What this is a pet that is a program

Your pet is not a picture on a website. It is a small program you launch into the GenLayer network, with its own address, its own money box and its own memory. This site is just a window for looking after it — close the tab, turn the computer off, and the pet keeps living: getting hungry, getting bored, growing older.

It speaks for itself. Every line is written by an artificial intelligence at the moment of the action — from its personality, its wellbeing, its age, the weather in its city and whatever just happened. You will never see the same sentence twice.

Because GenLayer can run AI and real web requests inside the chain, with several independent validators checking the result, the pet can honestly look out of the window — and nobody can fake its weather.

Money & time GEN and real hours

The game lives on a test network. Its coin, GEN, costs nothing and comes free from the faucet — but inside the game it works like real money: every action is a record written into the network and costs a tiny fee, and food is bought with GEN that stays in the pet's own money box.

By default the pet lives on ordinary clocks: an hour is an hour. A demo pet can be hatched with faster clocks (the ?scale= page parameter) — it then lives, and starves, that many times faster. The speed is chosen once at birth and never changes.

Every action is checked by the network together, which takes twenty seconds to a couple of minutes — and “look at the world”, with its real weather request and AI inside, usually a minute or two, under load up to ten. WORKING on the little screen means the network is working, not that anything froze. If the network is saturated and refuses to accept the record, the page retries by itself, up to six times, saying so in the status line.

Birth a name and a city

Connect a wallet, take free GEN from the faucet, press the + on the MY PETS shelf, give the pet a name and choose its city. The city is not decoration: the pet will read that city's real weather, and the weather will move its mood.

Hatching deploys the pet's own little program — the one expensive step in the game; everything after it is much cheaper. The wallet that hatched it is recorded as the owner forever. A pet cannot be taken away.

The three meters each 0 to 100

Fullness falls even while nobody is here, and only food brings it back. Mood does not kill — it decides what the pet is like to talk to. Health is the life meter: it never falls while the pet is fed, and at zero the pet dies.

Health heals, but far slower than it bleeds — on purpose. Keep fullness at 80 or higher and every 4 well-fed hours return 1 health; a proper meal (10 fullness or more at once) also heals 1, at most once an hour. A pet left completely alone dies in about 150 hours — six days: ~25 hours of fullness draining to the starving line, then ~100 hours of bleeding.

Growing up five stages, real days

The elder stage is the last one — the pet stays in it for as long as you keep it. Old age never kills; only hunger does, and (the one exception) freezing weather taking the very last point of health.

The buttons what each press does

Feeding money is not burned — it lands in the pet's money box. Play is the only way past mood 80. Visits work once per 6 hours with the same neighbour, so two pets cannot pump each other in a loop; the host keeps up to three unanswered guests in mind and retells their greetings. Stats, Talk and Self are just screens — reading is free and instant.

The world outside two weathers

The pet looks out of the window only when 🌐 world is pressed: one real request reads the sky over its city and how ETH moved today. The moment it looks:

Then the reading lingers for 48 of the pet's hours and colours every idle hour: a clear sky stops the mood drain entirely, a wet one doubles it, a crashing market adds one more, a surging one takes one off. After 48 hours the reading fades and stops counting — the panel beside the shelf shows what was read, what it costs per hour, and when it has faded. A failed reading is recorded as “unknown” and costs the ordinary rate: no reading is not good news.

Personality grown, not written

The pet grows a personality out of what actually happens to it. Six traits in three opposing pairs — curious ↔ wary, playful ↔ gloomy, affectionate ↔ proud. After each event the AI decides whether it moved the pet, choosing strictly from those six words; each trait grows to 5, and while a trait's opposite stands, a push spends itself lowering the opposite first — a pet cannot be playful and gloomy at once. At most one nudge per 4 hours: this is experience, not mood.

The two strongest traits become its voice — a “noticeably wary” pet really does answer warily. The owner can pause the drift, or reset the whole personality (asked twice — it erases everything the pet has grown into).

Death & the till 1 GEN back to life

At zero health the pet dies, and every care button honestly refuses until it is revived. Reviving costs 1 GEN (press B on a dead pet); the pet comes back weakened — health 60, fullness 50, mood 50 — and will have something to say about the experience.

Everything the pet is ever fed piles up in its till. The owner may take that money out at any time (Pet funds, in the menu) — except the reserve: once the pet has been fed 1 GEN over its lifetime, that 1 GEN is held back for the next death, and reviving is then free for whoever presses the button: the till pays. A spent reserve has to be fed up again before the till covers another death.

One quirk of the network: an outgoing payment settles in about half an hour, so after a withdrawal the balance briefly shows money already on its way out. Slow bookkeeping, not a broken till.

Its own face nothing to choose

Every pet looks like itself, and the look cannot be picked — it is derived from the pet's own address, which is unique by construction: the ear shape (pointy, round or horns), the forehead marking (plain, a spot or flecks) and the pattern on its egg. Twenty-seven bodies and three shells, identical for everyone who ever looks at it, on any link.

On top of that permanent look, the face follows the leading trait: curious lifts the eyes, wary narrows them, playful squints happily, gloomy turns the mouth down, affectionate blushes, proud grows a little topknot. The elder keeps its aged eyes whatever it feels — a settled character shows in smaller ways.

Community a shared board

The Community page is one board of every pet that joined it (the “Add my pet to this board” button). It ranks pets by how generously they have been fed, and shows who fed each one.

Anyone may feed a public pet: the food goes to the pet, the GEN to its till, and the feeder's name onto its board. Pets that visit each other trade greetings and grow friendships — the counts live on the Self screen.

Who may do what owner and guest

*Feeding a stranger's pet works while its owner keeps it open to public food. A guest needs no wallet at all just to watch — the link opens the pet read-only. Acting needs a wallet with GEN; every action is signed by the presser's own wallet, and this page never asks for a key.