pokegatchi
keyboard: A B C — hold B for status pages
keyboard: A B C — hold B for status pages
field guide
Everything below flows from one idea: how well you care for your pet decides how fast — and into what — it grows.
The fast loop. These drain in real time, even while the page is closed.
If health hits zero, your pet faints (easy tiers) or begins dying with a grace window (harder tiers). Pull the other meters up and health recovers.
The game keeps a rolling average of your care over roughly the last day and turns it into a multiplier of about 0.25× to 2× (range depends on difficulty). It scales everything: XP from every action, element points from every meal, and all the loot your pet earns while away.
A pampered pet grows up to 8× faster than a neglected one — there is no grinding around bad care. And because it's a day-long average, one missed check-in won't ruin you, and one great afternoon won't fix a bad week. Consistency wins.
Hatchling → Juvenile → Evolved → Apex. Levels come from XP (play > feed/discipline, all scaled by condition) and are permanent. But every stage door needs a level and a care record:
| evolves into | level | care average |
|---|---|---|
| Juvenile (stage 2) | 4 | 35 / 100 |
| Evolved (stage 3) | 12 | 45 / 100 |
| Apex (stage 4) | 30 | 55+ / 100 (harder tiers demand more) |
Hitting the level is not enough. A level-12 pet with a rough care history simply waits at the door — the moment your care average climbs over the bar, the evolution fires. And if your care average is 60+ at the moment of evolution, your pet takes the better-loved pampered variant of its form.
Ten elements. Every food feeds one of them — your diet is your destiny.
| food | element | trains |
|---|---|---|
| Ember Chili | Fire | Might |
| Fresh Fish | Water | Spirit |
| Cloud Candy | Wind | Agility |
| Static Berry | Lightning | Focus |
| Root Stew | Earth | Vitality |
| Frost Melon | Ice | Focus |
| Forest Berry | Nature | Vitality |
| Golden Bread | Holy | Spirit |
| Shadow Plum | Dark | Luck |
| Void Truffle | Death | Luck (stronger, less filling) |
Food isn't the only source: scenario choices grant element points, and so does the environment — a dark room feeds Dark, cold feeds Ice, heat feeds Fire, bright light feeds Holy (capped per day, so no freezer exploits). Elements come in opposed pairs — Fire↔Ice, Water↔Lightning, Earth↔Wind, Holy↔Death, Dark↔Nature — which matter in Esprit Trials combat.
A hybrid isn't unlocked — it's cooked.
At the moment your pet evolves, the game looks at its top two elements. If the runner-up has been fed well enough you get a hybrid — a two-element form like Fire + Water — instead of a pure line. Three conditions, all checked automatically:
Rendered live by the game's own sprite engine — hybrids are two-toned: body from the primary element, belly & accents from the secondary.
Worked example: make Ember Chili the main course and Fresh Fish the regular side — roughly two chili per fish, or closer. Keep care solid so the condition multiplier amplifies every meal, and your Evolved form comes out two-toned. Everywhere your pet is described — the device diary, the app's “dominant spirit” line — a hybrid reads as “Fire / Water”.
Missed it? The branch is re-chosen at every evolution: a pet that went pure at stage 3 can still hybridize at Apex — rebalance its diet before level 30. Ties always resolve the same way, so nothing is random.
All five tiers — Starter through “Are You Crazy?” — use the same rules above. What changes is how fast meters drain (0.5× to 3×), how forgiving death is, and how high the Apex care bar sits. The design promise holds on every tier: a morning / lunch / evening / bedtime check-in routine is always enough to keep your pet alive. On Starter you can miss most of them; on AYC you need all four, done well.