INSIDE THE APP
Everything that ships inside the downloaded Apollo Cypher handheld — every screen, every button, every rule of the game. This page mirrors the real client, pixel for pixel, so you know exactly what you get before you insert a coin.
THE HANDHELD
A cream shell with a rounded bottom-right corner, a dark bezel around a green LCD, and a full control deck below. It runs fully offline — nothing leaves your machine.
Power legend (ON · OFF) on the left, APOLLO branding on the right. Purely decorative chrome — the app is always on while the window is open.
A dark plate with 'BATTERY' (a green dot, always full — it's local) and 'APOLLO CYPHER™' etched above the screen.
A 330px green LCD with an inner glow. Everything you do happens here: the bus bar, the mode strip, the current view, and the bottom screen nav with a live clock.
'APOLLO CYPHER' in italic caps with a rounded HANDHELD badge, between the screen and the controls.
A D-pad, tilted red A / B buttons, SELECT and START pills, a speaker grille, and a printed shortcut hint — just like the real thing.
Ships as a desktop app at 620×880 on a sky-blue background. Unzip, run, and the handheld boots in under a second.
THE THREE SCREENS
The bottom of the LCD has a screen nav: NEST · STATS · ACTIVITY, plus a live clock on the right. Here's exactly what each one shows.
- ▸Your home screen. Shows the egg as ASCII art — closed while SLEEPING, blinking eyes (oo) once AWAKE.
- ▸Four action buttons live here: Hatch, Rain, Auto, Graduate.
- ▸Hatching shakes the whole screen for 350ms — your cypher is waking up.
- ▸A six-cell dashboard of your whole nest, updated after every action.
- ▸MODE shows the active cypher mode; STATE shows IDLE or AWAKE.
- ▸AUTO-RAIN reflects whether the B button is engaged.
- ▸A scrolling history, newest first, with timestamps.
- ▸Every hatch, rain, mode change, auto toggle, graduation, and reset lands here.
- ▸The boot line — 'APOLLO CYPHER v0.1.10 READY' — is always the first entry.
THE FOUR MODES
A strip under the bus bar splits the LCD into four mode cells. Tap one (or tap the D-pad) to switch. The active cell darkens.
The default. Your cypher runs its local broker raft — the baseline state you hatch into.
Feed channel. The cypher's feed persona — switch here to think of the nest as an inbox.
Storage mode. The nest as a vault: tickets and state you're holding onto until graduation.
Signal mode. The cypher as a signal brain — the experimental end of the mode strip.
Mode is cosmetic state today — it's logged, shown on the STATS screen, and carried in the protocol's mode slots ($APOLLO_MODE).
CONTROLS — EVERY BUTTON, EXPLAINED
Every physical control mirrors an on-screen action, and every action has a keyboard shortcut too. Nothing on the shell is decorative.
| Control | Key | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| A (red, right) | A or Enter | The big one. While SLEEPING it hatches your cypher. While AWAKE it collects rain — one ticket, with a 5-second cooldown. |
| B (red, left) | B | Toggles auto-rain on/off. When on, a timer rains for you every 4 seconds while the cooldown is free. |
| D-pad | ↑ / → | Cycles to the next mode: RAFT → CYPHER → VAULT → SIGNAL → back to RAFT. |
| SELECT | S | Flips between the ACTIVITY log and the NEST screen. |
| START | G | Graduate: spends 10 tickets, sends the cypher to the big leagues, and puts the egg back to sleep. |
| Screen nav | — | Tap NEST / STATS / ACTIVITY directly on the LCD to jump between views. |
| Mode cells | — | Tap any of the four cells on the mode strip to jump straight to that mode. |
| R (hidden) | R | Reset: clears cyphers, tickets, graduations, and auto-rain. Logged as 'RESET — NEST CLEARED'. |
RULES & NUMBERS
The little game inside the app has hard limits. Here is the exact rulebook the client enforces.
The nest holds at most two cyphers. HATCH locks once you're at 2/2.
Ten tickets per cypher. RAIN locks when the counter hits 10/10.
Graduation spends exactly 10 tickets and sleeps the egg.
Each rain sets a 5-second cooldown before the next one is allowed.
With auto-rain on, a timer attempts a rain every 4 seconds.
The client is fully local. Nothing syncs, nothing leaves your machine.
BOOT → press A to HATCH → press A (or B for auto) to collect 10 TICKETS over time → press START to GRADUATE → the egg sleeps, your graduated counter ticks up, and you hatch again. Two cyphers can live in the nest at once.
EVERY MESSAGE THE LOG CAN PRINT
The ACTIVITY screen speaks in short, timestamped lines. This is the complete dictionary.