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Welcome to the WordPress archive, where I keep all my old posts! As of 2025-04-19, this archive is complete! Every post that was on my WordPress (that wasn't a delay notification, anyway) is here now.
Scroll down to see them all from newest to oldest, or click one of the months below to jump to the oldest post for that month!
2025-04-06
I did another breeding project like my Bobtail one, where I mostly just saw what I can get from two catz of the same kind.
I plan on doing another part for this, but for different eye colours! A pink-eyed Alley Cat has been in my sights for a while, and I don’t want to just hex one…
In the meantime, this stamp is going up on my Stamps page!
2025-04-05
If you’ve noticed a spelling change in the term, that’s simply because I decided to revamp the conlang that the name comes from. (“Îgpla” means “mass” by the way. Like “lump”.)
As mentioned in the original post, these guys were inspired by the gelatinous mass from The Last Mimzy.
An îgpla (genus Agplis in-universe) is a fictional type of hydrozoan in my books. Hydrozoans are related to jellyfish and coral!
Most hydrozoans are microscopic, but îgplas eventually started growing larger and became (typically) about 30 centimetres long. You can see the resemblance to the genus Hydra especially, so I like to think that Hydridae and Agplidae (the fictional taxonomic family where Agplis is) are similar, and maybe share a node on the phylogenetic tree of hydrozoans. Or something. I don’t know, I’m just a science nerd.
I imagine that îgplas eat the way bladderwort plants do. Îgplas will eat practically anything they can fit inside themselves, but they have a fondness towards eating rocks and crystals. I’m not sure of a good science-accurate reason for this (maybe for digestion like birds?), but this is mostly because it’s a reference to The Blackout Scene™ in Mimzy.
Unlike most hydrazoans, which reproduce through budding, (most kinds of) îgplas reproduce through egg-like spores. Îgplas don’t have distinct sexes, and are capable of asexual reproduction as well.
(I actually find it amusing that îgplas are listed on the Petz wiki Wildz page, since, as stated, îgplas aren’t real. However, I do like that I’m the current face of hydrozoan representation in… well, pretty much anything.)
There are seven varieties of îgpla:
The rest of the mass varieties (purple, black, white, gold) are mostly just for aesthetics, though I did name them: violaceous, umbriferous, opalescent, and shimmering, respectively. “Umbriferous” suggests that black masses might have something to do with darkness, but besides that, I have no idea what these would do. I may give these their own separate abilities someday.
I forgot to actually bring up why the number of tentacles is relevant to the selîn mass! Whoops!
Like all cnidarians, îgpla have a polyp stage and a medusa stage. The polyp is the squishy mass body that we get in Petz, but in my books, the medusa stage is a sharp-edged, crown-shaped form called a krikîka ("krikîka" meaning "crown"). The selîn mass is the only mass that doesn't become a krikîka, and it's theorized in-universe that it's due to the same divergence that gave it only two tentacles!
2025-04-03
Continuing this series, here’s some of the lore for the Emmunes!
This one is late because I’ve kind of busy today, so I’ll try and keep things simple.
As mentioned in the first post, Emmunes are based on the Emoglobins, Evoglobins, and Nutsoglobins of Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story, bizarre block-like beings that save or heal, revive Bowser, and give quizzes, respectively. It’s that kind of game. Collectively, I generally refer to them as “Emoglobins”.
Named for their protective capabilities not unlike immune cells, Emmunes are cell-like creatures which acquaint themselves with a caring “host” as a source of food and shelter. They come in four major varieties: Emmunos, Hemmunas, Ennutties, and Evmunis.
2025-04-02
To celebrate the Hemmuna and Ennutty files, more pixel art cliques of the Emmunes are available now on my Cliques page!
2025-04-01
Default AC Name: Autumn (Hemmuna), Midnight (Ennutty)
Hexed From: Calico (Hemmuna), Black and White Shorthair (Ennutty)
Reasoning: Wanted a way to care for (more of) my own fictional species.
Variations: Two Hemmunas (orange and brown) and two Ennutties (blue and cyan)
Ivy's Fave: Brown Hemmuna and cyan Ennutty
Other Notes:
This is the other half of the thing I promised in part 1! These guys are the Hemmuna, based on the healing Emoglobin, and the Ennutty, based on the Nutsoglobin.
As with the other sets, these guys have similar colours to their inspirations, which you can see with the Kind Hemmuna and the Quiz Ennutty.
I could only make these guys’ shaped faces with the help of pastylabs. If you have complicated addball structures too, I highly recommend checking it out!
And, as always, these can be found on my Downloads page!
2025-03-31
The power finally came back on after around one and a half days of a massive outage here in Ontario, so needless to say I am very, very happy!
Considering that Maskbunnies were pretty much divorced from their original inspirations anyway, here’s a bunch of my old lore about them.
Maskbunnies are inhabitants of a desert surrounding the massive tree known as Kaukau. They aren’t truly bunnies, more like bunny-like entities.
They belong to seven group – fire (red), sun (yellow), plants (green), water (blue), animals (purple), earth (brown), and moon (white). Each of these groups lives beneath the Kaukau tree, in the sands. The Kaukau tree gives them their power, and if it were ever to die, they would cease to exist as well.
The Maskbunnies have two main sources of food: rodentlike Misa (singular Mousa), and porcine Piggis. These creatures fed on the Kaukau tree, damaging it, and necessitating intervention from the Maskbunnies. Naturally, as almost all of my Maskbunny stuff was carried out through Petz 5, these consisted of the mice and the host pig in the Backyard. If I trained my (then-Dachshund) bunnies to catch mice from my hand, sometimes they’d grab the Pig from my hand too when I lifted them up!
Maskbunnies grow up and progress through stages, starting with “newlings”, then “proggen”, then “younga”, then “addils”, then “maska”, plus “high maska” for a leader. They also apparently… shed their skins?
If you, for whatever reason, would like to grade your Maskbunnies on their progress as I used to, here’s the guide:
Maskbunnies also have an immense hatred of conch shells due to the belief that they cause corruption.
2025-03-29
Want to hex a pet or a breedfile? My Hexing 101 tutorial is up now here!
2025-03-28
Sorry for not posting the past couple days! Being at the beginning of exam season means that my motivation to do anything besides lie in bed and suffer is through the floor, and unfortunately, posts count as that.
But yay! I’m back again, for a little bit anyway. And here’s our very first lore post, for the BirdWorms!
As mentioned in the original BirdWorm post, the BirdWorm is based on the TK from Crash: Mind Over Mutant. I was very fond of TKs as a child, and made some out of pompoms.
I came up with all of these interesting little details about my doubly-fictionalized version of these little guys. They were part of a species known as Telekan flubus (referencing another strange creature I adored, the Flube from the reboot of The Electric Company, for whatever reason) at one point, which I’m going to rename (more properly at that) Avivermis mentemovens. I went through all the bits of lore I still had, and here’s some tidbits that I thought were still interesting enough:
2025-03-25
My tutorial on starting the Petz games is up! Go check it out on my Tutorials page here!
2025-03-22
I’m no stranger to making weird Petz creatures – I had someone on Petzcord call me a “weird breed appreciator”, and a more apt label has never existed for Ivy “ivymercury” Hydrargyrykennelz.
But what about that one time I swear I summoned an entity to my Petz game?
This is the tale of The Forbidden One, or more properly, Mr. Smiles.
I keep a dream journal because my dreams are strange as hell sometimes. I’ve had dreams involving elevator juice, a basement full of anthropomorphic chameleons, a loose bull in the school, and having lavender lemonade sprinkled over me.
So, on the night of November 25, 2022, when I had a dream about summoning an entity to Petz on a livestream, and hearing from my in-dream chat about another entity named Loopy, I didn’t really question things. After all, I don’t stream, and digital entities are a thing of creepypasta.
This was before I ever got into hexing, so I was attempting to naturally breed things. In this case, I wanted small, fuzzy terrier-like dog, the prototype to my Yorkie. At some point, I had the Pug involved, likely for size purposes.
My most recent dog, Anwen, was pregnant. This was probably anywhere from three to twelve attempts in, so I was really hoping to get something that looked good.
And then I got him.
Mr. Smiles, called such because of the markings his pug face gave him, was an odd but normal pet at first. My roomie found him unsettling, but that was before they really got used to Petz’s art style, so I just thought it was that.
Then things started… happening.
As biology students, I and my roommate both know that scientists are a superstitious lot. “If we don’t stand near the centrifuge it’ll explode”-type things, mostly. But we accepted we had a curse. Generally it was technology-related, such as my laptop not liking the programs we needed to process our data, or an equipment issue, such as the lenses that were off by 0.6 centimetres (about a quarter inch).
Until this incident. We were running samples of our hair for DNA gel electrophoresis (the experiment isn’t really relevant to the story). I’d just dyed my own hair, so we used my roomie’s, and our not-partners-but-adjacent-lab-group were using the hair of our class’ Resident Genius.
And the gel turned out like… this:
As you can see from lane 4, Resident Genius had none of his hair samples show up, but there was a suspiciously overlaid smiley face-shaped smudge on the image.
After getting this weird dog and suffering a weird string of curses? Yeah, this pretty much confirmed that I needed to do something.
Because I don’t use PetzA profiles, I have a bunch of folders for my various projects and such. I decided to feed and treat Mr. Smiles as well as I could, then put him in a hidden folder to “seal” him away.
To do so, and to counteract the curse, I decided to breed what I considered a “lucky dog”, which turned out to be a green-eyed Dalmatian with lots of spots. (No picture for obvious reasons.) I put her in with him, buried the folder, and thought that was the end of it.
We stopped referring to him by name, instead referring to him as “The Forbidden One”. (After all, if we call out to him, he’ll return to the real world – or that was the logic, anyway.) The curse faded after that, and since then, we’ve had a lot less failures of equipment and stuff too.
But that wasn’t the end! In the process of writing this post, I spoke Mr. Smiles’ name aloud without thinking. The next lab my roomie had, the equipment started to get finicky…
*wearing a tinfoil hat* That’s what they want you to believe!
Jokes aside, I really doubt Mr. Smiles was an actual entity living in my geriatric laptop. But the timing and coincidence of the whole thing – dreaming about a Petz entity, then getting a weird pet and a string of mishaps – was too good to pass up.
Have you got any stories of weird Petz situations you’ve had? If so, feel free to let me know!
2025-03-21
Last time I did something like this, I was getting my questions sourced from old, old polls on the RKC Petz Forum, but this time I’m getting my questions more organically!
I posed the question “What should I do for my next posts?” to Petzcord, and the lovely Thor of, well, Thor’s Petz Site, responded by giving me an idea to do another questions page!
… But that wasn’t enough! So I got my university roommate to ask me a thing. (Roomie has been involved with my Petz escapades before, but has never played them themself.)
And that still wasn’t enough to sate my desire for being grilled! So I went back to the forums. (Lol.)
So, without further ado:
Most of the time, when it comes to Petz, I’m doing breeding projects or just trying to test hexes. I’m always trying to see what stuff I can get from combining features! (I think the parrot-opossums were one of the cutest. Maybe I’ll show some of them off later…)
When I actually do things in-game outside of breeding, usually it’s during free time, with me opening Petz to check on any creatures I’ve got at that point, feed them, play with them, and then return to whatever I was working on.
There have been occasions, mostly before I started hexing like crazy, where I actually would play the game as vanilla as I could. I’ve been trying to get back into that, actually…
Because I like creating weird creatures and breeding weird creatures. The “I Love Hybrids” clique on my Cliques page isn’t undeserved.
(I kept saying this out loud as “monstrosipies uton the world”. Spoonerisms.)
All the time. When I’m in the middle of a breeding project, expect a lot of Age slider usage. Now that I have Prism’s PetzA fork, though, I’m using the Age slider less in favour of the “Age to 100” button.
Before the hexing began, I would also use the Fullness slider to ensure my picky Poodle, Cherry, would eat. (Lowering it to 0 means that the pet will immediately eat anything without issue. Is it cruel? Arguably, kind of…)
I assume this is without any hexed toys, so here’s those:
With hexed toys, though, they’ve got to be:
Vanilla:
Hexed (I don’t actually use a lot of hexed food or treats…)
(Plugplugplugplug for everyone mentioned in these two questions! If you like this site, go check everyone else out! More of the community is on the Links page.)
Sometimes, I think long and hard and deep and come up with a name that’s the very essence of a petz’ being (e.g. Sunny, UV, Charcoal). Sometimes, it’s Roomie (e.g. Forceps, Sneefer, and Kuro).
I love both methods.
Virgo.
Firefox.
As of right now, just my bird, Bonnie.
Besides Petz of course, other ones I’m fond of include Speedy Blupi/Eggbert, Angry Birds, Bejeweled 3, and a whole bunch of Flash games. It seems that liking games that are hard to find copies of is kind of my thing.
Ice cream:
Candy:
Chips/crisps:
“Day-tuh” and “dah-tuh” are interchangeable. It’s always “bay-tuh” though. (My roomie said the same thing. Maybe this is a Canadian thing.)
Mint-chamomile, or just mint.
2025-03-20
If you’re familiar with the Nintendo DS or the Nintendo Wii, you’ve likely seen this Petz logo (or a logo in the same text) slapped onto a game made by Ubisoft at some point.
This game will be a virtual pet sim, sure (with a few exceptions – more down below!), but it won’t be anything like the Petz 1–5 series. These games are collectively called the “Ubisoft Petz”, and I had no idea there were 70 of them and counting!
Thanks to the Petz Wiki.
Most players of the original Petz games dont acknowledge these, and I understand why, but I actually own a few of them: Petz Dogz 2 and Petz: Puppyz and Kittenz for the Nintendo DS, and the game that is the main reason I wrote this article.
“But Ivy,” you might be asking, “how could you possibly like an Ubisoft Petz game? Aren’t a ton of them derivative knockoffs of a bunch of Japanese-developed games with the Petz label slapped on frivolously?”
Yes. And that’s why I like this one:
(If you see a pause symbol in any of these screenshots, no you don't. /lh)
Petz: Dogz 2 (and Catz 2, but I never had nor ever saw that version) for the PlayStation 2 and the Wii here in North America, not to be confused with Dogz II and Catz II of the proper Petz series, is an Ubisoftized version of わんこと魔法のぼうし, or Puppy and the Magic Hat (Kitten for Catz 2; henceforth PupHat and KitHat because I don’t feel like writing any of these things out again).
I got PupHat for the PS2 and later the Wii, and played them numerous times throughout my childhood and even now, as evidenced by the screenshot above.They’re cute games, being a very kid-friendly adventure that mostly revolves around helping adorable dog characters and stopping the evil wolf Ivlet.
(Though I will admit there were some scenes that were intense for little me, me being a crybaby notwithstanding.)
Running around and just… existing in this game was one of my favourite pastimes. You could explore, fish, catch bugs, find fruit, and get cute clothes from the local tailor.
There was a part before the boss fight where you could do anything without any more quests, and that part was where I spent most of my time, just vibing. I did finish the boss fight, but it pretty much just takes you back to this point anyway, so I haven’t completed it since. I’m still working on 100%-ing the game, but I don’t think that changes anything.
The only reason I actually like Petz: Dogz 2 is because, well, it’s the only port of this amazing game that we get here in North America. I’d love to see a remake of this game under the original PupHat title, but unfortunately outside of some very dedicated fans I don’t personally see that happening.
I honestly highly recomment trying this game out! It's cute, it's cozy, there's no time limits, there's only a few real moments of peril, and the music is great!
Just for fun, to leave off, here is my favourite piece of music from PupHat.
2025-03-18
To celebrate the release of my files for the Emmunos and Evmunis, I made pixel art cliques of each variety!
Go get them on my Cliques page! I’ve added more from others’ sites too, since I found some new cool ones.
2025-03-17
Because I tended to love fictional species from video games as a child, and loved to make them my own (re: Maskbunnies, BirdWorms, Îgplas, Emmunes), I’m going to add a new lore category for explaining how I envisioned these species!
Of course, you don’t have to follow the lore if you don’t want, but I imagine some of you would like to see my thought process behind these breedz and what they do!
2025-03-17
Default AC Name: Jinx (Emmuno), Eva (Evmuni)
Hexed From: Russian Blue
Reasoning: Wanted a way to care for my own fictional species.
Variations: Six Emmunos (yellow, green, magenta, red, light yellow, grey) and five Evmunis (violet, purple, red, blue, and black)
Ivy's Fave: Green Emmuno and purple Evmuni
Other Notes:
My love of the most random video game species continues, this time based off of the Emoglobins and their variants from Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story, which was, as with many other people, my first Nintendo DS game.
When I was a kid, I made a whole bunch of OC variants of those little guys, and eventually adapted them completely away from looking like Emoglobins into being more cell-like for the most part (being the science nerd I am).
These became called Emmunes, with the spherical ones being called Emmunos (based on regular Emoglobins) and the ovoid ones with limbs Evmunis (based on Evoglobins, my personal favourite of the four). You can definitely still see their inspirations in the colour schemes of the Save Emmuno and Soul Evmuni. (The other variants have names too, as seen in their LNZ sections.)
Their lore was a lot more involved and actually kind of dark compared to the barebones info given about Emoglobins, what with the fact that Emmunes attach themselves to a host for life and the relationship is far from mutualistic.
There are other Emmunes as well based on the Nutsoglobin and healing Emoglobin, among others, which I do plan on creating breedz for, but they’re a lot more ambitious. I’ve settled for the simplest ones so far.
2025-02-08
One of my favourite pastimes in Petz was always training my petz to catch the mice. It was always integral to the Maskbunniez – I had a whole culture envisioned for them – but I still do it with other petz.
Included here are a version with the white mouse, a version with the grey mouse, and a version with the “mouse” symbol in Petz 4!
Head to my Cliques page to get them for yourself!
2025-01-13
My university roommate challenged me to do a breeding project where the final result needed to fit these conditions:
This cat is Sneefer, and she fits the criteria pretty well, I’d say! You can’t see it in the stamp, but her feet (minus one black toe) and the second ball of her tail are white.
I found the traits!
I was going through my notes on my phone to find an old one when I came across the list of traits I was going to give the cat from the Thx Roomie breeding project!
It is as follows:
All in all, I’d say Sneefer turned out well!
2025-01-12
I’ve already bred a black-eyed dog naturally, so this time I gave black-eyed cats a shot! This is Charcoal, and he’s a Siamese-Japanese Bobtail mixie. No funky cat breedz here—I was actually shocked to get him so easily.
2025-01-11
♧ — I'm working on edits for this image! Until then, please open the image in a new tab to view the white text! — ♧
Default AC Name: Cam
Hexed From: Siamese
Reasoning: Petz hated me and I felt spiteful… again. More below.
Variations: Nine! (Veiled, Parson’s, panther, carpet, and Rhampoleon, with the former four having gender-specific variants)
Ivy's Fave: Female carpet chameleon
Other Notes:
I have two characters, Michel and Leon. Leon, whom you might remember from the original Meet the Lizard post, is a veiled chameleon. Michel is a garden dormouse. They’re canonically not together or anything, but I have a few noncanon ideas where they’re in a QPR, and I wanted to recreate that in digital pet form.
I bred together Vickie’s fancy mice and ferrets until I came up with something similar to a dormouse, and grabbed one of my green V3 lizards, and I put them together in hopes of them maybe bringing the relationship to life.
But they hated each other. What I normally do in that case is PetzA-sex-change one (Leon in this case), breed them together, and—
It took me an embarrassingly long time and several attempts to fix my files before I remembered that Lizard is a dog-based breed, and both fancy mice and ferrets are cat-based! So if I wanted my Michel and Leon to like each other I’d need a cat-based file for Leon.
Since real-life pet chameleons are temperamental and finicky already, I decided to use the Siamese breed as basis for the file. On the bright side, these digital reptiles are a lot easier to care for than the real thing!
2025-1-10
Default AC Name: Hop
Hexed From: Dachshund
Reasoning: I wanted to disassociate from the Voodoo Bunny of their inspiration, since I realized I don’t vibe with their racially-charged concept like, at all.
Variations: Fourteen! (Red, yellow, green, blue, purple, tan, and white, with gender-specific variants)
Ivy's Fave: Blue male with blue-172 eyes
Other Notes:
2025-1-09
Default AC Name: Heccini
Hexed From: Persian
Reasoning: The Purple Mod.
Variations: Still seven!
Ivy's Fave: Magenta-253 spots and pink-75
Other Notes:
2025-1-08
Default AC Name: Squishy
Hexed From: Calico
Reasoning: The Purple Mod.
Variations: Still eleven!
Ivy's Fave: Blue-155
Other Notes:
2024-12-20
♧ — I'm working on edits for this image! Until then, please open the image in a new tab to view the white text! — ♧
Default AC Name: Kafka
Hexed From: Persian (like V2)
Reasoning: I wanted wings on my BirdWormz, and I also installed the Purple Mod, so I wanted a version that combined both!
Variations: 17, plus the three marked with an asterisk (*) if you get the Purple Mod version!
Ivy's Fave: Either Purple-234 with blue-174 eyes (with Purple Mod) or blue-4 with dark aqua-203 eyes (without Purple Mod)
Other Notes:
2024-12-19
One day, not that long ago, I was trying to locate all my Petz breed, toy, and clothing downloads for my attempt to emulate Petz 4 on my phone. (It didn’t work, unfortunately.)
I was going through my list of links to other Petz sites I have amassed, looking for stuff I missed, when I came across ButterflyFieldz once again. I’d once downloaded their Wolf file, struggled with it for half an hour, and realized it was Petz 4 only, but I decided to take a look again and —
Whoa. I decided I needed that immediately. So I plopped the Petz 4 and Petz 5 versions into my computer to use, and…
Wait. I can only use it in one program at a time because of how PetzA works?!
While browsing the ‘net, I happened to also come across CanisCoyote’s page on Petz utilities, and found this PetzA fork by Prism Rainbow Lens that allows, among other useful things, batch breeding in Petz4! I’ve already used it a ton, and it’s super useful for the breeding project challenges I like to do.
So I decided that I really have no more need for Petz 5. I still have it, but I don’t use it at the moment.
2024-10-09
I’ve been thinking of making a new Breed Update for the BirdWorm again, this time to add the stubby little wings the TK has.
The BirdWorm is absolutely perfect as is – I love the way they look like my pompom TKs – but I might add a possible body variation that has wings? Just because I do like the fetus-like shape the actual TK has.
As always, I’ll update if I do end up doing this variation, or if I just abandon it.
2024-10-01
This new stamp is in honour of my successful(?) Japanese Bobtail breeding project! From one black and one orange cat, I got 16 unique and interesting mutations! Sadly most of the eyes were flukes…
As such, I figured I should probably commemorate the occasion that happened yesterday where I actually managed to breed a dog with black-244 inheritable eyes without the Voiddog file!
As with the others, this stamp can be found on my Stamps page.
I may or may not put these guys up as a download, we’ll see.
2024-09-27
Visit the Catz section of my Crew page to learn more about her!
2024-09-26
I’m adding a Crew page to my site soon! This way you can see all my strange creatures. I might divide it into pages for catz and dogz, and maybe for common breedz I like too.
2024-09-24
My cheese-hating roommate and I have come up with the “cheese cult”, which is basically any pet that eats cheese regardless of favourite flavour. This is… a large number.
If you, too, want to have Petz join the cheese cult, you can get this clique from my Cliques page!
2024-09-23
In my time as a member of the Petz Community, I’ve seen some common questions, especially in the forums. As such, here’s some of my responses to those questions!
I “own”, for lack of a better word, Petz 5 and Petz 4. I’ve actually never had a legitimate copy, even when I was way younger – my first Petz 5 disc was a ripped copy given to me by my cousin.
Although, I genuinely like all the colours, especially depending on the pet!
Petzy. It’s what I can hex, lol.
When you’re hexing and for some reason the file won’t let you breed. It’s happened to me so much. Sometimes I can fix it, but other times it’s so far gone that I just start the file over.
Not really. I’ve literally had siblings of a litter fall in love, so. But I do tend to try not to inbreed.
Scarab Beetle Catch. Easy, fast, doesn’t require you to manhandle your pet, doesn’t even require your pet to be awake. Pretty sure my parents had that little opening song haunt their dreams.
TIC-TAC-TOE. As I said back in the community views on Petz 5 post, I have never won a game of Tic-Tac-Toe against the Prairie Dog. And I always hated his smug little jig when he wins.
2024-09-22
As a proud member of the queer community, I decided to make a bunch of these pride cliques! All of these are based on quirks of Petz coding I’ve encountered:
2024-09-20
The dog you see below is Sunny, my Dachshund-Tinybaby Dog mixie (from the same lineage as Forceps).
Back when I had my original copy of Petz 5, I wound up with an orange Dachshund that I named Sunset, or “Sunny” for short.
When my Petz 5 copy started acting up – due to the fact that it was on a failing, virus-riddled Windows XP – I resorted to uninstalling and reinstalling the game.
This, unfortunately, meant that Sunset was lost, since I didn’t think to take her out of the folder before trying to uninstall.
As a form of recompensation, I make sure I have at least one Dachshund named Sunny, preferably orange with brown feet. (My current Sunny is an exception because I was trying more for eye colour fun and stuff.)
2024-09-18
I have made 14 different cliques for your favourite range of “natural” Petz eye colour! Go grab the ones you want from my Cliques page!
2024-09-17
I have mentioned before in the Voidpetz post that, though I’ve gotten fluke mutation black-244 eyes, I had never been able to get inheritable ones before outside of using that file.
As such, I figured I should probably commemorate the occasion that happened yesterday where I actually managed to breed a dog with black-244 inheritable eyes without the Voiddog file!
Of note is that Forceps here is part Tinybaby dog, but no Tinybaby has black eyes, and the specific kind that he’s got genes from is the blue with pink eyes!
2024-09-16
I’ve made a page to put cliques I’ve joined and my own cliques I’ve made! Go check it out!
2024-09-14
As I’ve just joined the Whiskerwick forums (and the RKC forums as well – I’m @/ivymercury on both!), I’ve decided to engage in a Petz community tradition as old as… well, not time itself, but 2016 – making Petz stamps!
There will be a new “Stamps” page under construction to reflect this!
2024-09-13
Default AC Name: Liz
Hexed From: Dachshund (was Chihuahua)
Reasoning: I wanted to make the V1 variations more unique and less like Manda’s breedfile, as well as fix the shape of them. (I hated their buttcheeks.)
Variations: Ten! (red, yellow, green, green with translucence, cyan, blue, grey, brown, black, and white)
Ivy's Fave: Translucent green with steel-117 eyes
Other Notes:
2024-09-12
As you’re probably aware from browsing this site, I am an avid player of Petz 5, the metaphorical “bad apple” of the five main Petz games. But I wanted to play Petz 4 and see what the fuss was about. Thusly, I grabbed a copy of Petz 4 with PetzA installed from Yabiko, loaded a bunch of stuff into it, and booted it up…
If you, too, would like your Circus playscene slur-free, Gyiyg at Polygondwanaland has a download for that!
2024-09-11
As I mentioned back in my very first blog post, the Petz community loves Petz 4. This makes sense – it’s got more features than Petz, Petz II, or Petz 3, after all. But then, if so, why does Petz 5 – which has even more features – seem like the “black sheep” of the Petz series? (And no, we don’t talk about the post-2002 games, though I will admit that I liked Petz: Dogz 2, otherwise known as Puppy and the Magic Hat.)
As someone who, as of this writing, has only ever played Petz 5, I have compiled a list of all the things the Petz community dislikes about Petz 5. Obviously, I’m not trying to claim that people who dislike 5 are wrong. I myself also dislike some of these things!
Petz 5 was the first Petz game to not be fully under control of the rest of the series’ developers, P.F. Magic. Instead, it was made by Studio Mythos. It was also published by Ubisoft, which was the beginning of the end of the Petz series being the way that Petz 1-5 were.
However, as I noted in my breedz guide, a lot of these breedz only have one variation, and those with more than one usually only have a few colour changes. It’s as if the programmers were trying to do as little as possible. While people do like these new breedz – I myself am endlessly fond of Papillons and Desert Lynxes – most think more effort could have been put into them. Thankfully, there’s always hexing!
Petz 5 adopted a newer, more photorealistic style for the Playscenes. Some people like the change, some people don’t.
While lots of people do like that Petz 5 allows you to have litters of up to 4, some don’t like it. I’ve heard people say that litterz turn out looking “samey”, which is fair. Some people also play the game “vanilla” (without using PetzA to set litter size) and don’t like the randomness of how many babies they get.
There were three big changes to the Petz format that happened in Petz 5:
These changes were contentious for clear reasons: they changed parts of the game that were perfectly fine as is, and made things more complicated for no reason.
Speaking of the Carrying Case and toyz…
Petz 5 introduced a minigame mechanic, which sounds cool. The problem is, the Carrying Case starts with the bare minimum, and you earn more toys from going to other Playscenes and, once there were no new toys just sitting around anymore, playing these minigames.
Assuming the system works and you don’t end up with nothing, most of the time you’re going to get repeats. Plus, some of the minigames are freakin’ annoying. I’ve never won a game of Tic-Tac-Toe against the Prairie Dog. I always used to do the Scarab Beetle Catch one because it was the easiest and fast. The Obstacle Course was good for training petz but that was about it (besides, you could cheat on the pole and balance beam ones). Other people like Rock Paper Scissors for the easy cheat there too.
These minigames are the reason I use Tinker. It can put all the toys into the case for you, so you never have to catch another beetle or suffer the prairie dog’s smugness again!
Something I didn’t know until now was that in Petz 4, you could actually adopt Bunniez and Pigz (though you couldn’t breed them). In Petz 5 they’re just the host characters for the Backyard.
On the sharing side of things, it’s harder to convert a Petz 5 pet to another version than it is to convert a Petz 4 pet to another version. There is Petflux, made by Reflet at Yabiko, but that wasn’t available for a long time.
All the Petz games can be finicky with newer computers, but I think the fact that my fellow WordPress Petzer, Wayback Petz, has a page on Petz 5’s compatibility “issues” as opposed to “fixes” like the rest of them says a lot. I literally had to reduce my computer’s resolution to have my petz not look like Picasso art.
Because Petz 4 is so beloved, one recursive thing that has happened is that there is less Petz 5-specific fan content. Hexed breedz, clothes, and toys are more common for Petz 4 than 5, though there are also many sites that offer them both (and stuff for 3 as well). Plus there’s always Unibreed.
2024-09-10
If you’re new to the community and want to know some of the lingo, go check it out here!
2024-09-09
My guides to Petz genetics and the 30 Petz 5 breedz are both up now! Check them out!
2024-09-07
I mostly just had a gripe with my Lizard breed having babies that didn’t hatch from eggs.
So, I rectified that. Expect a tutorial on how to do it, since I couldn’t find a really detailed one and thus had one hell of a time.
I have only one small problem with the eggs…
… second-gen lizard babies have their eyes popping out of their eggshells! Yikes! But this is okay, since it gives you an idea of what their eye colour and/or scale colour is before they hatch.
Both this version and the original “live birth” version are available for download.
2024-07-22
Before I really got into hexing, I used to frequent a Petz 4 site called Intron/Exon, run by the lovely Kleo. That site has since gone down, but I have a handy Wayback Machine link I still use on occasion.
This site was my first introduction to the fact that the Petz games’ “genetics” are way more complicated than they have any right to be. This is a pet simulator game from the 90s and 00s, barely older than I am, and I’m like 99% sure it has more complicated programming than some modern games.
One of most helpful pages on the site was, to me, the eye colour genetics. This was how I learned that starting with green-2, aqua-6, or dark aqua-203 eyes gets you better chances of mutations!
Other useful things I learned from this site:
2024-07-19
Default AC Name: Kafka
Hexed From: Persian! (was Egyptian Mau)
Reasoning: Made fixes to the proportions and removed the pupils as detailed in the V1 post, and added more colours!
Variations: Seventeen! (Red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, teal, blue-grey, indigo, purple, pink, hot pink, tan, dusty, sandy, steel, black, and white)
Ivy's Fave: Blue-4 with dark aqua-203 eyes
Other Notes:
2024-07-18
Default AC Name: Hop
Hexed From: Dachshund
Reasoning: Wanted to include coloured mask variations like I mentioned back in the V1 MTPB post.
Variations: Twenty-four! (Red, yellow, green, blue, purple, and tan, with gender-specific variants and coloured mask variants)
Ivy's Fave: Green female with only coloured accents and dark aqua-203 eyes
Other Notes:
2024-07-17
Default AC Name: Liz
Hexed From: Chihuahua
Reasoning: Petz hated me and I felt spiteful. More info below.
Variations: Thirteen! (red, yellow, green, blue, pink, black, brown, tan, white, green patches, purple patches, and two special variations I mention below!)
Ivy's Fave: White with pink-70 eyes
Other Notes:
I found a really great lizard breedfile made by the lovely Manda of Silent Wolf Kennelz (link if you want to try said file out!). However, no matter what I did, it would not let me breed them. So I did what I had to do – I made my own instead. But then I went overboard…
I mentioned two special variations above. Sometimes, you’ll get a green lizard with translucence and glasses, or a yellow lizard with a pink sweater. These are references to my book characters Leon and Allie!
Technically, the tan lizard’s pattern is based on my other character Camille, but she didn’t have any distinguishing clothing I could make a proper variant for her with…
A cute thing to round it off is that I’ve made the lizard babies absolutely tiny. Just like the real things.
2024-07-16
Default AC Name: Squishy
Hexed From: Calico
Reasoning: I thought it would be funny to make a breed based off of the funny little gelatinous things.
Variations: Eleven! (Blue, dark blue, purple, pink, red, green, cyan, black, grey, white, and one golden one with sparkles!)
Ivy's Fave: Blue-155
Other Notes:
One of my favourite movies as a child was, for whatever reason, The Last Mimzy. In said movie is a toy that the director referred to as a “gelatinous mass”.
I used to be terrified of the gelatinous mass, because one scene featuring it (that the above trailer shot originally comes from) was way too intense for me even as a 10 or 11 year old (I saw the movie long after its release date).
It’s since grown on me, and I based the îgpla species for my books on the gelatinous mass. Îgpla are, in my books, a genus of hydrozoans.
Aside from the colour variations given, there are also some minor cosmetic differences. You can get îgpla of various sizes from the AC, ranging from very small to very large…
…and the green and grey îgpla have only two tentacles or two body segments, respectively. I tried to make this visible in the above variations image.
2024-07-15
Default AC Name: Floofy
Hexed From: Papillon
Reasoning: I wanted a dog that could impart a smaller body scale to other petz when they were bred together.
Variations: Seven! (red, orange, tan, blue, white, black, and brown)
Ivy's Fave: Blue-116 fur and pink-75 eyes
Other Notes:
I had a mixie named Saria once, who was absolutely tiny. I decided to make the Tinybaby Dog to get more tiny units like Saria.
These guys have default puppy scales as 50 and default adults scales as 75, meaning they’re absolutely miniature – here’s a Tinybaby puppy next to a Chihuahua puppy for scale!
I’m probably also going to make a Tinybaby Cat, but that’s for another time…
2024-07-14
Default AC Name: Kafka
Hexed From: Egyptian Mau
Reasoning: I wanted a bird-like creature based on my favourite fetus of all time, the TK. (You can tell because the breed’s short form name in the LNZ is still TK – to be fair, I’m pretty sure the Black + White Shorthair is BW.)
Variations: Twelve! (red, orange, yellow, green, teal, blue-grey, purple, pink, white, black, tan, and dusty)
Ivy's Fave: Blue-175 with yellow-161 eyes
Other Notes:
If I had a nickel for every breed I’ve made that is based on an enemy from a Radical Entertainment-produced Crash Bandicoot game, I’d have two nickels. The Maskbunnies are one, and this guy is the other, based on the TK from Crash: Mind over Mutant.
I always used to make TKs out of pompoms. Hell, I have one sitting next to me as I write this.
The grey-blue variant is based on the original TK, while the other twelve are either based on other pompom TKs I made (such as the yellow, pink, and black ones) or just for fun. (The default name, Kafka, was the name of one of the first pompom TKs I made.)
Being legless and earless, they can do some funky things when bred with other catz… And their babies’ proportions are accurate to the “top-heavy naked baby bird” vibe.
I might make them look a bit more like the actual TK, maybe removing the pupils or making them a bit more obscured, increasing the size of the eyes, and shrinking the beak? If I do, I’ll release a Breed Update.
2024-07-13
Default AC Name: Heccini
Hexed From: Persian
Reasoning: Strange spot and coat colours that can’t be provided by the Pixie-Bob. Also, I wanted an easy way of giving catz inheritable pink eyes.
Variations: Seven! (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, and pink)
Ivy's Fave: Magenta-253 spots and pink-75 eyes
Other Notes:
Heccs are also massive, being about the size of the Honey Bear.
Of the seven variations, Red gives cherry-50 eyes, Orange gives ginger-69 eyes, Yellow gives sandy-100 eyes, Green gives dark aqua-203 eyes, Blue gives aqua-6 eyes, Purple gives steel-199 eyes, and Pink gives pink-75 eyes.
2024-07-12
Default AC Name: Pip
Hexed From: Desert Lynx
Reasoning: I wanted a cat with spots. There’s already the Dalmatian. And sure, I gueeeeess I could just hex them onto preexisting catz. But there’s no fun in that!
Variations: Seven! (black, red, tan, brown, white, grey, and blue)
Ivy's Fave: Red-80 spots and green-132 eyes
Other Notes:
Based on the real-life Pixie-Bob breed, Pixies have features similar to the Desert Lynx, but possess spots and ear tips of a certain colour.
When breeding two Pixies together, the markings on the ears can be different from the markings on the body.
2024-07-11
Default AC Name: Hop
Hexed From: Dachshund
Reasoning: I always used to paint my Dachies to look like a certain video game race I really liked. I decided to facilitate the process by hexing a proper breed for them. I deserve a bit of fun sometimes, no?
Variations: Twelve (red, yellow, green, cyan, purple, and tan, with male and female-specific colouring from the AC)
Ivy's Fave: Cyan-254 male with blue-154 eyes
Other Notes:
I used to constantly play Crash of the Titans on my PlayStation 2, and for some reason my favourite enemy in that game was the Voodoo Bunnies. Probably because their masks freaked me out.
Yes, with the benefit of hindsight, the VBs are horrifically problematic. But the game came out in 2007 and is full of other tribal-punk-ish nonsense from that time, so a bunch of African-cannibal-stereotype rabbits isn’t too surprising to see.
Either sex of Maskbunny can have the coloured features, but only males will have black fur and only females will have gray fur if you get them from the Adoption Centre. (It’s a choice inspired by the Voodoo Bunny skins from that game – the skin for player 2 is a light teal.) But that changes if you give them a sex change through PetzA or breed them, of course.
Credit to CRASHARKI.
Breeding them sometimes results in cool colours like red, orange, brown, dusty, or white!
The coloured markings can be mixed and matched with breeding, or foregone entirely for black or gray. Sometimes the white “masks” glitch out too, leaving a “half mask” or what I like to call “tear streaks” of the fur colour showing through.
They kept their original breed’s personality, making them very energetic! The ears sometimes get a bit wonky because they still follow the animations for if the ears were normal Dachie ears, but sometimes it’s charming.
Now that I have a bit better idea of what I’m doing in Pet Workshop and LNZ Pro, I might make more variants based on the Voodoo Bunnies from the DS version of Crash: Mind over Mutant. I like their red masks. If I do, I’ll be sure to make a Breed Update about it!
2024-07-10
Default AC Name: Space (Dog) or Dark (Cat)
Hexed From: Great Dane (Dog) and Desert Lynx (Cat)
Reasoning: I love the vibes of a pet with pitch black irises, and wanted to get a pet I could use to pass them down, but it’s a ridiculously rare mutation in Petz 5, and when it does happen it’s never inheritable! So I made a pet that has black eyes, as well as black fur purely for the Careful What You Wish For aspect. Are you willing to take the chance of completely screwing up your pet’s look for the sake of a bit of aesthetic pleasure? I know I am!
Variations: A whopping sixteen for each! (Black, yellow, red, and violet eye colours, with every possible heterochromatic variant.)
Ivy's Fave: Black-244 and purple-5 heterochromia
Other Notes:
If I remember right, the dog in my logo is a Voiddog, lol.
These guys were inspired by Kuro here, a dog I had who had black-244 eyes. I spent so long trying to pass down his eye colour, but I couldn’t do it. Turns out black-244 eyes are uninheritable if they’re a mutation! So I decided I was going to darn well do it myself.
I made the Voiddog from a Great Dane for the lanky proportions, and the Voidcat is a Desert Lynx hexie purely because the ear tufts are my favourite cat feature. Looks like they kept their breeds’ personalities.
(I remember the Voidcat being more finicky to hex for some reason? Probably a Pet Workshop glitch to be honest.)
As you can see here in GenePoolz, Voids don’t pass down perfect red-249 or yellow-251 or purple-5. Instead passing down ginger or sandy or steel eyes. But black works perfectly! (Heterochromia also isn’t passed down – only the right eye is used when genetics are determined.)
2024-07-09
Default AC Name: Yappy
Hexed From: Scottie
Reasoning: I wanted Yorkies because I think they're adorable, and I also wanted to replicate the fucked up family tree of a couple of my book characters. The only other Yorkie breedfiles I could find had long hair and no colour variants, so I decided to take up hexing and make my own with different colours and puppy cuts. (Yes, that's right—this was my first hexed breed!)
Variations: Eight! (Six gold and blue, two black and tan—all with different eye colours as seen in the image!)
Ivy's Fave: Black-39 fur with blue-172 eyes
Other Notes:
The majority of the ones you get will be gold and blue with some shade of brown eyes (5 different variants). If you're lucky, you'll get a gold pup with blue eyes, a black and tan pup, or a black and tan pup with blue eyes for the double rarity (all have 1 variant each)!
According to my breedfile, I gave them the Chihuahua's personality to match their notorious yappiness. I've never seen them make yapping motions (they're mute and I can't fix them) but I have seen them do that zooming-in-circles thing that Chichis do!
I quite like how they look both as puppies and as adults. I adjusted the Scottie's features a bit to make them look distinct, but they still have the same body shape, which makes them look quite proud sometimes. It's cute!
2024-07-08
I guess technically it's a kennel and a cattery, but eh.
I chose the name Hydrargyry, from hydrargyrum, Latin for "mercury" (that's why its atomic symbol is Hg!). My Tumblr username is "owlkhemy", like "alchemy", so I thought it was a good fit, even though it's not really reflected anywhere here on WP. That's also why the icon for my site has a mercury symbol (☿) in it!
2024-07-08
I've just started a site here! Not that my Tumblr wasn't good, but it's nice to have something more official. Now I really feel like a proper member of the Petz community, lol.
Anyway, I'm Ivy! I've been playing the Petz series since I was a child. I've only ever played Petz 5, but I have plans to try out Petz 4 at some point simply because most of the Petz community focuses on it. Most Petz fans don't like 5, but it was practically my childhood.