Streamers · Chat · Reactions
What your creature does when chat pops off
During a stream, two things react on the overlay. The creature reads messages: when one contains an emoji or a word the creator of its egg set up, it plays the matching emotion for eight seconds. Scenery reads nothing: it counts events — chat intensity, follows, energies, subscriptions, raids — and animates when its family passes the threshold its creator set. Two rules absorb the bursts: the same emotion does not replay within twenty seconds, and at most six moods fire in a rolling minute.
Two things react, and not in the same way
The creature reads chat. The creator of its egg mapped emojis and words to emotions it knows how to play. When one of them shows up in a message, it plays that emotion. The map is written in advance and belongs to the egg: the streamer gets it as it is.
Scenery counts events. An element placed on the scene never looks at the text of a message. It watches one family of events, and only one, and wakes up when that family passes its threshold. The five families are follows gained, chat intensity, energies sent, subscriptions and raids received.
Both run at the same time, without talking to each other. A raid can send a ghost across a mirror while the creature, on its side, plays surprise because chat filled up with 😮.
Karst, by Filon9 — the egg, the first stage, and the evolutions as silhouettes. Its page lists twenty-three keys under "What wakes it up", short words like "gg" or "rip" and emojis like ⛏️ or 💎.
What the creature recognises in a message
- An emoji is looked for exactly as it is written.
- A word is compared stripped down: no capitals, no accents, no punctuation or spaces, and digits that imitate letters are folded back. "GG", "g g" and "gg !" are the same word.
- A Twitch emote is recognised by its name, spelled out as it appears in chat.
- A word is looked for anywhere in the message, including inside another word.
- The emoji comes before the word. If a message holds both, the emoji plays.
- The longest key wins. 🔥🔥🔥 beats 🔥, "ggwp" beats "gg": the most precise key is never hidden behind a shorter one.
A creation page shows its keys, without saying which emotion each one triggers. Which plays on what is found out live, and that is on purpose.
Why it does not flicker when the burst lands
A hundred messages with the same emoji should not replay the same emotion a hundred times. Two rules, fixed in the code and not adjustable, absorb the chat:
- The same emotion does not replay within twenty seconds. That is the rule against a single emoji being spammed.
- At most six moods per rolling minute, all emotions taken together. That is the rule against a burst of varied emojis.
A mood triggered by chat holds for eight seconds, then the creature goes back to how it was. Both rules are needed: the first alone would let six different emotions through in one second, the second alone would let a single emoji eat the whole minute.
So a message can trigger nothing for four reasons: no key was in it, the emotion already played in the last twenty seconds, the minute's budget is spent, or the message held a word from the exclusion list kept by the platform. On air the difference is invisible: nothing happens.
The text of the message goes nowhere. It serves to find a key, then it is forgotten: never stored in the creature's state, never written to a log.
Scenery: chat by message count, the rest by amount
Scenery that reacts carries two settings from its creator, a family and a threshold. What gets compared to that threshold is not the same from one family to the next, and that is the one subtlety worth keeping:
- Chat is measured in messages over the last sixty seconds. A chat threshold is therefore a pace: the scenery lights up when the conversation speeds up, not on the first message that comes along.
- The other families are measured on the amount of a single event. The viewers of a raid, the subscriptions of one gifting, the bits of one cheer. A follow always counts as one.
Bougeoir, by Nyctale — a three-candle holder whose flames grow and throw sparks when chat gets going. Family "chat": it is the pace of messages that lights it.
Psyché, by Nyctale — an arched mirror a ghost crosses on every raid. Family "raid": it is the number of viewers arriving at once that wakes it.
A reaction plays once, all the way to the end of its animation, then the scenery goes back to its ordinary loop. Each placed element counts for itself: two pieces set on two different families do not fire together, and nothing keeps them in step.
What stays a surprise
A creation page says which keys wake the creature, never what they play. An egg therefore keeps a part to be found out live: the first 😂 in chat, and at last you see what the creator put behind it.
It is the same logic as for evolutions, where the overlay widget announces the goals to reach without showing what waits at the end. The detail is in How a creature evolves. On the creator side, setting up your own reaction map is described in Make your creature react to chat emojis.
Frequently asked questions
Can I change the emojis my creature reacts to?
The map belongs to the egg: its creator wrote it, and the copy you own keeps it. The studio lets you add pairings where the creator left a gap, never on top of an existing key.
Why did my creature not react to an emoji listed on its page?
Four possible reasons: the same emotion already played in the last twenty seconds, six moods already fired in the minute, a longer key present in the same message won, or the message held an excluded word.
Do I need scenery for the overlay to react to raids?
For the scene animation, yes. A raid always feeds the creature's gauges, but the visual effect — a mirror crossed, a sign lighting up — comes from a placed piece of scenery whose creator set a reaction on that family.
Are chat messages stored?
No. The text is used to look for a key, then forgotten: nothing is written to the creature's state or to a log. An excluded message leaves no trace either.