Medical Monitor is the Best

I decided to finally spend some time in my recently-restarted C3/DS world, and boy did the Medical Monitor make a difference. Now able to stamp out diseases before they permanently harmed my creatures, I could focus on other things, like my fool's errand of trying to get the Grendels and Hardman Norn to get along. 

They still require a lot of oversight, but another feature of the Medical Monitor means I don't have to constantly hover, at the very least. In addition to toxins and diseases, it also alerts me to creatures in pain, allowing me to swoop in and break up fights. No longer can they get away with beating each other as long as I'm not looking! The Hand Knows All!

Generation 2 Chaos

I've been somewhat avoiding getting back into Creatures, especially the COBbling side, while I settled into a new job. I'm now feeling settled enough to dip my toes back in once in a while. I figured I'd play Creatures 2 a bit to get back into it, so I finished up teaching the last few second generation Norns. Magni was in the swamp, and Bjorn was by the calendar tree. The Grendel died with heavy metals poisoning, so I took pity on the new one and led it up out of the volcano in between teaching Norns. 

I Was Today Years Old...

 So, I've been playing this game for, what, nearly 20 years now? And I just happened across the page about Blueprints on the Creatures Wiki.

"Blueprints are agents first introduced in Creatures 3 and Docking Station used to hold information on how to connect Gadgets to make Machines.... If a blueprint is put in the Creatures 3 Replicator, then it will replicate the necessary gadgets needed for making the machine."

Wait, what? Let's go to the Replicator page; maybe there's more information there.

"Another feature of the replicator is its ability to create all the required parts of your newly-designed gadgets by replicating their blueprint. To do this, create your gadget by wiring its appropriate nodes together, use the context help to open a window about any one of your nodes, and press the button next to the red one in the top right. This should create a blue rectangular object."

I had absolutely no idea you could do this. How did I miss this? All these years, I've been manually replicating stuff! It can't really be that easy, right? I opened up the test world and chucked some random gadgets together for a quick test, and sure enough, on opening the tooltip for one of the component gadgets, there was the button that I had - somehow - never noticed before. A little arrow going through a circle, right next to the red "close" button. Clicked it; out popped a blueprint.

Well, I'll be. Sure enough, when I put it in the replicator, it spat out a radio, a not gate, and a light. How did I not know about this?

Situation Normal: All Fouled Up

I entered my Creatures 2 world to immediate problems. Sigurd and Bjorn were riding my boat across the ocean, but for whatever reason, Bjorn - and only Bjorn - was stuck inside it, despite all my safety mechanisms. In fact, he was stuck only on the left side of the ocean. He could step out of the boat just fine on the right side, but on the left, only Sigurd could get off the boat. So I carted Bjorn over to the right side, removed my safety rails, and tried to get the Norn into the water so I could pick him up and move him. He grabbed a bee, hopped in, and walked to the middle of the ocean. Er, what? After moving him, I removed and reinjected the swimming Mernorns COB, put my safety rails back up, and hoped that would do the trick while I went through the process of importing and teaching young Norns.

Hitting the Reset Button, Again

So, after adding the Medical Monitor and X-ray agents to my world and finding that all the Norns had been rendered sterile, I realized I'd need to start over. It was just a question of how much so - introduce generation 1.5, or full reset? I hatched the existing eggs and found that the population was... skewed. This wasn't going to work. And since I decided to also add the agent that removes seasonal gender bias, I'd need to remake the world again. As such, I've decided to put the second gen creatures up here for download. As before, they come with a mutation report as well as their parents' and their own genome file.

Medical Mysteries

 Eden is once again beset by one mysterious problem after another, and I cannot for the life of me tell what's wrong. I was streaming this session for some friends and may have forgotten to take as many screenshots as normal. Oh well!

First, I suddenly lost Meadowglade the Treehugger and Berrycove the Bengal Norn, for no apparent reason. In hindsight, I have a screenshot of Meadowglade shortly before his death that shows high levels of injury, thanks to a sickness I was slow to cure. I imagine Berrycove suffered the same fate.

I also caught Streamivy the Grendel hanging out in the airlock, and pulled him out before he could jettison himself into space, much to the amusement of those watching the stream. I then picked up a trout from the Woodland to airlock and show them what happens when something gets airlocked. The fish disappearing in a puff of smoke kicked off a round of hysterical laughter!