What you need
- Windows 10 or 11 with Stream Deck software 7.1 or newer.
- Any Stream Deck: there are pages for the Stream Deck, Mini, XL, +, Neo and Mobile.
- Nothing else: no account, and it never goes online. Your formicarium is saved on your PC.
1. Getting started
In testing. Ant Farm is being played on real decks before it goes to the Elgato Marketplace. This page will link to the listing when it is up. It is the fourth Deck Pets habitat, after Fish Tank, Rodents and Reptiles.
- Find Deck Pets in the Stream Deck actions list and drag the Formicarium key onto any page.
- Press it. A line-up of queens is waiting: pick one and give her a name.
- The whole deck becomes the formicarium: open ground along the top where the ants forage, the nest in the soil below, and your controls along the bottom row.
2. Looking after the colony
- Sugar fills the dish in the outworld. The workers live on it.
- Food is for the larvae: a cricket for most species, seeds for harvesters, leaves for leafcutters. The key says when the larvae are waiting on it.
- Water keeps the nest damp. The key shows dry, fine or damp against what your species likes, and warns when a press would make it too wet. Too wet grows mould; too dry and the brood suffers.
- Clean empties the midden, the colony's rubbish heap, and knocks back any mould.
- The colony key shows the queen and how many workers, eggs, larvae and pupae there are, with the most pressing worry on its rim.
3. The nest
The colony digs its own nest as it grows, so no two are alike: a queen's chamber, brood chambers, a food store and a midden, and for some species a granary, a honey room or a fungus garden. A young colony's nest is small; it spreads across the deck as the colony grows. Press the open ground to put food down right there. Press a chamber to see what is in it, but not twice: tapping the glass bothers them.
4. Nuptial flights
Once a colony has 100 workers it sends out winged ants every five days. You have two days to keep one of the young queens (hold the colony key, or More, Flights); the rest fly away. A kept queen can found a new colony if yours ever dies out, or start one in a second formicarium.
5. The species
| Species | Level | Brood food | Nest | Something special |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Black garden ant | 1 | insects | middling | the easy one to start with |
| Carpenter ant | 2 | insects | middling | big-headed majors |
| Harvester ant | 3 | seeds | dry | a granary of seeds |
| Honeypot ant | 4 | insects | dry | repletes: living honey jars |
| Leafcutter ant | 5 | leaves | damp | a fungus garden they farm |
| Weaver ant | 6 | insects | fairly damp | leaf nests in outworld plants |
6. Queens and one-offs
The queen is the rarity: every colony's ants take her colour, from Common to Legendary. The rarer she is, the more honeydew the colony brings in. Above them all are six named one-off queens, one per species, which are never sold and only come from the flights of Rare-or-better queens.
7. The shop
Honeydew buys bigger formicaria (from six chambers' worth of room up to eighteen), sand, garden soil, red clay or the classic blue gel (which never needs water), sugar water, honey or fruit for the dish, a longer-lasting feeding dish, a water tower (the nest dries half as fast), a heat mat (brood grows faster), outworld plants, pebbles, leaf litter, moss, backdrops, queens of the other species, and a second formicarium.
8. Settings
- Simulation or Casual: whether the queen can die.
- Illness, off unless you want it: then mould can make the colony sick, and an anti-mould spray is in the shop.
- Honeydew and XP multipliers, up to ten times.
- Day hours: at night the sky over the nest goes dark and a moon comes out; the ants work on.
- Across decks, smoothness, Snapshot, your record, How to play and Start over.
Frequently asked
Will my colony die while I am away?
No. Time away runs at half speed for up to three days and cannot kill anything.
The nest is tiny.
It grows with the colony. A few ants dig a few chambers; hundreds dig across the whole deck.
Something is still wrong.
Email support@teatimeservers.ca and tell us what you see.