…and this is my story!

as a disclaimer, this post isn’t going to involve any specific names of virtual pet websites, nor any specific cheats you can download. you all know what pet sites i play (basically all of them), but because cheating is not allowed, i need to create some plausible deniability. i may not use these cheats on ALL the pet sites i play, because i don’t want to be banned off those pet sites. but i do definitely cheat on some of them.

in this post i will explain how, but first i will explain why.

so, why cheat at pet sites?

by their design, virtual pet sites involve a lot of busywork, and most virtual pet sites (if not all of them) run on cycles: each day you will have “daily” things to accomplish, and there may also be “weekly” or “monthly” things you can do. the economy will probably revolve around time-consuming but profitable things you can do — restocking items from NPC shops in order to sell to other users, “quests” where NPCs may ask for particular items, games that give money — and “money sinks” to remove money from the economy, like paying to train your pet, spin prize wheels, donate to charity, etc.

this means that every month, every week, every day, if you want to be Good At A Pet Site, you are going to be doing a lot of clicking. if the pet site has games you might also be doing a lot of navigating using the keyboard, but mostly it’s going to be clicking.

a little while ago, i was diagnosed with a genetic disorder called an Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. there are multiple types of these syndromes, EDS for short, and because my genes weren’t tested we’re not 100% sure exactly which one i have, but officially it’s hEDS or Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, the most common type. this means that, in addition to a host of other unpleasant symptoms that i will manage for the rest of my life, my joints are too flexible; this is most severe in the small joints for me, like my hands.

what does it mean to have “too flexible” fingers? let’s think about the way that someone might push a button. you probably approach a button, depending on the angle, with your finger pretty straight.

however, my fingers are both too weak and too flexible for me to maintain this pose as i actually put any force down on the button. instead, the first joint of my finger lays flat against the button, with a backwards angle that looks painful for some people:

this is not great, and this happens with all of my fingers all of the time. they can even pop in and out of their joints, especially my thumb. even though this is a daily thing for me, if it happens too much, my fingers and hands become swollen and painful. much of my life still takes place in digital spaces, so to try and offset the inevitable pain i do my best to try and alternate between activities which take a lot of typing, activities which take a lot of clicking, activities which use a controller, and activities which use none of these.

and yet… my lifelong obsession is virtual pets, a genre of game that involves daily, repetitive motions. when i get into a new game, or an event is going on that’s particularly compelling, i will probably end up with swollen hands and painful fingers, and it takes weeks of gentle stretching and hand exercises — not to mention avoiding using them — to make it go away.

in a world where i had perfect self-control and the ability to simply stop liking something, i’d probably quit all virtual pet sites entirely. instead, to reduce my pain, i find ways to cheat.

so, how do i cheat at virtual pet sites?

let’s take “questing” as an example of a pet site activity and break down the steps. again, this is not specific to any particular pet site, but a lot of them have similar mechanics that work like this.

1. i’ll visit a quest page where an NPC offers me the quest.
2. i’ll click a button to begin/accept a quest.
3. the NPC will tell me what item i need to fetch for it — maybe multiple items — and if there is a time limit or another restriction.
4. for each item, i have to visit the site’s search page…
5. …search for the item by typing or copying/pasting it…
6. …find it in an NPC or user shop…
7. …click to buy it…
8. …and, when I have all the items, return to the NPC quest page.
9. finally, i have to click to finish the quest.

there are pet sites that ACTUALLY expect you to do a hundred or more quests in a row! in the most optimistic scenario where each quest asks for a single item, and it can be found quickly, that’s a lot of clicking and a lot of moving the mouse.

so… what if i… didn’t have to click?

using javascript, it’s pretty easy to automate most of these steps.

1. i’ll visit the quest page, where an NPC offers me the quest.
2. the button to accept is always in the same place on the page, and always contains the same text, so it’s very easy to find with javascript, and then send a click() event to.
3. the items to get are always shown in the same place. some sites will even have a button here to search for them in shops for javascript to click on. for others, you might need to have your code copy the name into a search bar or a search URL.
4. it’s also trivial to find the item in the shop…
5. … and click on it…
6. … and even return to the quest page when we’re done.
7. oh, and of course to click “finish!”

there are plenty of sites that make programs to play these games for you, and i suspect that most people who “cheat at pet sites” tend to use these programs: hands-off botting, sometimes with many accounts at once, for one reason or another. i take a more personalized approach, where, if i notice myself doing something over and over on any website, i’ll make a way to automate it.

i’m not interested in saying i’m better than other people who cheat at pet sites — it’s all ridiculous — but i like the way that i do it, because instead of pulling myself further away from the pet site (“i can just run my programs instead of playing it!”) i start to become more intimately familiar with it (“what classes are used in the CSS here? how do the shop search functions work? which tasks organically flow into other tasks, that i might want to link together?”). i’m still immersed, still participating… but i find ways to turn 10 clicks into 1 click!

sometimes i even remove automation entirely; there are sites where instead of clicking something, i might rig up a script so that i can hit a key on the keyboard to do the same thing. this is great for games where i have to continually make decisions, and more importantly i’m having fun playing them, but where clicking over and over is just too painful.

perhaps because of all of this — that my scripts are steered by me, not running autonomously for hours, and that they perform humanlike behaviors based on what i need to do — i have never gotten caught. sure, as a teenager i flirted with some of the “real” cheating scripts, and got an account frozen once or twice across my many pet sites; as an adult, writing my own code, i’ve never received so much as a warning.

this is probably because what i’m doing doesn’t matter, doesn’t break the site’s economy, doesn’t particularly stand out. they don’t make me superhuman or make me lots of virtual money. my scripts buy things much *slower* than a regular person trying to restock a rare item, they’re no better at games than I am, etc. they allow me to perform at the level of… well, myself, but with a little less pain.

if you want to learn how to cheat at pet sites, too, here are a few resources i can recommend:

https://www.tampermonkey.net/ — a browser addon that allows you to inject scripts and CSS into webpages!

https://www.w3schools.com/ — a perfectly acceptable reference page to understand javascript and CSS and how to use them

https://greasyfork.org — a site where people upload their finished tampermonkey-compatible scripts… maybe you’ll find something useful 🙂