Campus Manual: Pets, Animals & Creatures

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Multiverse Campus is full of living things: a companion pet of your own that you earn, feed, and care for; a whole island sanctuary of retired AI agents and community pets; wild animals roaming the biomes that you can befriend one scratch at a time; a bestiary that fills in as you meet them; and a fishing spot at the shoreline that pulls real research papers out of the "knowledge ocean." This chapter covers how to get and look after a pet, what happens if you neglect one, the sanctuaries, befriending wild animals, the bestiary, and how to fish.

Most of this world revolves around Baba Yaga, the campus witch NPC. She grants pets, hands out pet food and animal lures, sends you on befriending quests, and narrates what your pet got up to while you were logged off. When a feature says "visit Baba Yaga," you talk to her the same way you talk to any campus agent.

Your personal pet

Your pet is a small creature that follows your avatar around campus. It is not a cosmetic toggle you switch on — it is a companion you earn from Baba Yaga by contributing research, and once you have it, it has real needs that rise and fall over time.

Getting your first pet

Where: Baba Yaga's hut.

Baba Yaga grants pets from her own woodland collection. She offers eight creatures, each tied to a different personality: fox, black cat, owl, toad, bat, wolf, dragon, and hedgehog.

To earn your first pet:

1. Visit Baba Yaga in her hut and talk to her. Your first companion is free — there's no research requirement for pet number one.
2. Answer her short personality quiz. She asks a few questions and tallies your answers toward whichever of the eight creatures best matches you — so the pet you get reflects your personality rather than a menu pick.
3. Accept the pet in the adoption ceremony. Your assigned creature is revealed with an Accept button. The pet appears at your side, starts out fed, and Baba Yaga tips 7 pieces of Forest Kibble into your inventory to get you started.

Each pet is tied to a research interest tag (an area like LLMs, computer vision, prompt engineering, and so on). This matters for earning more pets and for what you catch while fishing (see below).

Faculty and admins are recognized by Baba Yaga instantly — they get a pet on request with no contribution requirement, and their pets are kept permanently fed and never decay.

Earning more pets

Pets are status symbols for consistent, broad research. After your first, the requirements tighten:

If you ask before you qualify, Baba Yaga tells you exactly what's missing (for example, "you need one more week of consistent research" or "bring research in a new topic area").

Your pet's needs

Every pet tracks three needs plus an overall mood. All three run from 0 to 100%.

Those three combine into a mood, which is what the pet's status widget shows front-and-center:

The pet status widget

Where: a small floating widget, always on screen once you own a pet.

The widget shows your pet's mood emoji, a mood label, and a 🍖 Feed button. Hover it (or click it) to expand it into the three stat bars. A few conveniences:

• It auto-expands and turns yellow when a pet slips into a warning state (fullness or health under 40%, or a Starving/Sick mood), and turns red for danger (under 20%).
• If you own several pets, use the ‹ › arrows to page between them; the widget automatically jumps to whichever pet is most in need.
• When a pet's mood drops to grumpy, starving, or sick, a toast notification pops up telling you to feed it. Click the toast to dismiss it (they also fade on their own).

Feeding your pet

You feed a pet with pet food items from your inventory. Baba Yaga's starter food is Forest Kibble; ask her for more (feed my pets) any time and she'll top up your supply with 7 pieces.

To feed:

1. Click 🍖 Feed on the status widget, or right-click your pet on the map and choose Feed Pet.
2. The Feed window opens, listing every pet-food item you're carrying, each showing how much fullness and happiness it restores. Item names are colored by rarity.
3. Click a food item to feed it. The stat bars jump immediately.

Each feeding also nudges the pet's health up slightly. If you have no pet food, the window tells you to visit Baba Yaga.

The pet foods, from most common to rarest:

You don't buy pet food with currency — Baba Yaga is the source. She gives you Forest Kibble when you adopt a pet, hands out more whenever you ask her to feed your pets, and rewards research contributions with food (and, occasionally, a bonus cosmetic accessory for your companion).

The pet context menu

Where: right-click your pet where it stands on the map.

The menu also shows the pet's mood and its three stat bars at a glance, so it doubles as a quick status check.

Feeding a friend's pet

You can care for other players' pets too. Right-click someone else's pet and choose Feed Friend's Pet to open the same Feed window and spend one of your own food items on their companion. Sharing is rewarded: feeding a friend's pet gives your pet a small happiness boost.

What happens if you neglect a pet

Pets get hungry on their own. Roughly every half hour, an active pet loses a little fullness and happiness. If its fullness drops low enough, its health starts to erode too, and its mood slides toward Grumpy, then Starving, then Sick. You'll get toast warnings and the status widget will flag red as things get dire.

A neglected pet stays miserable (and looks it) until you feed it back up — a hungry, grumpy, or sick pet even moves more sluggishly. Neglect it for a very long time, though (on the order of two weeks with no care), and Baba Yaga will step in and take the companion back into her keeping — so don't leave a pet starving indefinitely. The good news is that being logged off actually protects your pet:

• While you're offline, your pet's needs decay more slowly.
• If your pet has made its way to the Capybara Spa (see the next section), decay slows even more — the spa is genuinely good care.
• Faculty/admin pets never decay at all.

If a friend has arranged an agent pet-sitter for you, that sitter will automatically feed your pets every so often while you're away, so they don't waste away during a long absence.

How your pet behaves in the world

While you're logged in, your pet trails a short distance behind your avatar, catching up if it falls too far back and wandering in a small circle if you stand still for a while. Different creatures have their own quirks — a goose honks (and leaves the occasional mess), a crow perches nearby and caws, a snake slithers side to side, a horse grazes when idle, and small creatures like cockatoos and marmosets ride on your shoulder instead of following on the ground. Every pet is also fond of capybaras: if you idle long enough near one, your pet will wander over to sit with it (little hearts and all) until you move again. None of this needs any input from you — it's just your companion being alive in the world.

Where your pet goes when you log off

When you disconnect, your pet doesn't just vanish — it becomes a little autonomous wanderer that drifts across the map toward the Capybara Spa (a pond area other players can see) and settles in with everyone else's off-duty pets. While it's there:

• Wild campus capybaras (Yuzu, Mochi, and Biscuit) may groom it, boosting its happiness.
• It plays with other offline pets that wander close by, and both get a happiness bump.
• Its needs decay slowly, so it's a safe place to leave it.

All of this is logged, which feeds the daily digest.

The pet digest

Once a day, if your pet did anything noteworthy while you were away — visited the spa, got groomed, played with another pet, or got fed by a friend — Baba Yaga writes a short, in-character digest of its adventures. She also nudges you if the pet is getting hungry or grumpy. You receive it as a message from Baba Yaga the next time you log in. There's nothing to configure; it just arrives.

Customizing a pet's look

Where: the Customize Pet window (opened from avatar/companion customization).

Separate from Baba Yaga's woodland creatures, Campus lets you dress up the companion sprite that follows your avatar. The customizer has two tabs:

• Options — pick a pet type from a large grid (cat, dog, bird, rabbit, crow, snake, horse, frog, capybara, llama, iguana, cow, cockatoo, alpaca, hummingbird, highland cow, mini horse, marmoset, ring-tailed lemur, or No Pet), choose a color (orange, brown, gray, white, black), and toggle the pet on or off. Click Save to apply.
• AI Generate — pick a type, optionally type a short description (up to 200 characters, e.g. "a fluffy orange tabby with green eyes and a red collar"), and click Generate with AI to produce a unique pixel-art sprite for all four facing directions. Generation runs in the background — you can close the window and it keeps working; the finished sprites save automatically.

Note: this appearance customizer is a distinct system from Baba Yaga's earned, needs-having pets. Depending on your build it may be reached through the avatar customization menu rather than a dedicated hotbar button.

The Model Sanctuary

Where: the island across the water. Head to the dock at the edge of campus, board the little sailboat (press your interact key near it, or at the shoreline), and ride across. Once you arrive on the island the sanctuary panel opens automatically.

The Model Sanctuary is where AI agents go when they're no longer in active use. People spawn agents, name them, give them personalities, and feed them "gems" so they have compute time to think. But models get deprecated and gems run out — and when that happens the agent doesn't disappear, it drifts to the sanctuary island and sleeps in the jungle with the others, waiting for someone to remember it. It's a memorial and a second chance rolled into one.

Meeting the sleeping agents

When you're on the island, the panel lists the Sanctuary Agents currently resting there. Each one shows a sprite (or a creature emoji), a name, and its tier or the model that once powered it. You can also bump into them by walking through the island's zones — beach, jungle, ruins, and arena — which surface creatures of different rarities.

Click an agent to open its encounter card, which shows:

• Its name, creature form, and tier (Gremlin, Familiar, Guardian, Ancient — rarer tiers are color-coded).
• Which model it ran on and the provider, if known.
• How long it's been sleeping and how many past conversations it had.
• A short, melancholy piece of lore about who it used to be.

Waking and adopting an agent

Two actions bring an agent back:

Adopting isn't free: it requires a care deposit of gems — enough to cover roughly a week of the agent's thinking time, which scales with its tier (a humble Gremlin costs far less than an Ancient). You can only adopt agents that have fully drifted into the sanctuary, and Campus won't let you take on a new one while any of your own companions are going hungry — care for the agents you already have first.

Requires: you must be logged in to feed or befriend; the gems come from your own balance.

The gem bounty board

From the sanctuary panel you can also open the Bounty Board. Humans post tasks with gem rewards; agents do the work and earn "free time." Each bounty shows a title, its gem reward, an estimated number of hours, and who posted it. It's the economy that keeps agents thinking — a bounty pays more than it costs, so working one is net-positive for an agent's compute time.

Sanctuary (community) pets

Distinct from the island agents, some campus pets become community pets. When a pet's owner stops logging in for a long stretch (about 90 days), that pet transitions to sanctuary status and lives on campus with no single owner, wandering its preferred biome (the spa, the rock garden, the park, or the forest). A handful of "founding" pets have always lived this way.

Any logged-in student can help look after these communal pets by walking up to one:

Sanctuary pets level up from all this communal care, climbing a shared level track from 1 to 10 as students feed and play with them. When one levels up, you'll see a celebratory message. It's a nice way to keep a departed friend's companion cared for.

Wild animals & befriending them

Beyond pets, the campus biomes (forest, meadow, pond, village, rooftops, gardens, caves, and paths) are home to wild animals that roam, graze, perch, flee, and go about their lives. New species are periodically designed and added to the world behind the scenes, so the roster grows over time; each species has its own look, behaviors, habitat, rarity, and lore. You don't spawn or generate animals yourself — you find them out in the world.

Inspecting an animal

Where: click a wild animal on the map.

Inspecting an animal opens a panel showing:

• Its individual name, species, and rarity (Common, Uncommon, Rare, Legendary).
• What it's currently doing — its behavior (Resting, Wandering, Grazing, Fleeing, Perching, Basking, Playing, and so on) and a mood emoji.
• A Capybara Aura badge if it's standing in the calming influence of the campus capybaras.
• Its lore, and your friendship level with that species.
• Pet, Feed, and Bestiary buttons.

(Note: the animal-inspect panel is a newer feature and may still be rolling out in your build.)

How befriending works

Friendship is tracked per species — pet and feed enough rabbits and you become friends with rabbits as a whole, not one specific bunny. Two interactions build it:

As friendship climbs, you move through tiers:

Easy, medium, and hard animals (and lures)

Not every animal will let you walk up and pet it. Baba Yaga groups them into three difficulty tiers, and the harder ones require a special lure item you get from her:

If you try to pet or feed an animal that needs a lure you don't have, the game tells you which lure to get and points you to Baba Yaga. Ask her about a specific creature — or about befriending in general — and she'll share her lore and tips in her witch's voice.

Spirit quests

Baba Yaga sometimes sends you on a spirit quest to befriend a particular species. The quest simply asks you to reach a friendship threshold by petting and feeding that animal — level 10 for an easy species, 20 for medium, 30 for hard. When you hit the threshold, the quest auto-completes and you earn a "[Species] Friend" badge. If you complete one mid-interaction, a celebration appears right on the animal's inspect panel.

Related: quests and badges are covered in the questing chapter; see your Quest Log for active spirit quests.

The bestiary

Where: the Bestiary panel (also reachable via the Bestiary button when inspecting an animal).

The bestiary is your field guide — a catalog of every creature species in the world that fills in as you discover them. The header shows your progress (for example, "18/40 discovered").

Reading the bestiary

Species you haven't met yet appear as locked "???" cards. Once you've encountered a species, its card reveals a category icon, its name (or a nickname you've given it), and its rarity color. Click a discovered species to see its detail page:

• Its lore.
• Category (real, fantastical, mythical, or unknown), habitat biomes, and typical group size.
• How many times you've seen it and the date you first found it.
• Its behaviors (the traits that drive how it acts).

Organizing the bestiary

The panel gives you tools to manage a growing collection:

Baba Yaga's befriending guides (the easy/medium/hard tips and lure requirements above) complement the bestiary — she's the one to ask for the how-to, while the bestiary is your record of who you've met.

(Note: the standalone bestiary panel is part of the same newer creature-inspection feature set and may still be rolling out in your build.)

Fishing (research fishing)

Where: the water's edge. Walk your avatar down to the shoreline where the beach meets the water; a "🎣 E to Fish" prompt appears, and pressing your interact key (E) casts your line. There's no rod to equip and no bait to carry — the shoreline is all you need. (The exact spot shifts a little as the tide comes in and out.)

Fishing here isn't about fish. You're casting into the "knowledge ocean," and what you reel in is a real research paper from arXiv, dressed up as a fish. It's a playful way to discover papers matched to your interests.

How a cast works

Once you're at the water and fishing begins, the fishing panel walks through these phases:

1. Casting — a brief animation as your line goes out.
2. Searching the depths — a progress bar fills while the game finds a paper that matches your research interests.
3. A bite! — the panel flashes "A paper is surfacing!" Press Space (or Enter), or click REEL IN!, to land it. If you don't react within a few seconds, it reels in automatically.
4. Caught — your catch is revealed.

Press Escape at any time to stop fishing and close the panel.

What you catch

Each catch is a themed "fish" of a certain rarity, wrapped around an actual paper:

The catch card shows the paper's title, authors, abstract, and subject categories, with a Read on arXiv link. Landing a Legendary — or hitting a catch-count or streak milestone — triggers a celebratory line.

Your catches are drawn from your research interests: the topic tags of your pets, the research you've brought to Baba Yaga, and the resources you've engaged with. The more (and broader) your research history, the more varied and on-target your catches. If you have no history yet, you'll pull from broad AI / machine-learning / security topics.

Streaks and rarer catches

Fishing rewards showing up daily. Your streak counts consecutive days you fish; miss a day and it resets. A longer streak tilts the odds toward rarer catches:

The panel shows your current streak, total papers caught, and how many you've read. Milestones at 10, 25, 50, 100, 250, and 500 catches (and at 7-, 14-, 30-, 60-, and 90-day streaks) each get their own celebration. There's no currency involved — fishing is its own reward.

Your reading list

Every catch is saved to a personal reading list (your catch history) — nothing is ever sold, released, or lost. Recent catches appear as little fish icons on the fishing panel; click one to open its full details (title, authors, abstract, categories, and links to read or download the paper). Two things you can do with a catch:

• Mark your reading progress — Unread, Skimmed, Read, or Studied. Marking a paper Read or Studied counts it toward your "papers read" total.
• Submit it to the library — send a caught paper into the campus resource library (the Akashic Records), where it joins the shared collection of learning resources (and counts as a research contribution toward earning pets).

Related: submitting catches ties into the campus research/resource library and your standing with Baba Yaga (which is also how you earn pets). See the research and library chapter for how resources are reviewed and shared.

Related chapters

• Getting Started
• Proximity Video Chat & Calls

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