My review on the Neoclones, Moderneopets, Grundo’s Cafe and Virtu.pet

I’ve been into playing a few Neoclones lately. I got to sign up on Moderneopets when they opened free signups a few weeks ago, and managed to get into Grundo’s Cafe as well, with the help of someone on here. I also later managed to get into Virtupet by filling in an application on their site. Since there is very little information on these Neoclones online, and I received almost no answers in my previous post asking for comparisons between the different Neoclones, I thought I’d make my own post introducing each sites’ features, how they compare against each other, and my overall opinions of each site. All the sites have their own Discord servers, which invite links are provided on their respective homepages. I also included some screenshots from each site, all taken from mobile.

Moderneopets:

- Features a couple of fanmade species besides the full selection of official pets, as well as several fanmade colours. Some colours features variants, and you can use a special item to change your pet’s colour to another variant of that colour. They even have the Tatsu, which is the Eyrie’s predecessor, as well as the Vandagyre, complete with its own original fanmade artwork drawn in the style of the classic Neopets.

- Pet names are unique, but two pets can have the same name if you enter zero-width characters into their names. Pet names can have special characters like emojis, too.

- You can have up to 24 pets for free, but can expand your pet slots by using the Animalis.

- Can fish with all pets by paying 300 NP per pet.

- Your pet can be your shop and gallery keepers; in fact, you can only use your pet as the shop and gallery keeper because they haven’t added the list of shop/gallery keeper pictures from Neopets yet.

- Does not feature the Battledome

- Easier to make NP in general, way easier than the OG Neopets. Most of your daily NP will be coming from the Faerieland Emloyment Agency and Tyranu Evavu, which feature greatly-boosted NP ratios compared to the OG Neopets. The HTML5-converted games’ NP ratios aren’t as great, however. Not a lot of games are featured on the site at the moment.

- Features 5 Grimoires which have effects like giving an extra dip in the Rainbow Fountain, expanding your pet, inventory, shop or gallery slots, giving you 3 random map pieces, and allowing you to change your pet’s name and/or its gender, location, hobby etc. They can be bought in the Hidden Tower, be given out via REs, and restock in the Neovian Printing Press, and are bought via NP.

- You can let pet hold any item, which will be shown on its lookup, along with its Petpet, if any.

- When creating your pet (or when using the Mutarum Naturam), you get a lot more choices compared to the OG Neopets, under the ‘Gender’, ‘Where your pet lives in’ etc fields.

- You can complete the Secret Lab map multiple times, up to 10 times, and you can stack zaps. That means that if you complete the Lab map 10 times, you can zap 10 times per day. If you complete the map more than 10 times, you get some rare items and a lot of NP instead.

- Petpets zapped into another species by the Petpet Lab don’t revert when returned to your inventory, but cannot be traded.

- You get notified with an icon that appears on the top left side when someone replies to your thread on the Neoboard, which is really handy. You can also edit the title and content anytime you like.

- The Hidden Tower cycles its stock every 2 days.

- You can mix 3 Paint Brushes into the Cooking Pot to get a random Paint Brush (but it doesn’t work for morphing potions).

- Advent Calendar doesn’t come with any animations, but gives multiple items every day.

- REs happen every 8 mins, and shops restock exactly at 6 min intervals.

My thoughts:

Moderneopets is the easiest Neoclone by far. I like the way they have custom-made species, and the fan-drawn artwork for the new items and the ‘fish with all pets’ image is really nicely done. They have a good mixture of both classic and modern features, using the modern Neopets world map, the modern Pound images, and featuring Anchor Management, but using the old images in some places, like at the Healing Springs and the Giant Omelette. It’s also easier to complete the Secret Laboratory Map than on the OG Neopets, where map pieces can only be obtained through random events. The Hidden Tower features both retired and modern items, and some items are priced cheaper than on the OG Neopets. The Faerie Paint Brush costs only 600,000 NP, and coupled with how easy it is to make NP on the site, I was able to paint 2 of my pets Faerie, and one of their Petpets Faerie, too, in under 2 weeks. It is also much easier to get the ‘good’ results from the dailies (impressing King Hagan, winning paint brushes from the Fruit Machine etc), and the NP rewards are greatly improved. Morphing potions also stock pretty frequently. On a typical day, I find myself doing all of the dailies, earning my daily NP from the Faerieland Employment Agency, and buying and using the Occultus Loco (the Grimoire that grants you 3 random map pieces) whenever it stocks in the Hidden Tower in order to complete my Secret Lab map. As there aren’t really a lot of games on the site at the moment, there isn’t really much to do other than doing your dailies and working towards achieving your goals. However, they do sometimes run events to keep things interesting. Currently, there’s an event where Mystery Capsules are being given out at the Money Tree, which gives NC wearables. Ginger, a Baby Kougra mascot, is also now appearing randomly on pages around the site, which grants you a few items if you tap on it. As there is no customisation on the site, the most you can do with the NC items is to display them in your Gallery, or attach them as an item to your pet.

If you want to play a Neoclone that features fanmade species and colours, a wider range of available Petpets, QOL (qualify of life) changes, a site that features a mixture of both classic and modern features, as well as a site that lets you get your dream pets much easier, Moderneopets is for you. They have a pinned Newbies’ Guide thread under the Newbies board explaining the full list of differences, so if you sign up on the site, do head over to take a look. They only open free signups during certain signup periods; the only other way to sign up is by being a Silver and above supporter on their Patreon page.

Easiness rating: 9/10 (if 5 = OG Neopets)

Fun rating: 7/10

Screenshots of Moderneopets: https://imgur.com/a/u8K2cuj

Grundo’s Cafe:

- More faithful adaption to the classic Neopets. Does not feature any additional species, but features some fanmade colours and variants of existing colours, as well as fanmade art of colours that were introduced post-customisation.

- Has handy sidebar on the right side featuring shortcuts to things like dailies and other useful pages. Each daily disappears once you are done with it and reappear when you can do it again.

- You can have up to 6 pets for free, but can expand your pet slots by using a special item bought with Grundo Coins that are earnt via relics.

- Features relics, which are items that you can earn from REs, from scoring above a certain score in games, from doing dailies, and so on. Each relic can be exchanged for 150 Grundo Coins.

- Features special items in the Grundo Warehouse bought with Grundo Coins that can do things like expand your pet or inventory slots, change your pet’s name, join additional guilds, change your pet to an alternate variant of its colour, allow you to enter special characters in a pet’s name, attach items as Petpets, protect your pet from colour-changing REs, and so on.

- Can fish will all pets by paying a fee of 500 NP per pet.

- Pet names are unique.

- Features just a small collection of shop/gallery keeper images for now.

- Does not feature the Battledome yet, but it is in the works.

- The HTML5 converted games’ NP ratios are greatly boosted. You can earn up to 40,000 NP a day across all the HTML5 converted games, and up to 3 items per day (hitting certain scores in each game gets you a random item, which could be anything from a codestone to a paint brush or a relic).

- Features its own Food Club, but as I know nothing about how to come up with my own bet sets, I don’t play it. There are some users who share their bet sets in the GC discord, however. If someone was to get u/nsheng and/or u/jkRollingDown to join GC and get either of them to make daily bet sets for GC as well, I would totally start betting every day.

- Doesn’t have some dailies like Wise Old King and Grumpy Old King yet.

- Your active pet’s portrait shows up under Coltzan’s Shrine along with its remark, and your pet also makes a different remark after approaching the shrine.

- Has quite a great selection of games. It even has its own Lenny Conundrum, with riddles made by the site owner.

- Features a Neoschool, which is probably the main ‘selling point’ of the site. You can start a Neoschool course every 2 weeks, and once you start a course, you have to answer a question and turn in 2 items from the school supplies shop every day for 7 days. You will receive rewards at the end of the 7-day course depending on how well you do, which can include things like relics, morphing potions, rare stamps and magical plushies. The whole Neoschool feature is really official-looking, and if I had never played the OG Neopets, I would have totally believed this was part of the OG Neopets.

- You get notified with a mushroom icon on the top left side whenever something is added to the New Features section. New colours and updates get added pretty frequently, which is pretty cool.

- You can mix 3 Paint Brushes into the Cooking Pot to get a random Paint Brush, and 3 Morphing Potions to get a random Morphing Potion.

- Advent Calendar features animations - I’m not sure if they are fanmade animations or re-used old official AC animations.

- Little icons appear under every item everywhere, allowing you to easily click them to search them up on the Shop Wizard, in your SDB, on the Trading Post or in the official Neopian store it is being sold in.

- Has custom avatars added, and some requirements for some of the avatars have been changed.

- They seem to run their own fanmade events pretty often. Right now, there’s a Snowball Fight event, where you gather snowballs to target members from the other teams and earn points for your team. You can also do a special event quest to earn sets of snowballs by turning in icy goods.

My thoughts:

Before joining Grundo’s Cafe, I have been hearing nothing but good things about the site. What I had actually been most excited about was Neoschool, and my excitement proved to be worth it, considering how official the whole system looked. I read somewhere that they run their own mini-plots too, which turned out to be true, with the current Snowball Fight event going on. I have to say this is my favourite of all the Neoclones I’ve played. They keep things interesting with frequent updates, and the provided sidebar is really helpful. I’m most excited about the Battledome once they introduce it, and have been training up my pet in preparation. I hope they bring back the Defenders of Neopia along with it, because it has been broken on the OG Neopets since 2012. NP ratios have been improved by a fair bit compared to the OG Neopets, though not as much as Moderneopets. By the way, they even have the Apothecary on this site, a shop that was removed from the OG Neopets in 2002. Generally, the site is very faithful to the Neopets from the early 2000s, using the old world maps and images whenever possible. I typically spend a day on the site doing the dailies and playing games to earn up to the daily limit of 40,000 NP, making sure to earn all 3 items from hitting certain scores in the games every day. I made most of my money from RS-ing, however.

If you like a more vanilla experience that is generally on the classic side of things, but with a couple of QOL improvements, as well as a site that brought back abandoned Neopets features, and ran frequent events, then Grundo’s Cafe is for you. Unfortunately, the only way to sign up on Grundo’s Cafe is via a referral code from an existing user. I know how hard it is to get into GC, so I’m willing to help anyone who wants to get into the site. However, as the site only allows users to generate a code every 14 days, depending on the number of users who want a referral, you might need to wait a bit.

(Edit: 1st June 2024: Good news! GC has open signups to everyone for a limited time!)

Easiness rating: 7/10 (if 5 = OG Neopets)

Fun rating: 9/10

Screenshots of Grundo’s Cafe: https://imgur.com/a/YYIlO9u

Virtu.pet

- Pet names are not unique, so more than one user can have pets with the same name, but you cannot have more than one pet with the same name on the same account.

- Features the Vandagyre, which cannot be created via Create-A-Pet, and can only be morphed into.

- Features a mobile layout too.

- Grumpy/Wise Old King allows you to click on a ‘Say whatever comes to mind’ button to fill in all the blanks at once to generate a random joke/words of wisdom.

- Features VirtuGems, which can be either converted from NP or earnt by crushing items. You can use them to exchange for items that give you additional pet slots, a rainbow fountain dip, change your pet’s name, etc.

- The ‘Christmas’ colour is called ‘Yuletide’ on this site.

- You can give your pet items to hold as ‘treasures’, which show up on your pet’s ref page.

- You can ask Fyora to show either her old stock or her modern stock in the Hidden Tower.

My thoughts:

I’m sorry… but there isn’t much for me to say about the site. I like the way the creator made a mobile layout for the site, and the creator has a couple of dailies added in and all, but hmm… there’s not a lot about the site that stands out in particular to me. There’s isn’t much to do at the moment besides the dailies, and the NP ratio from the games, while still better than the OG Neopets’ NP ratio, isn’t particularly that great compared to the above 2 Neoclones I reviewed. They don’t exactly have plenty of fanmade colours or any fanmade species, either. The most I can comment on is the fact that they have the Vandagyre, along with its own fan-drawn artwork done in the classic Neopets style that is separate from Moderneo’s. I understand that this site is a one-person project compared to the above two fansites, so something like this is considered pretty impressive for a single person’s work.

While you can give this site a go if you don’t mind a simple pet site where you earn points to buy items to feed and play with your pet, with all due respect, I think you can skip this one if you have the option of playing either of the above Neoclones instead. The site creator did mention that Virtupet is not meant to be a competitor to the other Neoclones, and was just made as a hobby for users who want a nostalgic experience. You can apply to sign up on the site by filling up an application via Google Forms on the site.

Easiness rating: 6/10 (if 5 = OG Neopets)

Fun rating: 5/10

Screenshots of Virtupet: https://imgur.com/a/rc77VsG