SPICEBONE

Pica where it doesn’t belong

1/4/2026

Vintage Story

If you know me personally, I’ve probably rambled incoherently at you at least once, at length, about Vintage Story. And I’m NOT SORRY.

I’ve said it 100 times and I’ll say it again: Minecraft is dead to me and Vintage Story has killed it. Load up Minecraft after a week trying Vintage Story and it’ll strike you immediately – the dull lighting, the drab lifeless world, the sheer emptiness of it all; utter confusion at how I managed to spend thousands of hours of my life playing something so shallow. Vintage Story, in stark opposition, presents a world that feels real and alive, painstakingly simulated and beautifully realized. There is always something for you to do, and every system is deep and meaningful. It also has mod support!

There are a ton of character mods, including at least two options which allow you to make a canid character. The kemono mod with the Furry Additions add-on (shown above) is very in-depth, even allowing you to draw your own custom markings in-game. There’s also the Lupines mod, which is much more realistic (and therefore much more my style), but as of writing it’s very limited on color options.

Pica Accuracy: 8/10
Pica Energy: 6/10

Furcadia

I hope no one is seeing this and asking “what is Furcadia?”, but just in case, the answer is this is where furries lived before VRChat. It has been running for 29 years as of writing, making it the recordholder for longest-living online game.

For a furry game, it’s painfully short on anthro character options, with a solid 90% of its avatar choices (known as Digos) being technicolor animals and mythical creatures. There is an anthro wolf, naturally, but it doesn’t look very good or remotely like Pica, so this Pica is technically a fox. Don’t tell anyone.

The game also allows you to upload custom portraits for your characters… each for a small fee, of course. Which I was willing to pay to ameliorate the vulpicity.

Furcadia’s developers have quite thoroughly abandoned it, but the community is still alive and well, and you can almost always find someone to chat with. New user-created worlds (known as Dreams) seem to appear weekly, and many decades-old ones are still lovingly maintained. Check it out if you’re curious. This is an order. (and come find me 🙂 Pica Spicebone in-game 🙂 )

The scoring system doesn’t work terribly well for this one since it’s 50% a fox and 50% a drawing of Pica. I’ve averaged the rating between them for simplicity’s sake.

PICA ACCURACY: 7/10
PICA ENERGY: 7/10

Critter Cove

If you like Animal Crossing, you’ll like Critter Cove. It’s cute, it’s fun, there’s a lot to do, it’s made by a small indie team and not one of the most soulless companies on this dark Earth. I burned myself out on it, but I’ll be back eventually.

One of its main selling points is its character customization, and let me tell you, you can make Whatever The Hell You Want. Your fursona? It’s here. Your favorite guy? They’re here too. Complete and utter abomination? The world is your oyster. Just look at this perfect, beautiful, completely vanilla Pica. Superb.

PICA ACCURACY: 10/10
PICA ENERGY: 9/10

8/18/2025

WolfQuest: Anniversary Edition

I love WolfQuest – surprising absolutely no one – and highly recommend it. The gameplay loop is excellent and generally very relaxing in spite of the subject matter. It also lives up to its original goal of being an edutainment title; play this and you’re going to learn about wolves whether you like it or not.

As far as recreating Pica, or any other specific design: there are a lot of coat options, but you’re given very limited color choices for them. Customization is designed around making something that could conceivably be a real grey wolf rather than your OC. While I can give my wolf a radio collar and one floppy ear (on the wrong side only), none of the coats have similar markings to Pica’s, and the game doesn’t support custom skins or mods. I choose a different one every time I start a new save, which ends up being very often, because I’m a Real Gamer™ and refuse to play anything but permadeath on the highest difficulty.

It does earn extra points on Pica Energy for regularly accurately representing my real-life condition.

PICA ACCURACY: 5/10
PICA ENERGY: 6/10

Valheim

I don’t have much to say about Valheim! I like it and I think the environments and atmosphere are some of the best in the genre, even for being procedurally generated. On the other hand, I probably wouldn’t get into it again until its full release, which seems to be on track for 2030.

Valheim Pica is facilitated by the Beast tribes mod, which includes just barely enough customization for me to feel like it still qualifies for the list. The mod is abandoned, but as of writing (8/18/2025), the most recent version available in their Discord server is still functional.

PICA ACCURACY: 2/10
PICA ENERGY: 4/10

Cyberpunk 2077

To be honest, I was primarily interested in trying Cyberpunk 2077 to check out the Biosculpted Exotics mod by CobaltOwl, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the game so far. I’ll save further thoughts for the blog post I’ll inevitably need to make to contain my growing screenshot collection.

The mod’s included wolf looked absolutely nothing like Pica. Fortunately, unlike WolfQuest, it was technically possible for me to circumvent this. I only had to learn how to decompile, modify the included textures, and recompile the mod… a small price to pay for Pica.

Cyberpunk Pica is a little cursed with its uncanny-valley wolf-human-hybrid proportions, but it’s got the spirit. It’s also forced to have hair by virtue of the alternative being a frightening smooth egg-like dome between the ears.

PICA ACCURACY: 7/10
PICA ENERGY: 8/10

6/17/2025

Garden Paws

Garden Paws is a 3D farming and life sim, one of the early entries in the Genre That Shall Remain Unnamed popularized by Stardew Valley and recent Animal Crossing games (and you know it’s an early entry because there is not a single instance of the word “cozy” on its Steam store page). I think it may have been either the first or one of the first games in the genre that let you play as an animal character yourself. This should be more common by now and I’m mad that it isn’t!!

It has a variety of playable animals and a very janky texture editor packaged in, which repeatedly crashed my entire computer, but by working in 10-minute intervals I was able to make a Pica. I’d definitely recommend if it you like similar games; the NPCs are very basic and there are frankly way too many quests, but it’s fun and it has a LOT to do.

PICA ACCURACY: 8/10
PICA ENERGY: 4/10

THE ELDER SCROLLS III: MORROWIND

I love Morrowind, even though my ability to play it is frequently limited by my patience for the level of planning and organization required to level correctly. Could I simply decide not to care and level wrong? Absolutely not. Give me 5x skill increases or give me death.

This Pica is a retexture of Sabregirl’s Wolven mod, with a fix by Qawsed. This one isn’t particularly high-effort because the texture files are microscopic and apply strangely. Not shown: the head texture applies on both sides of the head, so this iteration of Pica has a second eyeless face on the back of its head which desperately needs hiding by some manner of helm.

Below you can see me under attack by my haters.

PICA ACCURACY: 7/10
PICA ENERGY: 10/10

VRChat

This one barely qualifies since most furries have their fursonas in VRChat, but it’s MY website and I decide what goes on it!

VRChat Pica uses the CleanerWolf base, with a custom body resculpt since the original only supports very traditionally-masculine body types. I’ll probably dedicate a full page to this eventually since I’m constantly tinkering with it.

PICA ACCURACY: 10/10
PICA ENERGY: 10/10

This one’s kind of cheating but sue me.

FERALHEART (+ FERALHEART UNLEASHED)

I practically grew up on FeralHeart – a 3D chatroom where you play as an ambiguous feline or canine – and its long-dead predecessor Impressive Title. Allegedly FeralHeart’s server is still up, but I couldn’t connect to it; by the grace of the offline character creator I was able to make a really ugly Pica anyway. The game has a feature where you can make your own custom textures (called “presets”) but I was not going to put that much effort in, especially since I can’t play it. I’ll score it for the hell of it anyway –

PICA ACCURACY: 4/10
PICA ENERGY: 1/10

Since I couldn’t get on the server, I decided to try FeralHeart Unleashed instead, which is a fanmade continuation still in active development. Behold! A much nicer Pica:

I’m hoping to actually play this a little to see what kinds of things they’ve added.

PICA ACCURACY: 9/10
PICA ENERGY: 8/10