Deck Pets: Bugs & Friends

Deck Pets: Bugs & Friends

Bugs & Friends turns your Stream Deck into a planted terrarium. The whole deck becomes the glass: stick insects sway on the twigs, millipedes wander the leaf litter, rhino beetles plod across the floor and isopods busy themselves in the soil. It dims at night.

Seven kinds to keep, unlocked level by level:

Indian stick insects, which sway like twigs

Giant millipedes

Isopods, a colony that eats the mess and grows

Praying mantises

Rhino beetles, whose grubs grow in the soil, pupate and come up as beetles

Chilean rose tarantulas

Regal jumping spiders

They grow by moulting. Before a moult a creature stops eating and keeps still; then it sheds its whole skin, and for a while after it is soft. A moult goes well in damp air, with no hands and no crickets or flies in with it. Otherwise it can go badly, and the creature is stuck and unhappy for a couple of days. A good moult leaves a shed skin on the floor: press it for nectar. The Creatures key shows the moult most worth knowing about.

Each kind has its own care. Feed puts in what each one eats (bramble, leaf litter, beetle jelly, flies or a cricket) and holds live food back from anyone about to moult. Mist raises the air only as far as your creatures like, with the range they want marked on the key. In damp, still air, old food and a dirty floor grow mould: clean it away a key at a time, fit a mesh lid, and let the isopods eat it back. Pick one up now and then and it grows tame.

Content creatures earn nectar, which buys new creatures, bigger terrariums, bark, moss, plants, substrates and backdrops, and each level opens up more of the shop. Mantises and spiders live alone, so from level 4 a second terrarium keeps a second lot beside the first, sharing the same nectar. Stick insects lay eggs by themselves; the others need a grown pair, and a mantis or a spider may eat her mate (never in Casual).

Every creature is Common, Uncommon, Rare or Legendary: a Pink-winged stick insect, an Orchid mantis, Dairy Cow isopods. The rarer it is, the more nectar it brings in. The shop turns over each day and saves its best for keepers whose creatures are tame, content and clean. Above them all are six one-offs, one for each kind, each with a name and colours of its own. They are never sold: only two Rare or better parents (or a Rare stick insect on her own) can hatch one, and each turns up only once.

How hard it is is up to you. In Simulation, creatures that are neglected can die. In Casual, nobody dies. Illness is off unless you turn it on, and you can speed up nectar and XP. Time slows down while Stream Deck is closed, so a weekend away won't cost you a creature.

Everything happens on the deck. The shop, your creatures, the settings, even typing a name: it all lives on the keys. Press Status and the whole terrarium is laid out across them, a fact to a key: the air, the mould, who is moulting, the food and everyone in it. On a Stream Deck + the dials feed, mist and clean, and a Terrarium dial puts a live view on the touch strip. There are layouts for the Stream Deck, Mini, XL, +, Neo and Mobile, and with more than one deck the terrarium can stretch across all of them.

Adds support for the Corsair Galleon 100 SD: the habitat, shop, settings, status and every other page are now laid out for its 12 keys, and both dials work on both layers.