Talus

v1.5.0 — 2026-10-06

• A new creature: a blocky hermit crab with one big claw that scuttles sideways along the bottom of the screen, and now and then turns on the spot to walk forward before turning back.
• Hover over the hermit crab or click near it and it raises its claws, and the big one snaps.
• The hermit crab ducks into its shell when it is startled or clicked, and when the creatures fall asleep it sleeps inside its shell.
• Its eyes, up on their stalks, follow the mouse.
• It has four idle moves of its own: a claw wave, a look around on its eye stalks, a shell wiggle, and a quick duck into its shell.
• Settings: the hermit crab's body, legs, claws and shell each have their own colour, and you choose how many appear like the other creatures.

v1.4.0 — 2026-10-06

• The octopus keeps its blocky look, and each arm is now a chain of nine box links that bends and ripples like a real octopus arm.
• When the octopus swims, its arms open wide into an umbrella and squeeze shut on each stroke.
• On the floor the octopus slithers, its arms flat along the ground and moving forward each on its own irregular rhythm.
• Drop the octopus in mid-air and it keeps swimming instead of falling to the floor.
• Settings: choose how many of each creature appear, from 0 to 10 of each and up to 25 in all. They spread out when they appear.
• Settings: give each creature its own colours, with a Reset for each one, and use "Same for all" to match them or "Randomise" to give each a slight variation.
• Note: once you run 1.4.0, an older version of Talus can't read your settings. It moves the file aside as settings.json.bad and starts with default settings.

v1.3.0 — 2026-10-04

• The octopus is now as big as the manta ray, and it swims by default: real jet pulses, its arms flaring out and squeezing in, then drifting with its arms spread.
• Now and then the octopus lands to crawl along the floor or up the sides of the monitor, stepping arm by arm with its arms anchored to the surface.
• The octopus has a new hop, gathering its arms, pushing off, and reaching out to land.
• The spider no longer steps down off a wall onto a creature standing below; it turns back instead.
• Creatures on the same side wall now keep apart, and the spider's climb up its web gives way to whoever is on that wall.
• Walkers dropped on top of each other no longer get stuck, and they check for room before turning around.

v1.2.0 — 2026-10-04

• New creature: the angelfish. A tall silver fish with four black bars that glides, coasts, flares its fins, shimmies, and fades its bars while it sleeps.
• New creature: the octopus. It crawls along the floor, jet-hops, and sometimes swims up off the floor before settling back down.
• The octopus changes colour: it darkens, flushes, goes pale when startled, sends dark clouds rippling down its arms, and turns mottled while it sleeps.
• New interactions: the angelfish squares up to the koi, the angelfish can follow the manta in a shoal, and the octopus rears up to grab at the manta as it passes over.
• Drop the octopus onto the manta's back and it will ride along until it tips off.
• The spider's feet no longer dip below the floor when it turns the corner between a wall and the floor.
• Swimmers that end up overlapping now always separate instead of drifting along stuck together.

v1.1.2 — 2026-10-03

• Behind the scenes, the creatures' systems were rebuilt so new creatures and new interactions between them are easier to add. How the creatures behave should be unchanged.
• Settings: the introduction now names all four creatures, including the koi.
• If a creature isn't ready to join in, it no longer cancels an interaction already under way between two others.

v1.1.1 — 2026-10-02

• The spider's palps (the little arms beside its mouth) are now easy to see, and you can see them drumming.
• The koi now swims anywhere the manta flies, from the top of the screen down to the floor, and it is bigger: about half the manta's size.
• When the spider hops over another creature, it no longer lands on top of a creature on the floor.
• Settings: the spider's abdomen and the manta's tail have colour pickers of their own. A custom Body colour you saved earlier no longer tints them; they start at their default colours.

v1.1.0 — 2026-10-01

• A koi joins the spider, the manta ray and the trilobite. It swims through the air, feeds along the bottom and reacts to your cursor.
• New idle moves: the spider waves its palps and sways, the trilobite flexes its shell and shimmies, the manta curls its wingtips, hovers and drifts belly-up, and the koi gulps, gapes and hangs in place sculling its fins.
• The creatures now keep out of each other's way instead of passing through one another.
• The creatures doze off when your cursor has been idle for a while.
• Settings: pick the colours of each creature's parts, with a Reset for each creature. Reset to defaults clears them too.
• Settings: choose how often the creatures do an extra idle move, and after how many idle minutes they fall asleep.

v1.0.0 — 2026-09-30

• First public release of Talus for Windows 10 and 11.
• Three desktop creatures live along the bottom of your screen: a spider, a manta ray and a trilobite.
• The trilobite crawls on eighteen legs that ripple in a wave down each side.
• The spider and the trilobite never walk into each other: they stop, look, and the spider usually hops over.
• The manta sometimes picks up the spider and carries it across the screen.
• A Settings window (from the tray icon) picks the monitor, which creatures appear, how often they meet, and whether Talus starts with Windows.
• Installs per user with no administrator prompt; uninstall from Windows Settings.