Keeping tabs on the new inventory 🎒💪 and the old islands

Hey Poptropicans, look inside your bags for a big surprise: the inventory has gotten a refresh, with items now being sorted by categories!

While the Island and Pets tabs have always been there, the old Store tab has expanded into more categories to match the store’s layout. Now we have: Island, Costumes, Followers, Powers, Pranks, Misc, Pets. Check it out by opening your backpack from the menu!

It’s great to see Poptropica finally tackle the mess that was the inventory, which used to be a never-ending scroll through a single row of slow-loading item cards. Now, unless you have too few items, you can scroll through two rows at a time, and the speed has improved too.

One feature that could make this even better would be the ability to search for items by typing, with a Google-like autofill as you type to help suggest what you’re looking for without you having to type the whole thing. After all, some of us have years’ worth of items!

And there’s more: if your eye was sharp, you may have noticed something different about one of the item cards shown above. Instead of showing the player’s Poptropican, the Rainbow Ride hoodie has its own model, complete with a pose! In fact, all the new Haxe-era items will have their own posing models. Take a look in the store:

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While it was cool to have your Poptropican model your items before hitting Costumize (and as shown in the first pic, they still do show up for older Flash-era items) — it’s also interesting to see the variety in these new poses and models. Plus, it’s possible that these premade characters shave off loading time, and if that’s the case, it’s certainly welcome.

And look what else… pets know a thing or two about striking poses, too!

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In other news, the Grapple-Pap Gift side-quest is gone, as you may have seen from the absence of Clareta’s brother in our pictures from Home Island earlier this week. And there’s one more farewell we need to note…

As of January 12, 2021, Adobe Flash is truly dead. Yes, we did already our goodbyes to Flash in 2020, but now, when you visit Early Poptropica Island on the map (which would have led to all the other classic islands, and is only open to members), you’ll be greeted with a simple box with Flash’s grayed-out icon and an info button. Clicking it leads to Adobe’s page about the Flash Player’s end of life. RIP, our Flashy friend. 🙏

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But all is not lost! You can still play several more (though not all) of the classic islands with the Poptropica mobile app, available on iOS and Android. The app includes all the islands currently on Haxe, as well as all episodes of Survival, Mission Atlantis, PoptropiCon, Arabian Nights, and even the original Mythology Island. Even Kira’s Island, the American Girl ad, is somehow on the app, along with Reality TV: Wild Safari, Mystery of the Map, Shrink Ray, and Galactic Hot Dogs.

As the islands there don’t seem to be built with either Flash or Haxe, it seems they can hang out there for a while. Who knows, maybe Poptropica will create a connection for accounts between Haxe and the app like they did with Flash, so we can one day sync across on multiple devices again. It doesn’t seem to be a priority now, but we’ll see.

Another solution for accessing the classic islands you can try is idk’s curation of them on Flashpoint, the Flash game preservation project. You can find instructions on the Old Island Directory, which is linked on the PHB’s Glitching page. At this stage, the setup is a little complicated and only available for Windows. But according to the directory, “availability for Mac and Linux is coming soon, along with less complicated instructions” — so stay tuned!

Anyway, that’s all for this post! What do you think of the inventory update? Will you make use of the methods available for playing the classic islands? As always, keep on popping on!

~🐠