A whole new world

[Originally written August 15 2020]

After much preparation, I had a brand new C3/DS world set up. I had modified the bootstrap so that the game would use the birth and death music from C3 rather than DS. I’d set up ecosystem stabilizers. I’d intercepted Grendel and Ettin eggs and put them in water to keep them suspended. I’d planted tubas and bramboo (selecting different colors for different locations while I was at it). I’d stocked my inventory with lemon cookies and a few potions. And there were no pappuses this time. 

All that was left was to migrate the Creatures – and decide what to do with the Ettins.

Ultimately I decided to hatch the Ettin eggs. I still don’t have any particular interest in them, but for reasons I can’t articulate, I just feel they should be there. Also, hatching them would verify that the bootstrap edit worked and did not break the game.

With Huginn and Muninn hatched, taught to speak, and dropped off in the Desert, it was time to import my Creatures. There were the three named Norns (Helena, Horatio, and Lorenzo), Caliban, and three unnamed baby Norns, of course… but there were also a few Grendels who didn’t get their fair shot in the previous world – three males and two females. I figured instead of hatching the Grendel eggs in this world, I’d work through this queue first, starting with the two females. Caliban would be the first male reintroduced, after the females had their go.

Importing Helena gave me a bit of a surprise, as I’d forgotten she was pregnant when I exported her. She immediately rang in the new world with its first Norn egg, which I promptly stashed in my inventory for the time being. I then imported Horatio and Lorenzo, who immediately began sneezing. I took them straight to the Workshop to be isolated and doused in Pink Mist, while I left Helena in the Meso so I could do the same to her and everything around her with the hoverdoc. I was not about to deal with a repeat of the Plague from Verona.

Then I brought in the three babies, who had been exported immediately after hatching. I named each one according to the new naming scheme, then brought Tamora and Rosalind into the world. Just when I was about to hatch the first egg, I got a notification – Helena was expecting twins. Good lord, Norn, slow down! You don’t need to outbreed the Grendels this time! With this knowledge I decided that maybe the fourth egg should stay in the inventory for now.

Only, it turned out she only had one egg. The notifications were acting funky, which I figured out was due to having a backup copy of the .cos I’d modified still in the folder. Hopefully, removing it will fix the issue in the same world. Otherwise I’ll just have to export everyone and migrate to a new world again.

But for the time being, I had genetic analysis to do! First I checked Tamora and Rosalind against the gentle Grendel genome and the Banshee Grendel genome, to see if there was anything I’d missed in my initial examinations. And indeed there was. Because I had previously compared the Grendels to their actual parents rather than the base genomes, any inherited mutations slipped past. 

Notably, Tamora turned out to have the same receptor mutation that leads to immortality. I would need to manually force-age her when it came time. She also had a strange pose gene alteration for one of the poses when hitting the ground after falling, which changed the X in the “what direction am I facing” slot into a Y. I have absolutely no idea what that means. There were a couple more pose mutations but they just changed the angle of the body in a couple inconsequential animations so should not be a problem. Rosalind, on the other hand, had nothing to report.

Before starting on the new children, I took a good look at Lorenzo, who had never had a proper genome analysis done. Right off the bat he had something interesting to see!

Receptor

Gene 0017: Drive 16

Organ: “Creature”, Tissue: “Drive levels”, Locus: “UP”. Chemical: “Up drive”.
Analogue: Output = 0 + ((Signal - 0) * 1). 

Organ: “Creature”, Tissue: “Drive levels”, Locus: “UP”. Chemical: “Disappointment”.
Analogue: Output = 0 + ((Signal - 0) * 1).

I’m not sure whether the “up drive” is the drive that says “I’m too high up” or “I need to go up” but either way, it looks like this drive will actually be linked not to the drive chemical but to disappointment. The result should, in theory, be a Norn that feels a need to extract himself from the location when he’s disappointed. Although it will likely have no noticeable effect in practice, I can’t help but have the mental image of a hilariously disapproving Norn staring judgementally at the others as he attempts to ride the elevator away from their antics.

Reaction

Gene 0234: Anger creation

1 Anger + 1 Adrenaline = 2 Anger + 1 Adrenaline.
Rate: 41 (Half-life: 2.9 seconds)

1 Anger + 1 Dehydrogenase = 2 Anger + 1 Adrenaline.
Rate: 41 (Half-life: 2.9 seconds)

Now this is a neat one! Normally, if a creature is angry and has Adrenaline in his system, he’ll get even angrier. In Lorenzo, it’s not Adrenaline that causes this reaction but Dehydrogenase – a chemical that counters Alcohol. After a few minutes watching a Norn in my test world, I’ve concluded that this chemical is rarely, if ever, actually encountered naturally, which means that this mutation has effectively just silenced this reaction. Even if he does get some Dehydrogenase in his system, because only one side of the reaction mutated, it would quickly be converted into Adrenaline, which wouldn’t kick off the anger-producing reaction anymore.

In other words, Lorenzo isn’t mad, he’s just disappointed.

He also had a half-life mutation, which made my heart sink. Every chemical’s half-life is stored in one gene, so there’s no telling which one mutated without just scrolling through all of them. Thankfully, I only had to go down to Air to find it – it’s a couple seconds shorter, but that shouldn’t matter as he hopefully won’t be holding his breath.

Pose

Gene 0572: tired appr

"Tired 2": ?00 322 000 01 01 01X

"Tired 2": ?00 332 000 01 01 01X

He also has a pose mutation that affects walking, specifically when tired, which initially worried me, but it turns out this may actually be helpful, as it gives him a longer stride and allows him to move a little farther.

Another, more worrying pose gene change was that one of his Downhill poses mutated – not the pose string itself but the pose ID: Downhill 1 became Downhill 2, leaving him with two Downhill 2s and no Downhill 1. I’m not sure how this will affect him.

Boy, Lorenzo was enough of a case study in and of himself!