Bongo Cat Emotes: How to Use Emojis and Emote Chests

To use emotes in Bongo Cat, hover over your own cat for a moment and pick an emoji from the emote wheel. Emojis drop from a separate emote chest that was announced to show up once you are in a multiplayer lobby, and emotes returned to single-player on July 12, 2026. Four Emoter achievements count 10 to 10,000 uses.

How do you use emotes in Bongo Cat?

The developer has given one instruction, in the Emojis!!! post of October 1, 2025: "You can find your emojis in the bottom of your cosmetics tab! And you can use them by hovering a bit over your Bongo Cat in a multiplayer lobby." Later patch notes call the picker the emote wheel. No post walks through the wheel button by button, and no post names a keyboard shortcut for emotes, so a hotkey is not confirmed.

That update also handed out a starter set: "When you update the game, you will receive 4 emojis as a starter pack", with a warning that the grant can take up to 2 minutes. The interface has been reworked since then, in June and September 2026, and no announcement restates where emojis sit in the inventory after those changes; if the bottom of the cosmetics tab is empty, look for the emote category in the collection, which the October 6, 2025 notes added.

Emotes were tied to lobbies at launch. The Pat Your Friends update of July 12, 2026 then "Brought back emotes to singleplayer". When they had stopped working alone is not stated in any announcement. Setting up a lobby is covered in the multiplayer guide.

The developer writes "emojis" and "emotes" for the same items. Steam's achievement text says emojis, the collection category is called emotes, and the chest is an emoji chest in some posts and an emote chest in others.

When does the emote chest appear?

The emote chest followed a reversal. On October 1, 2025 emojis were added to the normal item pool, so regular chests could drop them. One day later the developer posted Emojis 2.0, and a sorry. In it the developer apologised, pulled emojis out of that pool and announced a second chest that "will ONLY contain emotes that will show up once you are in a multiplayer lobby". It shipped on October 6, 2025 in Emote 2.0 and bug fixes: "Adds a second chest, just for emojis".

So the announced condition is being in a multiplayer lobby. Three things about the chest are not in any announcement we read on October 9, 2026, and are not confirmed:

• Whether the emote chest also appears when you play alone, after emotes came back to single-player.
• How long its timer is and how many taps your own emote chest costs. The one price we found stated is for a friend's chest: opening it "costs you 1000 clicks, for your friend it's free", and both players must update the game.
• The odds inside it. The store page prints drop chances for the item pool, shown in the odds table on hats and skins, without saying whether they apply to the emote chest.

Two other sources of emotes are confirmed. The Paw Pass includes themed emotes and "cosmetic/emote chests with up to legendary rarity", according to the September 1, 2026 post. And the UI THEMES are here! post of October 1, 2026 says of its three UI themes: "Later this month, they will be added to drop in the emote chest". As of October 9, 2026 no follow-up announcement says that has happened.

What changed for emotes in each update?

Thirteen of the 63 developer announcements in the game's Steam news feed contain the word emote or emoji (full-text search on October 9, 2026). Dates are UTC posting dates.

Why are your emotes not working?

No announcement has a troubleshooting list for emotes, so this section only pairs symptoms with switches and fixes the developer has published.

1. Update the game. Several of the posts above end with a reminder to update, and the October 1, 2025 post points to the "update and restart" button in the settings.
2. Check that emotes are not switched off. There are several places, listed in the table below.
3. Check whether other players are hidden. Since October 6, 2025 emotes do not spawn if players are hidden.
4. If the wheel does not open or keeps resetting, note that both problems were patched, on October 14, 2025 and August 10, 2026, which again points back to step 1.
5. If you just installed the emoji update and own no emojis, wait: the starter pack was said to take up to 2 minutes.

If the emote chest gives a Steam Error popup when you open it, the checks for that popup are on the Steam Error and fixes page. Whether gaming mode blocks the hover that opens the wheel is not stated in the announcements we read, so it is not confirmed.

What are the four Emoter achievements?

Steam's global achievements page shows three achievements named Emoter and one named Sparkly Emoter. Steam's achievement percentage API returns internal names for them, not the display names. We paired the two by threshold; both sources were read on October 9, 2026.

Steam writes thousands with a dot, so 1.000 is one thousand. The two sources disagreed by a tenth of a point on the 100 tier in the same minute, so we print both. By our division of the API figures, about 53% of players with the first tier also have the second (6.9 ÷ 13.0), and about 8% have reached Sparkly Emoter (1.0 ÷ 13.0).

What counts as one use is not confirmed. The Steam achievements page gives the requirement as "Use emojis" a number of times and no counting rule, and the 13 announcements that mention emotes do not say whether each emoji sent counts once, whether the emote speed slider changes the count, or whether uses in single-player count. We did not read the achievement descriptions inside the game. The other 24 achievements and their rates are on the achievements page.

Can you exchange or trade emojis?

Exchange, yes. The October 8, 2025 notes added "an emoji exchange (emojis will trade up to other emojis)", and six days later a patch fixed "the exchange mixing things up with emojis and non emojis", and the October 2 post had already said the drop pool for hats and skins would be split from the one for emojis. The announcements do not give the number of emojis one exchange consumes; the ten-for-one rule on the exchange and trading page comes from a demo update that predates emojis, and applying it to emojis is not confirmed.

Selling emojis on the Steam Community Market: the words market and sell have 0 matches in the thirteen posts, so that is not confirmed. Trading or gifting emojis between friends is not confirmed either, and we cannot rule a mention out: the August 10, 2026 notes fix a Multiplayer Popup setting "where players couldn’t be gifted when the setting was turned off", without saying what is gifted.

Which emote details are still open?

As of October 9, 2026 the official sources above do not answer these:

• How many emojis exist. The only count is "over 100" from October 1, 2025.
• The emote chest's timer, tap cost and odds.
• Whether the emote chest appears outside a lobby.
• Whether the three UI themes have been added to the emote chest.
• A hotkey for the emote wheel.
• What exactly the Emoter achievements count.

Sources

The mechanics and numbers in this guide come from the material below. Open the original pages to check them yourself.

1. S001 Emojis!!! store.steampowered.com Accessed 2026-10-09
2. S002 Emojis 2.0, and a sorry. store.steampowered.com Accessed 2026-10-09
3. S003 Emote 2.0 and bug fixes store.steampowered.com Accessed 2026-10-09
4. S004 Bongo Cat 🍂Autumn Event🍂 store.steampowered.com Accessed 2026-10-09
5. S005 Small fixes store.steampowered.com Accessed 2026-10-09
6. S006 Bongo Cat ❄Winter Event & Advent Calendar❄ store.steampowered.com Accessed 2026-10-09
7. S007 Private Lobbies, Cosmetic Preview and QoL Changes store.steampowered.com Accessed 2026-10-09
8. S008 Steam Typing Fest store.steampowered.com Accessed 2026-10-09
9. S009 Meowtiplayer Chat, DLC Release, Collection Bundle store.steampowered.com Accessed 2026-10-09
10. S010 Pat Your Friends store.steampowered.com Accessed 2026-10-09
11. S011 Multiplayer Layout Settings store.steampowered.com Accessed 2026-10-09
12. S012 New UI and monthly Skins, Hats and Emotes! store.steampowered.com Accessed 2026-10-09
13. S013 UI THEMES are here! store.steampowered.com Accessed 2026-10-09
14. S014 global achievements page steamcommunity.com Accessed 2026-10-09
15. S015 achievement percentage API api.steampowered.com Accessed 2026-10-09
16. S016 Steam news feed api.steampowered.com Accessed 2026-10-09
17. S017 store page store.steampowered.com Accessed 2026-10-09

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