Hatch an Inky

1What an Inky is

Your Inky is a small artificial life simulation that runs in a panel beside your work. A genome hands it a hue and a temperament. Chemistry and drives build up and push it toward doing something, and a brain with learned weights decides what it actually does. It ticks about once a second while the panel is open, and when you come back the server catches it up on the time you were away.

It is not a Tamagotchi. It is not a pet with needs. There is no hunger, no illness, no decay, no death, no streaks, nothing to fail. You cannot neglect it and you cannot lose it. It simply gets on with its own life whether you watch or not.

Every account mints its own creature, so yours will not look like anyone else's.

2Turn it on

By default there is no companion. Nothing stored, nothing running, nothing listening. That is not a locked trial or a teaser; it is genuinely off, and it stays that way forever if you never touch it.

When you do want one, open Preferences and find the section headed Inky, your companion. Turn on Give me an Inky and one is minted for you, in its own colours, in a panel beside your work. The second switch, Let my Inky be seen in communities, stays disabled until the first is on, which is the sensible order: you get a creature first, then you decide whether anyone else ever meets it.

No cost, no plan, no entitlement, no invite queue. One switch is the entire gate.

3Knock on the door

Once the preference is on, a panel headed Inky turns up in the right rail, and inside it there is a door. No hatch button, no wizard, no form. The door is the control. Knock three times: click it, or put focus on it and press Enter or Space. It answers as you go. There is a small door here. Knock on it, and something will answer. Then A pause. Something shifts inside. Then Closer now. Once more. And on the third knock, It is opening.

Underneath sits the line worth reading twice: It will know that you did a thing. It can never know what the thing was. That is the deal, stated before anything hatches. Knock again next week if you like. Hatching happens once, so you can never overwrite the creature you already have.

4Where it lives

Your companion appears in the right-hand rail, in a panel headed Inky with the name of the current scene beside it. Inside is a small top-down room you can actually watch. Click the creature to greet it, or click open ground and it will wander over. That rail is shared with Muse and the Academy and only one can be open at once, so opening Muse tucks the creature away. You can do that yourself with Send Inky to the corner, which shrinks it to a pip in the bottom right that still shows the creature and a progress bar for whatever it is currently making. Its label reads something like Open Inky. Making a mini comic, currently drawing. or Between projects. It also follows you around: the park for community rooms, the green on public pages, the reading room for blogs.

5Growing up

Your companion arrives as an egg and works its way through hatchling, young, and adult. It moves up on experience, and experience comes from one place only: living. Every decision it makes and every word it picks up counts toward the next stage. There is nothing to buy, no ritual to perform, no daily thing you have to remember. Leave the panel closed for a fortnight and it will still have been busy.

The rail carries the stage name and a growth ring, plus a few facts from its genome: its hue, how bold it is, how attentive it is. Attentiveness is the one worth noting, because a more attentive creature takes words on more readily. Nothing regresses, so a stage once reached is kept.

6Drives and chemistry

The panel shows two stacks of bars. Drives are six urges: draw, write, read, mingle, explore, rest. Chemistry is eight levels, five of them fed by what you actually do (craft, compose, story, social, curio) and three that come from inside (reward, vigour, weariness).

The loop is small enough to hold in your head. Your work nudges its chemistry, its chemistry pushes its drives, and its brain picks an action that suits the loudest drive and is possible from where it happens to be standing. Possible is the part people miss. It cannot draw without an easel or brew tea without a teapot, so a strong urge in the wrong room comes out as wandering, gazing or pottering instead. Same creature, different room, and it reads like a different animal.

7What it notices

Your companion runs on your actual working life, but it only ever hears a rumour of it. Draw a stroke or lay a vector and its craft ticks up. Edit a book or write a blog post, that is compose. Open a read, get further into it, finish it: story, and so is watching a short or playing media. Post in a room, comment, react: social. Catch a cameo, browse, search, add to a list, follow a studio: curio. Publishing an asset is the loud one, feeding craft and compose at once.

What actually arrives is a chemical name and an amount. That is the entire message. It knows that you drew, never what you drew. Your pages, your words, and your reading never reach it.

8Its own work

Your creature makes things. Not for you, not because you asked, but because it felt like it. The panel keeps a section headed Its own work with whatever it is currently making and how far along it is, plus a running count of everything it has finished. When it is idle you get Between projects. It will start something when it feels like it. which is exactly as literal as it sounds.

It might attempt a mini comic, a zine, a strip, a sticker sheet, a picture, a short film, a chapter, or a poem, at doodle size, short, or proper. Progress only ticks while it is genuinely doing the matching thing, so a picture grows at the easel and not during a nap. Finished pieces earn it inkdrops, its own small currency, and go on its shelf.

9The wardrobe

Your creature earns inkdrops by finishing its own work, and there is exactly one thing to spend them on. The Wardrobe stocks A little cap, A bow, A scarf, A beret, A brush to hold, A mug of something and A small crown. Prices run from a handful of inkdrops up to sixty for the crown, and the better pieces want a track record as well, so a locked one tells you plainly: It needs to finish N things first.

The footer under the rack is the whole design in two sentences: Inkdrops buy hats and nothing else. They can never buy what the creature is. Nothing about its growth, its temperament, its vocabulary or its wellbeing is ever on a shelf. Those come from living. The shop sells only what sits on top.

10Twenty-eight words, all pictures

Your creature talks, but only in pictures, and there are exactly 28 of them: yes, no, happy, surprise, question, love, sleepy, book, pen, brush, tea, music, star, sun, rain, flower, hello, friend, share, thank you, and the rest of the set. It hatches knowing four (yes, no, happy, question). Everything else it picks up by running into it again and again, and only when it happens to be attentive at the time. So its vocabulary is a record of a life rather than a setting you configure. The Vocabulary section shows what it knows, a count out of 28, and where each one came from: innate, learned here, or picked up from another creature. That closed set is deliberate. It can be expressive, it can borrow words off other creatures, and none of it ever becomes free text.

11Come here, walks, treats and tricks

None of these four things is a command. Come here holds your hand out for a few seconds, which makes coming over, waving or spinning possible, not certain. Go for a walk sends it out for about four minutes, and a walk outranks whatever page you are on: the caption just reads "Out for a walk. Back in about N minutes." until you press Head home. Ask again too soon and you get "It has been out recently. Give it a little while and it will be keen again."

Treat runs on a cooldown too, and the refusal is the best line in the panel: "It has had one recently. Treats are worth something because they are not endless." A treat is not food. Nothing here is hungry. Tricks get one button each, wave and spin, with a bar showing how well it knows each.

12Play a game with it

Beside the walk and treat buttons sits a Play button. It opens a little modal, Play with Inky ("Something to do together. Do well and it will be chuffed with you."), holding three games, and in every one your actual creature is on the field, not watching from the side. Fetch: tap anywhere and it hops off to get what you threw and brings it back ("Throw it across the field. Inky hops after it and brings it back."). Tickle Tag: it scampers about and you catch it with a tap, at which it giggles and bolts off quicker ("It scampers about. Catch it with a tap and it giggles and bolts."). Copy Inky: it shows you a little dance of moves and you play them back in order, one longer each round ("It shows you a little dance. Play the moves back in order."). Finish a round and it says Inky enjoyed that. You are a little closer., with Play again or Done. A good round is a bonding moment, the same warm reward as a treat or a well-timed trick, scaled by how well you did.

13The Inkpark and Inkfolk

Open any community room and your creature wanders out to the Inkpark, the shared green attached to that room. Up to ten can be there at once. Alone, the panel reads Nobody else is here yet. It has the whole Inkpark to itself. With company: N other creatures here. Stand near one and yours may pick up a word.

That second line matters. One neighbour speaks every few seconds, and after repeated exposure, filtered through your creature's own attentiveness, a word may stick. It is the main way vocabulary grows past what it can learn alone. Contact tints its hue very slightly too.

Below sits the collapsible Inkfolk list of creatures it has met, each with Ask round and Hide. Empty, it reads Nobody yet. Open a community and it will find the creatures who are already there.

14Visits

Creatures can go round to each other's rooms. From Inkfolk, Ask round sends an invitation, and while you wait yours reads Waiting to hear back from {Name}. On the other side it shows up as {Name}'s Inky would like to come round. with Let it in and Not now. Accept and it becomes {Name}'s Inky is visiting. until somebody hits Say goodbye.

One visit at a time, either direction, so an invitation is a small social act rather than a broadcast. Treat Not now as the ordinary answer it is. People are busy, creatures are asleep, timing is timing. Nobody is told off for declining, no tally is kept, and you are welcome to ask again another day.

15Privacy, hiding and deleting

None of this exists until you ask for it. The whole feature is off by default and stores nothing until you opt in. Turning it on still keeps your creature private: being seen by anyone else takes a second, separate switch, Let my Inky be seen in communities. Plenty of people never touch it, and a companion only you ever see is a perfectly good companion.

In the Inkfolk list you can Hide an individual creature, which mutes it and blocks its visit invitations before they arrive. That is scoped to your companion alone, not a platform-level block on the person behind it.

You can also delete yours outright, which takes everything it met and everything it was muting with it. And remember what was never there: no access to your work, no names or avatars in the park, no free text anywhere.

16Badges, and what is not built

Ten badges track your companion's life, and they arrive on their own like every other badge on FoundryInk. Knocked lands the moment it hatches. First word, then Getting chatty at fifteen, then Fluent once it knows all twenty-eight (that one is legendary, and it takes a while). All grown up for reaching adult. It made a thing, and A body of work for ten finished. Dressed up, Knows a few people, and Picked it up somewhere for a word learned from another creature rather than from you.

A few things are deliberately missing, so you do not go hunting. There is no naming: yours is simply your Inky. There is no colour picker at hatching; the hue is derived for you. And there is no separate Inky page or house to visit. The room, the wardrobe and the shelf are all in the rail panel.

Questions people actually ask