Small pets.
BIG WEIRD.

Tap an empty patch of habitat to offer three meat morsels if food slots are free. Your gremlin chooses when to approach and eat. Consumed food restores hunger and energy; a tap alone does not. Chewing and gulping start after an actual bite.

A counted player meal starts a 30-care-minute discovery interval. Other bites still feed the gremlin without counting as another discovery meal. Egg Care shows the wait. Ordinary daytime care is roughly a meal every four hours; watch each friend’s needs.

Put tools away and close menus. Hold your finger calmly near a resident for four real seconds, without dragging. Successful holds build trust, meet the holding care requirement and prompt a lean, wink or affection puff. A six-second repeat cooldown gives each moment space.

Trusting, nonhungry gremlins can approach a settled finger. Knot contracts its loop, Maw works its lips, Cap folds its sails, Orb waves and Twig bows. A quick tap opens a card; a moving finger performs room care.

Food is fullness; Rest is energy; Stress is unease; Trust is connection with you. Low stress is good. The compact card shows shy–bold, solo–social and cautious–curious tracks.

MORE → CARE adds boredom, healthy growth time and roommate bond progress. MORE → TRAITS adds family, stage, health, active–cozy, favorites and the observed routine. These are living readings, not editable sliders. Care and their own behavior change them.

Each gremlin remembers its own favorite play toy, curiosity piece and bed or nest in each habitat. Actual visits shape preferences; some friends explore for longer before choosing. Successful play and investigation ease boredom and curiosity, helping shape later decisions.

MORE → TRAITS shows favorites and the observed routine. Memories and exact sleep destinations survive restarts. Moving rooms keeps the memories for the old room; changing roommates does not hand those memories to someone else.

Moving a piece moves the remembered destination. Removing it lets the gremlin use an available alternative; reintroducing that kind restores its remembered preference. Repeated new experiences can change a favorite. Routines describe real behavior rather than a fixed schedule, and favorite visits do not count as meals or growth care.

Explore the Department of Personal Little Habits →.

Tap a resident, press MORE and tap its name for the on-screen naming keyboard. Personal names can have up to 15 characters. Family labels remain Knot, Maw, Cap, Orb and Twig. A new name does not change inherited identity.

Detail-card arrows browse current-room residents. The named destination button moves that gremlin and follows it to the room. Top habitat tabs only change the view; residents stay assigned where they were.

Floor litter, illness, a completely bare room and two or more very overgrown plant beds can stress a gremlin out. Leave some leafy shelter, tidy the floor and trim crowded greenery gently. One tall bed makes a good hiding spot.

Rest and shelter help stress fall. Treat illness and keep meals, rest and cleaning going. A calm four-second hold builds trust. Visit the Tiny Calm-Down Clinic → for a friendly fix for each worry.

A gremlin can get sick after six accumulated care hours of severe hunger, exhaustion or very dirty floors. Warnings appear first. Meeting urgent needs reduces that buildup; Vacation pauses care.

For exact readings, illness risks are Food at 20% or less, Rest below 15%, or floor mess above 85%. Illness comes from unresolved care needs; stress alone does not cause it, and roommates do not pass it to one another.

MORE → TREAT gives medication, a small energy boost and a one-care-hour recovery head start. Recovery needs two accumulated care hours with urgent needs met. An urgent need returning resets recovery progress, so keep food, rest and cleaning going.

Rest at the cushion restores energy. Night rest slows needs. The default bedtime is 10 p.m.–6 a.m.; Journal options let you change bedtime and rest duration. Repeated neglect can make a resident leave when the colony has several friends. Becoming an elder does not cause automatic death.

The last living gremlin across all habitats cannot depart. If that lone resident is very hungry and its room has no food, a tiny emergency scrap appears. It gives a little relief without earning player meals, growth care, trust or discovery credit.

At two or more living residents, feeding is manual—even in separate rooms. The last friend still needs meals, rest, cleaning and treatment. Vacation is the way to take a longer break.

Trinket inspection can lead to a lick. A play flourish can produce a spit. Roommate or pod contact can trigger a greeting. Offering a bite to an already-full gremlin can occasionally cause a delayed cartoony bleh after chewing.

Small mess and bounded cooldowns make mishaps part of care, rather than constant chaos. Eyes glance and blink; faces chew and smile; legs bend, sails flex, tassels spread and lobes bob through the real game renderer.

Choose one of five founder families and begin with a hatchling. Earn two distinct player meals at least 30 care minutes apart, a calm four-second hold, actual cleaning and good health, with care running. Safety scraps do not count.

EGG CARE shows real progress, the meal interval and unmet requirements. MORE STEPS reveals the rest. A discovery egg brings a different founder family.

The waiting egg wobbles. Tap it to inspect Egg Care, then press HATCH EGG to accept it. The shell cracks and the hatchling peeks out. You control when the newcomer arrives.

The egg’s saved identity and future appearance are fixed when it forms. Returning or switching rooms cannot reroll it. A colony supports up to five living residents and one waiting egg.

Partners must be healthy, fed adults in the same suitable room. Leave one sufficiently grown canopy bed, keep floor mess below 65% and wall fuzz at or below 15%. The sponge preserves leaves while cleaning; trimming all cover to nubs blocks breeding until regrowth.

The checklist also needs real nearby social contact and completed breeding rest. Nursery, Workshop and Spooky use the same rules. EGG CARE and MORE STEPS show every requirement.

Bond time builds when at least one roommate follows the other and the pair stays nearby. Thirty accumulated care minutes of eligible contact can yield an egg once the other requirements are met. Merely being on screen together does not count.

Interrupted contact slowly loses progress. CARE shows the bond. After a bred egg, a shared 24-care-hour breeding rest applies to the colony.

Body topology and appendage style inherit independently. Colors, eyes, markings and saved motion parameters help make descendants their own odd little creatures. Natural variations can appear too.

LINEAGE shows all five family ancestry percentages and parent or founder information. Grown hybrids and healthy elders can become parents: the weird family tree keeps branching.

A resident needs a counted player meal, then healthy fed time. Juvenile begins at six accumulated healthy care hours, adult at 24 hours, elder at 30 healthy care days. CARE shows progress and remaining healthy time.

Illness, hunger, warnings and pauses can delay growth. Vacation pauses it. These are earned care times, not timers that start when you switch the device on.

Journal → Options cycles tools. Close the Journal to use the tool. Hand handles ordinary gestures and can trim a deliberate sideways stroke beginning on canopy. Sponge cleans wall fuzz and helps litter without cutting. Scissors trim crossed fronds without cleaning.

Tap the active-tool banner to put it away before feeding, opening cards or holding calmly. Dragging a resident does not pick it up.

Nest tassels, workshop tendrils and crooked fungi grow. Cover calms gremlins; bare rooms can unsettle them, while two badly overgrown beds can be stressful. Trim what needs trimming and leave enough nursery cover.

Wall fuzz is spatial: your stroke cleans only the part it crosses. Floor litter is tracked separately. Growth, trimming and wall-cleaning progress survive returning to the colony.

BED is the resting cushion, where a chosen rest restores energy. TRINKET is a curiosity destination that can ease boredom. TOY is the breathing spore pod, another curiosity and play destination.

Tap the object or label for help. A toy poke squishes it and puffs spores, with a three-second cooldown. Those taps do not feed, build trust or force a movement goal. A gremlin in the same spot takes priority and opens its card.

Nursery has stitched fabric, hanging nests, a canopy and rug. Workshop has rails, copper shelves, gauges and moving machinery. Spooky has purple boards, moonlight, webs, pumpkins, candles and seasonal animation.

Each room has rest, curiosity and play landmarks. Friendships and breeding partners are room-local, so move residents together when you want them to bond.

Tap Spooky to enable and open the optional Halloween habitat. Repeated taps keep it open. Move residents there from their detail cards.

Close Annex works after all residents have moved out. Viewing another room does not empty the annex. The card’s named destination button performs the actual move.

Pocket Gremlins is available exclusively on dedicated ESP32 devices sold directly by us. The game lives on the device’s touchscreen; this website is an interactive introduction and care guide.

The official release is Halloween, October 31, 2026.

Pocket Gremlins uses a small neural AI on the ESP32 to evaluate a snapshot of each resident’s needs, personality and surroundings. It chooses an activity and its urgency: seek food, rest, explore, play, investigate or visit a roommate.

Experiences shape remembered destinations, preferences and needs, which influence later AI decisions. Everyday creature life works offline, with movement and animations continuing between decisions.

See the Little Thinking Department → for a visual explanation of what the AI notices, chooses and does.

Journal contains colony history, Egg Care and options for tools, bedtime and rest duration. Device options expose brightness and battery information.

Use the touchscreen controls and on-screen naming keyboard. Need bars and personality tracks are readouts, not controls that edit the gremlin.

Vacation explicitly pauses decline, growth, breeding and scenery. Night rest slows needs. Switching off the display by itself does not mean Vacation, so use the Vacation control for a longer break.

Residents, personal names, genomes, room assignments, care, growth, habitat upkeep and personal favorites are saved. Your colony is your colony.

An outside tap closes a resident card and is consumed; it won’t also feed. Tap again for another action. Menus and naming keep input within their own controls.

A quick tap inspects; a still hold bonds; a drag cleans or uses the selected tool. Repeated empty-space taps offer food. Double and triple taps do not trigger a secret creature command.