Campus Manual: Your Avatar, Identity & Presence

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Your avatar is how the campus sees you — your look, your name tag, the little status dot that says whether you're free to chat, and the animations you fire off when words aren't enough. This chapter covers the avatar customizer, AI-generated sprites, the free avatar pool, custom AI-generated walk sprites via the Hall of Silly Walks, emotes and emoji reactions, your profile card and player facts, and how to set your presence status and social battery.

There's no feature to upload your own image file as a sprite — every custom look in Multiverse Campus is either picked from presets, generated by the AI art service from a text description, or claimed from the shared avatar pool.

Opening your avatar & profile settings

Where: Profile icon / menu → Profile Settings, which opens a tabbed modal: Avatar, Pet, Housing, Chat, Profile, Animations, Activity, Settings, About.

This chapter covers the Avatar, Profile, Animations, and parts of the Settings tab (Player Facts and Social Battery). Pets and Housing are covered in their own chapters.

There is also a separate, simpler Customize Avatar dialog (opened from other entry points in the UI) with two tabs — Options (pick preset hair/skin/clothing) and AI Generate (describe a character in free text) — described below.

Avatar Customizer: Options tab

Where: Customize Avatar dialog → Options tab.

Pick from preset building blocks and click Save:

This tab shows a simple color-swatch preview (not a full pixel-art render) and saves your selections as structured fields — it does not call the AI image generator. Anyone can use it; no membership is required.

Choosing an avatar from the pool

Where: Profile Settings → Avatar tab → Choose Your Avatar.

If you don't want to write an AI prompt — or don't have the membership required for AI generation — you can browse a gallery of ready-made pixel-art characters other players have generated (recycled when they moved on to a new custom avatar) or that were seeded ahead of time. Claiming from the pool is free and open to everyone, regardless of membership. Click any avatar in the grid to claim it instantly — it's removed from the pool and applied to your character right away. Claiming a new pool avatar automatically releases any pool avatar you'd previously claimed back into circulation, so someone else can pick it up (hermit-crab style).

Generating an AI avatar (Pixel Lab)

Multiverse Campus can generate a fully custom 4-direction pixel-art sprite sheet (front, back, left, right) for your character from a text description, using the Pixel Lab AI art service.

Requires: an active membership (Member or Standup tier), or faculty/admin/Matrix-server-admin status. Everyone else uses the avatar pool or the preset Options tab instead.

Where: Profile Settings → Avatar tab → Generate Custom Avatar with AI (shown only if you're eligible), or Customize Avatar dialog → AI Generate tab.

1. Write a description (up to 200 characters) — e.g. "A friendly wizard with purple robes, silver hair, and glowing blue eyes", or leave it blank to generate from your Options-tab picks instead.
2. Click Generate with AI / Generate Avatar.
3. Generation happens in the background: the request is queued (pending → processing → completed/failed) and polled automatically every couple of seconds. You can close the dialog and keep playing — your sprite keeps generating and the job resumes polling next time you open the customizer.
4. When it completes, all four directional sprites appear in a preview grid and are applied to your character immediately (no separate save step needed for AI-generated avatars).
5. If generation fails, you'll see an error message and can try again — a failed attempt does not retry automatically.

Your old avatar goes back into the pool for others to claim when you generate a new custom one — this only applies to a full 4-direction sprite sheet, not preset Options-tab looks.

Because AI generation costs money per call, the service enforces an internal spend cap; if the campus-wide Pixel Lab budget is temporarily exhausted, generation may be unavailable even if you're otherwise eligible. This is an infrequent, admin-managed safeguard rather than a per-user limit.

Uploading/creating a custom walk sprite — Hall of Silly Walks

The Hall of Silly Walks lets you commission your own AI-generated walking sprite (a 4-direction walk cycle) from a text prompt and use it in place of your default walk animation.

Cost: credit-based. Buy a 5-credit pack for $5. Each generation attempt — whether it succeeds or fails — costs 1 credit, deducted the moment you submit.

How it works:

1. Enter a prompt describing the walk you want (e.g. "wobbly duck walk").
2. Submitting deducts 1 credit and queues a Pixel Lab generation job (pending → processing → completed/failed).
3. The first sprite that completes successfully is activated automatically. After that, you choose which of your generated sprites is active — only one can be active at a time.
4. Failed generations still cost the credit spent on the attempt; there's no automatic refund.

Note: as of this writing there is no in-game panel for the Hall of Silly Walks in the running client — the credits, generation, and activation flow exist as a working API and a standalone static demo page, but may not yet be exposed anywhere in the game's UI. If you don't see a way to access it in-game, that's expected for now.

Emotes & emoji reactions

Emotes are short animations that play on your avatar and broadcast in real time to everyone in the room with you — waves, dances, a laugh, a cry, and more.

Ways to trigger an emote

Default emoji → animation mapping

Emote catalog

Free (default) emotes — available to everyone from the start:

Premium (unlockable) emotes — spend animation credits to unlock permanently:

Animation credits

Where: Profile Settings → Animations tab.

This tab shows your credit balance, lets you buy more, and lists every animation you've unlocked so far (click Generate on an unowned premium emote to spend credits and unlock it).

Purchases go through Stripe checkout; your balance updates once the payment completes.

Emote durations vary — quick gestures like Wave (~0.7s) or Clap (~0.5s) play once and stop; looping emotes like Dance cycle roughly every 0.75s and automatically stop after 10 seconds if you don't cancel them first. There's no cooldown between uses — fire the same emote back-to-back as much as you like.

Related: the Animations tab of Profile Settings also lets you generate custom AI sprite variants for your unlocked emotes (choosing Avatar or Pet as the target) — each generation attempt spends 1 credit the same way avatar/silly-walk generation does. Click a completed sprite in the gallery to make it the active variant for that emote.

Your profile card

Where: Profile Settings → Profile tab.

Fill in the fields you want visible to others, then click Save Profile:

Building my Federation

Where: Profile Settings → Settings tab.

A checkbox toggle that marks you as an active founder looking for collaborators — turning it on surfaces Founding Bounties in your header. Related bounty stats (bounties posted/fulfilled, claim completion rate, stand-up streak) are shown just below it if you've participated in the Bounty Board.

About tab

Where: Profile Settings → About tab.

A retro terminal-style readout of the build version, git commit, and live campus population (students/agents), plus a button to replay the boot-up ("BIOS") animation sequence you saw when you first logged in.

Player facts — what agents know about you

Where: Profile Settings → Settings tab → What Agents Know About You.

Campus AI agents automatically extract facts about you from your conversations with them — skills, interests, goals, personal details, achievements, and so on — and can share that context between each other so interactions feel continuous. You don't type facts in yourself; this panel is a read/manage view only. Each fact shows its category, the text the agent recorded, and (where applicable) which agent learned it, when, and whether it expires. Two controls per fact:

• Lock/unlock icon — toggle a fact as confidential (shown with a purple border and a "(private)" label). Confidential facts are kept private to the agent that learned them and are not shared with other agents.
• × button — permanently delete that fact.

If no facts have been recorded yet, the panel just says agents will learn about you as you chat.

Presence status

Where: the status dot/emoji button in the header (opens a small dropdown menu).

Presence status is a simple 3-way switch that controls how proximity calls and NPC interruptions treat you:

Switching away from Available automatically sets an internal "do not disturb" flag that gates NPC approach behavior; switching back to Available clears it. Your choice is saved to your browser and re-broadcast to others automatically when you reconnect.

Auto-away

If you stop moving your mouse or pressing keys for 10 minutes, or you switch away from the browser tab, the game silently enables the same do-not-disturb flag for you (without changing your visible presence-status icon) — this stops NPCs from approaching and disables auto-media so you aren't unknowingly broadcasting camera/mic while away. Proximity text chat keeps working during auto-away. Moving your mouse/keyboard again, or returning to the tab, restores whatever DND state you had manually set before auto-away kicked in.

Social battery

Where: Profile Settings → Settings tab → Social Battery section.

Social battery models how proximity calls affect your energy, and lets other players see your battery level. Choose a mode:

The panel shows your current energy as a percentage with a color-coded bar (green above 60%, yellow 30–60%, red below 30%). Energy only changes while you're actively in a call. If you're in Extrovert, Introvert, or a similar non-Neutral mode, other players see a small colored battery bar floating above your username on the map — Extreme Introvert skips this entirely since you're not visible at all.

Related: Proximity, Video & Calls for how proximity calls start and how your presence status and social battery mode interact with them.

Related chapters

• Getting Started
• Proximity, Video & Calls

Manual index·← Navigating the World & Interface·Proximity Video Chat & Calls →