claudemon

Wild Pokemon appear while you work in Claude Code. Your prompts are steps through the grass: the longer the prompt, the further you walk, and the more chances something jumps out. So is the waiting — every twenty seconds Claude spends working is another step, because that is the half of the session you actually have free.

The walking happens while Claude does, not the moment you press enter: a prompt buys you the steps and the turn takes them, so anything that jumps out does it with the grass already moving.

One at a time, and only for half a minute: a Pokemon that appears while you are busy wanders off if you leave it there, so a long session never leaves a queue of battles waiting for you.

However many Claude tabs you keep open, they all walk one trainer through one patch of grass — see below.

The original 151. Fully local — no account, no backend, nothing about you leaving the machine.

Waiting, which is most of it. The walk only moves while Claude does, so you can tell from across the desk without reading anything.

And when something does jump out.

It lives in a terminal tab of its own, next to the one you work in. The status line in Claude tells you something is waiting; the game tab is where you go and fight it.

┌─ Terminal 1: claude ──────────────────────────────────┐
│ > refactor this component                             │
│ ███████░░░░░░░ 63% left | Opus 5                      │
│ ✦ A wild PIDGEY appeared!  ·  24s left  ·  claudemon  │
└───────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Install

Typed inside Claude Code. Nothing to clone.

/plugin marketplace add zamarrowski/claudemon
/plugin install claudemon@claudemon

That puts the plugin in place — the hooks that make Pokemon appear come from it.

Now restart Claude Code. Claude Code only picks up a plugin's commands and hooks at startup, so until you restart, the next line does not exist yet — if you type it straight after installing, nothing happens. Once you are back:

/claudemon-setup

This does the rest: the claudemon command, the status line, and the sprites. It prints a line per step and says so if one of them did not work.

Then two one-offs, which it reminds you of:

1. Restart Claude Code once more, so the new status line loads.
2. In a second terminal tab, run claudemon.

It asks for a name and a starter the first time, and after that it sits there waiting. Send a longish prompt in the Claude tab and watch the status line.

What you need first

	How to check
Claude Code	You are already in it
Node.js 20.19 or newer	node --version. The game and the hooks run on it, and Claude Code ships as its own binary so it does not bring one. Nothing else to install — no dependencies, no build step
A terminal with truecolor	iTerm2, Ghostty, WezTerm, Kitty, Alacritty and VS Code's terminal are all fine. Not macOS Terminal

[!WARNING] In macOS Terminal the sprites come out striped and stretched, and no setting fixes it. Use any of the other terminals above.

The 151 Pokemon ship with the plugin, so the only thing the install downloads is the sprites, which takes a few seconds. After that the only thing that ever goes out is the version check below, and nothing goes out at all with it switched off.

Updating