Prof. Milton Clodbottle's Astounding Habitarium was a game on Neopets that involved observing the daily lives and habits of the smallest of Neopian species — Petpetpets (aka P3s).
About the P3s[]
A nesting Mootix.
The Habitarium's P3s came in 3 species: Mootix, Pinchits, and Larnikins. There were also three professions or types of each species: workers (that built structures), nesters (that laid and incubated P3 eggs), and soldiers (that battled raiders and pests).
Buildings[]
Storage units allowed users to store supplies harvested by their P3s, houses stored tired or hungry P3s to restore their stats, and hospitals healed injured P3s after a raid or pest invasion. Houses housed Nesters and workers, and Barracks housed Soldiers.
Glitches[]
A "lockout" banner for Habitarium
A lot of Neopets users used Habitarium as a quick and easy way of earning NPs. However, like most virtual games, Habitarium was not without its bugs (no pun intended)!
Many users have discovered that they ran into problems, including, yet not limited to: tiny eggs, double nesters, and the most horrific of all: watch-it-die. An in-depth description of the three, and two other well-known disasters, can be found here, e.g.:
- Tiny Eggs, which would occur from even fully incubating eggs, happened sometimes when a full-grown egg was accidentally located on tile 0 (the tile in the northernmost corner of the game board).
The Remedy: By either placing back on the nest, OR by moving a nest and its nester to tile 0, then trying to discard or hatch the egg.
- Bag Glitch: This occurred, incidentally reported, from having way too much in your Inventory (bag). It is often quoted on the NeoBoards that having way too much in the bag or on the playfield can cause this glitch to occur.
The Remedy: Gift what you do not want and discard what's not accepted. However, you could not earn XP from discarding unwanted items, except for Eggs, which discarded, award 200XP, albeit non-giftable. This hoarding issue would definitely disable your game (unless you already reached Lv. 50). Of course, you could switch to a browser such as Google Chrome (which can easily help you optimize for faster gameplay).
- Neocash items: Some said that they've had a terrible time with NC items, and therefore discarded them for the sake of their computers. Because of rumors, there were no known true episodes of Habitarium glitching through the use of NC Mall items, nor viable proof of actual occurrences. Therefore, no remedy is posted.
- Double Nesters: This glitch was an accidental one, most likely due to older coding for the game when it was a prototype (Petpetpet Habitats, which Premium users beta-tested).
The Remedy: You could not move either of the nesters, but you could still harvest eggs. You could try moving the nest around to see if one of them gets off, but even if they did not, don't worry; your nesters won't be stuck there forever. When either one or both of them died, you would've had a normal nest again. (copied from tintytiny909's Habitarium guide)
- Lock Out: This glitch commonly occurred when a user got stuck at the little "loading" wheel and the game would not actually load. Users commonly experienced this at level 50, when they just left the game running overnight to gain plenty of gems, which was frowned upon, since, well, the game played itself. As such, these users experienced "lock outs" when returning to their game if it was left running with a certain number of gems on the screen.
- Watch-It-Die: The most devastating glitch of all - there was nothing one could really do. However, Neopets staff disabled themselves from resetting Habitariums above Level 7. When this glitch occurred, you could not move your P3s, let alone have Soldiers and Workers repair buildings, fight off pests, gathering resources, etc.
The Remedy: Until two years earlier, Neopets had frozen any player from using "fixes", i.e, merge methods for example, until they tested the players' methods and found how it works. Therefore, there were several fixes, including in the link below for more in-depth details on how to do so.
Closure[]
Habitarium officially closed on September 17, 2014, following Neopets' transition from Viacom to JumpStart servers. If the player visits the Habitarium's landing page from this date onward, they will be greeted by Prof. Clodbottle, who will say the following (and give them a Habitarium Goodies Chest and an exclusive site theme):
Hold on! My datacrometer is blinking! Ah, it appears it's collected all it can from my invention, which means the experiment has come to an end. Thank you for helping me with my research! We learned a lot about these fascinating Petpetpets, didn't we? They really are astounding!
Please accept these gifts as thanks.
Maybe we'll meet again someday. A professor is always looking for new and interesting experiments, you know.
Once opened, the chest will award users with the following items:
- Cheese Crumb
- Mini Meatball
- Six-Sided Die
- Snowpetpetpet
- Tiny Giant Squid
- Water Droplet
Gallery[]
