With the autumn season falling slowly behind us, it's finally time to tally up the scores for the Woodhollow-een Building Contest!

Sora, Bob, and I set out to explore your creepy-spooky-possibly-macabre creations, and after a bit of debate have come to determine the Top 4 Winners, owing to the tie for the top slot! Our lucky winners are...

First Place: Anonymous_SoFar & Twixxi_
Second Place: StTheo
Third Place: Doctacosa

You can view the final scores and screenshots of each build on the results page, as always!

As for the prizes; both Twixxi and Anon will receive the 1st place prize of the Woodhollow Gourd and 30 Merit Points, plus the prizes for 2nd and 3rd place.

Our 2nd place winner will still be receiving 20 Merit Points and a copy of the 3rd place prize. However, since all of the Pumpkin Titans across Laurasia were slain and a cache of Woodhollow Lanterns was distributed throughout the playerbase, 2nd place will instead be receiving the Arsonist's Toolkit; an unbreakable flint+steel which gives +0.1 Speed and +7 Luck when held in the main hand.

The 3rd place winner nets more of those ever so tasty Pumpkin Juices and 10 Merit Points, while all other participants get 1 Merit Point just for entering!

Thanks to everyone who entered, and congrats!
~ Media

All contest areas are usually set around a given theme and have been designed to have a cohesive look amongst all buildings. New additions after the contests are usually welcomed, as long as they stick to the known theme and follow the same rules as the existing entries.

To help keep that unified, clean look, I'm adding an extra guideline today: at the staff's discretion, builds within former contest areas that don't belong are subject to be removed after two months of inactivity. This includes grossly incomplete works or ones that don't follow the guidelines. For example, our first contest in Oak Hills was themed around fancy houses. People are free to make new additions on the available lots at any time. However, cobble boxes have no place there, or a house with unfinished walls or roof, or a sandstone skyscraper.

The grace period starts today, so you still have the two months available should you wish to revisit or complete an older build. Thank you for your understanding!

It's snowing outside, which means it's getting cold!

Wait, that's not it. It's November again, which means that the Creeper's Lab is now eight years old! Still going strong, with many players staying around for long periods of time or even returning after breaks, proving that we're in a healthy situation. Thanks to everyone, old and new alike, for continuing to make this place to success!

Looking back at the past year, quite a few things happened:
- The email newsletter has been launched, with a new edition coming out every month. Subscribe today!
- Four major releases for the Horsemen events give you more content to play with!
- The main website had a refresh with (finally) mobile support!
- Gathering points now allows you spend them to gain a limited amount of flight or an XP boost!
- A difficult update to 1.14 was eventually done successfully.
- A new PvP game mode has been added to the lobby!

Additionally, thanks to the support of the Patreon backers, we were able to do a first round of advertising this summer and recruited many new players. While this required quite a few adjustments early on, we made additions and improvements through the month to better manage the flood of incoming players. To support this and new developments, in exchange for perks like in-game cosmetics and postcards, please consider looking at my Patreon page. Any amount of support is appreciated and can go a long way to make new things a reality!

New additions are actively being worked on, including one that should land Soon™. Stay tuned!

You might have seen some of our regulars chat about game randomizers, or playing "randos". These take a classic game, such as Super Metroid, and randomize the location of all items. The end result is that the gameplay sequence is completely different, forcing you to search for locations that you usually take for granted.

This is what we're doing for this monthly challenge. All item drops have been completely randomized: the classic "punch tree, get wood" no longer applies here! There is no set goal, as merely trying to work your way around the list of items should be enough to keep you busy. Teaming up might make this simpler!

Good luck!

Read on for the details