🐸 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
| Stage | Arrives at level |
|---|---|
| Frogspawn | 1 |
| Tadpole | 2 |
| Wiggler | 4 |
| Legs at last | 7 |
| Froglet | 11 |
| Pond hopper | 16 |
| Bullfrog | 22 |
| Elder of the pond | 27 |
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.