Habitica – Gamify Your Tasks

Habitica is a gamified habit tracking app that allows you to improve the habits you have, keep track of tasks you want to complete every day, and manage your todos. There are tons of habit management apps like Streaks and task managers like Todoist, but Habitica is one with a difference. To motivate you to complete the tasks you need to, and keep your habit and daily streaks going (more on this later). When you mark off a task, daily, or habit, you gain experience points as well as money you can use to buy equipment to level up your character. You can also get items that you can use to make pets, mounts, and a whole lot more.

It’s important to have your habit tracker and task manager on all your devices, so you’ll be glad to know that Habitica has a native iOS and Android mobile app, as well as a great web app so you’ll be able to use Habitica on any device you are on. Way to many great apps are spoilt by the fact that they are only available on a certain operating system, and you can’t access them on a different OS1. Luckily, Habitica isn’t one of them.

Tracking

The tasks page on the website
The tasks page on the website

There are three things you can track with Habitica – habits, dailies, and todos.

Habits

Habits are things you want to improve every day. You can set habits to have a positive effect, negative effect or both. For example, a negative habit would be eating junk food, so that habit would only have a negative counter. Habitica works by adding XP and Gold when you add a positive count to the habit, and it takes away health when you add a negative count2. There are also a few more advanced features such as selecting dates that you want the habits to be active, and how you want streaks to show on the habits.

Dailies

Things that you want to complete every day are called dailies. I have my morning routine in the dailies column. You also earn XP and Gold from completing dailies, however if you don’t tick one off one day you will lose health.

Todos

Finally, you can use Habitica as a task manager. I personally don’t do this as I use Todoist to manage my tasks, but Habitica seems like a cool option too. Completing todo adds XP and Gold, whilst if a todo is overdue and you don’t complete it you lose health.

The Streak System

Habitica takes into account how often you complete a task, and these are called streaks. When you have a low streak for a certain habit or daily, you earn more XP and Gold when you complete it. Likewise, you lose more health if you don’t complete it. When you have a high streak, you lose little health if you don’t complete the daily, and you don’t get as much gold or XP for completing a task that you have a high streak on.

When you have a high streak on a task, it shows up as blue. When you have a low streak on a task, it is red. This lets you really easily identify what tasks you need to work on.

Gameplay

There are many aspects of Habitica in the game sense. These all revolve around you completing your habits, dailies and todos to get gold and XP.

XP

As mentioned many times above, completing things in Habitica will lead to the gain of XP. XP leads to your character levelling up, and this unlocks the ability for your character to have pets and mounts, as well as mana (more on this later). Levelling up also increases your character attributes. At level 10, you can choose which class you want your character to be, such as rouge, warrior and more, which affect the stats of your character, how much XP and Gold you earn from a task, and have group effects.

Gold

Gold allows you to buy equipment for your character, such as armour and weapons. These increase your stats, which in turn allow you to get more gold and XP from tasks.

Gems

The market, where you can spend gems on rare items
The market, where you can spend gems on rare items

Gems are the premium currency of Habitica. By no way do you have to pay to use the app – it has no ads, and you can use it perfectly without every paying. However, if you want to support the developers you can buy gems. Special items can be purchased with gems, as well as backgrounds, pets, hatching potions and more. Gems can also be spent at the Market to buy hard-to-find eggs and hatching potions.

HP

HP is the amount of health your character has. You lose HP from not completing dailies or from overdue tasks, and also from negative habits. You regain HP from levelling up, and you can also purchase a healing potion with gold. If you lose all your HP, your character will faint and you will lose one piece of equipment you have. You’ll also lose all your gold, as well as a level.

Mana

When you hit level 10, you unlock mana. Mana allows you to use special abilities, and you can get it by completing tasks. The abilities that mana unlocks is different for every class, however for the Rouge (the class I choose), you can backstab tasks to get money and experience from them without completing them, as well as buff your party members. There are also a few different abilities for the Rouge. Note that the abilities for different classes will be different, as each class has unique abilities.

Rewards

With your gold, you can purchase weapons, potions and armour. These improve your stats, and potions allow you to heal yourself. You can also create custom awards, such as playing a game, taking a break, or watching a television show. You can fill in the price and name of a custom reward to suit your needs.

Equipment

The equipment screen
The equipment screen

Equipment can be viewed all on one screen, where you can see equipment sorted by class or by group. If you sort by class, you’ll see all the equipment you have gotten sorted by the class it gives the class multiplayer to (read about this in the classes section). You can also sort it by type, where it shows you what sort of equipment can be equipped where on your character.

Multiplayer

Guilds seen in the Social section
Guilds seen in the Social section

Habitica has a very in-depth multiplayer. I won’t go into it much, but I’ll need to explain some aspects of it because you’ll need to understand them in order to understand some of the information in this post.

Firstly, you can join Guilds in Habitica. These are basically chat rooms you can join where people can talk about a related topic. There are also guild quests and challenges you can do (I’ll go into quests and challenges in a bit).

Challenges are large competitions you can join. Challenges set you certain tasks, habits and dailies to complete, and if you do, you have a chance of winning the prize of that competition, which is often gems. Gems can be used to purchase premium items, as you have to pay to get gems.

Challenges
Challenges

Then, you can have a party. A party is like a smaller guild that consists of you and your friends. In your party, you can start quests to go fight bosses and search for items, and you get rewards from these quests such as Gold, XP and Items. What happens in a quest depends on how your party did in that day – if lots of people didn’t do dailies or did bad habits, you’ll do badly, but if everyone completed their dailies and did well with their habits you’ll do well.

Party as seen on Android
Party as seen on Android

This is a very dulled down explanation of the multiplayer in Habitica, but the multiplayer aspect is certainly one of the best features of the app.

Character Attributes (stats)

There are four character attributes in Habitica. Strength, constitution, perception, and intelligence. These four stats can be increased in certain ways, such as using equipment that boosts a stat. If that equipment matches your class, you get a multiplier so the effect of the equipment is enhanced. Levelling up also increases your character attributes by one point.

The Strength attribute affects critical hits and damage you do. Strength comes in handy whilst fighting bosses, as you will do more damage to them. To increase your strength stat, you can allocate resource points towards it, get weapons and armour that boost your strength stat, and choose your class to be a warrior.

Constitution reduces the amount of HP lost from bad habits or missed dailies. This is a handy attribute to have as you won’t lose as much health if you don’t complete your dailies, so you want to work on this if you are still building up your habits.

Perception is an attribute that increases the rate of earning drops and gold for each task. This is a handy attribute to improve as it means you get gold quicker, so you can upgrade equipment quickly and improve your character at a higher rate.

Intelligence is the final character attribute, and it increases the amount of experience you earn. If you want to level up quickly, you should improve this attribute.

Classes

When you hit level 10, there are four classes you can choose from. Classes have specific attribute bonuses, skills and equipment.

The default class is the warrior. You are this class until you hit level 10 and you can choose your own. The warrior deals a lot of damage to bosses, and has a higher critical hit rate. They can buff party members strength and constitution, and they are handy in boss battles. If you are motivated by random rewards, the warrior may also be for you.

The second class you can choose from is the Mage. The Mage gains experience quickly, and also gains mana very quickly. The Mage can buff party members intelligence and also restore their mana. If you want to freeze streaks, you can also do this with the Mage. The Mage is handy in boss battles, and if you want to level your player up quickly.

The Healer has high defence against damage, and can themselves and make their tasks less red and damaging. They can buff the party’s constitution and restore other party members health. They level up quickly, and are handy in parties because they can heal, and are good for players with many negative dailies or habits.

Finally, the Rouge. This is the class I choose to be, and the Rouge finds a lot of gold, so you can buy equipment quickly and easily. The Rogue also has a high critical hit rate, and can buff characters perception and avoid damage from uncompleted dailies. The Rouge is useful in collection quests, and is also handy if you want to upgrade equipment quickly, level up quickly and also find lots of items.

Pets and mounts

Pets seen on the iOS app
Pets seen on the iOS app

As you complete tasks, sometimes you’ll find random items. These can sometimes be eggs. You’ll also sometimes get hatching potions. Using these, you can hatch pets, and you can feed these pets with food you’ll sometimes find randomly. You can set your pet to accompany you in your profile picture, and when you keep feeding your pet, it will turn into a mount that you can ride.

Pets are a really cool feature of Habitica, as they add a little bit of flair and personalisation to the app.

Resource Points

You occasionally earn resource points once you hit level 10, and these can be put towards improving certain attributes to your character. You can also automatically allocate these resource points evenly, improve the most important attributes for your class, or manually assign them.


Habitica is a great app as it motivates you to complete your tasks, dailies and habits. It’s also a fun way to improve habits, and the party feature means that your friends will be motivated to complete tasks too. Habitica does require an internet connection to use it, and this means that I would like to see offline availability. Other than that, it’s an awesome app.

Habitica is free, and can be found on the website, on the App Store, and on the Google Play Store.

Thanks for reading!

  1. For example apps like Things 3, Ulysses and more have this problem. You can only get them for macOS and iOS, and you can’t use them on Windows or Android.
  2. When you lose all your health, you drop a piece of your equipment. This means you lose some stats, and you have to work hard to get enough gold to buy the piece of equipment again.
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