Adoptable sites, old and new

[Altairia]

Throughout the years I have been on quite a few adoptable sites. Neopets, Dragon Cave, Dragon adopters, Unicreatures, Valenth, Project Nyoka, Wajas, Vdex project... and Magistream, of course! I have forgotten quite a few, I'm certain. My very first was Neopets, it is quite different from the other ones and I only played it when I was quite young, that's why I rarely remember to include it.

There were a couple of games I used to play that I liked, but I can't remember their names. I tried searching on google, to no avail. Does anyone know what they were called?
Both games had pixel art for their adoptables. One was a dragon adoption game, where you could earn gold by clicking on other dragons. I remember the site layout being mostly black in colour, and you could post your pets into these big click boxes of dragons, it was a good way to earn money too. I liked the description of one of the species, I believe themed after an amphithere: they mimiced songs sung by people of an ancient civilization they used to live along with, passing them on to their offspring, keeping the ancient language alive in a way. I thought it was very mysterious and interesting, no suprise considering it's rather close to my interests

The other was a fantasy themed game. Adoptable creatures I remember include a carnivorous plant that lured victims with it's cat-like appearance, an island turtle, a white flower spider with different color variations, a mechanical spider, and rarest of them all, a red cardinal that was only available to early adopters. You could join a faction, similar to how you can join a guild on magistream, only able to be a member of one. At least at the time there were only two, an artificer themed one and one more in tune with nature, the latter being more popular. There was a banner hidden underneath ads that you would see if you had an adblocker on, that every time you block an ad a pet dies. I think I still saw it even when I didn't have an adblocker!

Which sites have you been/are currently active on? I don't think there are anywhere near as many alive nowadays compared to the olden days, probably since people don't really use forums that much anymore, having moved on to social media sites. Putting your adoptables into your signature to raise them was a good way to advertise sites, after all.

[Munin]

I have no idea for the first but the second sounds like World of Umbria? It was steampunk themed and had "shiny" versions of most sprites? It has been gone for a good long while but I think there is still a wiki page somewhere with a handful of creatures on it.

I currently only play DC very casually (mostly grabbing event critters), recently returned to magi after a 9 year hiatus, and occasionally grab capsules in the final outpost

[Altairia]

Ah, World of Umbria, that was it! I found a wiki for it, but sadly it looks very barren.

Edit: I managed to find the other site too, it's name is Forest of Mirrors! They made a new site, which is still up, but it hasn't been updated in a while...

[Munin]

Yeah, most of it is gone. There are some sprites still up on deviant art that you can find if you search for world of umbria and the waybackmachine has a few instances of the site cached if you want to wander memory lane

[Aflame]

neopets was also the gateway game for me back in the 2000s! I found magistream soon after and the other main game/pet site I hung around was myadopts? which itself was not necessarily the game but rather a site template that allowed people to make their own adoptable sites and upload images for each stage of a pet. everyone and their mother was making warrior cats ones with these templates... I remember being like 8 years old and coloring in the most awful designs in ms paint and asking my friend to make the pngs transparent for me because I didn't understand how to. I actually think one of the reasons I started playing ms was because a user here ran a myadopts site I really liked.

[Altairia]

Oh yeah, myadopts, I was on that site too. Never made my own though, just liked to adopt pretty much everything I saw lol.

[Altairia]

It seems I mixed up Forest of Mirrors with Tale of Dragons, so there's another one to add to the list! I also remembered Tales of Ostlea. Many of these kind of blend together in my head.

[bandbullets]

i used to be active on Mysgardia/Tales of Ostlea but they r on indefinite hiatus and i miss those two dearly

[Hellcat]

NeoPets and Wajas are my forever loves
I had a chickensmoothie wayyyyy back when for a second and rejoined a few months ago when I rediscovered the place and had no idea what was going on but was entertained enough and recognized the name LOL
That has now led me to rediscovering dragcave and finding this place and final outpost!

[froglady]

I came back to internet games after a 12-13 year hiatus (9 years of being sole caregiver for my aging parents and 4 years of chaos after they both passed on within 2 months of each other). I retired after an on the job injury forced it and finally landed myself in a permanent home in Florida, so I started looking up my old accounts.
Many of them are 404, unfortunately, but I rediscovered Magistream.

I'm nucmedtech on The Final Outpost.

I'm froglady on Flowergame.

I quit Neopets eons ago when Viacom bought it from the Brits and started having outfits for your pets. When I joined it was a site for college students and was rather adult in some of its lore, but at 40+ I wasn't really interested in a sanitized version with electronic paper dolls, LOL. It was great for kids to learn HTML and internet safety, though.

Wajas I joined when Estuko first put it online (I knew her from Furry Paws) and am in correspondence trying to get my account excavated so I can continue.

In that vein of breedable pets like Wajas I also play on Xanje as froglady and Felisfire as Amardella. In the vein of competition games like FP I've returned to play on Horse Eden Eventing as Clear Springs Stables.

Some sites I'm considering returning to: Furry Paws (my username was LJ), Grophs.

Some sites I just can't get back into: Chickensmoothie, PowerPets, OviPets, IcePets.

Some defunct sites: MisticPets, ZetaPets, CatTails, and a million others I can't think of the names of right now. One with fairies I know is gone because a friend wrote me when it went away. There was a MMOG about recycling and ecology that went offline to much gnashing of teeth (including mine)--it was called Faunasphere, I just remembered) and another where you explored the real world map gathering real stuff from plants and fruits to butterflies and frogs that killed itself trying to make the jump to iDevices. They had to restyle sprites, shrink storage, shrink the camp, reduce your animal and tree and crop limit to fit on iPhone and people who had paid a lot of money for that stuff got really steamed and quit. Then the app completely failed and the game folded. If anyone else remembers those please refresh my memory on the names.

Yeah, I have a lot of usernames. I used nucmedtech until about 2005, when I started running into someone else using it, then I went to froglady, then I started using my old AD&D character name, Amardella. The eljay/LJ thing is my family nickname of over 50 years duration, and it morphed into Laurelee for a while, so that one's out there, too.