Bitfold 1.1: Paper Harbor and Pockling make twelve Bitfold Originals

Bitfold 1.1 went live on the App Store on 6 November 2026, a day after 1.0. It’s the first update to Bitfold, our free retro game console app for iPhone and iPad, made for iPhone Duo, and it adds two Bitfold Originals. Paper Harbor is a daily puzzle: a new harbor opens at midnight, the same for everyone, and you sail paper boats to their piers with gusts of wind. Pockling is a virtual pet cartridge that you hatch from an egg and look after in real time. That makes twelve Originals, and the update also brings eight smaller changes to the shelf, to importing games and to save states.

Neither new game plays in the browser. To try the console first, Sprout’s Quest, Prism Drop and Noodle run free at bitfold.9io.ai/play for five minutes a day. The Pockling inside Bitfold is a different build from our separate Pockling app, which is made for touch and also free on the App Store.

This post covers both games, how Bitfold sets their clocks without going online, how the cartridge differs from the app, all twelve Originals and how to get the update. Our launch post covers Bitfold itself.

What’s new in Bitfold 1.1

The two new cartridges sit at the end of the shelf, after the ten from 1.0. Paper Harbor is 64 KB. Pockling, at 512 KB, is four times the size of the largest of the first ten, and about 200 KB of it is animation frames for six breeds at three ages. Both have a clock inside, which none of the first ten needed.

The rest of the update, from its What’s New:

• Delete an imported game from its long-press menu on the shelf. Bitfold asks first, and the game’s battery save and save states go with it.
• The shelf’s text follows your Larger Text setting.
• Games you tap in Bitfold’s folder in the Files app open straight away.
• A file in that folder that can’t be imported now says so.
• Zips with hidden files in them, like ones made on a Mac, import the right game.
• Files that aren’t games stay off the shelf.
• The Continue card’s last-played line no longer gets cut off.
• A damaged save state no longer changes the game you’re playing.

How Paper Harbor works

Each harbor is a grid of 8 × 7 cells with two to four paper boats and a pier for each. Each boat and its pier share a colour and a symbol, a heart, a sun, a moon or a leaf, so you can pair them on a monochrome screen or without colour vision.

Each press of the D-pad is a gust of wind. Every boat that isn’t moored sails that way until the next cell is the shore, a rock or another boat. Boats move front first, so a boat behind stops right behind the one ahead. A boat that reaches its own pier moors there, and later gusts leave it alone. Other boats sail over a free pier but bump into a moored one. Reeds stop a boat, and the next gust takes it out. A gust that moves nothing doesn’t count.

B undoes the last gust, but the gust still counts, as does every gust before a restart, so your result is how many it took. The attempt is saved after every gust, and three short lessons run by themselves the first time you play.

Par, stars and weekday difficulty

Par is the true minimum. A breadth-first solver played every puzzle before it went into the cartridge. The generator kept a puzzle only if its par fell in the day’s range, with few shortest solutions and no more than two first gusts that lead to par.

Docking in par gusts or fewer earns three stars and the word Perfect. Two stars, Shipshape, allow par plus 3 gusts, or par plus half of par if that’s more, and docking at all earns one, Safe harbor. With par 4, two stars allow up to 7 gusts, and with par 12, up to 18.

Monday’s harbor is the calmest and Sunday’s the stormiest. The table comes from the generator’s settings and the 728 puzzles on the cartridge, 104 for each day of the week.

A trap is a position from which the boats can no longer all dock, and every harbor from Tuesday to Sunday has at least one, which is where undo comes in. A boat that needs a stopper can only reach its pier by stopping against another boat. On Sundays, just one first gust leads to par.

Each puzzle is 20 bytes, so all 728 fit in one 16 KB ROM bank. Each weekday’s 104 puzzles last two years of weeks, then come back mirrored with the boats’ colours changed round, so a harbor repeats exactly only after eight years.

The result card, the streak and the stamp book

When the last boat docks, the result card shows the harbor’s number and date, your gusts against par, the stars and one square per gust. A square is filled for a gust that docked a boat and crossed out for one you undid, and each restart starts a new row. The streak, your time and a countdown to the next harbor sit below. The harbor itself never appears, so you can share the card without spoiling it, from Bitfold’s menu with Photo, then Share. Harbor No. 1 was Thursday 1 January 2026, so 6 November, the day 1.1 went live, was No. 310.

The stamp book is a calendar. A harbor docked on its own day gets a gold, silver or bronze seal by stars, one docked later a hollow seal and a missed one a dot. Every harbor since 1 January 2026 can be sailed from the book, but only harbors docked on their own day keep the streak going. One you start late in the evening still counts for its day until the end of the next.

Pockling, the virtual pet cartridge

You pick one of six patterned eggs, one for each breed, watch it hatch and give your Pockling a name of up to six letters. It’s a round fluffball that’s nearly all head, with huge glossy eyes set low and wide.

Its room follows the time of day, and at night the window goes dark with stars and the lamp is lit. You pick a kind of care there with the D-pad and press A.

• Feed it fish, carrot, cookie, honey, pepper or berries from your walks. Its favourite fills it most, with a burst of hearts, and the one it can’t stand gets a yuck.
• Love it with A, and hearts float up. B is a little boop, and it hops.
• Wash it by scrubbing with the D-pad until it’s squeaky clean.
• Sleep comes at bedtime. Put to bed from 6 pm, or before 7 am, it wakes itself at seven, and by day it naps for an hour.
• Play Snack Catch, 40 seconds of falling snacks. Honey is worth three and a prickly burr costs three seconds.
• Walk a short path in the park, one of three layouts, sniffing flowers and picking berries for the pantry.

Why a long absence never gets cruel

A Pockling’s five needs fall with real time, whether Bitfold is open or not. Out of 100, Tummy drops about 60 points a day, Clean 35, Energy and Fun 50 each and Love 30. Asleep, they fall far more slowly, and Energy fills back up. Below 25 on any need it looks sad, and a thought bubble says what it wants.

The cartridge’s design notes set one rule for time away, that a long absence never gets cruel. Only the first day and a half counts, and no need falls below 15 for Tummy and Fun or 20 for the rest, so a week away costs no more than 36 hours would. Come back after more than 30 hours and it tells you it missed you. It can’t die or run away.

Feeding, petting, washing, bedtime, Snack Catch and walks each count as a kind of care. Any two different kinds on the same date make a day of care, and the days don’t have to be in a row. After 3 days of care your Pockling is a kid, and after 7 it’s grown, bigger, with sparkles and a fanfare.

Each day’s first visit stamps a paw print in the stamp book and carries the streak on, and a day of care turns the paw into a heart. An egg marks the day it hatched and a star each day it grew up. The pet card, from the Start menu, shows its portrait, name, breed, age, love level, streak and days of care, plus its favourite food once you’ve found it, ready for Bitfold’s Photo and Share.

How the cartridges keep real time

Paper Harbor and Pockling are MBC3 cartridges, whose mapper chip has a battery-backed real-time clock. It counts seconds, minutes, hours and days, and the day counter has 9 bits, so it wraps after 512 days.¹ Both games count days from Thursday 1 January 2026.

Bitfold picks these two out by their cartridge header. The header holds a two-letter publisher code, the licensee code, which applies when the older one-byte code is 0x33.² Ours is BF. A cartridge with a clock and that code gets its clock set to the device’s local date and time whenever the game, its battery save or a save state loads, across time zones and daylight saving. One of Bitfold’s tests writes a save state on 2 November 2026, loads it on 1 January 2027 and checks that the clock reads the new date. Other cartridges with a clock keep their own time.

The games don’t trust the 9-bit counter alone. Each reads the full date in a window around the last day it saw, from 128 days before it to 383 days after, so a clock that wraps or is put back doesn’t scramble the calendar. A cartridge that has never seen a date places it in the 512 days from a month before its build, so both games need a rebuild at least once a year.

In Bitfold, each game asks you to confirm the date the first time. On original hardware or in another emulator, you set it once and the cartridge’s own clock keeps time. Nothing goes online either way, and Bitfold itself never connects to the internet.

Pockling in Bitfold and the Pockling app

The Pockling app, listed as Pockling: Cute Virtual Pet, is a different build made for touch. You stroke it, drag snacks to its mouth and walk it on a lead with your finger. It’s free on the App Store and in the browser, with no time limit, and it had its own 1.1 on 6 November, with more sounds. Both have the same six kinds and a pet that never dies, and most of the numbers differ.

Five of the six breeds also have a different favourite or least favourite food on the cartridge. Only the Bunling loves carrot and can’t stand fish in both.

All twelve Bitfold Originals

We wrote all twelve for Bitfold, with their own code, art, music and characters, as real cartridge images that also run on original handheld hardware. Our post on making 8-bit games with GBDK-2020 covers how we build them. They’re listed here in shelf order.

Bitfold is also a retro game emulator for iPhone and iPad, so it plays backups of cartridges you own. It includes and downloads no commercial games.

How to get the Bitfold update

Bitfold is free on the App Store for iPhone and iPad with iOS 17 or later, and new downloads get 1.1. With automatic updates on, an installed 1.0 updates itself. To update by hand, open the App Store, tap your photo or the My Account button at the top, tap App Updates and tap Update next to Bitfold.³ The two new cartridges then sit at the end of the shelf.

A first day with them:

• Open Paper Harbor, confirm the date and let the three lessons run.
• Look at the whole harbor before each gust. Undo gets you out of a trap, but the gust still counts.
• Share the result card with Photo, then Share, in Bitfold’s menu.
• Dock each harbor on its own day to keep the streak, and sail missed ones from the stamp book.
• In Pockling, pick the egg of the breed you want and give it two different kinds of care each day you play. Three such days make a kid and seven a grown Pockling.

For more on the new games, read how Paper Harbor works and how to hit par and the guide to all twelve Bitfold Originals. The touch version of Pockling has its own launch post.

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