Agents Pixel Dungeon

A native pixel-art guild for your live Herdr agents, for macOS and Linux. Made by Diabolo Studio.

Each coding agent is a hero in a dungeon room that changes with its real Herdr status: working at the forge, asking for your attention, exhausted on an infirmary cot until its usage limit resets, reading while it waits, done. Click a room to answer the agent, accept or decline its permission prompts, or summon a new one. Rust, egui, a status item in the menu bar or tray, no browser or server.

Watch the full demo video · Full-size screenshot · Guide

Download

Binaries for macOS (.app) and Linux (x86_64) are on the Releases page. The macOS app is ad-hoc signed, not notarized: the first time, right-click it and choose Open.

States and rooms

Herdr state		Room	Hero
working		Workshop: desk, bookshelves, forge, alchemy table	Works at the station of its last tool: reads, forges, brews, summons, plans or types
blocked		Sealed door, braziers, a rug	Jumps on the rug under a pulsing red "!"
session limit		Infirmary with a cot under the red cross	Exhausted, asleep on the cot under a breathing blanket, with the time left to recover until the reset
idle		An inn's bedroom at night: a canopy bed, a hearth, the moon through the window	Reads in an armchair with the fire at its back, by the window, turning a page now and then
done		Treasure chamber	Jumps for joy under a green tick, confetti flying
unknown		Ruins with a portal	Wanders, looking around

When the state changes the hero walks out through the door, the room changes behind it, and it walks back in.

The session limit is not a Herdr state: the dungeon reads it from Claude Code's own files when an agent or one of its background sessions hits its usage limit ("You've hit your session limit · resets 2:20pm"), and shows it until the limit resets.

Integrated terminal

Click >_ in an agent's chat, or choose the terminal action from its room's context menu, to open an integrated shell in that agent's folder. Each folder has its own session, with terminal colours, scrolling, selection, paste and interactive commands. Closing the terminal window keeps its session alive while the app runs; open it again from the same folder to continue. Run exit to end the shell, then choose New session to start again. Quitting the app closes its terminals. External terminal remains available in the terminal toolbar.

This shell is independent from the agent's chat and runs your login shell ($SHELL, with /bin/bash as fallback).

Heroes

Harness	Hero
claude (Claude Code)		Coral wizard with a staff
codex (OpenAI Codex)		Monochrome hooded alchemist with a glowing flask
kiro (Amazon Kiro)		Purple-hooded rogue with a ghost face
gemini (Google Gemini CLI)		Blue star cleric
any other		Green adventurer

Original pixel art drawn in Aseprite (sources in art/), coloured after each tool's brand; no logos are reproduced.

What it does

• Chat with an agent: its terminal's last lines, a box to reply (it grows to three lines, ⇧⏎ breaks a line), ↑/↓ to pick among a question's options, Accept / Decline / Stop buttons, a >_ button that opens a terminal in the agent's folder, /exit from the right-click menu.
• Background shells: a cauldron bubbles in the room for each shell a Claude Code agent left running; the chat shows its output and can stop it, and you hear when it ends.
• Summon agents in any folder with a first prompt, through Herdr.
• The guild's HP in full screen: each harness's plan left (Claude's week and 5-hour session, Codex's limits, Kiro's monthly credits) and when it refills.
• Session limits: an exhausted agent rests on a cot in the infirmary with the time left until its limit resets, also shown in its chat.
• Chimes and desktop notifications when an agent needs help or finishes.
• Subagents as small heroes at the station of their own tool (Claude Code).
• Filters, search and an activity log; the window resizes to whole rooms, scrolls, and remembers where you left it.
• Full screen (⌃⌘F, F11 on Linux): its own space, one column of rooms on the left, the live console (colours and all) in the rest.
• Event-driven: Herdr's socket events the moment they happen, snapshots only to reconcile.
• Spanish, English, French, Italian and Portuguese.

The guide has the details: how states are read, background jobs, the menu, configuration, privacy and the optional viewer mode without Herdr.

Build and open

Requires Rust (stable) and Herdr. Tested with Herdr 0.9.x.

git clone https://github.com/JoseValencia125/agents-pixel-dungeon.git
cd agents-pixel-dungeon
./scripts/build.sh

• macOS: open 'build/Agents Pixel Dungeon.app' (optionally copy it to ~/Applications).
• Linux (X11 or Wayland): ./build/agents-pixel-dungeon. Needs GTK 3, libayatana-appindicator, xdo and ALSA — on Debian/Ubuntu sudo apt install libgtk-3-dev libayatana-appindicator3-dev libxdo-dev libasound2-dev. build/ also has a .desktop entry and icon.

cargo test and --self-test run the checks; --demo shows fictional agents without Herdr.

Support the Guild 🧪⚔️

Agents Pixel Dungeon is free and open source, built alongside other experiments in AI agents, developer tooling and pixel-art interfaces. If it brightens your terminal, you can buy the guild a potion on GitHub Sponsors.

Prefer another amount? Pick a custom one-time or monthly sponsorship. Every potion goes into new heroes and rooms, bug fixes and keeping up with Herdr releases. No paywalls: every feature stays free for everyone.

Thank you for supporting independent open-source development. ⚔️

Credits and licenses

Created by Diabolo Studio (Nacho Valencia): code and all pixel art. MIT, see LICENSE and NOTICE.md.

Inspired by Claude Dungeon by thousandsky2024, which first pictured coding agents as dungeon heroes. No code or artwork from it is included.

Herdr is by the Herdr contributors and is installed separately. Agents Pixel Dungeon is an independent, community-made project: it is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Herdr, Inc. "Herdr" is used only to describe what the app connects to; Herdr and other names are trademarks of their respective owners.