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, Mobile and the Corsair Galleon 100 SD (on the Galleon, hold a dial for about 3 seconds to reach its second layer).
- Nothing else: no account, and it never goes online. Your formicarium is saved on your PC.
1. Getting started
On the Elgato Marketplace. Install Ant Farm from its Marketplace listing; Stream Deck loads it automatically. 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.
Demo profiles
A ready-made page with the Formicarium key and the care keys for each Stream Deck. Download the one for your deck and double-click it to import it into Stream Deck.
- Stream Deck: Formicarium, Sugar, Food, Colony, Water, Clean and Status
- Stream Deck Mini: Formicarium, Status, Sugar & food, Colony, Water and Clean
- Stream Deck XL: seven keys, with room for your own
- Stream Deck +: Formicarium, Sugar, Food and Status keys, and the Formicarium, Sugar & food, Colony and Go dials
- Stream Deck Neo: Formicarium, Status, Sugar & food, Colony, Water and Clean
- Corsair Galleon 100 SD: six keys and four dials
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: a press fills it to the top of what your species likes, never past it, and the key shows dry, fine or wet. Too wet grows mould; too dry and the brood suffers.
- Clean empties the midden, the colony's rubbish heap, and with it knocks back mould that grew there.
- 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. There is always a tunnel being dug, and you can watch its end creep forward between steps; the Digging setting speeds it up to ten times.
4. Nuptial flights
Once a colony has 100 workers (so from a medium formicarium up) 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 take over if yours dies, or start a colony in a second formicarium; you can also buy a new queen in the shop.
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 status page
Press Status and the whole formicarium is laid out a fact to a key: the queen's age, health and how many eggs she lays a day (and what is holding her back), workers against the room in the nest, eggs, larvae and pupae, then long bars across two keys for the sugar dish, brood food, the nest's dampness (your species' range boxed), the midden, and the colony's way to its next nuptial flight. Chambers dug, honeydew an hour and your level follow. News has its own key beside Back, and holding Status still opens the colony page.
8. 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 vented lid that dries a nest that has got too wet (open or shut the vents from the shop, the status page, or by holding Water), a heat mat (brood grows faster), outworld plants, pebbles, leaf litter, moss, backdrops, queens of the other species, and a second formicarium.
9. Settings
- Simulation or Casual: whether the queen can die.
- Illness, off unless you want it: then mould can make the colony sick too.
- Mould: on, growing slowly in a nest left damp and messy (the anti-mould spray is in the shop from level one), or off, and it never grows.
- Digging: how fast the workers dig, from as fast as real ants to ten times that.
- 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.
- Back up save: keeps a dated copy of your formicarium in
%APPDATA%\DeckPets\backups(the newest 20 are kept); hold it to open that folder. - Reset save: starts a new formicarium, with safeguards: a press arms it (the key turns red and counts down five seconds), then a two-second hold resets. Anything else, or the countdown running out, cancels it. It always backs up first, and will not reset if the backup fails.
Frequently asked
Where are the other dial controls on the Galleon 100 SD?
Each of the Galleon's two dials has two layers. The top layer has Sugar & food and Go; the second layer has Clean and Colony. Hold a dial pressed for about 3 seconds to switch it to its other layer, and again to switch back. The Stream Deck app shows all four at once, but the keyboard uses one layer at a time.
How do I put a backup back?
Quit Stream Deck, copy the backup you want from %APPDATA%\DeckPets\backups over
%APPDATA%\DeckPets\ants.json, and start Stream Deck again.
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. For quicker progress, turn up the Digging setting.
Something is still wrong.
Email support@teatimeservers.ca and tell us what you see.