers from accounts or a rollback of any kind, as all makers were spun legitimately and it was an internal bug.

Later on, we'd like to add a few mechanics to make the custom maker obtaining system a bit more fair and rewarding:

• An individual user cap where one user can only obtain a maximum of 1 custom maker per week/2 weeks.
• A sitewide cap where a maximum amount of custom makers can be obtained from machines weekly. This count would be added to the site UI so users can keep track of whether or not the cap has been hit.
• Occasional opportunities outside of spinning chance machines to obtain custom makers, such as raffles or contests.
  

As a large amount of custom makers were spun recently, we anticipate that the current custom queue will be longer for a few months. We are however confident that we will be able to catch up and maintain the queue with our current completion pace.

• Every month, Pai and Oran from Peddler's Port will have different sets of items in their shops that will retire at the end of the month to be replaced by new stock.
• These items are obtained from far away lands and follow the theme of the land they visited each month.
• All retired items from Monthly Shops will eventually be able to be obtained very rarely from Grandma Agnes later on.
  

WHAT WE'RE WORKING ON
Here's a look into what we're prioritizing currently, along with smaller QoL fixes and updates. This month, we are focusing on our usual work as well as internal planning and UI creation for new features and updates in the future. Because of a large portion of the work being internal this month, we don't foresee any major updates besides some changelogs for fixes and small batches of new content.

WISHING WELL AUGUST STREAM
A status post with a link to the stream will be posted when it begins!
We'll be working on a new batch of wishes from the Wishing Well thread. Hope to see you there!

RULES UPDATE & FORUM EXPANSION
We'll be working on some small updates, elaborations, and additions to our Terms of Service, Rules of Conduct, and various forum guideline stickies so that they more completely cover various questions and issues that have come up over the past year. After we do this, we'll be adding some long awaited expansions of forum categories, such as adding an Events & Giveaways forum, Hangouts forum, etc!

INTERNAL PLANS & MOCKUPS
We'll be taking some time to work with our development team to plan out and create UI designs for various updates and new features that are moving up the todo list. We're excited to move into the next step of our development for many of these features that we've been waiting to work on and implement!
This includes but is not limited to: Guild updates, new Autumn Event type, Housing, new Agnes related feature, QoL related updates to some existing features, Customs Market, Pet Accessory Market
Since this is an internal pre-coding process, there will likely not be any news or previews of these features just yet this month, we will update when work progresses further.

BETA CHANGELOG & RETROSPECTIVE
This item is still on our to-do list, and will remain here until it's complete!

ROADMAP THREAD
We'll be working on a Roadmap thread and planning out how to consolidate it with our existing priority lists in our monthly news posts and changelog posts. This update should make it easier to keep track of where the site is going and what's coming up on a more longterm basis. The Roadmap thread will shed light on our more longterm plans which includes things like the Vaer Quest updates, Balancing plans, new features and content, etc.