LUMINAIRE IS HERE JUST FOR YOU

December 1, 2025 1:21 pm

✨ Melody's Cottage is open! Melody has some changes this year that we think you'll enjoy.

🎁 You will be able to choose from two previous years and receive a random item from it! 🎁 We will not have new items every day. When collecting Melody gifts, you will see at the top of the page whether there is a new item. You will always be able to choose two previous years for items, though! 🎁 You can learn more about why we changed things here.

✨ There are two achievements related to visiting Melody. For Lumineve Regular 2025, you must visit Melody 20 days in the first 25 days of December because the achievement will retire at the end of December 24. For Melody Regular 2025, you must visit Melody for a total of 25 days during Luminaire. The days do not need to be consecutive for either achievement.

Decorate your Trees! 🎄 Choose your 2025 tree and have fun decorating it. Add a little something extra by adding a background for your tree.

🎄 You can donate sP to Melody after visiting her cottage to receive an Old Box of Ornaments. Opening the box will give you a random selection of ornaments to decorate your tree with. You can mass add ornaments from your inventory to your ornament inventory here.

🎄 You can adjust your tree gift settings here to be 'everyone' 'friends only' or 'no one'. Tree's will 'open' on December 25, which is when you'll be able to access your gifts! Below is the sCode for adding your tree to your status, on the forums, and more.

Miscellaneous ❄️ Keep an eye out for the snow fairy minions, which you can give via random event. There’s an achievement, 'Fairy Catcher!', when you find one. You can release snow fairies from your inventory for the 'Free all the Fairies' achievement. There is also an achievement, 'Fairy Collector' for having one of each color snow fairy in your inventory.

❄️ Mysterious Melody is back!

❄️ The snowtapult will open once Winter starts on Subeta on December 21. More information about throwing snowballs will happen then!

❄️ You spread joy on the Luminaire Forums throughout Luminaire. The forums will be open until January 5 to finish up any last-minute business.

❄️ Luminaire ends at 11:59pm on December 31. Once we get closer to the end of the month, we'll have updates about New Years.

Links will be added to the news side bar in the next 24 hours!

December 14, 2025, 11:50 am by

Wow this is so disappointing. Luminaire is something I always look forward to. The combination of moving to the new Kumos site and not even getting a new item every day is so disappointing. I was already losing interest in Subeta over the last year or so anyway, but this might be the final nail in the coffin. Disappointing to say the least.

December 11, 2025, 7:01 pm by

I have a suggestion about M. Melody's and it's... sometimes I saw items on the pool that were clear aimed at me but get none. Normal ocurrence in cases when there was only one of them on the pool, random nature of the event is, being random, I'm not talking about changing that, but, when there is 3 of the same item of them on the pool and I got none I guess the other 3 gifters have just received the very same item they gave... just, from another user. TECHNICALLY, they didn't receive the same item they gave but they did. It has happened to me one or two time already also, getting the same item I gifted but from another participant. Anyway, to keep it short, if 3 of the 4 gifters gift the same item, make sure the one user that did not get at least 1 copy? Thanks for reading.

December 10, 2025, 3:18 am by

I'm also having trouble with MM, particularly getting multiples of items, even sometimes ones that were on somebody else's wishlist rather than mine (which makes me feel bad that they were intended for them and not me), I also got 4 SubQ invites the other day :') I know it's all new and probably a bit trial and error so I don't mind, but figured I should mention it somewhere

December 8, 2025, 5:35 am by

Is anyone else finding that this year for Mysterious Melody something isn't right? Like they keep getting the same items in the one pool? In my last pool there was 3 Golden Lifelike Torrey Doll and 3 Arid Lifelike Torrey Doll. I have also received 2 of the same item in the pool twice and just to top it off I got one of the items I put in back.

December 7, 2025, 11:19 pm by

I'm also incredibly disappointed that its been 7 days and we've gotten only one new item.. I'm usually one to take changes in good faith, because I don't know what happened— perhaps y'all lost artists between morostide and now, but I just gotta say, getting your hopes up and logging in to no new items 6 days in a row is a bit of a bummer.

December 7, 2025, 8:54 pm by

apparently, per a forum post asking for the links, on a/the Subeta Discord it was said they will not be adding to legacy, because of some coding issue or some bollocks I don't care about anymore. Hiding information in places that you may stumble across them is just damn rude. Don't say something and then not do it. It is increasingly irritating being here, you either get the information AFTER the fact or you don't get any. It doesn't make me want to keep giving money.

Then there's the there won't be new items everyday, but I didn't think that meant you'd go a week or more without one. Getting crap from previous years has so far netted me one book and no need for anything else. Shocker. But the achievement is linked to still visiting the damn woman and getting crap from past years I have no need for.

This site used to be a place to come and not get bloody pissed off, not anymore.

December 7, 2025, 2:17 pm by

(Site made a liar out of me by giving me a fairy minutes after I left my last comment.)

December 7, 2025, 2:11 pm by

I've only gotten fairies through forum posts as well, and even that hasn't happened in at least 3 days (I've spoken to 2 other users who have reported the same, and I'm sure others here could as well).

It seems they announced the fairy achievements with no possibility of anyone actually achieving them this year (especially the "Free All the Fairies" achievement). I don't really pursue many achievements on the site myself, but I was excited when I created my Luminaire thread for people to give/receive fairies. It looks like it was for naught.

December 7, 2025, 12:45 pm by

same I think, they either forgot about them or don't want that many to go out, thus tie them to forum posts :-(

December 7, 2025, 11:13 am by

i really wish there was new items like previous years. :(

December 7, 2025, 6:55 am by

Can't find a Kumos Luminair features topic... Like every new Kumos feature, there is no link anywhere found on Kumos :-( I need to copy the link here on news (which eventually moves (far) away from front page) and paste on Kumos, or bookmark every single one. I believe I dedicated much more time to last year's MM, but I can't now. On item info, Kumos claims everything beyond rarity 99 to be a Free Gift, SS does not mention/link the actual shop (steamwork, quest,... what have you). Tedious. We have plenty of info on the new info page, but that is no real rival to our hover usage here. Minor issue: Every Shop price listed says sP (also holiday shops). Just drop the currency, like on legacy, that's less confusing.

December 6, 2025, 9:47 am by

It says that the normal news page sidebar links would be added "within 24 hours," but that was 5 days ago now...

December 6, 2025, 8:49 am by

can we get a shortcut to melody on the home/news page?

December 6, 2025, 12:41 am by

fairies are hiding this year I got 1 from a forum post that's it been 5 days now n none popping up

December 5, 2025, 8:19 pm by

Are the fairies being done differently this year, too? I've only gotten a few and they were all from forum posts. Has anyone else noticed a dearth of fairies?

December 4, 2025, 3:30 am by

The Lumi is always lovely :) However on december 1st I tried to refresh Melody during workhours from Europe and nothing happens :( I just seen on 2nd, that there was a refresh, but in our time zone it was late at night. Due to this I will fall from Melody regular (again) which is really sad. May we get the 31s regular on January 1st? Thank you in advance and happy Lumi!

December 4, 2025, 12:29 am by

thank you for taking my comments how they were intended, for your (uber fast!) response and responsiveness, for your transparency. i’m sorry i’m pretty analog 😬 put more specific feedback on the changelog post. and will try to familiarize myself more with kumos.. and css?? 😵‍💫 still remember when neopets sold out us users, & you were like— hold my beer (i might be paraphrasing slightly 🤣). i truly do appreciate you making this place, and doing all you have to keep it going (but whaddya mean, ya don’t wanna spend your entire 30s rebuilding it? 😜) thanks for making being in community possible here.

December 3, 2025, 10:37 pm by

My main issue with Kumos is it is NOT mobile friendly at all. Also, the Kumos questing system is annoying both on PC and on Mobile (It also never saves my layout preference for the darker layouts and swaps back to the bright ones that are like blinding light mode) but it's just Kumos the old Subeta is fine. Plus, I sign in and get an error/"This page has expired' message right after then I have to refresh I hope Kumos doesn't put me in a cycle of sign in/expired pages - again just Kumos.

December 3, 2025, 9:09 pm by

for about five minutes I thought it might be funny to try to write an avatar builder or pet system in Scala.

December 3, 2025, 6:51 pm by

you both put up wonderful posts that I couldn't agree with more :) It just feels like a lot of the feedback re: Kumos is being ignored... I appreciate Keith would rather do something new but that's not really what I (and I imagine a lot of people?) are here for. It's not that the site is being moved over to a new system, it's that a lot of it feels like an entirely different site.

December 3, 2025, 5:16 pm by

I made a ton of changes today based on feedback from this thread. Thank you everyone!

December 3, 2025, 4:09 pm by

Keith - I think the first thing that could be done to make kumos more usable is implement the popups with the features we're used to. Wearables to show on the avatar base without facial features; links to search in shop and search account; summary and metadata. Try to make them padding-less and small as possible too.

December 3, 2025, 3:43 pm by

We've been hearing you regarding the coding issue for years and understand. More so appreciate your endeavours. What many of us (have been) ask(ing) is, why you make Kumos so different, when we just want to move house with our family and all our belongings.

December 3, 2025, 2:48 pm by

Questions...

Are the daily visits to Melody recording somewhere? It isn't showing up for me.
Was there something new on the first day? Melody wasn't up and running shortly after midnight and I couldn't log on after that.

December 3, 2025, 2:47 pm by

Questions...

Are the daily visits to Melody recording somewhere? It isn't showing up for me.
Was there something new on the first day? Melody wasn't up and running shortly after midnight and I couldn't log on after that.

December 3, 2025, 2:27 pm by

When are we getting the new GA subscription item?

December 3, 2025, 1:52 pm by

the trees of lumi past are here: https://subeta.net/explore/luminaire/tree/past.php I found them when looking at the gift settings

December 3, 2025, 1:42 pm by

I appreciate the good faith here, and I want to respond in kind.

The core issue is that Legacy runs on a 22-year-old codebase in a programming language that's no longer supported. Right now it exists in a container frozen to 2019—I can't make security updates to it, and every time I touch the code I risk the whole thing collapsing in ways I genuinely cannot fix because the software it depends on no longer exists. We're paying a monthly fee to our database provider just because we're on a version so old they charge for continued support.

Things are moving to Kumos not because it's a better experience right now—I know it isn't, and I hear you on that. We're moving because the alternative is the site eventually going away entirely.

I want to be clear about something: Subeta isn't a large operation with a team behind it anymore. It's me—one programmer with a day job—keeping this running out of love for what we've built together, supported by a small group of people I can barely afford to compensate fairly. I'm the one who wakes up to check if the site is running, and I'm the one who can't go to bed until I've confirmed all the services are still up. That's been true for 20 years. To answer your question about helping: yes, absolutely. If people want to prototype CSS improvements, suggest UI changes, or mock up ways to make Kumos feel better—I'm genuinely all ears and I've implemented community suggestions before. What I can't do right now is facilitate or manage that process. We don't have anyone on staff who can coordinate that kind of effort. But if someone posts "here's some CSS that would make X better" or "here's a mockup for Y," I will look at it and implement what I can.

What isn't possible is onboarding volunteers to help with the actual infrastructure or codebase. We've tried. The technical debt and specialized knowledge required means there's no reasonable way to bring someone up to speed in a volunteer capacity. It's not gatekeeping—it's just the reality of a two-decade-old system held together by institutional knowledge that only exists in my head.

I'm not trying to sound defeatist. I'm trying to be honest about where we are so we can have realistic conversations about where we're going. Subeta is still here because people love it, and I'm going to keep it running as long as I can. But that means making hard calls sometimes, and moving away from Legacy is one of them.

December 3, 2025, 12:48 pm by

-whichever browser you use, go into options and hit “clear cache” or “clear browser data,” and then try visiting the tree page. usually fixes the not showing up prob.

and I’m not trying to pile on. But I’m with sekmhet, Boa, et al. there’s a functionality issue for the users with the kumos site (& yes, i do understand the coding and backend issues, RoxyWolf et al). The kumos site for many of us lacks the immersive, visually appealing magic of the legacy site. for me, as with others, images show up super distorted on kumos, and it is glitchy af. sometimes you refresh and retry a feature, and it just pops up with the same error. maybe it is easier to code and “ can actually make changes and improve it in a reasonable frame of time,” but that isn’t how it’s played out to date (with the exception of the pumpkin patch this moro). it’s been what, like two years of having various features over on kumos. many of us on the front end are still having problems. if the subeta userbase is “tiny and dwindling,” maybe that’s a contributing factor. I don’t think we’re ungrateful. I think when you build a global community, that does have some monetized features, there has to be room for honest feedback of people’s experiences and preferences (remember when we had polls before any pet revamp?), diverse points of view. as a resident of the states, and someone who’s watching Pluribus lol, this is something I personally value (as long as things stay civil). the monotone cult thing might be easier to manage, but boy howdy, esp after this last year, personally i appreciate the first amendment, and diversity of traditions, foods, peoples… People who have been here for years/decades stay because they have found something they love. praise be upon keith for building & maintaining this! 👑✨ and to all of the artists, admins, users who have invested time, friendship, ideas, money, plots, etc to make this place what it became. we KNOW we have a miracle; we’d like to keep it. if things are truly dire, how do we help? do we need to host a gofundme or other fundraising campaign to get adequate compensation to fix the coding/platform hosting issues? recruit amongst ourselves for volunteers who have the know-how in their irl communities? IS there a way to make kumos more universally functional, and more visually similar to legacy? earnestly asking in good faith. there must be a way to make this less of a headache for everyone, without throwing out the baby with the bath water/burning the whole thing down… I’m hoping everyone is warm and safe, and wishing each and all of you a very merry lumi. 🎄

December 3, 2025, 12:22 pm by

Is the "collect Melody gifts" button just straight-up invisible for anyone else?? It throws me off every time I load up the page. Really missing the old format...

To those asking about the presents for today/tomorrow, it says when you go to collect presents if there's a new gift or not. So far only December 1st had a new item to give out.

December 3, 2025, 10:21 am by

Two days in a row with no current melody item but I got my past melody items no problem...

December 3, 2025, 8:38 am by

are the Lumi links going to be added to the news side bar? It said within 24 hours but :C

December 3, 2025, 5:46 am by

me neither. The tree doesn't load when I try.

December 3, 2025, 5:23 am by

I can't decorate my tree. Is anybody else having the problem? Apart from that: Yeah! Finally! Luminaire!

December 3, 2025, 2:32 am by

Kumos is giving an error when I try to visit Melody

December 3, 2025, 2:30 am by

can we bring the Melody gifts to the old site as well? the feature of choosing 2 gifts from the past is good but it's easier to collect Melody gifts from the old site. there's always extra step to collecting in Kumos. i have to log in every time even though i check the remember me box. :(

December 3, 2025, 2:29 am by

Welp, now I can’t even get the Melody’s Cottage link to connect. SSL handshake failed. :|

December 3, 2025, 1:02 am by

I can't even use the Kumos site (not that I want to, ever) on my Kindle Fire tablet because every time I log in it keeps booting me out after a few seconds.

December 2, 2025, 11:50 pm by

I believe most of us know and understand all that. However, Kumos doesn't look and feel like Subeta. It's like playing on yet another pet site and that's what makes people grieve.

For me it's a mystrery, how anybody can play (actually do anything viable) on a phone with that tiny screen, constant resizing, scrolling, etc., I can't even "type" properly because I often enough hit the wrong key. But that's me and others are even battling and questing... my mobile for the most part of my day is not with me, anyway.

I remember 2 "major" design changes here, which a lot of us were not happy with in the beginning, it needed some adapting and getting used to, because colours changed and sidebar & header looked a little different, though added practical features. Yet basically everything stayed the same. However Kumos now is soooo different and less easy to navigate/use, not a rewrite of code but a completely new place.

December 2, 2025, 11:11 pm by

MM question - are we actually getting paired with real people or just NPCs?
Because they're actually NPCs I'm going to be phoning in my gift choices a lot more.

And...yeah add me to the list of people who miss the old-style MM. I don't really want to exchange gifts by dumping random stuff into a pool and having it distributed. I liked it being a gift exchange back and forth with someone. This is just...put in something of one value and get something random back. It doesn't feel like you're engaging with actual people, which was the fun of it.

I do appreciate all the work going into this site. I know it can't be easy to keep running. I'm glad it's still here. And I get why Melody gifts are mostly old ones this year. But changing the entire MM tradition is disappointing.

December 2, 2025, 10:42 pm by

Is there a way to tweak Kumos so that it LOOKS like legacy? That would help so much. Legacy seems clean and easy-to-use, while Kumos is a confusing mass of bubbles. At least let me put the navigation thing on the side, please! Legacy seems "better" because we've been using it for 20+ years. It's very familiar! Why not slap Kumos with the legacy skin, it would convince a ton of reluctant people to give it a try.

December 2, 2025, 9:29 pm by

I think there is a disconnect in the understanding of the phrase "does not work".

Subeta appears to work "better" for us on the front-end because it's familiar. It seems more stable from the outside looking in, and it's easy to say "if it ain't broke, don't fix it!"

But what Keith means by "the site does not work", refers to the back-end of Subeta, the parts we can't see. What seems functional and reliable to us is, in fact, a mess of old, outdated code held together with prayers and duct-tape. The current Subeta doesn't "work" because if anything goes slightly wrong, everything underpinning the stability of the old site falls apart and it takes Keith hours, even days of UNPAID labor to resurrect and repair the damage just to bring the site back online. Subeta has always been a bit of a slapdash hackjob because it was originally coded by a young man learning to create websites for a hobby, and not the professional web developer he's become. To put it simply, the site was designed with the ethos of "well, that works, good enough" -- and the downside of that comes now that it's no longer good enough, because it no longer works.

Remember, Subeta does not exist in a vacuum: web browsers and internet programming standards are constantly changing. Just like with the death of Flash, the old systems we rely on are eventually deprecated and replaced. Even if things are "working" right now, the amount of time and effort it takes to keep the site functional is unsustainable and takes time away from actually updating and improving the systems we already have, let alone adding anything new. If Subeta's fortunes ever improve financially (if I get rich...), Keith still wouldn't be able to bring on a secondary programmer, because the people who could do anything with 20-year-old netcode are few and far between. (And don't suggest AI... It doesn't even understand basic python unless it's ripping from a stackexchange thread, it's not going to accomplish shit with specialty edge-use cases like a virtual pet site.)

Whether we like it or not, Subeta has to change to survive, let alone thrive. It has to change because it DOESN'T work in any of the ways it needs to; did you know search engines downrank (aka make it harder to physically find) websites that don't offer modern coding design and features? I don't like it either, but that's the reality of our modern internet. Most sites in a similar situation to Subeta just wind down operations because their Admins can't afford- fiscally, but also in time out of their day- to keep the things online, let alone bring them up to modern standards. And while the site as it currently sits works for us, it's almost impenetrably dense and unintuitive for new players. There is no real modern onboarding for newcomers to Subeta; people who grew up on phones do not have an analogue experience like Neopets to guide them into how to play with a site like this and it's genuinely a problem if Subeta is going to survive, if it has any chance of growing and attracting new players. It's a problem that can't be addressed, either, until Subeta isn't a sprawling morass of cantankerous code that falls apart the second you try to change or alter anything.

It is, I cannot overstate this, a Fucking Miracle that Subeta still exists AT ALL right now. With the exception of a few sites like Neopets (venture capital investment based on the success of a formerly-valuable IP) and Flight Rising (eye-watering monetization,) most petsites are labors of love kept alive out of sacrifice by the people behind the scenes. It costs money to keep this site online, to keep the servers running, to pay the remaining staff members for their time and effort, to maintain and replace the physical hardware this site runs off of. I don't know what the financials for Subeta look like, but if the site's even breaking even I'd be surprised. At a time when everything costs so much just to keep food on the table, it would be easy for Keith to wash his hands of this place and all its headaches. The Subeta userbase is tiny and dwindling, and newcomers rarely stick around. The writing's been on the wall so long the paint's started to fade, and it's only dedication and love that has kept it going this long.

Whether we like it or not, Subeta MUST change. Subeta as we know it is a patient on life support, and if it's gonna pull through, change is inevitable. It has to modernize, it has no choice. The Subetan population is tiny and dwindling, and newcomer retention is probably a fraction of a percent because Subeta doesn't work for shit on phones, and the majority of internetizens now use the internet through a phone (a thing I despise, but it is what it is.) Kumos is going to look a little different, it's going to operate a little different, but it's still going to be Subeta at heart. For years the staff have put stents in Subeta's ailing heart to keep it flowing, and Kumos is a coronary artery bypass to redirect everything around the damaged areas of the old site. By the time its completed, Kumos will simply become Subeta, and it will function like a mechanical heart to keep this website alive for many years to come. It's not nice, or pretty, or easy, but it's a necessary change all the same.

And it will be a worthwhile change, because unlike regular Subeta, Kumos can actually be edited, altered, and upgraded without falling apart at the seams -- so if anything truly sucks, Keith can actually make changes and improve it in a reasonable frame of time. The only way to have a stable, functional, whole Subeta that doesn't lag and die during events is to fix all the core, underlying problems plaguing how it operates. The process of getting there sucks, it's true -- using two different sites at once is a pain in the ass, features working on one site but not the other is a pain in the ass, modern internet layouts are ugly and wide and are a pain in the ass -- but it's all necessary. All of this hassle and heartache is in the service of making sure Subeta can survive not just another year, but for, hopefully, many years to come. There's a method to the madness, and even if it's inconvenient, we have to trust that it's all going towards bettering this site we all love -- because at the end of the day, Subeta isn't its code or its servers, but the community and the people who make the site into the warm, wonderful place it's continued to be.

I think it's worth it to endure the situational suck in order to save Subeta. And I hope anyone who took the time to read all of this will be able to agree.

Thank you to all of the staff who have poured their time, energy, and effort into making Subeta into a one-of-a-kind website for all of these years. I see you, and I appreciate what you do. Merry Luminaire(y).

December 2, 2025, 8:05 pm by

Is composting still coming?

December 2, 2025, 4:04 pm by

they did say not everyday has a new Melody item, I also didn’t get one so I assume today is just old items. Which I don’t mind either, it’s nice to catch up on years I missed too lol

December 2, 2025, 3:08 pm by

Wow, I really garbled that comment. I did not get Melody's gift yesterday or today (if there is one today?). I got the 2 older gifts yesterday, but today it only says I already got my Melody gifts and there is no link to get older gifts :( And yes I am clicking on the Kumos site Melody link ^^

December 2, 2025, 3:01 pm by

I did not get the Melody gift yesterday...the brownies. I did yet the 2 previous yrs gifts, tho. Today it says I've already gotten my Melody gift for the day, but it says that I have...I don't see any link to get previous yrs gifts today either. Melody is not working well for me at all this year 😢

December 2, 2025, 2:48 pm by

In agreement with you, I find the kumos site clunky, and hard to adapt to. I still can't find my way around it, and mostly stay on the legacy site (except for the HA contests).

December 2, 2025, 2:29 pm by

Are the achievements for Mysterious Melody going to be connected to the new version this year?

December 2, 2025, 1:42 pm by

Yes there was a new item:

SPOILER (click to toggle)

Also I agree with and , especially Boa's comment. Not only is Kumos SO clunky, difficult to navigate and often super glitchy, but it feels like everything that shows up on there, is changed almost beyond recognition. It's very off-putting, it's hard enough switching to a new layout after all this time, but having the features be changed SO much on top of it doesn't really entice me to go over to Kumos. Hope that makes sense.

I like your suggestion of adding separate categories for the pre-2009 items, I hope this could be implemented later :)

December 2, 2025, 12:19 pm by

Happy Lumi! ⛄❄☃

Use @username to mention someone. Supports markdown formatting.

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LUMINAIRE IS HERE JUST FOR YOU

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