A small rainforest, kept slowly.
Pondlet is a pocket vivarium. You start with six small residents, let them grow, breed two adults, and merge the duplicates into rarer morphs. The tank keeps running when the tab is closed. It is not a game about winning. It is a toy about noticing small things.
Why a rainforest vivarium?
A bioactive vivarium is one of the smallest complete worlds a person can keep in a room. Plants grow under a cork-bark wall. Springtails and isopods turn leaf litter back into soil. The humidity and the light decide whether the moss spreads or the mold does. When the proportions are right, the tank can run for months with very little help.
That world is also full of real variation. Dart frogs come in hundreds of named morphs — Azureus, Blue Jeans, Patricia, Alanis. Isopods are collected for their patterns. Day geckos and mantises are kept for the way they move. Pondlet turns that variation into something you can collect without buying a dozen tanks.
How the collection works
There are 94 morphs across five families. Each one is a real species or a named captive morph, drawn as a pixel sprite with its own palette and pattern. Residents grow through three stages in real time. Adults produce dew, the tank's currency. Dew buys eggs, tank upgrades, and ornaments.
Breeding costs one heart and a little dew. The offspring is a roll: usually a common morph, occasionally something much rarer. When the tank fills with duplicates, merge ten residents of one rarity into one of the next rarity. Keep the ones you like marked with a star; favorites are never used in a merge.
The tank itself
The background is a painted rainforest interior; the residents are pixel sprites. The light follows your local time, so the tank is warm in the day and blue at night. Ornaments are cosmetic. They change the scene, never the odds.
On Chrome and Edge you can pop the tank into a small always-on-top window while you work. It shows the same residents, a dew counter, and a feed button. The main page keeps the panels and the collection.
What is free
Starting a vivarium, the full collection, breeding, merging, the care guides, and the daily loop are free. There is no account; the save lives in this browser. The site is supported by advertising on guide pages, optional cosmetic ornaments, and a paid build blueprint that turns a stable real-world setup into a shopping list.
The ornaments are cosmetic. They do not make breeding easier or the tank grow faster. The point is to look at something, not to optimize it.
Who makes it
Pondlet is an independent project, built and maintained in the open spirit of small tools. If something is broken, confusing, or quietly wrong about the biology, write to hello@pondlet.app.