Deck Pets: Fish Tank

Fish Tank turns your Stream Deck into a small aquarium. The whole deck becomes the glass: fish drift from one key to the next, plants sway, and the light comes up in the morning and dims at night with your computer's clock. It sits there while you work, and every so often it needs you.

The fish are yours, named by you, and they depend on you. They get hungry, leftover food sours the water, and algae slowly creeps over the glass. Keep on top of it and the tank thrives: fish grow, pairs lay eggs, and the fry that hatch grow up into the next generation. Let it slide and you'll see it in the water, and in the fish.

Happy fish earn shells. Shells buy more fish, plants, rocks and driftwood, better food, brighter lights and bigger tanks, and each level opens up more of the shop.

No two fish are quite the same, and some are special. Every fish is Common, Uncommon, Rare or Legendary, and the rarer it is, the richer its colours and the more shells it brings in. Now and then the shop has a better one in, but breeding is where they really come from, and it runs in families: pair up good fish and their babies are more likely to be good too, so a tank gets better one generation at a time. A Legendary is something you'll remember hatching.

Above all of them are the Uniques: twelve one-of-a-kind fish, one for each kind in the shop, each with a name and look of its own. Penny is a copper guppy, Moonlight a pale betta with pearl-white fins, Firecracker a lionfish striped like its name. They are never for sale. A Unique only hatches from two Rare or better parents, and only once in a tank, so finding them all is the long game.

Later on you can set up a saltwater tank beside your first, with clownfish, a blue tang, coral, live rock and a lionfish that will eat your shrimp if you let it go hungry. The two tanks share one wallet and grow side by side.

How hard it is is up to you. In Simulation, fish that are neglected can die. In Casual, nobody dies and you can come and go as you like. Illness is off unless you turn it on, and you can speed up shells and XP if you'd rather grow the tank faster. Time slows down while Stream Deck is closed, so a weekend away won't cost you a fish.

Everything happens on the deck. The shop, your fish, the settings, even typing a name: it all lives on the keys, so you never open a window to play. On a Stream Deck + the dials feed, clean and change the lights, and the touch strip shows a live view of the tank. There are layouts for the Stream Deck, Mini, XL, +, Neo and Mobile, and with more than one deck the tank can stretch across all of them.

It saves on your computer and never goes online.

We made Deck Pets because we wanted a real virtual pet for the Stream Deck: not a timer with a cute picture, but something alive that you check on between other things, the way you'd glance at a tank in the corner of a room. The keys already sit on your desk all day with a screen under every one, so it seemed like the right home for one.

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.