Evolution

A session always hatches at its picked line’s base stage (picking Gengar in the dialog starts you with Gastly, which evolves into Gengar on its own). Only time spent in working status counts toward the thresholds — idle, blocked, and wall-clock time do not. Branching lines (Eevee, Scyther, …) evolve into a random member of the next stage.

Static (Gen 6-9, #650-1025) species only enter the garden by manual pick, never at random. This applies at every random-selection point: the picker’s random default only draws from the bundled 42 (all animated already, so nothing to filter), and a branching evolution’s random draw (randomAnimatedSpecies in dexData.ts) excludes static targets before picking — Eevee’s random branch pool is Vaporeon…Glaceon, never Sylveon; if every branch option is static, the line just stops evolving there. A linear (non-branching) evolution is not a random pick at all, so it always proceeds even into a static target once reached — Bisharp still evolves into Kingambit on schedule. Either way, the static species is only reachable in the first place because someone picked its line manually; the automatic evolution is completing a choice already made, not making a new one.

One consequence worth knowing: the picker’s inline chain note lists every branch a line’s data says exists, including static ones — e.g. Eevee’s note still says “…or Sylveon” and Scyther’s says “…or Kleavor” — but the random draw above will never land on that branch on its own. Reaching Sylveon or Kleavor means picking them directly from the search results, not letting Eevee or Scyther evolve unattended.

Defaults: 10 minutes of working time to reach stage 2, 30 minutes to reach stage 3. Override for testing/demos with the POKE_EVOLVE_SECONDS environment variable, "<stage2>,<stage3>" in seconds, set on the process that launches Electron:

POKE_EVOLVE_SECONDS=20,60 npm run dev

Evolving plays a ~9s ceremony (flash-in, silhouette, an accelerating old/new-form oscillation, a lock, a flash-out reveal) modeled on the games’ own. A third, optional value scales its real-time speed (authored timings assume 1.0 ≈ 15s; the default is 0.6) — useful for slowing it down enough to catch a screenshot mid-effect:

POKE_EVOLVE_SECONDS=20,60,3 npm run dev