More disillusionment

 [Originally written September 11 2020]

Creatures 3/Docking Station used to be my favorite of the games but I’ve been having a hard time getting into it lately. 

Edit: Looking back, this loss of interest in something I once enjoyed should probably have been a big clue that I had then-undiagnosed depression. I am now doing much better, but let this be a public service announcement: just because you're functioning doesn't mean you're not depressed! If you lack energy and motivation, find that nothing is fun anymore, and generally hate yourself... talk to a doctor. Treatment is a game-changer.

I tried to dive back into my world, but I swear it’s coming apart at the seams. Things began rather normally; Thor decided to hop through the portal to the Meso while I was trying to coax Saga into pushing the Holistic Learning Machine. I noticed that the tubas had somehow gone extinct in their original environment (which I’ve never seen happen before, especially with so few Norns about) and made a mental note to reintroduce them from the Desert, where they were thriving.

Suddenly, I got a death notification – Lorenzo, who had been hanging out in the Jungle, had died without warning. I opened up the holodoc and got quite a nasty shock. I’ve never seen ATP decoupler appear in the world before! The holodoc reported bacteria on his body, which were likely the source of this nightmare poison. I immediately set to work scrubbing down the area in pink and yellow fog, rattling off curses the whole time.

To make matters worse, Baldur and Thor wandered into the Jungle, and I could see some of the yellow-dyed bacteria floating toward them. I actually gasped, and grabbed the Norns to haul them away from the potentially-lethal dots. I later realized that Tamora was also in there, in her favorite spot by the chili pepper plant. Thankfully, she stayed well out of the line of fire, and I got the situation under control without further deaths.

Helena decided to make her home in the Meso for a while. I’m actually a bit surprised the creatures haven’t spread out more; I expected the portals to see more actual traffic between areas. Mostly an individual goes through it back and forth a few times and then comes back out to the Woodland, having gotten their warp jump fix.

Loki, Thor, and Freya reached adulthood; Thor remained in the Jungle, while Loki was content to play with Rosaline in the Woodland. She’s such a sweet Grendel, and gets along perfectly with the Norns. 

Freya also remained in the Woodland, filling it with the low-glycogen music. She is without a doubt the worst eater I’ve ever had, and that’s including Creatures 1 and Creatures 2. I have to remove literally every inedible object from the vicinity before she’ll even look at food, as she will try to eat absolutely everything and anything else before actual food. I’m not even joking; I had to take her to the learning room by herself just to get her to eat, and she still tried everything else first.

Baldur continued his adventures, travelling to the Bridge and the Desert, taking good care of himself the whole way. He eventually returned to the Jungle where he walked in on the scene of a crime, as Tamora had beaten an unfortunate Ettin to death. 

Rosalind continued to be much better adjusted than Tamora, and proved excellent company for Heimdall.

It was around this point that I started to see signs of some rather odd diseases. I would hear coughs and sneezes, and the hoverdoc’s toxin list would come back with results – histamines, antigens, stranger things like alcohol… But bizarrely, it would claim no bacteria were detected. I’m not sure what’s going on with that – is my world broken? Is my hoverdoc malfunctioning? Are there viral diseases in this game? 

While making my rounds, I discovered Tamora had one of these weird illnesses, so I gave her some medicine… whereupon she promptly dropped dead! 

I was briefly shocked, wondering if I’d somehow killed her with cough syrup, before I noticed one of my biochemistry set graphs. I don’t know how she was so horribly injured – was it the sickness?

The weirdness continued from here. An attempt to take a picture of Saga when she wandered all the way to the Jungle led to some very strange results, where the background didn’t appear in the photo. I’ve also caught a few Norns stuck in loops where they march back and forth like soldiers guarding a gate, which requires picking them up and moving them to another room to snap them out of it. 

I’ve been playing this game for years, and I don’t remember it being such a train wreck.

On the non-glitchy side, my population control is working too well – I might just switch to rolling a four-sided die for everything if pregnancies continue at the same rate. Also, the man-o-war fix has backfired on me, leaving me with massive numbers of the dang things and practically no fish (because they’re eating them all!) so that won’t be going into future worlds.

Honestly, at this point, I am considering starting over yet again, perhaps with the CFF genomes this time.