game guide

Game Guide

The canonical cycle rule

• Egg fast-hatch (the one exception). ~10 minutes after your first usage of the week, the egg hatches into a Sprite — this is the only molt that doesn't wait for a 5-h window close. Every later molt obeys the 5-h cycle.
• Molt = the 5-hour session window close. The moment a pet can change stage, roll a trait, mutate, evolve, or attempt a grade-up.
• Rebirth = the week boundary. Dex record captured, inheritance roll, new egg. Rebirth never evolves the pet — its final form is whatever it became at the week's last molt.

Stages

Egg (Mote) → Sprite → Rookie → Evolved → Prime → Apex. The egg fast-hatches ~10 min after your first usage of the week. The first true molt commits the Mote to a House by the window's dominant model-ID gene.

Your pet grows over the week, not in an afternoon. A molt is a chance to evolve, not a guarantee — each stage takes a little while to mature before it moves up, and the later stages take longer than the early ones. So a sprite finds its feet on day one, but reaching the final Apex form is the reward of a sustained, good week (it also needs your pet to have graded up at least once — see Grades). All told the climb is paced across roughly five active days, leaving the back half of the week for the form to settle and the grade to climb. You'll never see an exact "evolves in N molts" countdown — what your pet becomes, and when, is meant to be a surprise. What you can watch is the Grow meter below the pet, which simply fills as it matures (see the vitals panel). Quiet week? Nothing is lost — your pet just grows more slowly, and a week with no usage at all rests as a Dormant cocoon.

Houses (identity & cosmetics only — equal stat budgets)

House	Diet (mixed model families)	Kingdom (creatures)	Theme	Stat lean
Aether	claude-* · minimax*	🌤 Sky Court (flyers)	ethereal / mind	WIS
Cipher	gpt-* / o* · glm* · mimo*	⛰ Crag Beasts (ground)	glyph / geometry	PWR
Flux	gemini-* · qwen* · kimi*	🌊 Tide Runners (swift)	light / current	SPD
Forge	llama* · mistral* · deepseek*	🔥 Iron Brood (robots)	metal / ember	GRT
Wild	anything unmapped	🌱 The Bloom (plants)	feral / overgrown	neutral

Each House blends models from several makers, grouped by vibe, not brand — no House is all-Western or all-anything. Each is also a Creature Kingdom that gives its pets a real animal body (flyers, ground beasts, swift swimmers, robots, plants) — looks only. No House is stronger; no model is better food. "Lean" redistributes an equal budget. (Full list + glob patterns + kingdoms: Houses.)

The vitals panel: Food, Diet, Grow, Odds

The pet's four stats (PWR / SPD / WIS / GRT — a fixed equal budget, who it is) sit up by its name in the identity header. Below the pet are four more readouts — the living ones. None of them ask anything of you; they just show what your real usage is doing to the pet, reading top-to-bottom as now → life → growth → next:

 Food   ▕█████▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▏  84.2M / 200M   +6% molt ↑
 Diet   ▕███████▒▒▒▒▒▏  Aether 72% · Cipher 28%
 Grow   ▕████▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▏  Rookie · Molt 4h 59m
 Odds   B → A 18%  · Reborn 6d 23h

The Food, Diet and Grow bars are the same width at every terminal size, so they line up — but they move in different ways, which is the whole point.

Food — how much you're feeding it now. A bar that fills with the tokens used in the current 5-hour session window toward a 200M "full" mark, then resets when the window closes. The fuller it gets, the bigger that molt's grade-roll bonus, shown live as +N% molt, up to a cap — then it stops mattering. So a last push of real work before a window closes sweetens the roll. It's a small, capped bonus on top of your baseline-judged odds; model choice never changes it (see Grades).

Diet — what you've fed it over its life. An always-full bar split into colored House shares (e.g. Aether 72% · Cipher 28%), with the percentages beside it. Unlike Food it never empties — its proportions simply drift as your model mix accumulates across molts. This is identity only: it tints the pet and steers which species line it grows into, and never touches stats, grades, or speed. (Houses, not raw model names — see the table above.)

Grow — how close it is to its next form. A bar that fills as your pet matures through its current stage and resets each time it evolves. The label beside it names the current stage and counts down to the next molt — e.g. Rookie · Molt 4h 59m — so you always know where you stand and when the next change can happen. At Apex-S, when there's nothing left to roll, it settles to Apex · max grade. What the bar deliberately doesn't reveal is what form comes next — the branch your pet takes stays a surprise until it evolves.

Odds — your next grade roll. The single live chance for the current → next grade, the only jump that can fire at the next molt, e.g. B → A 18%. The grade letters are colored by the grade ladder (C grey · B green · A violet · S gold). The number moves with your activity and your Food bonus, so you always see the exact odds before they roll — no hidden math, no pity. Beside the odds, a muted · Reborn 6d 23h deadline counts down to the automatic weekly rebirth. Once at S grade it reads S ★ apex — no further rolls.

At Apex stage the rebirth deadline becomes a clickable [ Reborn Now · … ] button — press it (or click) to force an early rebirth before the week is up. A confirm modal opens first; if your pet hasn't reached S yet, it clearly warns you the grade can still roll higher.

Traits (rolled once per molt, up to ~5 slots)

Marathoner · Sprinter · Polyglot · Nightshade · Daybreaker · Switcher · Deepdiver · Swarm · Polyhost — all triggered by work patterns, never by model choice or volume.

Pattern evolutions (locked at the week's final molt)

Marathoner+Nightshade → Vigil · Sprinter+Swarm → Tempest · any 4 distinct traits → Prism · Polyhost+Switcher → Chimera.

Dormancy

A week of zero usage sends the pet into a cocoon — not death. It wakes when you return, and surviving Dormancy is itself an achievement.

The shell at a glance

The interactive shell (tt with no args) has six pages, selectable by the hotkeys in the bottom menu bar:

Key	Page	What you'll find
1	Pet	Your live pet, stats, and the four-row vitals panel
2	Dex	Your per-House species constellation + detail records
3	Loot	Habitats and trinkets — browse and equip your collection
4	Feats	Achievements — earned ones shown, locked ones masked ??? with a how-to hint
5	Battle	Pick a fighter and challenge a DNA code or your own Dex
6	Settings	Cycle mode, color, sub-cell density

Press q or Ctrl-C to quit.