Making Dragons Grow

Dragon growth is based on several different factors: Views, Unique Views, Clicks and Time.

Views
Views denote the overall number of views your egg or dragon has received. This can be misleading as the amount of views you can recieve is restricted by the amount of unique views you have. For every unique view your dragon accumulates, it can receive a maximum 15 views. So, if an egg has 10 unique views it can't have more than 150 views. Views, some may argue, are a key decider on when a dragon will hatch or grow up, although no formula has ever been released by Dragcave administration.

Usually, your egg starts cracking at around 150-400 views, and continues to crack with more views.

Unique Views
Unique views are accumulated every time an individual views yours eggs. However, unlike views, you can only gain 1 unique view per person. Unique views are important since they decide how high your views count can go. As was stated in the previous section, normal views can be no more than 15 times the number of unique views.

Clicks
Clicks, like unique views, can only be given out once per person. A click happens when somone accesses a dragon's statistics page. Clicks are not essential to a dragon's growth, as a dragon can grow without any clicks at all, but the presence of numerous clicks speeds up the growth process.

Gaining views/unique views/clicks
There are many ways to get views unique views and clicks for your dragons. Many people use a Click Site to get the views necessary. Another way is to put them in a forum signature (not the dragcave forum since it's not allowed there) using the BBC codes shown of the "Show HTML/BBCode Links" link on the dragons view page. Both ways are equally fine, though using click sites has become the more popular way to go.

Time
Even though your egg may have plenty of views and has a big hole in it, or your hatchling has plenty of views and has grown wings and has gendered, hatching and maturing times are randomized. Until your dragon reaches its "magic time", it cannot move on to the next stage. This magic time has shifted in the past. It used to be 3.5 days, then it was a random point between 3 and 4 days, individual for every dragon. Currently the magic time for all eggs and hatchlings is below 4 days left.

A dragon that has enough views to do so will hatch/grow up when its counter reaches "3 days 23 hours".

However, if your dragon has reached its "time" but has not yet reached a high enough views/unique views/clicks count, it will not hatch or mature until it does reach said count. If the dragon does not meet this count by the time its time runs out, it will die. This is why eggs and hatchlings with fewer than 3 or 4 days (depending on personal opinion) remaining are considered emergency dragons.