DotPet User Guide Welcome to DotPet! DotPet is a highly customizable virtual pet for Windows PCs and tablets. The information below will be helpful in caring for your pet. The main window shows your pet in its playfield, dividing two sets of buttons. When you minimize DotPet, an icon is placed in the notification area (system tray). Double-click or right-click to show the program again.

• Food Open the food selection box. Food is an important pet statistic. The Food statistic represents how full your pet is. There are two types of food: a Meal and a Treat . Meals raise your pet's Food, Health, Energy, and Weight statistics. Treats raise your pet's Happiness, but won't raise its Food statistic and brings its Health down.
• Medicine Cure your pet of illness. If it is not sick, your pet will refuse to take medicine. The Health statistic indicates how healthy your pet is. If your pet's Health drops too low, it will become sick and require medicine. Once its Health reaches 0, your pet will die.
• Discipline Scold your pet when it becomes uncooperative. When your pet becomes uncooperative, you will have to discipline it. It will not enjoy being disciplined, so this will lower its Happiness each time.
• Sleep Your pet will become tired when its Energy drops low enough, and you can make it sleep. Your pet will refuse to sleep if it is not tired. When Energy reaches 0, your pet will fall asleep on its own, and it will gradually regain Energy while asleep. You cannot feed or play games with your pet while it is sleeping.
• Game Play a coin toss game to raise your pet's Happiness. Your pet will become sad once its Happiness drops too much. Feed it treats or play a game with it to raise this statistic. To play with your pet, a coin is tossed three times and you call heads or tails for each. Getting all three guesses correct will raise your pet's Happiness by 20, getting two correct will raise it by 10, and getting one correct will raise it by 5. There is no effect if all three guesses are incorrect. Your pet loses a small amount of Energy each time you play a game with it.
• Clean Clean up waste that your pet leaves on the playfield. Make sure to clean up waste in a timely manner to keep your pet happy and healthy!
• Information View your pet's Food , Health , Happiness , Age , Discipline , Energry and Weight. Any changes to statistics while this window is open will be reflected in the window. For every 24 hours passed in DotPet, your pet's Age will increase by one year. Its Weight increases a small amount each time you feed it a meal. When you exit DotPet, its statistics are stored and will not change until the program is open again.
• Settings Configure visual aspects of the game. The default pet is Blobcat, with the three colors to choose from being gray, orange, and brown. Custom pet images can also be loaded from this window. For more information, read the DotPet Customization Guide. Custom pet images must be PNG files contained in a single folder and must contain the following files: angry1.png
angry2.png
eating1.png
eating2.png
good1.png
good2.png
happy1.png
happy2.png
refuse1.png
refuse2.png
sad1.png
sad2.png
sick1.png
sick2.png
sleeping1.png
sleeping2.png
ghost.png If any files are missing or otherwise inaccessible, an error will occur and the program will load the default sprites. The playfield image can be changed to an image of your choosing. The recommended canvas size for playfields is 228x113. Changes made in this window will take effect immediately. You can rename your pet here at any time. You can also reset your pet from this window. The default configuration can be restored using the Defaults button.