Deck Pets: Rodents

Rodents turns your Stream Deck into a little cage of hamsters, gerbils, mice and rats. The whole deck becomes the cage: your pets potter about the bedding, run on the wheel, carry food home to their stash and curl up to sleep. Hamsters, mice and rats wake as the evening comes on, gerbils are up by day, and the cage lives on your computer's clock.

The pets are yours, named by you, and they depend on you. The bowl empties, the bottle runs dry and the bedding gets dirty, and a pet that's hungry, thirsty or living in mess lets you know. Keep on top of it and they settle in. Give an awake pet a stroke now and then and it grows tame, and a tame pet will come and see you even when it would rather be asleep. A happy pair of the same breed will have a litter, and the pups start tiny and grow up over a few days.

Happy pets earn seeds. Seeds buy new animals, wheels, houses, tubes, hammocks and a sand bath, better food, backgrounds and bigger cages, and each level opens up more of the shop. Each kind has its own ways: Syrians insist on living alone, the others get lonely without company, and different kinds never share. When you want a second kind, a second cage sits beside the first, sharing the same seeds.

No two pets are quite the same, and some are special. Every animal is Common, Uncommon, Rare or Legendary, and the rarer it is, the finer its coat and the more seeds it brings in. The shop turns over each day and saves its best for keepers whose pets are tame and happy, but litters are where the good ones really come from, and it runs in families.

Above all of them are the one-offs: eight one-of-a-kind pets, one for every breed, each with a name and coat of its own. Butterscotch is a Syrian with a white saddle, Frost a winter white with frosted points, Mittens a Berkshire rat. They are never for sale. A one-off is only born to two Rare or better parents, so finding them all is the long game.

How hard it is is up to you. In Simulation, pets 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 seeds and XP if you'd rather grow the cage faster. Time slows down while Stream Deck is closed, so a weekend away won't cost you a pet.

Everything happens on the deck. The shop, your pets, 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 fill the bowl and bottle and clean the cage, and the touch strip shows a live view inside. There are layouts for the Stream Deck, Mini, XL, +, Neo and Mobile, and with more than one deck the cage 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 peek into a cage on the shelf. 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.