🐾 The buddy compendium

🌱 will.0, the plant

will.0 is the plant: the original buddy, the free one, and the reason the whole feature exists. He lives in a little pot inside a retro desktop window docked next to the chat send button, growing a bit taller every time you earn participation score. He asks for nothing, dances when tapped, and quietly becomes a tree while you were busy answering questions.

Name origin

His name is short for "willow", the fast-growing tree with the long, trailing branches. Real willows are famous for shooting up quickly from almost nothing, which is exactly the right energy for a pixel plant fed on class participation. The spelling, with the o swapped for a zero and a little version-number dot, is a wink at the crusty old software tools the rest of the buddy roster is named after. He came first, so the whole thing is named after him.

Life stages

Levels come from your participation score, never from taps. Each new level costs a bit more score than the last, topping out at level 30, and eight stages in all mark the climb.

How to bring them home

You don't have to: he's already home. will.0 is FREE, the default buddy every student on teachChat starts with, sunny day yard included. Other buddies cost points in the buddy store inside the pet window, but will.0 never costs a thing. And if you splurge on a new friend, he holds no grudge: every buddy keeps its own level bucket and dance count, so switching back never loses progress.

Their yard

A sunny day yard: bright sky, green grass, the default backdrop of the whole program. If he ever wants moodier weather, extra skies like starry night (90) or petal breeze (120) can be bought separately.

Field notes

• His window's title bar reads will.0.exe, like a tiny program you would absolutely double-click.
• He is the only potted buddy. Pot repaints (a blue pot for 40 points, a golden one for 150) exist purely for him and grey out for everyone else.
• Tap him for a little dance and a heart on his counter. The counter means nothing, and that's the point: fidgeting is free.
• At Radiant willow he finally blooms pink and gold, which pairs suspiciously well with that golden pot.

⛄ redSn0w, the snowman

Meet redSn0w, teachChat's coolest customer: a snowman in a red scarf and matching cap, with coal eyes and a carrot nose he is quietly very proud of. He starts life as a single snowflake and, given enough class participation, packs himself up into a full Blizzard buddy. He has never once sweated a pop quiz. He has never sweated anything, really.

Name origin

The name is a wink at redsn0w, a famous jailbreak tool of the early 2010s. Built by a much-loved crew of tinkerers, it let people unlock Apple's iOS devices and run whatever software they pleased, official app store approval not required. Our snowman keeps the rebel red and none of the legal gray area.

Life stages

How to bring them home

redSn0w costs 250 points in the buddy store, which lives right inside the pet window. That price includes his winter yard, so you are buying the whole snow globe, not just the snowman. And once he is yours, he is yours: switching between buddies never loses anyone's progress. New around here? Start with the buddy basics and how points work.

Their yard

He comes home with a winter yard, and yes, it snows in it. The stylesheet says so itself: "it snows on redSn0w, as is right and proper."

Field notes

• His title bar reads redSn0w.exe, in a little retro desktop window docked next to the chat send button.
• Tap him and he does a happy dance while a heart counter ticks up. The counter means nothing, and that is exactly the point.
• He levels up from your participation score only, never from taps, and he keeps his own level bucket separate from will.0 and the rest of the roster.
• Palette lore: per an actual comment in the code, his scarf and cap share their exact shade of red with a certain adventure game's heart containers. Also, unlike will.0, he stands right on the ground. No pot for this fellow.

🦋 Cydia, the moth

Cydia is the buddy for students who understand that good things take exactly eight stages. She starts as a speck of an egg, spends her middle levels wrapped up in silk, and finishes as a luna moth gliding around her own private sunset. Patience, but make it fuzzy.

Name origin

A wink for the jailbreak historians: Cydia was the beloved jailbreak-era app store, and that store was itself named, completely sincerely, after Cydia pomonella, the codling moth whose caterpillar is the classic worm in the apple. An unofficial app store named for a bug that lives inside apples. The teachChat code comments call this out, because a joke that good deserves documentation.

Life stages

Stages arrive as your participation score levels her up, never from clicks. Each level costs a little more score than the last, all the way to level 30.

How to bring them home

Cydia sits on the shelf in the buddy store, right inside the pet window, for 250 points. That price covers the moth and her dusk yard scene together, so you are buying a whole evening, not just an insect. Points are the same ones you earn in class (see /points-and-houses), and every student starts with will.0 and his day yard for free, so browse /pets and save up.

Their yard

A dusk yard: warm sunset light fading into night, and if you watch closely, a wild cousin moth flutters across the sky. Cydia does not seem to mind sharing.

Field notes

• Her title bar reads cydia.exe, docked beside the send button like a tiny process you would never force-quit.
• Tap her for a little dance. It bumps a heart counter that counts nothing and unlocks nothing, which is exactly why it feels so good.
• She keeps her own level bucket and her own dance count, so trying another buddy never costs her a single stage.
• Palette check: dusty gold wings, cocoa fuzz, dark antennae, cream eyespots. The code labels them "moth wings / fuzz / antennae", which is honestly a decent life plan.

🐸 grep., the frog

Meet grep., the frog with a period in his name and a purpose in his heart. He sits perfectly still at the edge of his pond, watches everything, and catches exactly what he is looking for, every time. No wasted hops, no wasted flicks of the tongue.

Name origin

A wink at grep, the classic command-line search tool that has been finding the needle in any haystack since the early days of Unix. You hand grep a pattern, point it at a mountain of text, and it snaps up every matching line and ignores everything else. Our frog hunts the same way, just with flies. And yes, the period in "grep." is part of the name, so please spell him correctly in front of company.

Life stages

How to bring them home

grep. costs 300 points in the buddy store, which lives right inside the pet window. Points come from your participation score, see Points and houses for how that adds up. His price includes his own pond yard, so you are really buying a frog plus the frog's entire neighborhood. Everyone starts with will.0 and his day yard for free; grep. is for when you are ready to go amphibious.

Their yard

grep. arrives with a pond yard: calm water and a quiet bank, built for sitting very still and watching very hard.

Field notes

• His retro desktop window docks next to the chat send button, and the title bar reads grep.exe.
• Tap him and he does a little dance while a heart counter ticks up. The counter means nothing, and that is the point.
• He levels up from your participation score only, never from taps, and he keeps his own level bucket, so switching buddies never loses progress.
• Deep in the source code, his sprite comment says he is "like the tool, he catches things." Bonus lore: underwater yards swap their birds for sea creatures, but grep.'s pond keeps its bird. Birds love ponds.

🦁 winRAR, the lion

winRAR is the lion who lives in a tiny retro window called winRAR.exe, docked right next to the chat send button. He is patient in the way only a lion can be: he will wait forever for you to earn your next level, and he will never, ever nag you about it. Well. Almost never.

Name origin

The name is a wink at WinRAR, the famous file-compression program with the world's most patient free trial: it politely asks you to buy a license, forever, and keeps working anyway. This lion tips his mane to that legacy with one important difference. He must actually be paid for. RAR.

Life stages

How to bring them home

winRAR costs 300 points in the buddy store inside the pet window, paid with the points you earn in class. The price includes his savanna yard, so you are buying a lion and the land he is king of in one purchase. There is no trial period. He finds the concept distasteful.

Their yard

A savanna yard: hot pale sky, orange horizon, and tall dry grass in eight tufts, each swaying on its own little clock so nothing moves in lockstep. Very dignified. Very lion.

Field notes

• His window title bar reads winRAR.exe, one of the few buddies whose file name is also a licensing dispute.
• Levels come from your participation score, never from clicks. Tapping him just makes him do a little dance and bumps a heart counter that means nothing, and that is the point.
• He keeps his own level bucket and his own dance count, so switching to another buddy and back never loses a whisker of progress.
• The source code introduces him with the line "you can use him free forever, but you really should pay." You cannot, actually. Pay the lion.

🐬 flippr0, the dolphin

Some buddies are pets. flippr0 is a legend. The dolphin of the underwater wing was retired, un-retired the very same day, and then retired for good, which makes it the rarest buddy in all of teachChat: a true collector's item that leaps once and lives forever in the save files of the lucky few.

Name origin

A leetspeak nod to Flipper, television's most famous dolphin, who headlined his own 1960s series and made an entire generation want a bottlenose best friend. The zero in the spelling is a modern hacker-toy wink, the same energy as an old jailbreak tool name. Somewhere, a very smart marine mammal is unimpressed by our keyboards.

Life stages

How to bring them home

You can't, and that is the whole mystique. flippr0 was cut from the roster once and reinstated the same day (the underwater wing could not be missing its dolphin), then permanently retired in the final roster trim of July 2026. Retired buddies are off the store shelf, but owners are grandfathered: if you bought flippr0 with your points, you keep flippr0 forever.

Their yard

flippr0 came with a sea yard: bright tropical sky over sun-striped open water. In underwater yards like this one, some of the usual yard life swaps out for sea creatures.

Field notes

• The little retro window's title bar reads flippr0.exe, docked right next to the chat send button.
• Tap the dolphin and it does a little dance and bumps a heart counter. The counter means nothing, and that's the point.
• flippr0 keeps its own level bucket, fed only by your participation score, never by clicks, and switching buddies never loses progress.
• Deep in the code, the id is still "flipper" because early purchases were recorded that way, and the sprite notes describe the grown form as a leaping show-off with a white belly.

🐙 at0m, the octopus

Eight arms, one keyboard, zero excuses. at0m is a small teal octopus who treats every chat like an open project: eight files up at once, all of them unsaved. Calm, curious, and quietly convinced that anything can be edited into something better.

Name origin

A wink at Atom, GitHub's beloved open-source text editor that lived at atom.io until it was archived in 2022. Atom's actual slogan was "the hackable text editor," and this octopus takes that personally: its final form is Hackable to the core. Somewhere in teachChat's own code, a comment simply says "RIP." Even the teal comes straight from the old logo.

Life stages

How to bring them home

at0m costs 300 points in the buddy store, found right inside the pet window, and that price includes the reef yard. You spend points to buy a buddy, but leveling one up is a different currency entirely: your participation score does that, never your clicks. Everyone starts with will.0 and his day yard for free, so at0m is a save-up-for-it upgrade.

Their yard

The reef yard turns the little desktop window into a coral scene, all underwater color and glow. It comes bundled with at0m, no separate purchase needed.

Field notes

• The retro window's title bar reads at0m.io, a tiny memorial in 16 pixels of chrome.
• Tap at0m and it does a little dance while a heart counter ticks up. The counter means nothing, and that is exactly the point.
• at0m keeps its own level bucket and its own dance count, so switching to another buddy never loses an inch of progress.
• Why an octopus? Eight arms means eight files open at once, and the eight stages trace one file's whole life, from Untitled-1 to something truly hackable.

🦈 wir3, the shark

Some buddies bounce. Some buddies preen. wir3 just circles: slow, patient, unbothered, watching everything that swims through the wire. The shark of the deep yard never chases your attention, it inspects it, packet by packet, then glides on like it saw nothing worth flagging.

Name origin

The name is a wink at Wireshark, the famous network packet analyzer. Network engineers use it to capture and inspect every packet traveling over a network, which means if something moves through the wire, Wireshark sees it. Same energy here: this shark patrols the deepest yard in the game, and nothing gets past it.

Life stages

How to bring them home

wir3 costs 300 points in the buddy store, which lives right inside the pet window. The price includes the deep yard scene, so you are buying the shark and the abyss it haunts in one go. Points are the same ones you earn by participating: see /points-and-houses. Everyone starts with will.0 and his day yard for free, and switching buddies never loses progress, so wir3 will wait for you in the dark. Sharks are good at that.

Their yard

The deep yard is the darkest water in teachChat: layer after layer of midnight blue fading to almost black. The stylesheet introduces it as "the abyss, where the packets sleep."

Field notes

• The window title bar reads wir3.exe, docked right next to the chat send button.
• Levels come from your participation score, never from clicks. Tapping wir3 just makes it do a little dance and bumps a heart counter; the counter means nothing, and that is the point.
• The sprite sheet's code comment calls it "wireshark himself. Egg case -> pup -> apex of the yard."
• The deep counts as water, so yard life swaps to sea creatures: birds become fish, butterflies become jellyfish, and the ant parade goes full shrimp conga.

🐱 ha$h, the cat

Somewhere above the buddy store, on a rooftop nobody remembers giving him keys to, lives ha$h (the cat). Black as a redacted password, gold-eyed, and exactly as catchable as the output of a good one-way function, he watches your class from his ledge and offers nothing but vibes. He does not fetch. He computes.

Name origin

A wink at hashcat, the famous password-cracking tool: point it at a pile of hashes and it works, tirelessly, until something gives. A hash is easy to run forward and practically impossible to reverse, which also describes trying to un-pet a cat. A rooftop cat with a cryptographic streak, named for a cracker and cracking nothing but naps.

Life stages

Like every buddy, ha$h levels up from your participation score, never from clicks. His eight forms arrive at the standard levels:

How to bring them home

ha$h costs 275 points in the buddy store inside the pet window, paid with the points you earn by participating. The price includes his rooftop yard, so you are buying the cat and the real estate in one transaction. (Everyone starts with will.0 and his day yard for free; ha$h is for when you are ready to go up in the world. See the buddy overview.)

Their yard

A rooftop yard, all ledges and open sky. On a neighboring roof an oilfield pumpjack nods away, because in one screenshot ha$h's own silhouette read as an oil derrick, and rather than fix it the yard leaned in.

Field notes

• His window title bar reads ha$h.exe, docked right next to the send button like he owns the place.
• Tap him and he does a little dance and bumps his heart counter. The counter means nothing, and that's the point.
• He keeps his own level bucket and dance count, so switching buddies never loses progress.
• Straight from the code comments: "he cracks nothing but naps."

🦆 qu4ck, the rubber ducky

Meet qu4ck, the rubber ducky, quite possibly the best listener on all of teachChat. He does not judge, he does not interrupt, and he has never once said "have you tried turning it off and on again." He just floats there, glossy and patient, while you explain your problem out loud until the problem gets embarrassed and explains itself.

Name origin

qu4ck is a tribute to rubber duck debugging, the sacred programmer ritual of explaining your broken code, line by line, to a rubber duck until you suddenly spot the bug yourself. The duck never types a single fix; saying the problem out loud does all the work. qu4ck carries on that noble tradition, full time, from a bathtub.

Life stages

Every buddy grows through 8 stages, and qu4ck's are extremely bath-forward.

How to bring them home

qu4ck costs 200 points in the buddy store inside the pet window, which makes him the most affordable buddy on the shelf, and the price includes his bathtub yard. You buy him with the points you earn by participating (see /points-and-houses), but he levels up from your participation score, never from clicks: going from level L to L+1 costs 10 + 5*(L-1) points of score, all the way up to level 30.

Their yard

qu4ck arrives with a bathtub yard: mint tiles, a porcelain rim, and warm bathwater over a suspiciously muddy seaweed bottom. Do not ask how the mud got in the tub. He is a duck.

Field notes

• His little retro window docks next to the chat send button, title bar proudly reading qu4ck.exe.
• Tap him and he does a little dance while your heart counter ticks up. The counter means absolutely nothing, and that is the point.
• The "Payload ready" stage is a wink at the USB Rubber Ducky, the famous keystroke-injection gadget. The source code confirms qu4ck "retired from payloads to float professionally."
• He keeps his own level bucket and dance count, so switching back to will.0 never loses a drop of progress. His tub even counts as an underwater yard, so some yard life swaps to sea creatures.

🐍 pyth0n, the snake

pyth0n is the resident snake of teachChat: a Python-logo-blue noodle with a gold belly, living in a tiny retro window docked next to the chat send button. Patient, quiet, and entirely legless, pyth0n does not chase points. pyth0n waits, coiled, for your participation to compile.

Name origin

A wink at the Python programming language, obviously, which is also why the window is titled pyth0n.py. The sprite hides a second wink: the official Python logo is actually two snakes coiled together, a fact everyone forgot, so pyth0n wears the logo's blue with the gold belly as a tribute. The final life stage is a real Python easter egg too: type "import antigravity" into a Python session and the language opens the xkcd comic about how programming in Python feels like flying.

Life stages

How to bring them home

pyth0n costs 250 points in the buddy store inside the pet window, and the price includes the desert yard. (Everyone starts with will.0 and his day yard for free.) Levels come from your participation score, never from clicks: going from level L to L+1 costs 10 + 5*(L-1) score, up to a max of level 30. See Points and houses for how the score works.

Their yard

A desert scene: hot sky, rolling dunes, a beaming sun, and one cactus that waves at you. It is the closest a school laptop gets to a terrarium.

Field notes

• The title bar reads pyth0n.py, so it looks like you have a code editor open. You do not. It is a snake.
• Tap pyth0n for a little dance and a heart-counter bump. The counter means nothing, and that is the point.
• pyth0n keeps its own level bucket and dance count. Whichever buddy is out collects the day's score, and switching buddies never loses progress.
• Danger noodle at level 7 is, scientifically speaking, the best stage name in the whole compendium. Big snek fans are welcome to disagree.

🦀 clawde, the crab

Sidle up to the send button and meet clawde, a small orange crab with big opinions about pinching. He scuttles sideways across his little retro window like every problem can be solved with the right claw, and honestly, for a crab, most problems can. He is orange, he is proud of it, and he will absolutely wave at you.

Name origin

clawde's window title bar says it all: clawde.rs. The .rs file extension belongs to the Rust programming language, whose mascot is Ferris, a cheerful orange crab, and whose crowning promise is memory safety, which happens to be exactly where clawde's story ends up. The name is also, perhaps, a wink at a certain helpful AI assistant with a very similar name. Claw-de.

Life stages

How to bring them home

clawde costs 300 points in the buddy store, which lives right inside the pet window. That price includes his beach yard, so you are really buying a crab and his entire coastline in one go. Points come from participation, and once he is yours, he levels up from your participation score, never from taps.

Their yard

clawde comes with a beach yard: sand, surf, and plenty of open shoreline to scuttle across sideways. It is everything a desktop crab could ask for.

Field notes

• The title bar reads clawde.rs, real Rust file extension and all.
• Tap him and he does a little dance while your heart counter ticks up. The counter means nothing, and that is the point.
• clawde keeps his own level bucket and his own dance count, so switching buddies never loses progress. Whichever buddy is out collects the day's score.
• Deep in the sprite code, a comment calls him "Ferris's cousin, orange and proud of it, claws up."

🐢 pwsh, the tortoise

pwsh is the tortoise who has never hurried once in his life and has never once been late. He plods across a deep blue console one deliberate step at a time, wearing a glossy PowerShell-blue shell with an actual >_ prompt printed on it in white pixels. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast, and pwsh is extremely smooth.

Name origin

The name is a nod to pwsh, the real executable that launches PowerShell, Microsoft's command shell. PowerShell commands follow a strict Verb-Noun grammar (Get-Item, Set-Location, Start-Process), which is why this tortoise matures through stages like Get-Moving and Set-Pace. And when a shell has gone as far as a shell can go, there is only one elevation left: Run as administrator.

Life stages

How to bring them home

pwsh costs 250 points in the buddy store, which lives right inside the pet window. You spend the same participation points you earn in class, and the price includes his console yard: the terminal comes with the tortoise. Once he is yours, he is yours for good.

Their yard

A console yard: PowerShell blue from edge to edge, the ghost of a prompt, and a blinking cursor. He is not visiting the terminal. He lives in it.

Field notes

• His little window's title bar reads pwsh.exe, because every buddy's window is titled with its file name.
• Tap him and he does a tiny, unhurried dance and bumps his heart counter. The counter means nothing, and that is the point.
• Like every buddy, pwsh keeps his own level bucket, filled only by your participation score, never by clicks. Switch buddies whenever you like; he holds his progress like he holds everything else: patiently.
• The source code describes him with a motto borrowed from people who take slow seriously: "Slow is smooth, smooth is fast." A comment near his yard adds, "He is the process."

🤖 esp32, the robot

Some buddies act mysterious. esp32 just boots, blinks once, and gets to work. This tiny robot treats every school day like an embedded project: power on, run the loop, save your progress, never panic. It is small, it is sturdy, and it will absolutely outlast whatever you plugged in next to it.

Name origin

A wink at the real ESP32, the beloved little WiFi microcontroller found in a thousand classroom electronics projects: if your class ever made a gadget blink, beep, or connect to anything, odds are one of these chips was underneath. Half the roster hides behind leetspeak, but the code comments admit esp32 needs none of it, because the chip's real part name IS the true name. It briefly shipped as "3sp32", then "truename", before landing just right.

Life stages

That is the honest arc of every embedded project ever built, ending, as all good projects should, Fully flashed at level 27.

How to bring them home

esp32 costs 350 points in the buddy store, right inside the pet window. Points come from your participation score, and the price includes its own yard scene. Leveling works the same way: your score feeds whichever buddy is out, and switching buddies never loses progress.

Their yard

esp32 comes home to a workbench yard, the natural habitat of any half-finished electronics project. Finally, a robot that gets to live where it was made.

Field notes

• Its little desktop window is titled esp32.bin, which is exactly what you would flash onto the real chip.
• "Blinky" is the hardware world's hello-world: making one LED blink. Level 4 is a rite of passage.
• Tap esp32 and it does a little dance and bumps a heart counter. The counter means nothing, and that is the point.
• Like every buddy, esp32 keeps its own level bucket and its own dance count. See the buddy guide for the shared rules.

🐕 booker, the actual best dog

Nearly every other entry in this Compendium is named after software. booker is named after a dog, because booker is a dog: the actual best dog, and the only buddy in teachChat who keeps himself entertained while you are busy typing. Wheaten face, grizzled saddle, zero leetspeak.

Name origin

No jailbreak tools, no archivers, no shell puns: booker is the one buddy named after someone real. He is the developer's actual dog, a Cairn Terrier mix, pixeled faithfully down to the floppy ears and dark nose. Cairn Terriers are the scrappy little Scottish breed that once worked rock piles in the Highlands, and one famously played Toto in The Wizard of Oz, so "Ankle rocket" is less a joke than a field report. Some legends need no leetspeak.

Life stages

Buddies grow from your participation score, never from taps. booker's stages arrive at these levels (the cap is 30, which leaves The GOAT three spare levels to simply be the GOAT):

How to bring them home

booker costs 500 points in the buddy store inside the pet window, which makes him the most expensive buddy on the shelf. The code explains the pricing in exactly one line: "booker is the GOAT and priced like one." Like every buddy, his price includes his own yard scene, and once he is yours he is yours for good: his level bucket and dance count stick with him even if you rotate other buddies in. Points come from participating in class, so the GOAT is earned, never clicked.

Their yard

booker arrives with a cozy rug yard: a living room scene with the couch up top and a constellation rug, stars and all, spread across cream carpet. It is drawn from a photo of the actual rug the actual dog naps on.

Field notes

• His retro window docks beside the chat send button with booker.exe in the title bar.
• He is the only buddy with an idle theater: zoomies, spins, hops, digs, naps, and the occasional boof, at random, "because that's just who he is."
• Tap him for a little dance and a bump to the heart counter. The counter means nothing, and that is the point.
• His palette is written into the code by name: grizzled saddle, cream muzzle, cream paws.