Friday, July 21, 2023

Animated Den Item Crashing

Some den items have complicated animations which can take up lots of memory while playing Animal Jam. Some notorious den items include the shoal of minnows and the smack of jellyfish.


If heavy-memory den items appear all at once in any inventory, they have the potential to crash your game. During a crash, your screen freezes, and to other players, you are not online.
Crash when viewing den items
Crash when viewing input inventory

Opening an input inventory includes putting den items for trade, gifting den items and putting den items for sale. Trying to recycle multiple of these animated items also results in a potential crash.

Recycling inventory

Luckily, input inventories and the recycling inventory sort by oldest den item first by default, so its possible to get rid of these laggy items by scrolling down so that only 3 appear at once at the bottom of the inventory. However, if you don't have many den items to begin with, you may struggle to get these animated den items off your account. 😧

If you somehow manage to place a lot of animated items in your den, anyone who enters your den, including yourself, will likely crash. If you are traded multiple animated items, you are also likely to crash. Interestingly, windows users are more succeptible to crashing via a trade than macOS users. Unfortunately, "minnowing" has become a new tactic for trolls, whereby the victim is traded multiple minnows so that they are crashed out of Animal Jam. As you can probably imagine, causing other jammers to crash is highly annoying! 😤

An example of a "crash trade"

If you recieve a crash trade, neither the animated den items nor the item being traded for will load, and only the tags will appear (e.g. member tags and rare tags). The buttons to accept and decline will also not load in. Since the game is frozen, you have to log off and log back into Animal Jam.

Intriguingly, looking at animated den items on a trade list doesn't seem to crash you, and neither does looking at animated den items which are for sale in a shop.

Shoal of minnows in shop
Shoal of minnows on trade list

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