[XCL] [0.25.9] X-Change Life Pets 1.0.0

There is a unit at the quiet end of Paradise Mall, past the shutters of two shops that never reopened, and you can hear it from the escalator. Summer City Animal Shelter is three volunteers and a van, and everything in it is secondhand except the animals. You can walk round as long as you like. Signing for one is a different matter, and the part nobody warns you about is not the paperwork. It is that the bowls have to be filled twice a day, every day, by you.
 

The shelter

• Kennels, a cattery, a reptile room and a wall of tanks, each with its own photograph. Eight animals are in on any given week and a new intake arrives every week, so the dog you did not sign for on Monday is gone by the next one.
• 16 breeds across four species: golden retriever, german shepherd, black labrador and chihuahua; tabby, tuxedo, calico and maine coon; corn snake, ball python, milk snake and kenyan sand boa; leopard gecko, bearded dragon, blue tongued skink and chameleon. Every one has a name, an estimated age, a temperament that sets how warm it starts, and a card the staff have written on, usually with a question mark.
• They will not sign until the house is ready. A dog wants a bed, a bowl and a lead. A cat wants a litter tray instead of the lead. A snake or a lizard wants a vivarium and a heat lamp. The front desk sells all of it, secondhand, with the prices written on masking tape.
• Fish work differently: buying the tank is how a fish keeper adopts, and the fish inside are its stock. Goldfish live on their own, three to a coldwater tank. The heated tank holds eight and there is a laminated sheet by the racking explaining which of them can live with which.
• You name them on the form. The volunteer will point out, twice, that you can change it now and not on the chip afterwards.
• You can ask about giving one back. Nobody will tell you off. They would still rather you did not, and it costs you something that is not money.

The care loop

• Feed and spend time with them in the morning, in whichever room they have made theirs, and again at night before you sleep.
• Both feeds and some attention and the bond climbs. One feed and it slips a little. An empty bowl all day costs twelve points, which is the number that ends things.
• Miss two days and the shelter puts a card through the door. Miss three and they come for the animal: a hundred and fifty dollar fine taken out of your wallet, and a fortnight before anybody will sign anything over to you again.
• Contribute two hundred toward the rent and your stepdad and Alexia fill the morning bowl before you are up. That buys you out of the empty bowl, not out of the decline. Pay and then never touch the animal and you are on one feed a day, and you will still lose it, just slowly.
• Snakes, lizards and fish are ownable and passive by design. They eat, they can be checked on, and they will never ask you for anything else.

Greenbank Park

• A new daytime activity that only appears when you own something you can put a lead on. Four streets to the gate, a bandstand nobody has played in for years, a rose garden gone to seed, and a mile of path.
• Real fitness XP through the game's own progression, scaled by how long you stay out. Throw a ball for a dog. Cats can be walked too, and two separate people will stop to say they did not know you could do that.
• Encounters along the path: other owners whose dogs have already decided about yours, a bag you did not think to bring, and a cat forty feet up a tree with an audience gathering.
• The joggers have their own photographs rather than borrowing the gym's, so the woman who slows down to make a fuss of your dog is actually standing in the park, and the description you read matches the picture you are looking at.

What they give back

• On a night when the game offers you the ashamed branch, an animal you trust can take the edge off it. Nothing gets solved. It gets smaller, which is not the same thing. How well it works is rolled against the bond, so a devoted animal usually helps and a wary one usually does not.
• Trust them far enough and they start bringing you things. Usually a single trainer, not yours, not new. Sometimes a folded note with money in it. Occasionally a sealed pill packet, drawn from the live pill database, so what turns up is whatever your load order actually has in it.
• Get the bond past forty and the thing that comes through the bedroom door at the worst moment might not be your stepdad. It costs your partner some satisfaction, leaves your family relationships alone, and the scene picks up where it left off. Owning something that can push a door open also nudges the chance of being caught up in the first place, which is the honest price of the hedge.

12 achievements, from signing your first form to leaving an animal long enough that somebody else takes it away
Two mod settings: turn the whole mod off, or keep it and switch off the neglect consequences