# Houses

A **House** is your pet's identity — its theme, palette, and which species line it
grows along. Your House is decided by the **model-ID family** you code with: whatever
agent and model you already use picks the House for you. That's the _only_ thing the
model choice does.

A House is an **aesthetic family, not a brand**. Each one deliberately blends models
from several makers — Western and otherwise — so no House is "the Claude house" or "the
Chinese-models house." Models are grouped by _vibe_ (mind, geometry, light, metal), and
which one you use just colors your pet's identity. It never changes power.

> **No model judgment.** A House is cosmetics and identity, never power. Every House
> shares the **same stat budget** — no House is stronger, no model is "better food,"
> and your grades are judged against your own baseline, never your model. Houses are
> also the _only_ public vocabulary for provider identity: in battles and on shared
> DNA codes, the House shows, the provider name never does.

## The five Houses

Each House is also a **Creature Kingdom** — its pets are a distinct kind of animal you can
recognize from silhouette alone. That's pure looks: the kingdom never changes power, only the
shape your pet wears.

| House      | Diet (model families)¹              | Kingdom (creatures)       | Theme             | Stat lean | Status       |
| ---------- | ----------------------------------- | ------------------------- | ----------------- | --------- | ------------ |
| **Aether** | `claude-*` · `minimax*`             | 🌤 Sky Court (flyers)     | ethereal / mind   | WIS       | Shipped (M1) |
| **Cipher** | `gpt-*`/`o*` · `glm*` · `mimo*`     | ⛰ Crag Beasts (ground)   | glyph / geometry  | PWR       | Shipped (M1) |
| **Flux**   | `gemini-*` · `qwen*` · `kimi*`      | 🌊 Tide Runners (aquatic) | light / current   | SPD       | Shipped      |
| **Forge**  | `llama*` · `mistral*` · `deepseek*` | 🔥 Iron Brood (robots)    | metal / ember     | GRT       | Shipped      |
| **Wild**   | anything unmapped                   | 🌱 The Bloom (plants)     | feral / overgrown | neutral   | Shipped      |

**The Kingdoms.** Aether's **Sky Court** are winged sky-creatures that never touch the ground —
floating moth-sages and sky-mantas trailing veils of light. Cipher's **Crag Beasts** are heavy
ground predators in faceted, glyph-etched armor. Flux's **Tide Runners** are streamlined,
fast-darting creatures of current and fin. Forge's **Iron Brood** are riveted constructs with
glowing ember-vents. Wild's **The Bloom** are feral plant-beasts — and the home of every
not-yet-recognized model, waiting to sprout. A creature keeps its kingdom's look — and its own
signature feature — as it grows, so an Apex still reads as the grown-up of the hatchling you
started with.

¹ Full glob set per House (the table shows the headline ones; this is everything, in
match order — first match wins): **Aether** `claude-*` · `minimax*` · `abab*`; **Cipher**
`gpt-*` · `o1*` · `o3*` · `o4*` · `o*` · `glm*` · `codegeex*` · `mimo*`; **Flux** `gemini-*`
· `qwen*` · `qwq*` · `qvq*` · `kimi*` · `moonshot*`; **Forge** `llama*` · `mistral*` ·
`deepseek*`. Matching is **case-insensitive**, so a CamelCase slug like `MiniMax-Text-01`
lands in Aether all the same. Only popular families are mapped today — anything else (e.g.
`phi*`, `gemma*`, `yi-*`) grows a **Wild** Bloom until a future pack adopts it.

**All five lines are live.** Aether, Cipher, Flux, Forge, and Wild each have their full
11-form creature line now — code into any of them and your pet grows along its own kingdom.
Wild's **Bloom** doubles as the home for any model the game doesn't recognize yet (see below) —
so there's no blank silhouette anymore; an unmapped model simply grows a feral plant-beast.

**About "stat lean."** Every pet gets the same fixed stat budget across PWR / SPD /
WIS / GRT — the lean only changes how that one budget is _distributed_. An Aether pet
leans into WIS; a Cipher pet leans into PWR; the totals match. It's flavor, not
advantage (see [Grades & Records](grades-and-archive.md) for what actually moves a
pet's quality).

## How your House is chosen — the Diet

Your pet's House is locked at its first true molt — the Diet bar then shows the running mix of everything it has eaten since. It is an always-full bar split into colored House shares, e.g. `Aether 72% · Cipher 28%`. The Diet:

- **commits the egg to a House** at its first true molt, by the window's dominant gene;
- **tints the pet** with the House colors of every model family you have used;
- **never** touches stats, grades, or speed — it is identity only.

**A cosmetic spread keeps things diverse.** When your pet hatches, the game picks a House from your dominant gene's family — but there is roughly a 50/50 chance it branches you into a _different_ House instead (chosen deterministically for your install). This spreads teams that share a single model across all five Houses so not every colleague ends up with the same creature kingdom. It is purely cosmetic: your stats, grades, and speed are identical regardless of which House was chosen. If your pet ended up somewhere unexpected, that's why — and it's intentional.

Code mostly with `claude-*` or `minimax*` and your pet lives an Aether life; lean into
`gpt-*`/`o*`, `glm*`, or `mimo*` and Cipher's geometry takes over. Because each House blends
several makers, your everyday model mix — not its brand — is what settles your pet's
identity. Mix across Houses and the Diet blends, which is exactly how the hybrid lines
and fusion specials of later milestones come into reach.

## Wild — The Bloom (the feral house)

**Wild** is the House for anything Token Tamers doesn't yet recognize — and it's a real,
playable line now: **The Bloom**, a kingdom of feral plant-beasts with a neutral (balanced)
stat budget. Code mostly with a model the game hasn't mapped (e.g. `phi*`, `gemma*`, `yi-*`)
and your pet grows a Bloom — a Sprout that climbs to a towering grove-spirit, same 11-form
track as every other house.

It keeps its **dormant-gene** nature too: the registry is additive-only, so when a future
content pack (or an [update](getting-started.md)) teaches the game that model's family, the
gene "awakens" and that model moves into its newly-recognized House. Nothing is lost — and in
the meantime your unmapped models grow a real creature instead of a blank silhouette.

(Note: a shared DNA hash referencing a _species_ your build doesn't have still shows as a
`???` Dex silhouette until you update — that forward-compatible discovery is unchanged.)

## See also

- [Game Guide](game-guide.md) — the vitals panel, where the Diet bar lives
- [Species](species.md) — the lineage shape each House grows along
- [Grades & Records](grades-and-archive.md) — what actually determines pet quality