Paradigm Shift

 [Originally written July 5 2021]

Yesterday I spent the day cobbling together my first C3 agent, and I’m quite proud of it! This smart vendor can only vend so many calm balm potions in a given amount of time, represented by an energy meter, and won’t vend if too many are already nearby. If the conditions are right for vending, though, it vends on push from creature or hand, or if a creature complains of anger (using code very similar to the empathic vendor). Gone are the days of hitting gadgets and toys to deal with anger; now these potion makers are distributed around the ship!

Download the Calm Balm Vendor

And not a moment too soon. As I placed the new vendors, there was a flurry of noise and activity among the creatures. I hatched a replacement Hawthorn (wasn’t gonna waste a perfectly good name) I injected with the genetics kit, as my egg layer seems to still be spitting out both kinds of Grendel. Oh well.

In the chaos, sadly, several Norns were lost. Ash and Lilac succumbed to old age, while Birch, Peony, and Sunflower were killed in the midst of attempting to transition into a potion-based anger management model. 

Then, as suddenly as the chaos had started, it calmed down. Norns wandered about the ship, Hawthorn and Sycamore learned to turn to potions instead of violence, and, after a few eggs went into my inventory, I was given a blissful respite from the constant influx of new creatures. At this point I turned down my creature cap to 20 (18 breeding cap) because this is about all I can handle.

Finally, I was able to actually make my rounds and check on everyone. They were scattered about in the Jungle, Desert, Woodland, and Meso, and I got the occasional scare from death notifications from Ettins wandering into ponds and drowning. Sadly, one was not a false alarm; Fig, of all creatures, killed Hawthorn just as he was settling in. The new Grendel is a Banshee called Dogwood, and he seems to be taking well to the potions. Amaranth and Daisy had to be scooped out of their vacation in the Jungle for quarantine as they picked up some sickness, but thankfully the lull in activity gave me a chance to actually deal with the situation. A few minutes later, Pine had to get a similar treatment, but all three got a clean bill of health and released not long after.

After that, I sat around in the Meso, keeping an eye on Dogwood and Sycamore. It was too… well, it’s never quiet with Norns around, but it was too calm. I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. A flurry of eggs, outbursts of violence, a sickness… but nothing happened.

Having lost two of the three recent hatches and with three more eggs in my inventory, I decided it was time for another round of hatches. The first one was Tulip, daughter of Rose and Sequoia. She has an ominous looking mutation that changed her initial concentration of air into chemical 28, but she was the first to hatch and didn’t immediately collapse, so I guess it’s not as problematic as it looks. She also has three invisible pigment bleed mutations.

Next was Hazel, Sycamore’s first child by Foxglove. He also caused the weird glitch in the mutation finder where it would spit out vast walls of text due to the actual gendiff.exe failing, so I edited my script again to make the “cannot identify line format” error terminate the script; I am no longer seeing weirdly formatted lines anyway, so I only see that error when gendiff breaks. 

Having corrected the script and Hazel’s genome, I took another look. He has a couple invisible pigment bleed changes, and a minor inconsequential change in his half-lives (a 255 changed to 254), which I didn’t even bother to figure out what chemical it was. Slightly more notable is this change to a receptor.

Receptor

Gene 0006: Drive 7

Organ: “Creature”, Tissue: “Drive levels”, Locus: “TIREDNESS”. Chemical: “Tiredness”.
Analogue: Output = 0 + ((Signal - 0) * 0.851).

Organ: “Creature”, Tissue: “Drive levels”, Locus: “TIREDNESS”. Chemical: “Tiredness”.
Analogue: Output = 0 - ((Signal - 0) * 0.851).

Normally, as the tiredness chemical value goes up, the creature’s tiredness drive in the brain will go up accordingly. In Hazel this has mutated to be inverted, so the drive goes down as the chemical goes up. However, since the nominal value here is already 0, and the value can’t be negative, this effectively means his tiredness drive will always be 0, no matter how much tiredness chemical he has in his system. Thankfully, his sleepiness drive is fine, so he’ll rest because of that (hopefully).

Last, we have Sycamore’s second child, Carnation, daughter of Amaranth. The mutation finder detected 4 mutations in her, and opening her file produced a note saying that 3 genetic errors were corrected, and one of the genes the mutation finder indicated had no visible change in the genetics kit, so that must have been one of them. Another mutation was an invisible pigment bleed change.

This left two instinct mutations, but I couldn’t write them off as being the remaining autocorrected errors; Amaranth’s file had 2 autocorrected errors too. Indeed, both of the indicated instincts were mutated, which means that Amaranth’s error mutations have passed to Carnation. I’m still not sure if they actually affect anything though. Anyway, the instinct to eat fatty foods when hungry for fat mutated to be variant 1. Carnation is variant 5, so this instinct is dormant in her. The other mutation was an exercise in irony.

Instinct

Gene 0467: Approach if lonely

When… “Tissue 2: noun” “IT is <ID 36>^(Norn)” …and you “Approach it”: -1 LONELINESS.

When… “Tissue 2: noun” “IT is <ID 36>^(Norn)” …and you “Approach it”: -1 CROWDEDNESS.

Essentially, Carnation won’t instinctually want to go to other Norns when she’s lonely, but she will instinctively flock to them when she’s crowded. She’s a masochistic introvert who stays by herself even when she wants company, and is perpetually uncomfortable in crowds but can’t bring herself to leave. I can relate!