Santae

3/10: Playable but I would not trust the site owner

Santae is what I would consider a Neopets Clone (Known more as Neoclones), however the only thing making it unique in its current state is simply its pet designs, while it claims at have the highest kickstarter funding of any petsite, it had an extended kickstarter campaign, so it is mildly cheating in this claim. It is also missing many features that are basic requirements for a standard Neoclone. I mainly played during alpha testing, and while the site updated decently often during that ime, it felt more style over substance most of the time, and has grown very controversial in the petsite sphere.

Gameplay

The main gameplay of Santae is adopting pets, and clicking around a mess of a website with barely any good tutorials, being given a million timer based activities, with some bugs that have been longstanding since the alpha testing phase with the only thing worthwhile is one specific quest that pays out well. Unlike sites like eggcave, questing for anything but the most optimal payout one is basically useless, since not everyone will care for the collection feature.

Santae has events but whenever they occur, they seem to be carbon copies of the last one. Go do the gathering and fishing activies a bunch of times together with a bar on top of the activity with how far everyone has gotten towards the goal. This makes them quite boring gameplay wise, but at the very least would help keep the economy in check by encouraging use of bait/fertilizer/whatever else items speed up timers.

Santae has also, at the time of writing this, only recently added pet trading, with no pound feature and has renaming pets behind a paywall.

Also, you would think with questing being the optimal way to make money, restocking would also be very profitable then but well... there are multiple issues with that. Santae does not have enough item varity to make questing balanced and there's a bigger, more social issue at play...

Community and Economy

While generally outwardly friendly, some of Santae's community is, strangely, very hostile to the idea of others making big profits off of restocking. One of these groups, known as Wallmert I believe, severely undercuts listing to basically not make profits at all, to make questing "accessible" and may have viewed listings that made significant profits as "predatory". This pratice, quite frankly, should not be possible on a petsite with balance in its questing system, for reasons I'll get into. I believe this group also listed high profit listings and gloated about them selling, but that's neither here or there (and I may be misremembering this, grain of salt).

Santae's economy is, quite frankly, busted as shit. Everything has extremely high payouts, and while some one-time use items are expensive to try and make up for it, most money makers aren't going to be buying them, inflating the economy further and further. So in player efforts to make questing accessible, they are worsening the already out of control economy of the standard currency. Santae also used to have a bank feature with interest, but there was some kind of bug with it and it was taken down without warning. I had all of my money disappear instantly, if there was a warning it was discord only and I didn't end up seeing it in time.

With some viewing high profit shop listings as morally wrong, Santae's community is negatively impacted by an increasing mindset among players of economy based games, that making profits is wrong and bad. While some player behaviors in economy games make sense with this logic, such as players on Flight Rising listing gem marketplace items for only 5 gems higher to prevent preying on ignorance, in Santae this behavior seems only to harm the game balance. In economy based games, there is very little "predatory" actions, simply actions that either lose money or gain money, either short term or long term. If a listing is unreasonable, it simply won't sell, because even with demand, the price being too high will ward off any buyers, because they aren't forced to buy your listing at all. With prices being low all of the time, it will only lead to quest items being made worthless, and the game economy horribly inflated to Gaia Online-type levels.

Controversy

Santae has had an incredible amount of controversy for a petsite, a lot of the time controversy on petsites passes by easily. Santae, however, makes stumble after stumble, almost perfectly making every step to be as controversial as possible. Even breaching containment to get its drama posted on Reddit, though I have no idea if those posts there went literally anywhere. We have stuff like CJ being the former owner of Lurapets, underpaying artists by hiring ones in different countries, use of Ai and actively lying to the community about using it, aggressive monitization while in alpha and beta, art theft, paywalling renaming pets while a bug was still active that disallowed non-unique names for a type of pet, allegedly doxxing an ex-staff member, banning a user and then requiring said user to provide their ID, making it against TOS to post staff emails online post the last incident, and much, much more.

Considering this sketchy activity and aggressive monitization of a game that isn't even finished, I would wager Santae will be a petsite they may or may not be in beta forever, and if it does release for real, it will be just as bare bones as it is now. If CJ rugpulls for a second time in a row, surely this time his repuation will be ruined forever as soon as the Lurapets and Santae connections get revealed if he attempts this again. Overall I do not trust Santae with player information, not because I believe the alleged doxxing was real, but because petsites are pretty high targets for hacking due to the general ease of it (since often children play on these websites, and they make simple passwords for themselves) and because petsites tend to have a black market of sorts with Real-Money Trading (known as RMT) which is usually banned but occurs anyway. With incidents like asking users to provide ID, it does not make me confident that this information will be kept secure. A petsite should never, ever ask you to provide ID first to verify its owner, not only because there are free to play players, but because of the aforementioned being a high hacking target, especially if it ever allows Cross Site Trading with games like Flight Rising.

Conclusion

Overall I would not reccomend Santae at this time, wait until it offically releases and check it out would be my recommendation to those interested in it. If you must play it, I implore you to use a VPN and adblocker, and do not make purchases in the shop, because I would not be surprised if Santae gets hacked and all userdata was stored improperly. Do not trust CJ with his history of lying until you actually see a change in behavior.

Written 4/11/25