New Laptop, Who Dis?

 So I've recently moved and started a new job (and have already managed to convince one of my new coworkers to try Creatures), but because of reasons I find myself in need of a more portable source of entertainment than my beefed-up gaming desktop. And I have a crappy laptop on hand. Solution? Migrate my Creatures setups to the laptop. The games are over 20 years old, so even the lowest-end of modern laptops can handle them easily.

So I packed everything up, installed Creatures 1 and 3 on the laptop, ran through my world setup, and moved everybody over. Granted, there was one small hiccup - while creatures can be exported, eggs cannot, and my inventory in Eden had 19 eggs in it, so I had to hatch them all and export them on the spot. They're now tucked in a folder waiting for generation 2's turn in the world, when I'll analyze them (and any other eggs laid between now and then) and select which ones to bring into the world. I suppose I'll put the rest up for download because I've bred more than I can handle in the world.

But for now, I have generation 1. And one of the benefits of having Creatures on my laptop is I can play during lunch break at work!

Things were more-or-less calm for most of the hour, with creatures spreading out across the newly revamped Eden, although tragedy did strike. I hadn't set up the biochem kit, and x-ray had crashed, so I once again didn't have a full view of what was going on, when Lakeivy fell ill with Antigen 4 and Fever Toxin. Sadly, he didn't make it. I shut the game down briefly so I could fix the catalogue files and get my x-ray up and running again.

Mistreed also caught a sickness while she was hanging out in the Jungle, but between my swift intervention and her tough Hardman immune system, she pulled through. The same went for Wolfflower, though she needed more assistance. They got a heaping helping of Antigens 5 and 6 respectively.

Wolfflower, however, had additional problems. Though she didn't seem to be hungry, she had low glycogen levels, filling the Ark with sad music. I spent the remainder of my lunch break trying to talk her into eating, and ultimately had to put up the white flag until next time.

Pax Albiana

Has it really been nearly two years since I played Creatures 1? Strange how so much time can pass, and yet when I return, it feels like it's been maybe a week. Anyway, when I started the game, pretty much everyone was clustered on the island, so I decided to move some Norns around. Some were more reluctant to leave than others; Cassius continually tried to wrest control of the mover from me to return to the island, but I eventually got him over to the beehives. Eudocia, Gaius, and Augustus were boated over to the Grendel Tree without complaint, and Aurelia rode over to the lighthouse without any fuss either. Eventually only Oriana remained on the island.

Eudocia, who has been quite good about taking care of herself - sleeping and eating on her own - laid an egg in the Temple, surrounded by a gaggle of Norns (and the Grendel), a few of whom made a couple attempts to go down to the deathcap, which I swiftly intervened in.

Amazing Technicolor Sharks

When you start a new C3 world, your aquarium has a variety of colorful rainbow sharklings, but as time goes on they tend to become... not very rainbow. That does make sense, because offspring will have colors between those of their parents, so over the generations the colors will tend to go toward the middle of the color wheel. But maybe with a little tweaking, this could be fixed!

I do love that I can open C3/DS cos scripts and get the initial injection code, rather than having to backwards engineer it as in C1 and C2. Given how complicated many of the objects in C3/DS are, this sort of modification may well have been impossible without this small change in code accessibility! Here's the initial shark script - with a lot of unnecessary empty lines removed. Actually, this whole script seems to contain a lot of unnecessary stuff, such as a reps loop that runs once, or object variables that are set but never referenced. It feels very much like code that was never cleaned up after they got it functional.

Medical Monitor is the Best

I decided to finally spend some time in my recently-restarted C3/DS world, and boy did the Medical Monitor make a difference. Now able to stamp out diseases before they permanently harmed my creatures, I could focus on other things, like my fool's errand of trying to get the Grendels and Hardman Norn to get along. 

They still require a lot of oversight, but another feature of the Medical Monitor means I don't have to constantly hover, at the very least. In addition to toxins and diseases, it also alerts me to creatures in pain, allowing me to swoop in and break up fights. No longer can they get away with beating each other as long as I'm not looking! The Hand Knows All!

Generation 2 Chaos

I've been somewhat avoiding getting back into Creatures, especially the COBbling side, while I settled into a new job. I'm now feeling settled enough to dip my toes back in once in a while. I figured I'd play Creatures 2 a bit to get back into it, so I finished up teaching the last few second generation Norns. Magni was in the swamp, and Bjorn was by the calendar tree. The Grendel died with heavy metals poisoning, so I took pity on the new one and led it up out of the volcano in between teaching Norns.