Spring Cleaning 2026

[Emily]

Spring Cleaning 2026

Here we are again, a year later and we hope a year wiser. On March 2nd, 2025, I posted a thread I titled 'Spring Cleaning' in hopes of pushing the site into a new era of productivity and creativity. I shared some statistics, recapped some events, and provided some ongoing changes and promises for the year ahead. Now, did one of those promised changes happen literally a handful of days ago? Maybe, but we don't need to acknowledge that.

I've gathered some statistics as of March 1st to present, and will include the changes between last year and this year specifically. Here they are:

• 13 Players with Approved Characters (+0 from last year).
• 38 Characters (+5 from last year).
• 20 Threads (+7), including four major events (+2).
• 478 in-character posts. (+159!)

While 2025 wasn't as active as 2024, mostly due to real-life issues arising for multiple members and a downswing of available time for us, we experienced quite a bit of growth in posts and threads. Notable 2025 threads included El's first major site event, The Beaumont Ball, which to date has achieved 37 posts, El and Cat's Sands of Spirits Lost with 30 posts, Cat's Cookery Chaos with 25 posts, and MJ's Of Phantom Pains (Akkala Edition) with 22 posts! These are pretty big threads and you should all be proud of yourselves!

We're still looking to grow. I attempted some basic recruitment in late 2024 and early 2025 and realised that there aren't a lot of recruitment spots where you can find people who are specifically looking for Legend of Zelda content. There are a lot of forums still up on the internet in their various hidden corners (like this one), and they're hard to find. Ultimately, I found that the work I was putting into getting these recruitment sites to notice us wasn't worth the insignificant potential benefits we might get in the long term, but certainly didn't get while I was working on it. If anything, membership might be in a bit of a dire place, because we've actually lost posters, and several people came to post an application and then left. Something to look into in the coming year.

But we have made some major changes in the past few months, and I'm very excited about those! Adding different elements to the site can only help, as people like different things and could get hooked onto different parts of the site.


New Staff

This was one of those things that I knew I needed to push for, as I had the vision despite nobody seeing the need for it immediately. I've been running Zelda RP sites for a very long time now (21 years since I made my first one), and I felt severe burnout getting to me last year. I hadn't lost my interest in writing- in fact, I've been making progress on original works for the first time in years, and I'm excited about our non-Zelda RP thread. But I knew I needed people who were more involved in things than I was to help out. So, in true Zelda fashion, I appointed three and colour-coded them. El, Rex Draco, and Cat are extremely active and involved members of the community. They've pitched story ideas to me in DMs, run threads, and/or been involved in a significantly-wide array of threads on the site. Moreso than me, they have been trustworthy in keeping up with posts and putting in the work. So why shouldn't they have some level of sovereignty in the site? All three have full permission to run things they like, make changes they want to, and post guides. And they've hit the ground running.

Character List

The Player Character List, created by Cat, contains every character in the game. It links to the character sheet post where they are contained and has some basic information on all of them. If you're trying to remember who a character is or who plays them, this is the thread for you. It also provides an easy way of seeing just how many characters are on the site. Thanks so much, Cat!

Thread List

Now here's one I'm going to be using all the time. Cat's Thread Index is another significant feat, collecting all the RP threads on the site and sorting them into open, closed, and completed. If you're looking for somewhere to post, or need to find a link to a thread your character was in but that you left off your character sheet by mistake (hello, that's me), this is a wonderful gift. Thanks even more, Cat!

NPC List

Now hold on, Emily, I hear you saying. You promised this last year. That's true, I did do that. But due to the same issues I laid out earlier that led me to giving more people control over the site, I really didn't get around to it until recently. But hey, the thread actually exists now! You can see the proof-of-concept that will be added to over time with separation between the Game-Canon NPCs and Site-Canon NPCs. The main thing that was holding off progress was the need for a template that looked nice, and that's been found.

Story So Far (WIP)

Another promise made, this time a thousand years ago when the site opened, I have posted what I have so far as a work-in-progress. The thread will be separated, eventually, into eras, and at that time things will change. For now, we have completed two events, and they are more or less summarised, though I'll no-doubt come back around to them and fiddle with the formatting. Once more events are completed, things will be added on, but for now we are still in the building and exploration era.

Feedback/Suggestions Thread

Suggested by Rex, the Feedback thread is meant to give everyone a voice in running the site. If you see a deficiency, or something left out, or you want to see a certain type of event or feature brought to the site, please please please post here. We've already made progress on some of the initial requests and we will continue making progress as time goes on. We all have ownership of this story and this world, and I want everyone to see some of their work present in the site that they see.

The Upcoming Year

With all of those administrative accomplishments achieved in the waning days of 2025 and the earliest days of 2026, what are the plans for the rest of this year? We have some ideas, things that have come up in the Feedback thread mostly, and I'm sure there will be plenty more things coming up in the days to come. We have some rolling goals, mostly cleaning out older threads to make space for newer ones and looking for new people, but there are also some more specific goals I have in mind.

Hyrule Castle

We will be entering the castle this year. I have an idea of how to theme it based on the time of year we can all get to it, based on how well we do at handling the currently-running events. There are a few options, and I think they are all quite good. But we've all agreed that Zelda will be more effective if there's a castle, and we can start involving court politics in our threads, which I know at least two of us are huge fans of writing.

NPC Thread

I will keep working on the NPC thread. This is an "as I have time" type of thing, as the formatting and gathering of information is the most time-consuming portion, and also it's not that important to the running of the site. But I will complete the game-canon section and make considerable progress on the site-canon section before the end of the year.

Completing Events

The Sky Island event will be completed before Autumn 2026. I swear it.