A sample small incubator
An incubator was an image you could post in signatures and various websites, showing your dragons and allowing people to click them. They were very widely used in the Dragon Cave forum, because it is against the rules to post your individual eggs (it causes spam and lag). The offical Dragon Cave incubator could be made for everybody's scroll, and looked like a piece of parchment with pictures of the user's dragons on it. Only one incubator could be generated per scroll per half hour. This option was available by clicking the "Generate Incubator" link at the top of a scroll.
This feature has since been phased out on the site, and the term now refers to similar images that are instead generated by fansites.
Incubator Options
When this page was clicked, a number of options appeared, including:
- Sort Order: This includes options such as age, breed and scroll order. You can also choose whether eggs, hatchlings, frozen hatchlings and/or adults show, and whether or not duplicate sprites are allowed.
- Display: This changes what you want to be seen inside your incubator. You have the choice whether or not to show your eggs, hatchlings, frozen hatchlings, and adults.
- Size: The size of the individual tiles is either Normal (36x48), or Small (24x32). Normal tiles are larger, but more Small tiles can fit on an incubator. The option "Automatic" selects whichever tiles make sense based on incubator size and number of dragons.
- The size of the incubator itself is either Large or Small. The Automatic option also exists.
- Uploading: You have the option of not uploading, or to upload the incubator to ImageShack, TinyPic, or CDN.
- Other: Lastly, you also have the choice of including your username on the incubator.