Desperate times and desperate measures

 [Originally written September 27 2020]

I let my test world run in the VM for a while with all the COBs and a few extra creatures to populate it, to see if it broke, but all went well, so that was no good for debugging. Mystery unsolved, I was reluctant to return to Creatures 1, knowing it would be a frustrating battle with my computer, but return I did. I’ve provided the observation kit status for a state of the world briefing; Sidonia is in the world too, and probably around the same health range as everyone else, but not shown because you can’t resize the kit for some reason.

Gaius, Sidonia, and Flavia were hanging out on the island with Julia, making a nuisance of themselves as I attempted to coax her into eating something. I caught Lucius and Greg riding the lift down to the deathcap and promptly pulled them out again before they could touch it. Meanwhile, on the island, Julia had laid her egg, and I alternated between trying to convince her to eat a coconut and doing the same with Sidonia, who I’d wrangled into the underwater bubble.

The egg eventually hatched and was exported, as Julia’s life force continued to drop. You’ve been raised in an environment with non-buggy food items, why are you making this so difficult? Finally, I got her to eat something! I managed to herd the other Norns off the island so they’d leave her alone as I tried to repeat that success, as Julia’s life force was hovering just above 40. Alas, my efforts were in vain – the game crashed, setting me back about 10 minutes.

I tried to debug the issue with the Windows event log, which allowed me to identify the problem as a combination access violation and stack buffer overflow. Unfortunately, without access to the engine source code there’s not a lot I can do to debug these kinds of errors. It led me to suspect that perhaps Creatures 1 doesn’t actually free memory when it deletes an object, so just keeps eating more space when filled with COBs that continually die and respawn rather than recycling, but keeping an eye on the task manager memory chart didn’t shed any light there because it looks like the game just grabs a chunk of memory at the start and sits on it, so I can’t see what’s going on under the hood. Again, without the engine source there’s not a lot I can do – I can see what goes on in the individual object scripts, but what happens on a meta-level is a mystery to me.

Defeated, I launched the game again and assessed the damage. The egg had to hatch and be exported again, and Julia needed to be convinced to eat. That quickly got derailed though because this alternate timeline threw a new curveball at me. Lucius, hanging out by the ugly tomato, was sick, so I sent him up the lift into the… what even is that little dwelling with the clock in the tree? It’s not a treehouse, but it’s also not just a hollow. 

Well, whatever it is, the troublesome Banana Norn didn’t want to stay there alone, so he went right back down and picked up poor Quintus, who was immediately infected. And so it began. Had this entry been a video rather than a written log, the next fifteen or so minutes would have been sped up and set to yakety sax. It was like my Norns were conspiring to give me the hardest time possible, and I don’t mean just refusing to eat. Oh, no, the whole time I was bouncing between the two ends of the skybridge, playing tug-of-war with the lifts and shooing creatures this way and that. Even Greg got in on the chaos, and despite his brief trip up to the treehouse, he luckily wasn’t infected; that would have made my life so much harder since I can’t view him on the Observation Kit and need to jump back to the button by the incubator to select him.

And I wasn't just trying to keep the uninfected Norns from going up and the infected ones from going down (both occurrences the entire population seemed intent on making happen), but also to shoo curious creatures away from the deathcap, which they had all simultaneously developed an obsession with. Thankfully, nobody got a bite in! I had enough on my plate with the lift-juggling! 

Lucius gave me a real hard time even without his constantly pressing the lift call buttons; Quintus ate well and kept his life force high, but Lucius dwindled to about 13% life force and I just could not get him to eat – or obey at all for that matter. He kept lurking by the call button in the tree trunk, which I was worried was going to lead to him either going down into the crowds that had formed around the base, or fishing them up in the lift. I tried to get him to follow me away from it, but he started ignoring me, so in desperation I gave him a whack in the hopes it would get his attention, but it just made him afraid and he started to run away every time I called him. That would have been workable, since I could have herded him away from me just as easily as leading him, except that Quintus was very obedient about following me. Trying to wrangle them together was a nightmare!

As if all this wasn’t enough, the game crashed again. Record scratch, end yakety sax. On reopening the game, I found it had set me back about seven minutes – long enough to be obnoxious but not long enough to be before the sickness started. Resume yakety sax for another twelve minutes of madness. And then… almost as suddenly as it began, it was over. I was so caught up in the chaos that I didn’t notice they’d started to recover until the graph was just hitting the zero line. I breathed a sigh of relief and turned my attention to the world itself. Fed up with the crashes and with no leads on what was causing them, I resorted to exporting everyone and wiping the world.

The next world was populated with what I considered the bare minimum: Grendel Friendly, the Grendel selector button, the drive computer, Jessica’s updated carrots, and my updated lemons and herbs. No cheese tray, no coconuts (official or modified), no underground mushrooms, no hive and bees update, no hootch hider, no beelacanth, not even any danged cloud butterflies. I intend to inject the rest of my cobs one at a time, over a long period of time. As everyone arrived in this new world, Greg apparently empathized with my stress level, since he went for a calming shower.

Flavia chose the worst spot to lay an egg – I didn’t even know she was pregnant, thanks to the limited size of the Observation Kit. That would be the least of my worries though, because the nightmare wasn’t over. Antigen 7 heard about the delightful party that Antigen 2 had thrown and it was upset it hadn’t been invited, so it decided an encore was in order. Poor Quintus couldn’t catch a break – he got hit with this one too, and ended up being quarantined in the treehouse again.

Flavia was also infected, but I managed to intercept her in the garden and hit the teleporter button to get her away from the others. Both Norns were contained, but not very well, and having them on opposite ends of Albia made my life much harder than it needed to be! So once again, I was hopping back and forth playing lift pingpong and swearing at my computer screen. Flavia came close to pulling Lucius up with a well-timed button press, but he stepped out of the way just in time. Presumably he had already had enough from the first quarantine! Unfortunately, with his role as the troublemaking sick one unfulfilled, the duty fell to Quintus.

Flavia recovered quickly enough, and that forgotten little egg hatched, drawing my attention away from the Purple Mountain Norn. I quickly exported the baby before she could sample the deathcap she’d been born next to, and went to tend to Quintus. 

He, apparently, didn’t like being the only sick one, so he went down the lift to fetch Gaius, who he promptly coughed on. Gaius was understandably unhappy about this. Sorry buddy, you’re stuck in quarantine with him now!

Greg continued to pick up on my stress, and had taken up drinking! The poor Grendel didn’t have much to eat down there (thanks to the current lack of underground mushrooms), so I took a brief break from tending the sick Norns to lead him onto the raft and up the lift, back into the wide world and well away from most of the hootch. He made a beeline straight for the deathcap, which I guided him away from. Go home, Greg, you’re drunk.

Then it was right back to Gaius and Quintus. “Oogh” is a pretty accurate representation of the feeling of being sick! That being said, evidently Gaius missed one of his vocab words. I’ll need to remember to correct that at some point. It was a good thing I was keeping them on the treehouse side, because the trunk side lift was very popular. Julia brought Verania up to see the sights, and while I managed to send the former back down to the bottom of the tree, the latter stepped off just as the lift left. 

This was a dangerous situation indeed – thanks to her mental handicap, I have no control over Verania whatsoever – she doesn’t even know what “come hand” means and even if she did she probably lacks the capacity to focus on me long enough to follow the command. But trying to focus on getting her out of harm’s way meant not paying attention to the sick Norns, who decided to spread the love – and Antigen 7. 

Quintus apparently handed the sickness baton off to Tiberius on his way out; one Norn healed, another infected. At least Gaius took pity on me and decided to make the quarantine a little easier on me by taking the gondola over to the beehives, where he’d wait out his illness in isolation, so the only one I had to keep an eye on was Tiberius. That would prove to be more than enough! I had to briefly leave him unattended to pull Flavia, who was pregnant, away from the deathcap, and while I was at it I spotted the opportunity to extract Verania from the treetops. 

I returned just in time to catch Tiberius riding the lift down, and I started spamming the call button at the top in a desperate attempt to rein him back in before he could run off. Unfortunately, due to the delay on the call buttons, there was enough time for two other Norns to pile in with him, and promptly get coughed on all the way up – including Flavia! I had forgotten at the time that she’d already had this sickness not long ago, and I didn’t really realize at the time that the other Norn on the lift was Quintus, who had likewise just recovered. I just saw two healthy Norns in the quarantine zone, one pregnant, and panicked. Thankfully, either they had enough antibodies left to grant immunity or Tiberius had gotten over his sickness just in time – as by the time I wrangled the other two back out, he was enjoying the view while recovering.

Meanwhile, Gaius wasn’t doing too well, mainly due to the lack of food where he was. I’d been so busy with Tiberius that I wasn’t shuttling food over to my other patient, but now I could focus on him, with little chance of interruption. I brought him carrots, and thankfully he didn’t put up too much resistance to eating them, unlike some of the other Norns I’d been tending to! He, too, was soon recovering, and rather than leave him up by the beehives, I sent him on the gondola, to rejoin the other Norns. He must have gotten rather attached to his bees, because he fought me for control of the gondola the entire way! I did eventually get him to the other side, though he wasn’t very happy about it!