Topsy Turvy Toxic World

So, last session I said that "while I like Toxic Norns well enough, it's a huge hassle to keep and interbreed them with other Norns" and that got me thinking. I'm not going to attempt keeping Toxics in the main world, but I realized I could easily have a separate world for them. So I created the Mire, dropped the Ettin and Grendel eggs into the water, and started spreading nastiness around the whole world.

Of course, a world full of one breed of plain Norns wouldn't be that much fun, and I was curious about how colortrue creatures worked, so I cracked open a genome and whipped up a colortrue Toxic Norn. I'm sure there are better varieties out there currently that can interbreed with other colortrues (at least as well as any Toxic could interbreed), so I'm not going to put this variety up for download, but it was interesting to see how simple the edits really are. The pigment genes are just moved around so they fall under different organs, their mutations are turned off, and they're unlinked from age/gender. There are four of each color channel, and the base creature of any color has all four of a given channel set to the same value.

I'm not a big fan of the overlay look of high pigment values, so I stayed in the middle as I created six Norns: three male, three female. The males each have one color channel that is higher (set to 192 instead of 128), and the females each have one color channel that is lower (set to 64 instead of 128). And of course, I created a new name generator catalogue for this world too! From left to right, these are Foulvenom (magenta), Acidfilth (yellow), Witchphlegm (green), Rotgut (blue), Ruinbile (red), and Slimestump (cyan). I definitely prefer the look of the females with the lowered channels, so hopefully we'll see colors leaning toward the middle over time.

Download the Toxic Names Catalogue

I had never realized how hard it is to intentionally get Norns infected with bacteria! I certainly never thought I'd be glad to see the hoverdoc reporting their presence. According to the care guides, being sick actually helps nourish a Toxic Norn, which seemed pretty important given that they were perpetually hungry for fat! A peek into the genome revealed that eating detritus only fulfils their need for starch and protein. For fat, they instinctively seek out "manky." Problem is, there's no manky in the game. 

Rather than run the honey pots back and forth to keep up with their voracious appetite, I figured I'd just solve the lack of manky. "20 minute coding adventure, in and out," I told myself. I ended up spending a day and a half working on this project, although a lot of that was spent just waiting for my new Toxic Bramboo to grow for debugging purposes! 

And admittedly, far more time than I'd like to admit was spent wondering why the newly injected Bramboo wouldn't grow; I felt pretty dumb when I realized I'd been clicking "Inject Install Script" instead of "Inject Install Script and Event Scripts." Making matters worse was that the Bramboo code was a nightmare to decipher, full of empty doif statements and other unnecessary nonsense. It's also incredibly long, with literally dozens of object variables being thrown around. 

The kicker is, while tearing this code apart I discovered that, at least as of C3, CAOS does in fact have some limited support for named variables, which makes the insistence on dozens of ovXX variables all the more infuriating. Granted, given that the code is pulled from the game scriptorium, it's entirely possible that there were originally comments explaining what everything was. 

Still, I spent quite a bit of time cross referencing to figure out what in the blazes I was even looking at. And you don't even get an annotated script out of it, because honestly, there was so much stuff piled up in this script that there were vast sections I didn't even bother to decipher, as there was nothing in them I actually needed to change. By the time I was done I still only knew what about half the variables were for!

Slowly, but surely, though, the Toxic Bramboo came together. You can see in these screenshots how I slowly hammered the thing together; agents are not made in a one-and-done manner, but start off slapdash and get progressively less janky. You can also see it diverging from the original Bramboo code, as I started off using the same color and placement scripts, leading to pastel colors and oddly placed flowers and berries. As I refined the positioning, sensitivity to growing conditions, and mutation scripts, I also fine-tuned the colors. They always start off with green flowers and red berries, but can mutate over time, just like normal Bramboo.

I also debugged a few issues with accidentally deleting normal Bramboo, which inspired me to include a remover agent so you can get rid of the nontoxic version (or restore it by removing the remover agent) if desired, and while I was at it I threw together a catalogue file that adds a quirky cookie recipe (distinguished from a normal Bramboo cookie by having a red base). Eventually, I was happy with the results, and brought it into the Mire.

Download the Toxic Bramboo

Of course, this still wasn't enough custom content for me! In a world with only one breed and not even any Grendels or Ettins around, I wanted some variety - and what better suited to living alongside toxic creatures than an inorganic one? I genetically altered a Gaius to remove his sex drive, nullify any negative effects toxins might have on him (he's a robot, after all), and prevent him from aging past adulthood. I've also injected edible gadgets for Geats and scattered a few solar flowers around amongst the stump plants. He'll act as a timeless other-species mascot, in much the same way as the Grendel in C1. I may have made a small mistake though, in that I heard some slaps around him and couldn't tell (not being familiar with his animation) whether he was the aggressor, so I took him aside for training. That involved telling him to "hit Norn" so I could smack him and show him how to tickle instead. He got rather too into slapping, though - hopefully I haven't done more harm than good!