In the modern day, it's an interesting relic, with over 25 years of strange creative decisions, lovingly made game-within-a-games (a simple tycoon game, an entire RPG, a Minesweeper analog, etc), things to do, and things to collect. It also has a kind, enthusiastic, vibrant community full of neurodiverse people (I like to joke that you can't throw a stone in a crowd of Neopets fans without hitting an autistic person, myself included), LGBT people, and/or creatives, most of whom are adults despite the site's kid-friendly vibe.

There are currently two associated mobile app spin-offs (Tales of Dacardia and Faerie Fragments). These are mostly dull but will give you onsite goodies (if you care) if you make a NeoPass and connect your account.

There's a lot of attempts at monetization (some may say excessive) by the current staff, and so I recommend you use an adblocker - additionally, some of the game's mechanics are a bit bewildering (half the site is stuck in an old layout), so it has somewhat higher "friction" than you might expect from a more modernized website. Some might be interested despite these hurdles, and hopefully these resources help.

(By the way, yes, you can still play the flash games, most have been converted to HTML5.)

If you're new and want a good place to start, check out Jellyneo: Neopets for Absolute Beginners.

If you hate all this new stuff like customization and ads and wish Neopets was like the good old days, try to get an invite to Grundo's Cafe or a similar fan-run "neoclone".

Jellyneo has sub-websites for items, lore, cosmetics, Battledome, onsite images, and official merch.

Jellyneo wishlists can be used for tracking items as well as trading purposes. I highly recommend making an account to use them. It also has a Dailies page that, with an account, can be customized to your liking.

Neocash (pay currency) items are obtained in the NC Mall. They are mostly wearables. Releases are typically themed items sold in gacha capsules and retired after a month or two. Neocash items cannot be traded for Neopoints items or vice versa. I can't explain all the intricacies of NC trading here, but Jellyneo has a guide, as does Stylisher, and the NC Trading neoboards or #nc-chat r/neopets discord channel are always willing to answer questions.

Basically: All Neocash items cost gift boxes to send to other players. Gift boxes can be gotten from gift box capsules or Trudy's Surprise. Gift box capsules (GBCs) contain gift boxes and thus are the de-facto currency. Most (but not all!) items are worth 1 GBC. Not everyone accepts them, some prefer item-for-item trades.

Items are generally valued according to a fan-collected resource, Lebron, based on historical trade information. Other sites have taken up this mantle in the past such as Owls but are now retired. Some may disagree with these values, especially depending on supply and demand. Stylisher can be used to view trade reports as well as values of tokens.

Trading is often done by sharing Dress to Impress wishlists on the NC Trading Neoboards or the #nc-trading portion of the r/neopets discord. Jellyneo wishlists are also used. You can list your username on either one to receive neomail inquiries or make neomail inquiries of your own. Tokens cannot be listed on DTI wishlists, only JN ones.

Tokens are like a whole weird thing. Basically they're fancy art for your Neopet but you can't put clothes on them, just background/foreground elements. They also have a gacha element to obtaining them and are rotated out periodically. A lot of them are based on nostalgic old art ("unconverted" art, leading to the now mostly-irrelevant term NC UCs) from before the site made its modern customization conversion. I don't really mess with tokens, so good luck there.

Neopets allows for the basic customization of many of your pages using HTML and CSS (no javascript). This includes your userpage, your shop, your gallery, and your pets' pages. All of it is malleable so long as you leave important information intact. Notably, every single Neopet can have its own "pet page" that you can use for whatever you want. That means a user with all of their pet slots can potentially have over 20 original webpages hosted on Neopets. Many people get very creative with this, even turning their pages into resources for other users. If a page on here has an ~, that's a petpage.

That said, most of the HTML/CSS allowed to you is rather antiquated! You won't find any Webkit features here. The fanciest layouts make ample use of what the community refers to as "anchor links" (guide). My advice is to start with premade layouts to get an idea of what is possible, and not to get too frustrated if Neopets eats a chunk of your CSS when you go to save it.

Also, you will notice that Neopets gets funny about certain characters being adjacent to HTML, like quotation marks. Use a blank Unicode space like this one to get around that - put it between the quotation mark and your HTML.

In this fix, you will have to replace the "<div align="center">" tag with a "<center>" tag. Additionally, you'll notice what I mentioned about Neopets not liking putting quotation marks up against HTML tags. Put a blank unicode space between your quotation mark and HTML tag. Finally, if you want to use this code, due to the trick used to hide the shopkeeper image but preserve your item images, any image with a link will be constrained to 80px by 80px!

If you want to replace your gallery keeper go to your gallery, tick "Do NOT display Gallery Keeper to visitors", then just do something like this.

<center><img src="https://i.imgur.com/6TGR0Vh.png"> <br> <b>EGGWeewoo Mote says 'weewoo mote'EGG</b></center> <p></p> regular gallery description goes here

...Replace "EGG" with the blank unicode space mentioned above.

If you are younger you may be unfamiliar with this term, especially as it has taken in new meaning in the modern day. While "adoptable" nowadays typically refers to a character design that you pay real money to own, back on web 1.0 websites, adoptables just meant a cute premade drawing you "adopt" by putting it on your webpage with a link back to the creator, with no limit to how many people can adopt the same adoptable.

Many (myself included) make adoptables in the old sense to this day as a nostalgia thing. So if you hear "adoptable" (adopts for short) mentioned on Neopets, it is not referring to any exchange of real currency.

Neopets comes from the days where 500kb images were considered inconsiderate to post because they took so long to load. For reference, your average Youtube video soaks up several times that per minute.

As a result, it has draconian image compression requirements that haven't really been updated. There are two primary Neopets art contests - the Art Gallery (staff curated) and the Beauty Contest (user-voted). You can find more about the exact requirements through those links but basically they are a 78kb and 75kb limit, respectively, and require either GIF or JPG format. 600x600 is the max for art gallery, beauty contest has no max resolution but again is limited by 75kb filesize. Images not in a square resolution may get a little scrunched, so keep that in mind. Animated GIFs are allowed.

(Images on your petpages, userlookups, etc are not subject to any of these restrictions. Use PNGs to your heart's content.)

The art gallery goes heavy on "themes" - general submissions aren't as likely to get in as, say, submitting Buzz art for Buzz Day. You can find upcoming themes on the Neoboards. It has like some weird best practices for maximizing the chance you get your entry in and I'm not really familiar with them. I think you're supposed to submit like the morning of? Jellyneo has information on this.

The Beauty Contest I am more familiar with. It is a popularity contest and has nothing to do with art quality. I put hours of blood sweat and tears into both making a piece and advertising the hell out of it, only to have it come 2nd place to something traced off of official art, submitted by the owner of a particularly large guild. I later submitted a shitty doodle for the same pet, barely advertised, and got first place easily. Please god do not base your self-esteem on this shit lol.

Your best bet is to post on the Neoboards in the Art section, put a link in your Neoboards signature and post elsewhere, send the link to your friends, and post it in your guild. You cannot advertise it offsite (e.g. social media or public discord channels). I also like to put a link to my entries in my Neopets shop. Put a larger version of your art on your petpage if you like.

If your entry isn't uploading despite being the right filetype/size requirement, try opening it in a different program (like Paint) and saving it again.

If you have any questions or concerns then ask #creative on the r/neopets discord or the Art neoboard.

CLIP STUDIO PAINT USERS

I got this info from someone on the neoboards and I am legally obligated to pass it on. (Don't forget to resize your image BEFORE compressing.)

This will bring up a file save prompt. Save your file and some JPEG export settings will pop up. The only thing you need to touch is this:

Start at 90, hit OK. It will tell you what the filesize will be. If it's over the limit, go back and lower the quality to 80. Then 70, etc. This is how you compress JPGs in CSP and they will look buttery smooth with barely any compression.

So what are userscripts? Userscripts are fan-written scripts that inject Javascript into your browser to accomplish various things. Only install userscripts you trust. You will need to install a browser extension like Tampermonkey. If you have an Android device, Firefox Mobile allows extensions. I think Tampermonkey has an iOS version that costs money, don't know how well it works.

Some may have questions about the legality of userscripts. The official Neopets Team word is that these are unapproved - you use these at your own risk. The actual reality is that a sizable portion of the community uses extensions and has for years.

The general community consensus is this:

The r/Neopets discord maintains an "Approved Userscripts" thread under #coding, with scripts generally considered to be safe.

I feel weird *not* talking about Battledome because it's one of the most overlooked dailies (particularly if you have Premium) and it really is way more simple than people make it out to be. Jellyneo has a basic guide here.

The only problem is what equipment you want kind of varies? If you have some points from the Void Within plot, just get Thunder Sticks, Grapes of Wrath and Wand of the Dark Faerie, in that order. Buy a Leaded Elemental Vial and MAKE SURE TO EQUIP IT, NOT USE IT, because for some reason it can be consumed like a potion if you just select "Use"??? If you equip it you can just use it infinitely in-battle as a once-per-battle heal that will heal you to full.

There are some good cheap weapons but I don't know them off the top of my head. You can ask in #battledome or on the neoboards to tailor to your budget, or check Jellyneo's weapon recommendations. You want two weapons (this would be Grapes of Wrath and Wand of the Dark Faerie if you have them) and a freezer (Thunder Sticks, or something cheaper like Sleep Ray).

Your goal is to train upward, starting with the Swashbuckling Academy into the Mystery Island Training School, keeping your pet's stats well-rounded (Jellyneo has a guide on how to do that but basically train every stat to your level X 2, level 25=50 str, ignore Movement if you want because it's glitched). Level 50 should be your first goal because you can learn the ability Lens Flare.

The meta goes like this: attack on turn 1 with weapon+freezer+Lens Flare. They will be immobilized by Lens Flare on the first turn, and the freezer will immobilize them for the second turn. Then you attack with weapon+weapon+whatever ability. With an OK amount of strength, a lot of battledome opponents will crumble with two turns of damage, and they'll be unable to attack you back.

Honestly, for most people and most opponents, that's good enough! You can now farm battledome opponents and get a bunch of goodies every day! If you're premium use the premium dome opponents, whichever one you're strong enough to beat - you can either wail on Jetsam Ace or try the rotating opponents if you're strong enough to fight whoever's dropping an album item that sells well. Otherwise check out this guide on opponents and drops.

If the plot is active you can beat up plot baddies too for points and profit. Generally speaking, fight normal BD enemies first then once you hit the limit (15 items) go for plot baddies (15 more items for plot baddies).