It is September, fall is almost here, so it is time for our new SOTM!
This month we have #61 Bojing and #164 Manngi!
You can earn double coins for them! Go here to find out more!

It is October and I am late! Here are the new SOTM!
This month we have #74 Sia and #269 Daimyo!
You can earn double coins for them! Go here to find out more!

We have a new, short event for you to enjoy! It is autumn still and there are a lot of nice foods to dvelve in!

Go and show us your love for this season! A great price waves and every participant gets a lot of coins! The event begins on the 7th of November and will be available until the 28th! We are looking forward to your contributions!

Go here for the Event

1st place goes to: Nanashi

2nd place goes to: Music-Minx

and 3rd place goes to: Lunafiore & Ararasnowdog!

Everyone else participating gets 30 coins and the badge as well of course! Thank you so much for the great contributions!

You can find the awesome winning submissions in the Hall of Fame!

Here are the new SOTM!
This month we have #6 Karlissa and #59 Maple!
You can earn double coins for them! Go here to find out more!

Here are the new SOTM!
This month we have #116 Nyx and #251 Erzili!
You can earn double coins for them! Go here to find out more!

No graphics this month, since I am only on my tablet.

Time flies by and we got some lovely entries!
The jury and I had a hard time picking this years winner, so we decided on giving out some extra prizes!

The grand winner is:
Isuna, with this awesome picture:

You won a broken star item!

2nd place is shared by Lorelthebison and Music-Minx!
Your additional prize is a Marking Brush!

3rd place is shared as well by Moql and Distantvampire!
We decided to give you a familiar colour pot as a little extra!

Thank you everyone for participating and have great holidays!

The new year has come, so here are the new SOTM!
This month we have #17 Vashti and #27 Eneas!
You can earn double coins for them! Go here to find out more!

Thank you for everyone who participated in our little Christmas event and helped to decorate our tree! We look forward to seeing it grow and grow next year too! 

Almost time for Valentines <3 Here are your sweetheart SOTM!
This month we have #88 Rigel and #232 Levy!
You can earn double coins for them! Go here to find out more!

This month there is a slight change; the site will be automating SOTM picks going forward so they will be updated automatically on the 1st of each month. For this month only, you will have until March 10th, 11:59PM CET (GMT+1) to submit gift art for the previous month's SOTMs. 

In the future we will also be implementing logic to help ensure that SOTMs are part of our community (in Discord at a minimum) and that the same user isn't being chosen at too high a frequency. 

This month we have #97 Hadrian and #20 Nian-Zhen!
You can earn double coins for them! Go here to find out more!

Today we close the MYO Design contest! There are so many great designs and also some for raffling! Thank you everyone for participating! Please allow around 1-2 weeks for us to judge all the entries! We will announce the winners and the raffle around that time!

And we have out first Breeding Event for mated pairs!
For more info, go to the event page!

BREEDING EVENT

Here are the winners by category!

Category	Participant	Shiji Picture
Sea Life	Violent-Pentakill
Sea Life	DeafDragon
Sea Life	Music-Minx
Career/Job	Ohmwreckt
Nature	Blood_infestation
FTO	Bagworm
Fur	8BitBaker
Fur	Blood_infestation
Enchanted	Mewwolf
Enchanted	Wallflower_Chlo
Enchanted	Violent-Pentakill

Raffle Designs:

	Made by: Sonia/Distantvampire
	Made by: Music-Minx
	Made by: Music-Minx
	Made by: Yuunis
	Made by: Kyouki
	Mady by: Ohmwreckt

Please give us a bit of time to add all of them to the masterlist <3 Thank you so much for participating!

It is May and spring is finally here! TIme for new SOTM!  Here are your sweetheart SOTM!
This month we have #243 Toffifay and #257 Roux!
You can earn double coins for them! Go here to find out more!

About Toffifay:

Toffifay is a sweet bean who is friendly with everyone though can be a bit shy at first. He's soft spoken and gets slightly overwhelmed in bigger crowds. He enjoys warm things like drinks and sunlight for examples. Toffifay feels at peace in his own presence and those who he is close to as well.

The world awakens from its slumber and what better time to have a new event? See below for all the information!

Please submit your entry here: https://shiji-long.com/gallery/352

We had lovely entries again this time and it was hard to decide who won. For some we liked the crowns better, others had wonderful illustrations, but everyone's work was awesome to look at!

1st Place			None of us thought about crafting flowers, but this is a very creative idea and we loved it! Same as the illustration. It is super adorable and definitely a great way to celebrate the Flower Festival! Congratulations!
2nd Place			The beautiful illustration made this piece by Ohmwreckt 2nd place. A wonderful display of atmosphere and love. Congratulations!
3rd Place			The detailed and beautiful illustration from Isuna made 3rd place! We loved the background and how the character is portayed. Congratulations!
			We also liked Kaliboo's story of the festival and decided to give out a second 3rd place! We loved reading how Kaliya enjoyed the festival. Congratulations!
Honourable mentions Crowns:			We loved all entries, but some crowns just looked too good to just award the basic entry reward! Mercuria's was just a beautiful composition and we utterly adored LexTalionis' real self-crafted clover crown. Congratulations!

Thank you everyone for participating!

Go here!

After quite a longer while (I am so sorry! Summer time is crazy!) we finally have our winners of the last event!
We really have to thank you all for your work, there are so many great writers in our community and all the places you described were so good, that we decided to make them all real!

 And, enough of the talking, we are off to pronounce the winners!

And we have 2 first places. Me and the judges agreed that these two entries just had to win! Congratulations to:

8BitBaker with the entry Shinrinyoku & Aylabug with the entry Weifang's Teeth
Congrats! You two will get the Ancient Flask!
(Please work closely with me on creating the subspecies.)

Second place goes to Kaliboo with the entry Sapphire Grotto! Congrats!

And third place goes to Valkhana and the great entry Shipwreck!


Everyone of course gets their badge and coins!

Thank you all for participating!

Here You Can Find The Description Again, As Well As How To Submit Your Entry! Click me!

First place goes to: "Aquatic Coral Horns" by Kaliboo!
Second place goes to: "Split Scales" by 8BitBaker!
All other winners:

Congrats to every winner! And thank you everyone who participated!

https://shiji-long.com/world/events/15

First Place: Music-Minx!

Second place: WallflowerChlo

And our two third places go to LexTalionis & MikazukiHellfire!

Congratulations to all winners! I hope you all had a great Summer!

We apologize for the delay, but, here are our Halloween winners!

We loved all of our entries but these were our absolute favorites:

First Place: Vampire Artemis by Yenevrah

Second Place was a tie between Plaguedoctor by Dame and Go Beyond by Violent Pentakill

Thank you to everyone who participated, we hope you had a great fall!

There were so many beautiful entries this time, thank you for participating! Since we enjoyed all of them, we decided to honour every submission with a price and jusge a little bit different this time!

• First Places:

- Archery with "Bliss"
- SavannahSage with "Remember not to forget"

• Second Places:

- Aku136 with "Lanterns for the Fallen"
- Aylabug with "Valeria's Flower Festival"
- Music-Minx with "Sabine's Sneaky addition"

Please tell one of the mods if you want a dragon egg or a Dragon bone!

• Third Places:
  
  
  

- Mikazukihellfire with "Garland Making"

• Singing Winners:
  
  

- Archery with "Calypso sings"
- Music-Minx with "Accidental Audition"

- Aylabug with "Valeria's Singing Audition"
- Mikazukihellfire with "Lumikki Sings"

Please decide which Active and Passive magic you want for your Shiji.

Congratulations, everyone! Thank you for participating <3

Go here to find the event!

• Pearl Diver: Rin-Ink's "Lumiel Ithilanin", Ohmwreckt's "Pearl Diver" & Minx' "pearl Diver"
  
  

• Food stand / Cook / Bar keeper: 8Bitbaker's "Ash on the Rocks", Tyr's "Whisk"
  
  

• Life Guard: 8Bitbaker's "Meri" & Mikazukihellfire's "Damon"
  
  

• Tourist: Ohmwreckt's "Tourist" & Sonia's "Aalto"
  
  

• Clammer: Mewwolf's "Clammer"
  
  

• Treasure hunter: Minx' "Treasure Hunters", Tyr's "Treasure Hunter"
  
  

• FTO: Kingsan's "Red Lightning" & Moonfin's "Luciano"

  
  
  

Go here to find all the gorgeous designs!

But all designs were awesome and can of course be reused with MYO scrolls and other events! The designs that did not win got some more bi as compensation <3
Thank you all for participating!

Please make sure to send a transparent version of your design to a mod so we can add it to the Masterlist!

Happy Halloween!

Through the end of November you can earn a new special currency - Pumpkoins - by doing various activities around the site. These coins can be used to purchase special items from our new shopkeeper, Peach! 

Click here to view the event details.

We finally have a new event for you guys! It's still summer so we want to use that <3
Find all the infos down below!

❀Summer Event!❀

👻 SPOOKY SEASON! 👻

Check out the 2024 Halloween Event below. 

🎃 Tianshu Halloween Carn-Evil of Terror! 🎃

Thank you all so much for your participation in the halloween events this year! We loved reading everyone's prompt entries and seeing all the wonderful contest entries. Read on below to see our winners! 

Left For Bread

Boo Pizza by Anthemis

Infested Eggs by Aylabug

Pumpkin Stew by Deyluriane

Spook-tacular Crafts

Skeleton Shiji Plush by Sunny

Ghostly Light by music-minx

Spooky Pendant by Seraph

Haunted Statue by rosepeony (Honorable Mention)

Spooky Create-A-Trait

We had so many wonderful entries for this contest and we want to thank everyone for participating. We've decided that any entry that received five or more votes will receive an extra treat giftbag and their trait will be made official (this won't happen immediately). Additionally, since we had one individual that won twice for this category, we've taken the top four popular votes for this contest! music-minx will receive one lavish basket for the first entry and an extra treat giftbag for the second entry. 

Spectral Chest by music-minx

Particles by Archery

Spectral Flame by music-minx

Void Eyes by Seraph

We heard your feedback regarding SOTM picking the same users over and over again. You all were right to suspect that there was an issue, because there was.

That issue stemmed from a server SQL version update at some point (likely over two years ago) which changed the way the "Last SOTM" date was stored for users who had never been SOTM in the database. There are several pieces of logic used to check who is eligible, but one of them was effectively "the year of the user's 'Last SOTM' date must NOT be equal to the current year."

This statement in the code would look towards the database and see that many users had "NULL" (nothing) stored for their Last SOTM date. Early in the code's creation, "NULL" was assumed to be the same as "00/00/0000" for comparison purposes, which meant that the code would effectively say "0000" (the year of the NULL date) "is not equal to 2025." This meant that users who had never had SOTM were eligible for SOTM, which was correct. 

However, after the SQL version update, the statement in the code looked at the database and began to interpret the "NULL" values as "[the concept of nothingness]" instead of a set of zeros. Because of this, instead of asking "is 0000 = 2025" it began to ask; "is [the concept of nothingness] = 2025" and the answer to that question (for a computer) is "I don't know." Since this comparison couldn't be made successfully by the program, it excluded users who had never had SOTM instead of including them. 

This meant that from the time the change was made, only users who had already had SOTM but had not had SOTM in the last year were eligible. This has now been corrected, once again allowing users who have never had SOTM to be eligible. 

There are a few things it is important to clarify:

1. Staff had NO say in the original selection of users who had been SOTM prior to the SQL update. Even before the implementation of the coded logic, characters were always randomly rolled.  
2. There was NO visual indication of this issue in the database. Both before and after the update, the way all of the data was displayed was exactly the same. No errors were being generated in any error logs.
3. The issue with the code was not that computers "heavily favor certain numbers or patterns." It is true that computers cannot truly generate random numbers. However, this fact has a negligible impact on the vast majority of coded applications, including ours. In the original code, the largest issue with repeat selection was simply that we were choosing from a pool of characters instead of a pool of users. This meant that, much like any lottery, users with a large number of characters were much more likely to be selected vs users with only a single character. We have always been very transparent about this and this was originally by design, as the system was meant to highlight characters, not users. 
4. We will never limit SOTM to only characters with gift art turned on. The point of SOTM is to feature characters. It is not to feature users or to allow users to farm bi. We choose to offer an incentive to users doing gift art of SOTM characters as a kindness to all users, but it is not a requirement of SOTM characters (or any characters) to allow gift art.

All of that being said, we recognize that this system has caused confusion over the past few years and we take responsibility for the selection system malfunctioning. In response to this issue, we have done several things. To start, staff have chosen to opt out of SOTM in order to give other members a better chance of being chosen. Staff will be excluded from SOTM selection until September 1st, 2028. 

We have also completely overhauled the way SOTM works. The new logic works like this: 

• A list of eligible characters is created, defined by the following criterieon: 
  • The character is not an MYO slot (meaning it does NOT appear on the MYO masterlist: this does NOT exclude code MYO characters, it just excludes slots)
  • The character has at least one image (art)
  • The character is of the Shiji-Long species 
  • The character is either NOT code BBY or if it is code BBY, it has received at least one approved design update 
• From the list of eligible characters, a list of users owning at least one of the characters is created.
• The list of owners is then further slimmed down to determine eligible users. Eligibility for users is determined with these criterieon:
  • The user has NEVER had SOTM or the year of the user's last SOTM is not the same as the current year
  • The user is not the site admin (shijilongadmin)
  • The user is not banned 
  • The user has logged into the website in the last 12 calendar months
  • The user is not a current staff member and the current date is before 2028-09-01 
  • The user has one or more eligible characters
• Based on the eligible users list, a user is randomly selected.
• Based on the user's eligible characters list, a character is randomly selected. 
• After the eligible user/character pairing is selected and their "Last SOTM" date is updated, then the above logic is run again to select a second user/character pairing (which will exclude the first user/character pairing selected for that month). 

These changes will result in a more fair/more balanced selection system which does not prioritize any specific subset of users, including those who have many characters. It is important to understand that this new system does not exclude those who have had SOTM prior to 2025. Meaning that users who were in the accidental multi-year pool are not being excluded and are still eligible to be selected going forward, as long as they have not had SOTM this year. 

Finally, as an apology to everyone who has been unintentionally excluded, we will distributing a small gift. Until 10/1/2025, if you have never had a character selected as SOTM (we will check), we will open a new discord channel where you can post a message to claim your gift. On 10/1/2025 we will distribute the gifts. Please check the announcements channel in Discord for additional information.