Daycare over the mesh

The daycare is MonsterMesh’s always-on social layer. When you’re not actively battling or exploring, your six party monsters “check in” and live a little life with the monsters on other nodes in LoRa range — earning XP that gets written back into your real save file.

It’s designed to make a mesh of T-Decks feel alive even when nobody’s actively playing, and to give solo nodes a good experience too.

Lifecycle

1. Check-in. When the emulator goes idle (you switch to the Meshtastic UI or terminal), the module reads your party out of the Game Boy save — species, levels, nicknames, moves, XP.
2. Beacon. Every 5 minutes the node broadcasts a compact party summary over the MonsterMesh mesh channel. Other nodes that hear it become your daycare neighbors.
3. Events. Roughly every 30 minutes the daycare generates one event — your monster does something, alone or with a neighbor’s monster.
4. DM the partner. When an event involves a neighbor, your node sends a text DM to that trainer’s node describing what happened, written from their monster’s point of view, so it reads naturally in their Meshtastic chat (and theirs does the same for you).
5. XP & write-back. XP earned accumulates in daycare state and is patched back into your .sav on the SD card (with the SRAM checksum fixed up), so the levels show up the next time you boot the game.
6. Check-out. When you launch the emulator again, the daycare stops touching the SD card so the game has exclusive access; it re-reads your party on the next idle period.

Neighbors that go silent for 2 hours are considered gone.

The event generator

DaycareEventGen is a dual-layer system so events feel hand-written but never repeat:

• Layer 1 — flat templates. Hand-authored, species-specific signature moments (the kind of thing a specific monster is famous for). These fire first when they apply.
• Layer 2 — compositional assembly. Sentences built from interchangeable slot pools (subject + action + target + location + outcome). Outcome pools are weighted by a monster’s personality archetype, and type filters keep combinations sensible. This is the engine for everyday variety.

Species data driving all of this — types, habitat, stat bias, personality archetype, evolution stage, and a curated moveset — lives in DaycareData.h, generated for all 151 Gen-1 species from PokéAPI.

Day/night and weather

• Day/night: if the node has a GPS fix, the daycare knows the local hour (from latitude + day-of-year) and unlocks night-only events like dreams.
• Weather: weather-themed events are WiFi-gated — without a network connection there are no weather events (no fake weather). With WiFi, weather can flavor events and bias which type of monster is having a good day.

Friendship & rivalry

Pairs of monsters that keep interacting across the mesh build up two parallel scores, persisted per pair:

• Friendship grows through positive interactions (faster for same-type pairs), unlocking warmer event text and small XP bonuses.
• Rivalry grows through sparring/competition; a pair can be both friends and rivals.

These scores surface in the event text (e.g. a friendship counter in the message) and shape which events the pair gets pulled into.

Achievements

There are 34 daycare achievements (DaycareAchievements.h), spanning time-in-daycare milestones, friendship/rivalry milestones, and rarer feats. The rare ones are broadcast to the whole mesh when earned, so the network sees them.

Persistence

Daycare state — per-monster hours and XP, friendship/rivalry scores, and earned achievements — is saved to /monstermesh/daycare.dat on the device’s internal LittleFS (via Meshtastic’s FSCom), separate from the SD card. It survives reboots.

Solo nodes

A lone node is not a sad node. With no neighbors around, monsters explore, train, nap, and dream; mood drifts toward “content” rather than getting stuck “lonely.” When a new node finally appears, there’s an excited burst. The daycare is meant to be enjoyable whether you’re the only T-Deck on the mesh or one of ten.

Save-file safety

The write-back only patches XP/levels into your existing .sav; it computes the Gen-1 EXP curve and repairs the SRAM checksum so the game accepts the save. As with any save editing, keep a backup of your .sav — this is pre-alpha software.