Annoying Hack/Bot Raid Currently Happening

UPDATE: It seems to be all done now!

Hey Jammers! It's a bit late, so I'll try to make this post quick.

Tonight I was just wandering around Jamaa when I got a couple of Jam a Grams from a New Jammer, both of them saying "AJ Classic rocks!" with the "Chill out in Mt. Shiveer" card. 

I had thought it was an actual person who wanted to send me a JAG... but nooooooooo.

It's yet another wave of a spammy hack on Animal Jam Classic that's been recurring on-and-off since December 2020. Until Wildworks removes the script that the hackers put into the game, Jamaa's weather will be looking cloudy with a chance of bots raining everywhere you look. 

This hack is definitely disruptive and concerning, but as of now, it looks like it's not about cracking passwords and stealing info– it's most likely main purpose is to lag the game, spam the chat log with ominous phrases, and fill up rooms and servers. 

To avoid some spam, it's a good idea to turn off Jam-a-Grams for the time being :0

Another weird thing:

I was having some trouble logging in, and when I finally could I got to Crystal Sands and apparently a bunch of others were having the same problem... 

Long story short, this is pretty bad and Wildworks needs to patch this hack ASAP. HOWEVER, you don't need to panic. Like I said above, evidence so far suggests this hack is just to spam the game and not steal items or player information. 

Still, it might help to do these precautions anyway:

First, change your password. Make it super complicated and hard to guess– full sentences can be good, numbers/symbols/uppercase mixed in can help make it secure. If you don't have a sibling or roommate who's itching to get on your account, you can write your password down in a notebook or somewhere protected if you don't think you can remember it.

Second, whenever there's a hack scare, it can help to go to Parent Tools and temporarily disable (not delete) your account after you log out. It's under the orange AJ badge in Parent Tools.

Alright. I'm gonna go to sleep now. But first, here's an actual image from when the hackers got together to plan this:

See you in Jamaa! Lets hope things stop being spammy soon...

The Random Animal Design Challenge

Hey Jammers! Here I am again, finally with the color palette post I started working on so long ago. I started doubting if this would actually be fun pretty early on, so I hope it was worth the wait >.<

But anyway, lets get this post started!

Welcome to the Random Animal Design Challenge! I came up with this idea while trying (and failing) to settle on a new color scheme for my panda.

This version involves counting up the number of letters in your animal name, username, and a few other non-personal-info things to create an AJ animal design that is totally unique! Perfect for anyone who's indecisive, anyone who's bored, or anyone who just wants to look like a Falling Phantoms bot:

Unfortunately, this first version of the Random Animal Design Challenge will only work for land animals because I was really stuck on how to adapt it for underwater animals. You see, underwater animals have different kinds of patterns and eye shapes available than land animals (who also have some variation of their own) so it was pretty hard for me to figure out...

However, you can randomly design any AJ animal by using a random number generator like this one that can get each random number value for you. Just change the max number to 50 for the first two main colors, 8 (or however many eye shape options you have) for the eye shape, 50 for the eye color, 12 or however many pattern options you have for the pattern shape, and 50 again for the pattern color c:

Now let's start this challenge!

Step 1: Finding the first main color.

To find your animal's first main color, figure out these things:

- The number of characters in your username (example: DoomyPanda has 10 characters)

- The number of letters in your animal's name (example: Countess Spookypanda has 19 letters)

- The number of your birth month out of 12 (example: November is considered the 11th month of the year, so my number here would be 11.)

After you've written those numbers down, add them all up and then subtract 10 from the answer like this:

(# of characters in username + # of letters in animal name + birth month) – 10 = your first main color number

As an example, this is what I get:

(10 + 19 + 11) – 10 = 30. 

For my first main color, my number is 30! Finding it on the color chart at the very top of this post, my first main color is this:

 

...which also happens to be the default panda color somehow :0

Step 2: Finding the second main color.

To find your animal's second main color, either add or subtract the number of letters in your animal name from your first main color number. You can try both adding and subtracting to see which result you like the look of better.

your first main color number + or – the number of letters in your animal name = your second main color number

This is what I got:

30 + 19 = 49.

NOTE: If the number you get for your second main color number is over 50, just subtract 50 from it like this:

The number you got that is over 50 – 50 = your second main color number.

And if you end up with a negative number, just add 50 to it. 

Step 3: Finding the eye shape.

Finding your eye shape will be a bit easier. Just decide which color of this rainbow you like best, and that color's number will determine which of the following will be your eye shape:

(NOTE: I started with the circular black eye as #1 because it is the default eye on most animals.)

Green is my favorite color, so my panda's eyes look like this now:

Step 4: Finding the eye color.

For your eye color, take the number of characters in your username and either add or subtract them from your second main color number. Again, you can try both adding and subtracting and just choose the eye color you like better c:

your second main color number + or – the number of characters in your username = your eye color

Here's my example:

49 + 10 = 59

59 – 50 = 9.

Once again, if your number ends up being over 50, just subtract 50 from it like I did to get your final eye color number! 

And if you end up with a negative number, just add 50 to it.

My panda's eye color is now a dark navy blue.

Step 5: Finding the pattern shape.

You're almost done! For the pattern shape, all you need is the number of your birth month out of 12. That means that my panda gets the crescent moon pattern.

And finally...

Step 6: Finding the pattern color.

To find the pattern color, take your birth month number and add or subtract it from your eye color number.

your eye color number + or – the number of your birth month out of 12 = your pattern color

For me, that would be:

9 + 11 = 20.

And now we have the final result! Very random looking indeed, but maybe it can be a starting point for a cool animal look :3

I hope this challenge was at least kind of fun for you! And if not, that's okay too. This wouldn't be the first silly post I've put way too much effort into xD

Before I go, I just realized that it's June 17th today– exactly 9 years since my first post. Sometimes I feel self-conscious about the fact that I've stayed an Animal Jam blogger for that long, but honestly it's been nothing but fun. I regret nothing! Writing posts for Animal Jam Stream has been such an important anchor for me through all these chaotic years, and I so deeply appreciate this small yet wonderful community that makes it all possible <3

Thank you all so much!

And until next time...

See you in Jamaa!

More Den Item Contest Details

Heya Jammers! I'm back again with a quick post– an actually quick post this time. I swear. 

So in the last post, I mentioned that I didn't know the deadline for Animal Jam Classic's den contest because it wasn't included in the Jamaa Journal. 

Apparently, that information was actually posted yesterday on the D.E., so I wanted to share it in case any of you were also confused:

"Have your ideas ready, head to Coral Canyons, select the paint tool to draft your design, and choose the send to AJ option to enter your creation. 

Entries will be accepted throughout June and 10 designs will be selected and developed for release in August!"

As long as you get your den item design in by the end of June, you should be good to go :)

Also! According to AJHQ, you can definitely submit more than one design to the contest:

I am so excited to see all the design ideas people are gonna come up with.

If this den item design contest goes well for AJHQ, wouldn't it be cool if it became a more regular thing? What if they had a seasonal design contest where Jammers could design new winter/summer/fall/spring themed items? That could be really fun. 

That's all I have in terms of AJ-related news for today, but I thought I'd also include a little blog update before I go.

So I got some big goals for Animal Jam Stream this summer. I want to work on getting into a consistent posting schedule that's at least once a week, host some contests, and also finally re-do my blog's layout– something I've been talking about for years but just haven't done yet because HTML is scary. I swear this will be the summer where it happens for real!

I have some other goals and tasks I need to do first, so I'm not sure yet when you're gonna start seeing these things getting done, but here is the most likely order in which you can expect them:

1. That color palette post. 

2. Complete blog layout re-work. 

3. A silly quiz: Which one of these AJ school roleplayers are you?

4. Who's That Animal? #2 C:

5. Another fun post that I don't know how to describe right now, but I hope it'll make you laugh when it's done :D

6. A contest! Ideally one that's more interesting, like the riddle contest I did a bunch of years ago. Maybe there will be an environmental focus?

And of course, more topics will come as I think of them! After I get some other things done, I can promise you that the color palette topic will be the very next post after this one. 

Alright, I'm gonna go to sleep now.

See you in Jamaa!

3 AJ Art Tips: Saving, Erasing, and Creating Tones!

Hey Jammers! I'm gonna try to make this a quick post– the shelf in my room fell off my cursed wall for the third freaking time so I need to figure out how to nail it back up (:

So, I'm the kind of person who waits until the last minute to do things, but I was so excited about AJC's den item contest that I decided to get my design in early. It also didn't say when the due date for the contest would be, so I wanted to have a better chance by getting it in soon...

I'm a verrrrryyy slow worker with my art, so I spent a good 10 hours doing my best to perfect my design. As for what it was– I'll show you after the winners are announced! 

Because Animal Jam's painting tool isn't always the easiest to work with, I wanted to write this post to share a few quick tips that I think are good to know c:

Tip #1 – Keep saving your work as you make progress.

Because the Art Studio's Undo button can only take you back one paint-stroke, it's good to save your art every 5 or 10 minutes as you make progress. That way, if your computer crashes or you make an accidental paint stroke you can't undo, you can just click 'Load' and go back to one of your saves.

On the right is an example of my AJ Art Saves folder– "wip" stands for WithIn Progress. For the den item contest, I saved my work a total of 41 times! It sounds like a lot, but it really helped me add extra details without worrying about doing anything irreversible. 

Tip #2 – Pick a background color to be your "eraser" color.

This one is pretty simple, so you may be doing this already– if you're drawing something in the foreground (example: an item) and you don't already have a background in mind, choose a background color and paint it over things you want to erase.

Tip #3 – How to create tones.

Now here is a very specific trick you most likely don't know yet: how to create tones!

Did you know you can't actually get every single color from the Art Studio's color palette alone?

Because each rainbow color fades into black, you can get dark colors called shades– meaning, a color mixed with black. The dark purple shade on the left is a shade of red. Because each rainbow color also fades into white, you can also create light colors called tints– the pink on the right is a tint of red.

However, because the greys get their own separate section of the palette, you can't get tones– colors mixed with grey. The default panda color is an example of a tone:

So if you'd want to use this color in the AJ paint studio, how might you do it?

I'll tell ya!

So, let's say you want to draw the panda above with its exact default color, or at least as close as you can get. 

Before you start your drawing, do this:

Make your canvas a medium grey, and put a small dab of your ideal color's hue at the very bottom with your paintbrush. A hue is like the true underlying color before it's mixed with grey, white, or black to become the tone you're looking for.

You can play around the find the hue, OR you can use an online tool to help give you a sense of what it is. 

I used this tool. As you can see, I ended up darkening the pink I used in the Art Studio a bit more, but you could still basically get the color you need if you used the hue this site gives you.

After you've found the hue, use the biggest size of the smudge tool and smudge from the very top of the hue upwards, going side-to-side zigzag but not up-and-down:

As you can see, I'm not blending that pink hue into the grey, but using only the tiniest bit of it to make the default panda's specific tone.

From there, ignore the rest of the pink hue and smudge from the murky tone that you've begun to create. Keep dragging that tone until it creates a sizable blob.

At this point, you should use Tip #2 and use the medium-grey background color to erase the bright pink spot along with the bottom-most part of the tone blob:

This is important so your tone doesn't pick up any lighter colors.

And then, just keep smudging that dark tone until it fills as much of the canvas as you want. For this tutorial, I'll just keep going until it fills the entire canvas.

Ta-da! Now you have your tone– a color mixed with grey that you can't select from the color palette. 

To make a panda, you could do something like this:

(For this tutorial I'm just drawing the head because I'm lazy)

You could draw the lines, and then use the fill tool to make the white parts white, leaving the rest:

And when you're ready, you can use the fill tool (along with the paintbrush tool) to change the background color:

There you go! Now you can use darker tones in your Masterpieces that you couldn't use otherwise C:

Well... as is what always happens, this has been the exact opposite of a quick post. I started at 1:10 and now it's 4:04. Dang.

But anyway, I hope you enjoyed these AJ painting tips! Feel free to share any tricks and tips you use when you use the Art Studio ^-^

See you in Jamaa~

An Actually Interesting AJ Classic Update

Heyyy Jammers! While I trimmed the difficult parts down as much as I could, the last post was about a rather heavy topic. I think it's still an important issue to discuss, but for now I think we can take a break... because for once, there's some good news:

A genuinely good AJ Classic update.

(gasp emote)

It's not the best thing in the world, of course– just a small step in the right direction for AJHQ. Still, it was enough to pull me away from all my other plans so I can post about it! 

Maybe you've already noticed this, but I've really held off on reviewing updates for over a year now because they just haven't been that interesting. 

But I'm happy to say that that changes today!!

While there are two main highlights I think are particularly interesting, I'm gonna go in order of the Jamaa Journal pages cuz I think there are little good things in each as well c:

So first up, we got a Wild Weekend featuring some coding related items! Not my favorite items, but coding can be a good skill to have. If I knew how to code, my blog would be looking a whole lot better than it does right now X)

What's good about this item set is that it seems to be all new, at least! Even though I don't think I'll ever get used to this minimalist style, some artists are doing their best to add new AJ items to the game.

I probably mentioned this before here, but I'll bring it up again because me and a buddy were talking about this recently: my theory behind the big art style shift in items. So, since Fer.al began production, I think that most if not all item design for AJ Classic may have been outsourced to other studios that might be struggling to adjust to the Animal Jam art style. That could explain the minimalism as well as the cautious re-colors of clothing items that keep getting released instead of entirely new ones. 

Either that, or WildWorks is just stretched thin and low on resources :\

Could be both!

But anyways, moving on...

We got this thing too! Looks alright, but don't worry– we haven't gotten to the best parts of this update yet... 

Aaaaand, now–

THIS!!!!!!!!!!!! YES!!!!!

So much is on AJPW that just never makes its way to Animal Jam Classic, so I was happily surprised when I learned that another den item design contest was finally coming back.

One of the best parts about this is that ten contest entries will win. Ten!!! Ten people get to see their art become a part of Animal Jam!! :D

And as a reminder, only five winners were chosen for the AJPW clothing item contest. You know, maybe this has to do with the fact that Animal Jam has been around for ten years while AJPW has been around for five... HMMM....

But anyway, I love that creepy purple chair(?) thing. It's absolutely nightmarish and I would never ever wanna sit on it xD

I bet it lives in the same dimension as Blinky, the WildWorks mascot :D

In the past, some really nice AJ items have come from contests:

Cleverclaw's Dresser, designed by Miss Cleverclaw in April 2012...

Speedywolf's Seahorse, designed by Awesome Speedywolf in May 2012...

And the Mira Waterfall, designed by Princess Fierywolf in June 2015. So far, these are all the den items designed by Jammers, and I can't wait for there to be more! 

...and oh yeah, I'm definitely entering >:)

Moving on, the next cool thing:

A never-before-done plushie scavenger hunt through AJ! Probably inspired by all those plushie hunts that people do in their dens for prizes. 

Along with being a nice lil throwback to the fun-fact Spring egg hunt that used to happen from 2011 to 2014–

–the fact that Epic Plushies are being made fully available brings up more than a little trading weirdness.

I'll show you what I mean:

On the left is the Epic Panda Plushie as you can now find it through the scavenger hunt. The Item Worth Wiki views it as not being worth much, because of course you can buy it through the scavenger hunt. 

On the right, however, is the Rare Epic Panda Plushie on the Item Worth Wiki– the original Epic Plushie release with the same exact design, and the only differences being the added rare tag and the dramatically higher "worth".

I say "worth" in quotations because as I've talked about before, the Item Worth Wiki doesn't accurately show item worth– the editors don't have access to the real number of these in the game, so everyone's just guessing. 

This seems to be AJHQ's attempt at keeping traders happy by maintaining the rare status of their pre-existing Epic Plushies, but technically, the same exact item is now easily available without trading... will people really keep viewing Rare Epic Plushies as rare when the non-rare ones are exactly the same?

This reminds me of a conundrum some people deal with on another game I play:

On Chicken Smoothie, these two are the same exact kind of pet and both have the same level of rarity. However, the original is from 2008 while the other is a re-release from only a few years ago. Some people view the "true date" pets as rarer than the rereleases and will trade accordingly, but many people don't see a difference cuz they're just the same pets.

Here's a feature that might make AJ's trading system less messy: on Chicken Smoothie, each pet's rarity tag is calculated by the real number of that pet owned by active players. Popularity/demand also effects trading, of course, but what if AJ items had real, accurate rarity tags based on the true number of existing items?

Alright, I know how ugly those example tags look xD

Maybe adding extra tags would end up looking too busy. But I think it might make trading easier. It might also completely turn trading around as people realize how common Spiked stuff really is in the game...

Let me know what you think about this idea! 

Anyway, moving on...

Next up, the Rainbow Raccoon has returned this month as it did back in June 2020! Presumably as a small nod to Pride Month :)

And finally, pet elephants! Not much to say about this, but they are cute. 

Whoooo... it's a little after 1AM where I am right now, and I have no idea how long I've been working on this post.

I'm gonna go to sleep now, but before I do, here's something you might find cool:

Up until around 2016, snowyclaw would update an archival blog for the Jamaa Journal! For this post, I turned to it to find the original drawings for Cleverclaw's Dresser and Speedywolf's Seahorse. 

If you want a blast from the past, or you just want to enjoy looking at how cute the Jamaa Journal used to be before it became the Jamaa Wood Slab, click here to go to snowyclaw's Jamaa Journal archive!

Alright. I'm done with this post. See you in Jamaa!

P.S. It might take a while, but I'm still making progress on the upcoming color palette post!