Happy New Year!!

Welcome to the new year!

Several new items have dropped with the ball, many of which can be found via Foraging or are teasers for things we're hard at work on.

To make way for planned updates, the Xiunus DPIP team have concluded that we need to make some adjustments to the way we handle colonist images here on Xiunus. These changes may be disappointing to some, but we promise that they will be worth it!!

In order to make way for more releases of custom backgrounds and some extra special customization we have planned, all new colonist images must be transparent to make use of the customization items. You are welcome to submit design update requests to adjust old images to be transparent at no cost, but any design changes will require the appropriate items.

Especially important is the fact that image dimensions and ratio, with transparency, is now regulated! All new colonist images must be 1830px by 1200px (OR a similar ratio sized down to no less than 1220px by 800px. They also need to fit within the same general scale and placement as the newly refreshed official line-art, which include PSDs with a layer for shadows beneath the colonist - optional especially for aquatic/reef/water type colonists! Transparency will no longer be automatically chopped off! This also means that all background items will have their extra padding removed. You are welcome to submit design update requests with your colonist images with this newly required scaling/padding, especially if you find that your colonists are a bit too close to the edges now.

You are not required to update old colonists to this new setup, however, they may not look the best and their placement on backgrounds probably won't look too great. To help with this adjustment, for every colonist that you update to a transparent background and the correct ratio via an update design request (accessible in the bottom of the colonist's sidebar), we will send you 25 RP.  For record-keeping, please submit a claim for these, in batches if you're updating more than one at a time. Please link to the colonist in question and mention the # of their design update request in these claims. The title for your claim can be something like "New Colonist Format."

Custom line-art is still allowed!! We have no plans of requiring the use of our official lines; however if our official lines are used, please use the updated versions! Some have some clean-up beyond just the sizing and shadows that we are eager to see in use.

We've made a new guidebook page to detail custom line-art and rules regarding accessories, size, etc, especially for those who have made custom line-art for the Xunari public to use. If anything's confusing, feel free to reach out to staff for clarification! We will be outfitting that page with image examples in the coming days, but all feedback in the meantime is highly appreciated!

To make way for planned updates, the free cave background items have had a face-lift! We've also released a new Ocean Caves background, seen below!

As many of you have noticed, we are in the process of releasing philters, special items that can be used to add single alleles for individual markings onto colonists, genos, and whelps. These are released via the Genetic Research prompt. Adding these philters to whelps via the automated breeding roller is coming soon, but you are welcome to "apply them" and add it in your post-weaning comments for us to manually remove the item from your inventory and process the new allele.

These will be available to craft, with recipes incoming in chunks as they are released. They will be all considered alchemy.

New pet + fauna, released last month: Bokbok! Coming over from Tark'ee, the Bokbok is a very finely rounded creature, sporting eggs from the females and strange powders from the males. Females account for about 75% of the population to account for the rarity of the males' drops. Their drops only build up for a few days. They've replaced the Huldah in the Wandering Merchant with the Bokbok.

While there are definitely some fun updates coming in the future with animals, we have revamped our Variants system to now be able to feed these new "Swill" items to your animals to make them the variations. They will be available via crafting and potentially can be found as Investigation rewards very soon. If you have any suggestions for their ingredients, feel free to shoot us a line!

There will be nine total colour options currently in the works: Black, Blue, Earth, Red, Grey, Olive, Spotted, Tan, and White. The current pets

Agriculture animals now cannot be assigned to individual colonists as pets.

All current Aquatic Tark'ee Natives have been created and released. That means all Aquatic Tark'ee genos that have been fully migrated from their original ARPG via the form have been created as genos and have been transferred to their owners. We also did this for Draconic Tark'ee genos, but there's still one or two of those Natives who we need to create and upload. 

What do I do with my migrated tark'ee?
If you want to use your old design from the original Tark'ee arpg, you may use that image, preferably with the background edited out. However, if you want to use the old lineart and/or old designs, it cannot be different from the original deviantart-posted design! If you want to use any other lineart from its official deviantart reference, you will need to base the design on their Xiunus genetics and marking/colour rules. Use the colonist creation guide and if you have any questions, feel free to ask via Discord!

I want to redesign my Tark'ee but I don't have the means
For the first month after your Tark'ee colonist is migrated, you are welcome to submit a Claim to request your Tark'ee be redesigned by the staff. All newly migrated Tark'ee that have already had their genos generated and sent to their owners have until one month after this news transmission to make that request. The same option will be available for the other Tark'ee subspecies upon their release as the event progresses.

Can I migrate my tark'ee genos from deviantart?
Unfortunately, genos on the deviantart version will not translate over after cut-off for its subspecies. Until the cut-off point, you may request geno conversion via the discord channel in the Tark'ee server and then use that to submit the design through the this deviantart form. We request that any of these newly submitted designs use the new line art and marking rules. To give us time to convert the geno and yourself time to design it, please leave two weeks of lee-way between when you request the geno conversion and the cut off point below.

Cutoffs for deviantart design approval:

• Aquatic/Wave: February 9 (One month after this post)
• Draconic/Serpentine: February 9 (One month after this post)
• Flight/Aerial: TBA
• Volcanic/Rock: TBA
• Base species/Earth: TBA