Guild Spotlight: Our Favourites

With all the Guilds on Habitica, sometimes it can be difficult to know where to start. This year, our Guild Spotlights are going to highlight the favourite Guilds of Habitica’s staff, moderators and some high-level contributors! If you want to curate your Habitica experience and join active, positive Guilds, this is a great way to pick up some new ideas for Guilds to join.

Nakonana was kind enough to agree to share her favourites this month! You may have met her in and around Habitica both helping out as a socialite and working on the German and Russian translations of the site. If you haven’t met her before, you might just run into her in the following guilds!

ADHDers Guild 🐿️ : As one of the guildmembers recently said, it is “the one guild that has the most/best advice for staying on top of things and staying focused”. I know, other guilds might claim that for themselves as well, but for us ADHDers (and those who find the advices helpful even if they don’t have ADHD) it sure is a nice and safe space of understanding and support. Oh, and look at that squirrel!

Bakin’ Bakin’ All Day Long: I really enjoy the community and challenges of this guild. Each month there’s a new cake theme, new bread and new country to discover! And people give tips, if one needs help with something. It’s also beginner friendly, so I recommend giving baking a try, if you haven’t yet.

The Otaku and Gamers Dōjō: A guild to talk about anime, manga and games but also Japan related things that go beyond those topics. It hasn’t been too long ago and we would talk about cherries and brownies when it was the time of the sakura blooming… Don’t question it, just visit and join the conversation xD.

The Jobseekers: This guild helped a great deal with my last job search! Implementing the methods learned here, I received more replies to my applications and found a new job way faster than when I tried on my own. If anyone is struggling with job hunting, make sure to check it out.

Go ahead and jump in (and say hi!) if any of those guilds sound like they might be your thing!

If none of those are calling out to you, there are lots of other Guild Spotlights as well, including ones from other contributors — there’s something for everyone. There’s a new spotlight every month, so keep an out for that, too!

Use Case Spotlight: Adapting to Life Changes

Illustration by gully

This month’s Use Case Spotlight focuses on something that all of us have to deal with at some point or another: Adapting to Life Changes. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a good change like a new job or something like a serious illness, big changes can throw off your routines, make things you used to do easily more difficult and introduce new needs — all while making your old coping mechanisms a little outdated. This month we’ve asked users to talk about how they use Habitica to help them with that kind of change!

First of all, synitheia has a really good insight to share about how to use the different task types on Habitica to your advantage:

Push more things to habits. Dailies can be quite stressful especially when I am tired or short or time so habits can help me encourage good practices such as getting enough sleep and maintaining good hygiene. I can even use habits to give me a boost in Experience Points and drops when I complete a large number of to-dos, level up or complete my dailies! It is quite a good reward for me.

juarezmiranda has a tip that sounds really simple, but can be really impactful to help you adjust to changes in real-time:

Every Saturday I review all of my dailies. I always try to see what’s working, what’s not working and make some changes.

OptimumKitten talks about how she adapts to big changes by remembering that you can start over:

To keep things manageable when a significant change comes along, I start from zero and gradually add my dailies one at a time because I know that everything will be turned upside down, so there’s no point in trying to force myself to juggle tonnes of old projects when a new and more urgent task has appeared. At the start of this year, I deleted all of my tasks and started again. Starting with my physical and mental health, I first created a habit for waking up at a certain time and a daily for journalling before going to bed. I stuck with just these tasks until I felt confident with them, then slowly added more one-by-one as each task felt easier. It’s important to first care for your health, because otherwise you’ll lack the energy to put into your tasks and then quickly feel burned out and discouraged by the lack of progress.

Ingvanya added some thoughts about positive and negative reinforcement which can be really useful to keep in mind as you adjust to a new situation:

I decided not to have negatives for things in the sense of punishment for not doing a thing or on time, etc. Except for things that affect my health or specifically negative habits to break. The reason for no negatives is because I would feel bad and stressed about not being able to keep on things and have a feeling like a weight was on me to keep up the positives. So now I have only positives for those things (that aren’t bad habits to break or negatives for my life. I.e.: drinking water (+)/drinking soda(-)). That way it’s like building up my life (and level, coin count too, etc), instead of constantly filling holes

Check out the other ideas in the Use Case Spotlights guild!

Don’t forget, if you’re a member of the Use Case Spotlights Guild and you contribute your ideas for the monthly prompt, you might be featured in that month’s blog post! It’s great to see users sharing their expertise and helping each other out!

Cards

Illustration by Cosmic Caterpillar

It’s Wiki Wednesday! Once a month we highlight a helpful post from the Wiki with tips about productivity, wellness, and optimizing your use of Habitica!

Did one of your Party members just get a promotion? Want to wish someone good luck in an exam? Or is someone a bit under the weather? You can send them a card within Habitica on our web platform! We have several different card types, including a Birthday Card… but let’s allow the Wiki to give us the details:

Cards can be purchased for 10 gold, under the Shops > Market section (direct link). The selection of standard cards includes the following:

• Birthday Card
• Congratulations Card
• Get Well Card
• Good Luck Card
• Greeting Card
• Thank-You Card

There are also two seasonal cards:

• Valentine Card
• New Year’s Card

You can read all about the Cards and how to send them to your Party members in the full Wiki article! There are answers on the Wiki to a lot of the most common questions about Habitica, so it’s definitely worth checking it out!

Why not send your Party members a Card today?

Guild Spotlights: Our Favourites

Vikte

With all the Guilds on Habitica, sometimes it can be difficult to know where to start. This year, our Guild Spotlights are going to highlight the favourite Guilds of Habitica’s staff, moderators and some high-level contributors! If you want to curate your Habitica experience and join active, positive Guilds, this is a great way to pick up some new ideas for Guilds to join.

This month, we’ve asked one of our Artisans to let us know her favourite guilds! Vikte is responsible for various well-loved backgrounds, equipment pieces and Magic Hatching Potions. Visiting a halfling’s house, or feeding the ducks at a duck pond? You’re hanging out with Vikte’s imagination! You might know her from Pixels in Progress if you hang out there, but you can also catch her in other spots around Habitica!

Cat Lovers. This is the first guild I ever joined – if I remember correctly, a few days after I joined Habitica, there was a Bailey update promoting cat and dog lovers guilds. I love cats and have a lovely tabby named Simba, so it was a no-brainer joining this guild. After a while, the guild leader disappeared, but the guild was still going strong, so I volunteered to be the new leader, which I am to this day. It’s a friendly and supportive guild, in which we share cute stories about our cats, give each other advice on cat care, training, solving behavioural problems etc. The guild is quite active, but not overwhelming, just like us cat people like it.

Pixels in Progress (Aspiring Artisans). As a pixel art contributor to Habitica, I frequent this guild regularly. We workshop the upcomming pixel art for Habitica there. The community is really helpful and nice there. This guild helped me grow as an artist so much, and I constantly witness other people growing way beyond what at first seemed to be their limits. It’s one of those rare exceptions when a crowd is wiser than an individual :D.

Pixel Power. It’s a small but active guild, which creates a lot of themed challenges for pixel artists to compete in. The members give each other feedback, technical tips and support each other’s progress. I’m not its member anymore, because I have enough pixel art related activity in Pixels in Progress, but I’ve just checked the Pixel Power guild and they seem to be doing great!

Star Trek Fans. I’m a huge trekkie who have seen all the series and movies ever released, some of them more than once. I was eager to join a guild of likeminded fans, unfortunately it’s not as active as I wish it was.

Don’t forget to check out these Guilds for yourself using the links above, if any of them sound like they might be your thing! There are lots of other Guild Spotlights as well, including ones from other contributors, and including all kinds of different options for you to check out. There’s a new spotlight every month, so keep an out for that, too!

Use Case Spotlight: Managing Your Biggest Projects

Illustration by Vampitch

Each month, we have a Use Case Spotlight, a feature designed to show off some of the ways different Habitica users use Habitica to help them reach their goals or manage different aspects of their lives. Some goals are small: it’s pretty easy to figure out how to create a habit for brushing your teeth, or going for a walk every day… but how do you manage a really big project?

Well, there’s no one answer to that, but we asked some of our users to have a think about it, and here are their words of wisdom!

OptimumKitten started us off again with the way she organises her task list:

To-dos can quickly build up and get lost in Habitica, especially for those of us who bite off more than we can chew or don’t have spectacular memories. To keep them organised, I create to-dos that are not meant to be ticked off. I use the markdown cheatsheet on the Habitica wiki to format the title into a bigger and bolder font, then add a line break in the notes using three dashes. This makes the to-do really eye catching and then it is useful as divider for my goals. I use this method to separate errands, side quests (small multi-step tasks) and main quests (long-term projects), and then separate my main quests by topic, for instance “Game Dev” or “Health”. This method is also really handy for separating groups of habits by unchecking both the positive and negative spinners. I can quickly see the large titles as I scroll through, which helps me to find what I’m looking for more quickly. (This is especially useful for forgetful people like me who can never keep consistent tags on tasks).

SirHCoftheDesert has some wise words on not biting off more than you can chew, and building some flexibility into your projects:

Hello – returning Habitica user here! In the past for big projects I would do what most people are saying. I tracked goals and milestones in To-dos, with checklists for intermediate steps. And then I’d use Dailies to make sure I was getting to everything.

I eventually burned out! My new approach is to use Habits instead of dailies. That gives me the option to plan my days as I need, without creating extra pressure on myself to get it all done.

Trangon has some thoughts about how to break projects into smaller tasks:

For long-term projects I generally have a ToDo task (using ## to get a nice big heading) with all the necessary sub-tasks as a checklist (you know what they say about splitting big tasks into smaller ones). Whenever I am starting to work on one of the sub-tasks (which might itself have it’s own list of sub-sub-tasks) I create a new ToDo only for that sub-task. This way I avoid having a lot of ToDos for each subtasks of the big project and I keep my ToDo list better organised. Obviously, each project gets an emoji with which I identify all the sub-task ToDos as well.

And WindySilver shared how they use Dailies to make sure nothing slips under the radar…

With studies, I’ve noticed that “out of sight, out of mind” has been my bIiggest problem. If I don’t see reminders of, say, an online course I have, I end up forgetting it and having to cram its assignments to the last weeks and days. Therefore, I have put each course into Dailies, given them days when I want to work on them and thus been able to track what I need to work on. I also use To-Dos to track weekly exercise batches to keep up with the deadlines and how much I’ve already done of the week’s exercises. In addition to that, I’ve put fully-online courses (that were completely online before the Coronavirus quarantine, that is) into To-Dos as well to keep track of their deadlines so that I can make sure I’m not running late with them.

We hope you find these suggestions useful! Don’t forget that there’s no one way to use Habitica, except the way that works for you…

If you’re interested in reading more, check out the Use Case Spotlights Guild for the full discussion! And don’t forget to keep an eye out for the new theme: if you contribute to next month’s topic discussion, you could find your examples shared here to inspire other Habiticans!

Rest in the Inn

Illustration by Hachiseiko

It’s Wiki Wednesday! Once a month we highlight a helpful post from the Wiki with tips about productivity, wellness, and optimizing your use of Habitica!

Did you know that you can pause your Dailies? Even in the midst of the most epic quest, it’s possible to step aside and take some time out in the Inn. This can be useful when you’re sick or going on holiday — or when you need to take some time out for self-care! The Wiki has all the information you need about how the Inn works:

A player may rest in the Inn when they are ill, on vacation, or unable to complete their Dailies due to other circumstances. This prevents health loss from incomplete Dailies. If they are on a boss quest, resting in the Inn also stops their Dailies from damaging the other quest participants, but damage from other party members’ missed Dailies will still occur. Party members who are resting do not contribute boss damage or collection items until the next Cron occurs after checking out of the Inn.

Don’t forget to check out the full article on the Wiki! It explains everything about how the Inn mechanic works — and it even has tips on pausing just some of your Dailies.

Guild Spotlights: Our Favourites

citrusella in the Tavern

With all the Guilds on Habitica, sometimes it can be difficult to know where to start. This year, our Guild Spotlights are going to highlight the favourite Guilds of Habitica’s staff, moderators and some high-level contributors! If you want to curate your Habitica experience and join active, positive Guilds, this is a great way to pick up some new ideas for Guilds to join.

This month, we’ve asked citrusella to share her favourite guilds! citrusella is a real jack-of-all-trades: you may know her as a Socialite asking questions in the Tavern, a Comrade creating third-party tools, a Scribe editing the wiki, or a Blacksmith helping to fight bugs! You might run into her in the Tavern at any time… or maybe you’ll meet in one of these guilds:

The Crystal Gems: So, since I’m this guild’s owner I was gonna try having a pithy sales pitch like “the show may be done but that’s not the end of the fun!” but it didn’t feel right. o.o The show ended March 27 and the guild’s floating in a sort of limbo while I and the members try to hammer out its future, but I still love every time I see a new messages notification for the guild, even in its quiet moments. (Bonus: Based on when this post comes out, there’s still a few days to get in on the “farewell” challenge I created there in honor of the finale—it closes at the end of April!)

Report a Bug: Really maybe a strange choice—I’m sure most people aren’t looking to join the bug guild, and you definitely shouldn’t be doing general discussing in there, but I really love helping out there from time to time, trying to lighten the load for the “on duty” people there, as it were. It’s not recommended to help there if you’re not very experienced with Habitica/bugs, like higher-tier contributors might be, but that’s part of what I like about it—I don’t just go there to help, sometimes I just read through the bug reports and answers and learn new things! It’s fun to read if you’re into that kind of thing, even if you’re not (yet?) ready to help there.

Ghost Ship: Like donating blood? Like donating organs?! Then this is the guild for you! I became aware of this guild from the “I am an organ donor” challenges for opting into end-of-life organ donation, and it always reminds me I’d like to give more. It’s motivated me to give blood and I’ve also thought of other ways of aiding medicine and such because of the guild. (It’s also got a challenge about end-of-life planning I’ve been meaning to work on working through…)

Horrible Housekeepers of Habitica: I don’t owe all of my housecleaning strides to this guild, but I definitely owe a lot of recent ones to it. In particular, the Climbing Mount Dish challenge hosted there has really gotten my dish-doing in check—I’m really dishwashing-averse, but with the challenge it’s not even that bad! There are other quick and slow housekeeping challenges hosted there, and a supportive chat whether you’re in a time of cleaning triumph or having real difficulty getting stuff tidy.

Check out these Guilds for yourself using the links above, if any of them sound like they might be your thing! But don’t fret if nothing piques your interest this month… there are lots of other Guild Spotlights from other contributors and on all kinds of themes which you can check out. There’s a new spotlight every month, too!

Use Case Spotlight: Managing Longterm Conditions

Illustration by aspiring_advocate

We hear from a lot of folks that they use Habitica to manage longterm conditions, whether that means keeping track of a meds regimen, reminding them to do physio or keeping up a routine that best manages their mental health. (Or all of the above!) This month, we asked Habiticans to share their advice on how they do it!

Even if you don’t have a longterm condition that you’re managing, these ideas might be helpful in figuring out how to do things that are particularly difficult for you. For instance, OptimumKitten talks about using a checklist to stack up points to make a task extra motivating!

I use to-dos as my “quests”, “achievements” and “boss fights”. I create a to-do for exercise with list of sub-tasks, such as a to-do named “Go for 3 walks” and then the sub-tasks are named 1, 2, and 3. By the time I tick off the third, the task becomes worth a lot of experience and therefore makes the work toward ticking it off highly rewarding.

OptimumKitten also had some wise words about how they take into account the fact that they will have bad days. This neatly gets around the issue of missing a Daily through no fault of your own!

I know that to manage my condition, I need to try to get some form of movement into my day to stay healthy. However, I have a lot of bad days that mean I simply can’t move around much without severe pain. Having separate habits, dailies and to-dos in Habitca helps me a lot with this. Instead of having a recurring item on some to-do list to go for a walk or get enough sleep, I make it a habit in Habitica. This means I can check it off when I do it, but I’m not punished for having a bad day by taking damage from missing a daily. I have separate habits for eating breakfast, lunch and dinner too. I can’t eat three meals everyday, but by keeping the habits separate, I can at least encourage myself to eat even just one or two. I have two separate habits for sleep: “slept at least 7 hours” set to medium difficulty, and “slept at least 8 hours” set to hard difficulty. This means that I’m still rewarded, albeit a little less, for getting a decent amount of sleep that isn’t perfect.

shanaqui has some tips on using habits to create positive reinforcement around damaging habits:

I think the single best thing I have for managing my mental health is a positive-only habit for resisting one of my bad habits. For instance, sometimes my anxiety will get fixated on something, and there’ll always be an urge to check it over and over again. Unfortunately, that kind of thing is self-reinforcing (the more you check, the more you need to check — everything is okay because you checked, and you start to need that affirmation more and more). So I have a positive-only habit for resisting that kind of urge: every time I put off the behaviour for ten more minutes, I can press +.

I also have one for stopping and rewording my frustrations and anger with myself. If I’m thinking “I’m stupid because I can’t make this phone call”, I can press + if I think about it and reword it: “This phone call is hard for me because it’s an unknown situation.” Bonus: that can help me identify what the root problem is sometimes instead of just beating myself up!

LMCarpe uses Habitica to manage and monitor their health after serious surgery and life-threatening illness:

I use dailies to remind me to stretch my muscles and do light weight strengthening exercises every day. I use habits to help me make good food choices and get enough to drink every day to keep my kidney healthy. I also have some nerve damage from the surgeries which causes me to be in so much pain that even the highest allowable dosages of Percocet cannot dull. I have to go to the doctor twice a week to help manage my pain and being able to schedule the dailies to fall on specific days of the week is a huge help. Habitica also helped me stay focused on the positive! I have a few to-do’s that never get checked off because they are my motivational quotes and affirmations. Even with all of that, I had been able to return to teaching which I love and Habitca helped me keep everything organized for that as far as lesson planning and grading.

We hope you’ll find these suggestions helpful in crafting your own routines! We’d love to hear more from users about how they use Habitica in these situations: don’t forget to check out the Use Case Spotlights Guild to have your say!

If you contribute to the discussion once the next topic is announced, you might even be featured in next month’s spotlight!

Hall of Heroes

Illustration by Katy133

It’s Wiki Wednesday! Once a month we highlight a helpful post from the Wiki with tips about productivity, wellness, and optimizing your use of Habitica!

In your time in Habitica, have you ventured into the Hall of Heroes? If you take a moment to step inside this august building, you’ll find inscribed on the walls the names of contributors and patrons of Habitica, all of whom have brought their skills to build the world and community that Habitica has become. The Wiki has more information!

Two halls listing these players’ usernames and contributions have been implemented. These are the Hall of Contributors, which honors content contributors, and the Hall of Patrons, which honors financial supporters.

You can enter the Hall of Heroes through the “Community” section of the fixed bottom navigation menu.

You can check out the full article on the Wiki! Don’t forget to take a peek at the Hall itself: the Habitica team are so proud of and grateful for all the people who have helped make this concept real!

Taking the Cake: Dessert Pet Pics from Habitica’s April Fool’s Celebration

April 1st came round again, and turns out the April Fool served up a totally sweet prank this year! Hearing we’ve all been having a hard time, he made sure to come up with something we can all get our teeth into: this year he turned all Habitica’s pets into various sugary confections!

As part of a special Challenge to mark the occasion, we asked Habiticans to show off the results of this Great Habitica Bake-Off on social media! We thought we’d share just a few of the many awesome pics you all posted as part of the Challenge to whet your appetites.

First up, here are our challenge winners! They’re on a (cinnamon) roll:

“One S’more into the breach for Silvercat17!”

RaidingPartyGames decided to spice things up a bit to match their cinnamon bun pet with a Dune reference: “The spice must flow!”

A starring roll for Pangdood

No-bun foresaw this, not even Spacehawk!

“Donut test me,” VixiMonster says!

Of course, the mods and staff wanted in on the fun…

Cantras spilled over with excitement to match her pet! Dessert in the desert!

beffymaroo had muffin to do with the April Fool’s plans!

Sabrecat’s no sucker, he’s keeping this Lolly pet in line!

Apollo is sneaking about in the dead of night with his new friend, ready to commit the perfect cream.

Piyo finds herself with a dang ol’ dango!

We also just had to highlight some of the best bakes we saw on social media and while judging the contest…

ProbablyASeaBass’ Rogue skills have got what it cakes

x4ojM gave us a whole sweet of images!

x4ojM combines a little heat and sweet with this Cactus/IcePop combo!

x4ojM conjures Valentine’s Day with this dreamy Chocoberry scene

Citrusella really leans into the Sugar Rush this year!

Natevaelle can’t decide if they’re the baker or the treat!

 

jjgame83 is taking some time to mallow out with his toasty friend

And finally, CoreytheChosen1 treats us to a selection of sweet profile pics to show their different sides.

Wow, that was enough to satisfy even the biggest sweet tooth! We hope you all enjoyed the event as much as we did… and let’s see what the April Fool can whip up next year!

Want to see the April Fool’s past antics? Check out our posts from the social media challenges in 2017, 2018 and 2019!