What it does
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Lives on top of everything, gets in the way of nothing
The cows walk along the bottom edge of your screen, above every window. The overlay never takes focus, never appears in Alt-Tab or the taskbar, and every click passes straight through to whatever is underneath. It hides itself during fullscreen games and presentations.
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Each cow is a friend
Everyone who runs Cowpanion in the same pasture gets a cow on everyone else's screen. When a friend opens the app their cow walks in from the edge; when they close it, their cow trots off. Your own cow has a small marker so you can spot it.
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moo
Say something small
Press Ctrl+Alt+C, type a short line, press Enter. It shows up as a speech bubble over your cow on every screen in the pasture for a few seconds, then fades. There is no chat log to scroll back through. That's the point.
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Quiet by default
Completely silent. Low CPU, since cows are slow. If the server is down or you are offline, the herd keeps grazing locally with a few filler cows. Nothing ever waits on the network.
How to install
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Download and run the installer
Cowpanion-win-Setup.exe installs a self-contained build for Windows 10/11 on x64 into
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Cowpanionand adds a Start menu entry. No admin rights and nothing else to install: the .NET runtime is bundled, which is why it is about 80 MB. -
Pick a name
On first run it asks for a display name (your Windows user name is prefilled, up to 16 characters). Then the cows arrive. Everything else lives in the tray icon: Settings… (or double-click the icon), chat history, focus mode.
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Optional: start with Windows
Right-click the tray icon and tick Start with Windows. Untick it to remove the entry again.
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Updates
Cowpanion checks for a new version shortly after it starts and once a day, downloads it in the background and installs it the next time it starts (or right away with Restart to update in the tray). You can check by hand from the tray, or turn automatic checks off in Settings. Uninstall from Windows Settings → Apps.
Prefer no installer? Cowpanion-win-Portable.zip runs from any folder and updates itself the same way. On the old
Cowpanion-win-x64.zip? That one cannot update itself; install once with the installer above.
Hotkeys
| Ctrl+Alt+C | Chat: type a line, Enter sends, Esc cancels |
|---|---|
| Ctrl+Alt+H | Send a heart from your cow, without opening the chat |
| Ctrl+Alt+J | Make your cow jump on everyone’s screen |
| Ctrl+Alt+M | Mute or unmute speech bubbles, emotes and reactions |
| Ctrl+Alt+F | Focus mode: release every hotkey except quit and this one |
| Ctrl+Alt+Shift+K | Quit immediately, from anywhere |
These are the defaults. Change any of them in tray → Settings… → Hotkeys.
Play with friends
Pastures
A pasture is the room your herd lives in. Everyone starts in the shared one, called commons. For a private herd, agree on a code with your friends (lowercase letters, digits and dashes, up to 32 characters) and set "pasture" in %APPDATA%\Cowpanion\config.json. The app picks the change up on its own; no restart needed.
A pasture code is a shared secret, not a login. Anyone who knows it can join.
Talking
Ctrl+Alt+C opens a small input next to your cow. Bubbles hold about two short lines, stay up for six seconds and queue politely if someone is chatty. If it gets to be too much, Ctrl+Alt+M mutes bubbles until you press it again.
What’s new: type /moo, /jump or /spin and your cow does it on everyone’s screen. Type just an emoji (up to three), or /heart, /lol, /wave, /party, and it floats up from your cow instead of a bubble. Ctrl+Alt+H sends a heart from anywhere, and Ctrl+Alt+J makes your cow jump. Rest the cursor on a cow to see whose it is; flick the mouse past the herd and they scatter.
Seven colours
Pick yours from the tray menu under Cow colour. Friends see the colour you chose.
Privacy
This is a toy, so it should not know anything about you. Concretely:
- No accounts, no sign-up, no email. You pick a display name and that is it.
- No message history. Chat is relayed live and never written to disk, on your machine or on the server.
- No telemetry, no crash reports, no update checks, no analytics, no third-party services. The app talks to exactly one server and sends only what the protocol needs: a random client id, your pasture code, your display name, your cow colour, a heartbeat, and the messages you type.
- The server's access logs contain IP addresses and are deleted after at most 7 days.
- Turn multiplayer off in the tray menu and the app makes no network connections at all.
The full statement ships next to the exe as PRIVACY.md. It is reproduced here. This website itself is static files with no scripts, fonts or images loaded from anywhere else.