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Pets

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Sources

Docs: Ponder Primer Web App: Open the Parable Pets control beside your profile in Ponder. Pets are animated visual companions for Ponder. They belong to you, can move around the working surface, and stay separate from the Problems and Workspaces you use. Pets are presentation only. Adopting, moving, hiding, or changing a Pet never changes Ponder’s instructions, access, response quality, available actions, or cost.

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Hatch a Pet

  1. Open the Pets control beside your profile.
  2. Open Potential Pets.
  3. Choose Hatch a Pet.
  4. Meet the randomly selected, newly named companion at the bottom-right of the Ponder surface.
Hatching spends one egg and never selects a Pet you have owned before, including a Pet remembered under Potential Pets. You can keep one Pet on screen at a time. Pocket that Pet before hatching or bringing out another. Development seed data supplies possible Pets, not adopted Pets. A new local account begins with an empty Pet collection and meets its first Pet through Hatch.

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Place a Pet

Drag a Pet by its grip to move it anywhere in the application viewport, including across navigation and to either screen edge. You can also:
  • use the arrow keys for precise movement;
  • hold Shift with an arrow key for a larger step; and
  • double-click the Pet or press Home to return it to the center.
Ponder remembers each Pet’s relative viewport position as the window changes size. Reduced-motion preferences keep the Pet still while preserving its current pose and placement.

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Pocket a Pet

Choose Pocket when you want a Pet off screen without giving it up. The Pet keeps its name and saved position under Pocketed Pets. Choose Bring Out when you want the companion back. Pocketing the on-screen Pet makes room to hatch or bring out another. Choose Abandon from your named Pets or Pocketed Pets when you want to give up a Pet. It moves to Potential Pets in a muted style and keeps its name and artwork as a remembered record. Hatching will not select that archetype again. Hover or focus its row and choose Pity to return the same Pet to Personal Pets. You can also drag an on-screen Pet over the quiet pocket target that rises from the bottom-center of the main Parable view. The target reads Plop here and strengthens when the Pet is inside it. Release there to pocket the Pet; release anywhere else to keep its new position.

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Potential Pets

The Potential Pets tab shows egg progress as current/possible. The possible count is the number of catalog Pets multiplied by the active Pet styles, excluding the automatic style. Everyone starts with one egg. Hatch a Pet spends one egg and selects a random unseen Parable Pet for you. The operation is idempotent, so retrying the same completed request cannot spend another egg or create a duplicate adoption. The menu header reads <First name>’s Parable Pets. Shared ReUI tabs sit across the top: Personal Pets, Pocketed Pets, and Potential Pets, always in that order. Personal Pets is selected when the menu opens. One group is visible at a time, below the tabs; selecting the same tab does not collapse it. Use the arrow keys, Home, and End to move between tabs. Empty Personal and Pocketed groups show a centered, uppercase empty-state title without an action. The menu occupies half the viewport height; long groups scroll within the space below the tabs. Tab icons and counts remain visible when switching groups. Eggs use the same sprite-width row pattern as Pets and read <count> Earned Eggs; hover or focus the row to show Hatch a Pet. Pet rows animate their companion on hover, and long lists fade and scale slightly at the scrolling edges. Searching hides the tabs and shows matching Pet rows across groups. Clearing search restores the selected tab. The appearance, sound, and Pets controls stay visible together at the right edge of the sidebar footer. They do not depend on hovering the sidebar. Clicking appearance switches directly between the visible light and dark modes, including when the current appearance follows the operating system. Its icon shows the current mode; the sound icon shows whether sound effects are on. Dragging a Pet reveals a high-contrast Pocket target at the bottom-center of the main content. The Pet uses its sad animation while it overlaps that target. Local development exposes an Unlimited Pets feature flag in the collapsible DEV panel. It is off by default and stored only in the current browser. When enabled, Hatch a Pet does not spend eggs or require an open on-screen slot, so you can meet every remaining unseen catalog Pet. The switch does not change Bring Out, and a production server ignores the development override even if a client sends it.

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Personas and Pets

A Workspace may associate a Persona with a kind of Pet. That association does not adopt the Pet for you or place it on screen. Your own Pet menu remains the source of truth for the companions you have adopted and chosen to display. The association is visual only. It does not change the Persona’s instructions, models, access, or available actions.

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Troubleshooting