On Dragon Cave and Other View-Based Collection Games

In 2009, I was at peak Dragon Addiction and was looking for anything to sate my desire to be a dragon. Sometime during that year, I found the website Dragon Cave, a site dedicated to breeding and collection dragons. The idea is simple: you pick up an egg, either a fresh new one from the Cave or from a pile of eggs abandoned by other players, and you feed it with clicks and views. After 4-7 days, if the egg gets enough views, it hatches and you need to feed your new hatchling more clicks and views. After 4-7 more days, your dragon grows wings then becomes an adult, after which it’s added to your collection, you get more information on what species it is and you can breed it with other dragons.

There have always been LOADS of these sort of websites, pixel critter hatching sites, animal catchers and things like that. The only other one I remember joining and the account details of is GPX.plus, a Pokemon-themed one that had a fuckton of features based off the original Pokemon games. Honestly a pretty cool site, but I was never a fan of Pokemon. It’s generally just the theme that changes. You’ll always have a thing where you raise your pet by feeding them with views and clicks. You always have freshly generated eggs that only have descriptions shown, making you guess what they are and quickly realising that 99% of them are common eggs. There’s generally an abandoned area as well, filled with all the critters other people have started raising then given up on. Often these sites have a breeding and trading aspect as well, you can flog your rare creatures to other people and hope to complete your collection or get your creature to the highest level possible.

It’s all much of a muchness.

Dragon Cave though stuck out because it’s about dragons and literally nothing else. You collect dragons and breed dragons. Some people want to collect one of everything, others spend weeks making detailed lineages, others grab any dragon they can find, others create scrolls filled with only one or two species of dragon.

And for a long time, there was literally nothing else. Back in 2009 when I joined, there wasn’t much to Dragon Cave at all. There wasn’t even proper trading. The only way you could trade was to send each other the code of each dragon egg or hatchling, enter the URL to adopt the dragon (something like dragcave.net/adopt/*dragon code*) and spam the refresh button and hope you catch it when the other person hits the Abandon button. This was of course really risky, and I’m pretty sure I lost a dragon during my few attempts in trading.

Luckily trading was sort of fixed with Magi Dragons being given the ability to teleport eggs to other users.

There are way more features now. Proper trading. The ability to reorder dragons. Half-decent events. An actual backstory and some lore. An encyclopedia so you know which dragons you have or haven’t found. Not to mention the huge number of dragons that have been released over the years. But it’s only been recently that there’s an actual on-site dragon trading area (rather than having to rely on the site’s IPB forums) and an optional currency and market to buy eggs are the site’s newest additions. Many dragons also have various abilities that help or hinder you and your collection.

These breed-specific actions are actually an interesting part of Dragon Cave. Rather than being able to trade immediately, you need to raise a Magi Dragon, get it to adulthood and THEN use it to trade with other people. The same goes for other dragons. For example, you can use a Pink Dragon to alter the chances of an egg becoming a certain gender, you can use Red Dragons to help dragons hatch faster, or you can use Aeon Dragons to see what gender your egg might be. Some dragons, like the ‘Legendary Trio’ of Thunder, Ice and Magma, can be used together to summon a new dragon, while having 6 Zyumorph dragons (one of each colour) can be used to attempt to summon a new dragon too.

This all requires time and effort though. And a couple of click sites to help you get your eggs hatched. It used to be that you could put your eggs and hatchlings in the signature of any forum you visited, but these days, that’s not quiet enough. Luckily sites like The Allure of Neglected Dragons will help you out.

For someone as impatient as me, I’m not sure how I ever stuck around for so long. But I was adopting and raising dragons for a good long time, and went back to the site again last year, surprised to see that my account still existed. I’ve got quite a lot of dragons, recently getting the Gold Trophy for reaching 500 adults. It’s nice though, seeing this massive collection of dragons I’ve picked up. Okay, yeah, most of them are either random Black dragons I picked up with inbred lineages or my huge collection of unwanted Caveborn dragons turned into Vampires, but still, it’s cool.

The great thing is though, I can grab a few eggs as I please, I can put them in a hatchery website, leave that hatchery website in a new tab to give views to other dragons and go about my day.

It’s mostly luck, but I don’t care. Look at my army of dragons! Look at them!