Deck Pets: Rodents

What you need

• Windows 10 or 11 with Stream Deck 7.1 or newer.
• Any Stream Deck: Stream Deck, Mini, XL, +, Neo, Stream Deck Mobile or the Corsair Galleon 100 SD (on the Galleon, hold a dial for about 3 seconds to reach its second layer). Each gets its own cage, shop and pet pages.
• Nothing else. No account, no internet connection, no setup.

1. Getting started

1. Find Deck Pets in the Stream Deck actions list and drag the Cage key onto any page.
2. Press it. A new cage offers a line-up of six pets: press one to take it, or hold it to name it yourself.
3. The cage then opens across the whole deck, with Back, Food, Water, Clean and More along the bottom row. By day your pet is probably asleep in its house: hamsters are like that.
4. Press Back to return to your own page. The cage carries on without you, and the Cage key keeps watch.

Demo profiles

A ready-made page with the Cage 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: Cage, Food, Water, Clean and Status along the top row
• Stream Deck Mini: Cage, Fill up and Clean, then Status
• Stream Deck XL: the five keys along the top row, with room for your own
• Stream Deck +: Cage, Food, Water and Status keys, and the Cage, Food, Clean and Go dials
• Stream Deck Neo: Cage, Fill up, Clean and Status

2. Your first pet, and its name

• A new cage (and a cage you reset) opens this line-up instead of the cage. Press one to take it, and the cage opens.
• The key beside Back shuffles: a press brings six others, a hold gives the six there other names.
• Hold one of them to name it yourself.

• Press letters to spell a name, up to fourteen; the first letter of each word is capitalised for you.
• The key beside Back rubs one out, and a hold clears the lot. The corner key turns to the next page of letters (a Stream Deck holds twelve at a time, an XL all of them).
• Back keeps the name; hold it to leave the old one alone.
• Any pet can be renamed later: press its card on Your pets, then hold it. Or pick a pet and type a name in Stream Deck's own settings panel.

3. Looking after them

• Food fills the bowl and Water fills the bottle. On the Mini and the Neo, one Fill up key does both. Your pets eat and drink by themselves.
• A well-fed pet carries spare food home to its house; you can see the hoard at the door. With the bowl empty, they eat the hoard, which buys you time.
• Status shows your level, your seeds and whatever most needs you. When something has happened, it shows the news first, one line at a time.
• More opens the page with the settings, a picture, the shop, your pets and the screensaver on it.
• The Cage key's rim turns amber when something needs doing and blinks red when a pet is in trouble. A number in its corner is news you have not read.

A pet with no water is in trouble within a day; with no food, or in a filthy cage, a little longer. The keys warn you for hours before anything dies. While Stream Deck is closed, time passes at half speed for up to three days, and nothing dies of it.

Tins of food

• The bowl is filled from whichever tin you are on, and the Food key says which. Four of them, and they argue with each other rather than being a straight ladder.
• Seed mix is what a cage starts on. Muesli (level 3) is the one they love, and they pick through it for the good bits, so it goes down faster and makes more mess. Nuggets (level 5) are what a vet would tell you to feed: nothing to pick out, a bowl goes further, and far less ends up on the floor. Forage mix (level 7) manages both.
• A tin is bought once and yours, so swapping back and forth afterwards costs nothing.

4. Cleaning, one area at a time

Mess builds up across the cage floor at its own pace in each place: most by the house, the bowl, the wheel and in the corners, where real pets make it. You can see the droppings where they are.

1. Press Clean. The cage keys get a dashed green outline.
2. Press the cage keys where the mess is. Each one sparkles as it is cleaned.
3. Press Clean again when you are done, or just leave it: cleaning stops after 15 seconds without a press.

Hold Clean to do the whole cage at once. A pet that has died is taken away when you clean where it lies.

5. Taming

• Press the cage and an awake pet walks over to where you pressed, to be petted. Little hearts mean it counted.
• Petting at least a minute and a half apart makes a pet tamer: shy, then getting used to you, then happy to be petted, then hand-tame. Rats tame fastest, mice slowest.
• Poke a sleeping pet and it wakes up grumpy, and a little less tame. A tame one wakes up for you instead, and comes over to be petted, even by day.
• Hold Status for Your pets: a card for each pet. Press a card for its breed, mood and tameness; hold it and press again to rehome that pet.

6. The animals

• Hamsters: Syrian, Campbell's dwarf, winter white, Chinese and Roborovski. Syrians live alone; the dwarfs like company, and a Roborovski is lonely without it.
• Gerbils are up by day as well as night and are happiest in pairs.
• Fancy mice are tiny, quick and sociable.
• Fancy rats are big, clever and very social. They need a friend, and a medium cage or bigger.
• Different kinds never share a cage: the shop says so rather than letting you try. From level 4 a second cage (150 seeds) sits beside the first for a second kind, sharing the same seeds; set a Cage key to Second cage to open it.

7. Seeds, levels and the shop

• Happy pets earn seeds and experience. Levels unlock new animals, toys (tube and ledge, sand bath, hammock, seesaw, chew sticks, soft bedding) and bigger cages.
• Open the shop by pressing Status once the news is read, or by holding the Cage key or any part of the cage.
• Press a shelf once to see it, and again within three seconds to buy it. Anything you cannot buy says why.
• Lose every pet without the seeds for any animal in today's shop, and the shop gives you a Syrian hamster to start again.

Seeds in the bedding

• Every eight hours or so a little pile of seed ends up somewhere on the bedding. Press the key it is under and you sweep it up: each pile is worth about an hour and a half of what your pets earn.
• The pile catches the light, and the Status and Cage keys mention it quietly, after anything that actually needs you.
• Up to three lie about at once, and one is trodden into the bedding after about eight hours if it is never found. They turn up while Stream Deck is shut too, so there is usually something waiting when you come back.
• A press sweeps up rather than calling a pet over, so you never wake anybody going for one.

8. Decorating

• Your pets use their things. They sit up on the cork log, the climbing branch, the rope bridge and the lookout tower, dig in the digging box, nibble at the hay rack, gnaw the chews, roll in the sand bath, play on the seesaw and nap in the hammock (a second bed). Each kind has its own tastes: gerbils dig and sand-bathe, rats climb and use the hammock, mice climb and seesaw, hamsters dig and run. A thing counts fully towards their happiness when they have used it lately, so buy what your animals like.
• Backgrounds go behind the cage, because a cage stands in a room: a bookshelf, a window with a sill and a sky that changes with the hour, striped paper, a workshop board hung with tools, or a string of fairy lights that glows after dark.
• A background is bought once and yours for good. Putting an old one back up later costs nothing — press its shelf in the shop and it goes up.

9. How special an animal is

• Every animal is Common, Uncommon, Rare, Legendary or Unique. A better coat is a colour the ordinary stock never comes in, its card carries the word and its own colour, and it earns more seeds an hour just for being worth looking at.
• The shop turns its animals over once a day. Every pen holds the actual animal that would come home — its coat, and whether it is a female or a male — so you can see what you are buying and plan a pair.
• What is in those pens depends on you. A keeper whose pets are hand-tame and happy in clean bedding is offered the animals a breeder holds back: up to four times the ordinary chance of something better. A neglected cage is shown ordinary stock.
• A Unique is a named animal with markings of its own, one for every breed: Butterscotch in a white saddle, Sable, Frost with its dark points, Ink, Pepper, Pearl with her ruby eyes, Amber and Mittens. They are only ever offered to a cage that has earned it — every pet hand-tame, happy, in clean bedding — and each can turn up only once.

10. Litters

• A grown female and a grown male of the same breed, both fed, watered, well and happy, with room in the cage, will have a litter in their own time. The mother is expecting for the best part of a day, and her card says so.
• Syrians never have one. They live alone, so a pair cannot happen in the first place: breeding means moving up to one of the sociable kinds.
• Pups are born small and grow to full size over about three days. They take no room in the cage while they are small, which is how a litter fits at all — and then they grow up, the cage is suddenly over full, and somebody has to be found a home. The cage will say so.
• It runs in families: every step a parent is up the ladder makes a better pup likelier, so a good animal is worth pairing. Two parents that are Rare or better can have a one-of-a-kind of their own, which is the other way to find one.
• A mother is left in peace for a couple of days after a litter, and only one is ever on the way at a time.

11. Illness, if you want it

• It is off until you switch it on. Settings has an Illness key beside Simulation and Casual, and an existing cage carries on exactly as it was.
• With it on, bedding left filthy brings on wet tail in hamsters and the sniffles in mice, gerbils and rats, and an animal from the shop occasionally arrives with it. Their coat loses its shine, so you can see it in the cage.
• It spreads to the others sharing the cage.
• Two ways out. A sachet of medicine in the food clears the cage in about six hours. Or clean the bedding and keep them fed, and it passes in a day or two for nothing. The shelf only sells it while somebody is actually poorly.
• A travel carrier is where a poorly one rests apart, drawn in its carrier with food and water brought to it, and while it is in there it gives it to nobody (and has no litters). Filthy bedding still reaches everyone, so the brush is the real answer.
• Left alone it takes about a week to kill, and in Casual nobody ever dies of it.

12. Stream Deck + dials

• Food and Water: push or touch to fill.
• Clean: the strip is a map of the cage floor, each area as dirty as it is. Turn along it (the cage keys light up where it points) and push to clean there.
• Go: your level, seeds and news. Turn to pick Cage, Shop, Pets or Back, push to go there, touch to read the next news.
• The Cage dial goes on your own pages: a live window onto the cage across the touch strip.

13. More, and the screensaver

The More key sits in the cage page's bottom row, and holding Back opens it from anywhere. On it:

• Settings, Shop and Your pets, one press away.
• Snapshot: a picture of the whole cage, saved to Pictures\Deck Pets and put on the clipboard. Hold it to open the folder.
• Status: your level, seeds and the latest news.
• Screensaver: the cage over every key of the deck, controls and all. Press any key to bring them back.

Your pets, and your record

• Your pets lists everyone on a card. Press a card and that animal opens across the whole block of keys: a picture, its name, and bars for health, food, water, happiness and how tame it is, then its age, breed, what it is worth, what it is doing and whether it could have a litter. Press any key to go back, or hold one to rename it. Holding a card in the list still arms rehoming, as before.
• Your record is the cage itself, laid out the same way: how old it is, how clean the bedding is, what is left in the bowl and the bottle, who is in it, what it has earned, how many litters it has had, how good a name you have with the shop, and how many one-of-a-kind animals you have kept. On a deck too small to hold it all, the corner key turns the page.
• Nothing sits across a bezel. A pet walking through a gap reads fine because it is moving, but a number cut in half does not, so each key carries one fact and reads on its own from across the desk.

The status page

Press Status and the cage is laid out a fact to a key: bars across several keys for the food bowl, the water bottle (with how long it will last), cleanliness (with a tick at the dirtiest spot), and your pets' average fed, water, happy and rested, the good range boxed; and single keys for who needs you, who is awake, the hungriest and thirstiest, anyone ill, room, pups and the next litter, level, seeds an hour and the second cage. The busy hours show as a bar across the day. Press the bowl or the bottle to fill it, or a pet to open its card.

14. Settings

Hold Back on the cage page for the More page and press Settings, or use the key beside Back on the shop and pet pages, which goes round to it. Press a key to change that setting, hold it to go back the other way; the key beside Back carries on round to the shop. On a Stream Deck the settings run to a second page: the corner key turns to it, and from there goes back to the cage. Everything here is also in any Rodents key's settings in Stream Deck, if you would rather.

• Mode: Simulation, or Casual, where nothing dies. Casual changes nothing else: your pets still get hungry and thirsty, the cage still gets messy and the warnings still come, but a neglected pet only ever gets poorly. Switch either way whenever you like; it is kept with the cage.
• Seeds and XP: 1x, 2x, 5x or 10x each. Seeds multiplies what your pets earn and the seeds you find in the bedding; XP multiplies experience, so levels and the things they unlock come sooner. Rehoming still pays its usual price. Both keep working while you are away.
• Pet hours: like real life (busy at night), or swapped, so your pets are up while you are at your desk.
• Day starts and Day ends: the hours the cage counts as daytime, anywhere from 05:00 to 23:00.
• Across decks: with more than one Stream Deck plugged in, lay one cage across all of them, and your pets walk from deck to deck. Opening or leaving the cage then moves every deck.
• Smoothness: frames a second on the cage page, from 2 to 15 (8 to start). Lower it if the deck or the computer feels busy.
• Snapshot: takes the picture from here too; hold it to open the folder it went to.
• Name a pet: pick one and type a name, if you would rather use a keyboard than the deck.
• How to play: ten cards of the rules, a key at a time.
• Your record: eight cards of how it has gone — the cage, your pets, where they came from, your care, seeds, the tamest, the oldest and how it is played.
• Back up save: keeps a dated copy of your cage in %APPDATA%\DeckPets\backups (the newest 20 are kept); hold it to open that folder.
• Reset save: starts a new cage, 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.

15. Your save

One cage is shared by every Stream Deck plugged in. It is saved every half minute and whenever you do something, to %APPDATA%\DeckPets\rodents.json, with a backup beside it, and it survives plugin updates and reboots. To start again, use Reset save on the settings page (it backs up first), or quit Stream Deck, delete rodents.json and rodents.json.bak from that folder, and start it again. The plugin makes no network connections and collects nothing.

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 Food and Go; the second layer has Water and Clean. 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\rodents.json, and start Stream Deck again.

Can I rename a pet?

Yes, and in two ways: press its card on Your pets, hold it, and type the name on the deck, or pick the pet in any Rodents key's settings panel and type it there.

How do I get rid of the controls and just watch the cage?

Hold Back for More and press Screensaver: the cage fills every key of the deck. Any press brings the controls back.

My hamster is always asleep.

Hamsters, mice and rats sleep through much of the day. Set Pet hours to Swapped, or keep gerbils, which are up by day anyway.

Why can I not buy a second pet?

The shelf says why: the cage is full, a Syrian hamster will not share, different kinds cannot live together, or rats need a bigger cage.

Will my pets die while I am on holiday?

No. Time away can leave them hungry, thirsty and weak, but never kills them, and it stops counting after three days. Fill the bowl and bottle soon after you are back.

Something is still wrong.

Write to support@teatimeservers.ca with your Stream Deck model and what you saw.