The End is Nigh

The very first thing I did on re-entering C2 was to banish that freaking boat. There's a tool at The Shee's Lost Knowledge that can identify classifier numbers, but rather than install that, I just used the script directly in the C2 CAOS tool. Once I'd identified the boat, I simply ran enum 3 6 1 kill targ next. I will eventually make a COB for this, but the hard part of this will be to make it re-create the boat on COB removal, and I frankly couldn't be bothered with that today.

Though I spent this session just playing with Norns, believe you me, I am definitely putting together a to-do list, because there is a lot wrong with this game. Speaking as a professional game performance tester: Creatures 2 should never have released in the state it was in. Even with all the haphazard patches released after launch, it's still buggy as all get out, and should have remained in development for another year or two. But it didn't, so for now I just have to deal.

One of the biggest issues, and the one that might be beyond my ability to fix on my own, is that the creatures are constantly tired. I haven't yet confirmed my theory that most of the food items are busted and that's the cause of their issues with eating, but the sleep problem is almost certainly a genome issue. This didn't stop them from producing seven hatchlings, though! I'll split the genetic analysis into a separate post.

Even with the boat removed, I still had Norns occasionally get stuck by the horn; presumably they fell into the sea and the pufferfish ejected them on the wrong side. I've got a few ambitious ideas bouncing around for how to deal with the boats, the tendency to fall into the water, and the little dead end island, but these will take a lot of work to implement, and that's in addition to whatever overhauls I have to make to the food!

On the bright side, sickness doesn't seem to be as big a problem here as it was in Creatures 1; Sigurd got sick and recovered quickly enough that he was better by the time I'd gotten him out to quarantine. In fact, if it weren't for the antigens in his system, I would have assumed he'd eaten a weed. 

Meanwhile, Inga clipped through the floor of the incubator room and had to be lured out to jump back into the water. I was frustrated at the time but in hindsight she was remarkably cooperative. Olaf followed her example and clipped into the submarine bay in the volcano, and was an absolute nightmare to get back out. I got him up the lift easily enough, but he developed an obsession with the call button, to the point where he wouldn't come to me or eat anything. He collapsed and had to be resuscitated several times, and every time I got him out to the beach he'd turn around and head for the button again. 

After much effort, I finally got him to jump into the dark ocean. Apparently the boys on land thought that looked like fun, so they all decided to join him. Once again the dark sea puffer wasn't doing it job, so I had to fish them all out - although technically, Sigurd would have been fine down there, since Frog Norns are amphibious. 

Around this time I noticed that Magni had only produced one child, and since I wanted to be sure Lop genes would make it to the next generation, I encouraged him to breed. 

Bjorn, however, wanted in on the action, and kept tagging along, so when Freyja finally got pregnant, I wasn't sure who was the father!

While waiting for the egg to arrive, I decided to stick my nose into the game code again, and tried to use the identification script to get the classifiers for some object I wanted to look at. In doing so, I accidentally found something that had fallen through the ground, so I picked it up, and to my shock, it was an egg! I had no idea where it had come from or when!

I was drawn away from it, though, by a low ATP notification from Inga collapsing at the verge of starvation. I resuscitated her and tried to coax her into eating. I noticed she was having some trouble with the goldfish so I went to re-inject the edible goldfish fix, and discovered that the injector kit crashes when I select that particular COB, so that's fun. 

I didn't get much time to worry about that, though, because I got another notification, this time from Freyja. I got her back on her feet, but she collapsed again. A look in the science kit brought my spirit down immediately.

Freyja became priority number one at that point, and I hovered over her to keep her on life support until the egg arrived. She wasn't the only one with this problem, either, as Gunhild collapsed moments later, and also turned out to have a dead organ problem, which claimed her life. Once Freyja's egg arrived, I decided not to revive her if she collapsed again, since I would only be delaying the inevitable.

I was not counting on her getting pregnant again! Once again, I kept her on life support until she laid the egg, and this time, she passed away mere seconds later, with Magni still at her side.

Meanwhile, poor old Olaf was suffering; his drive support organ had failed, so no matter what he did, his sleepiness, exhaustion, and hunger remained maxed out. He too, passed away, leaving Inga alone in the vast sea.

At this point, unless Sigurd sneaks down into the water to breed with Inga, no more pairings are possible. Only Magni, Sigurd, Bjorn, and Inga remain. But there are a whopping 16 second-generation creatures waiting for their chance to enter the world, and they probably won't be waiting much longer.