New Laptop, Who Dis?

 So I've recently moved and started a new job (and have already managed to convince one of my new coworkers to try Creatures), but because of reasons I find myself in need of a more portable source of entertainment than my beefed-up gaming desktop. And I have a crappy laptop on hand. Solution? Migrate my Creatures setups to the laptop. The games are over 20 years old, so even the lowest-end of modern laptops can handle them easily.

So I packed everything up, installed Creatures 1 and 3 on the laptop, ran through my world setup, and moved everybody over. Granted, there was one small hiccup - while creatures can be exported, eggs cannot, and my inventory in Eden had 19 eggs in it, so I had to hatch them all and export them on the spot. They're now tucked in a folder waiting for generation 2's turn in the world, when I'll analyze them (and any other eggs laid between now and then) and select which ones to bring into the world. I suppose I'll put the rest up for download because I've bred more than I can handle in the world.

But for now, I have generation 1. And one of the benefits of having Creatures on my laptop is I can play during lunch break at work!

Things were more-or-less calm for most of the hour, with creatures spreading out across the newly revamped Eden, although tragedy did strike. I hadn't set up the biochem kit, and x-ray had crashed, so I once again didn't have a full view of what was going on, when Lakeivy fell ill with Antigen 4 and Fever Toxin. Sadly, he didn't make it. I shut the game down briefly so I could fix the catalogue files and get my x-ray up and running again.

Mistreed also caught a sickness while she was hanging out in the Jungle, but between my swift intervention and her tough Hardman immune system, she pulled through. The same went for Wolfflower, though she needed more assistance. They got a heaping helping of Antigens 5 and 6 respectively.

Wolfflower, however, had additional problems. Though she didn't seem to be hungry, she had low glycogen levels, filling the Ark with sad music. I spent the remainder of my lunch break trying to talk her into eating, and ultimately had to put up the white flag until next time.

Amazing Technicolor Sharks

When you start a new C3 world, your aquarium has a variety of colorful rainbow sharklings, but as time goes on they tend to become... not very rainbow. That does make sense, because offspring will have colors between those of their parents, so over the generations the colors will tend to go toward the middle of the color wheel. But maybe with a little tweaking, this could be fixed!

I do love that I can open C3/DS cos scripts and get the initial injection code, rather than having to backwards engineer it as in C1 and C2. Given how complicated many of the objects in C3/DS are, this sort of modification may well have been impossible without this small change in code accessibility! Here's the initial shark script - with a lot of unnecessary empty lines removed. Actually, this whole script seems to contain a lot of unnecessary stuff, such as a reps loop that runs once, or object variables that are set but never referenced. It feels very much like code that was never cleaned up after they got it functional.

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!

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?

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!

Creatures 3 and Docking Station are now on Steam

I never thought I'd see this day, but Docking Station and all the breed packs are now available for free on Steam, with Creatures 3 also available for six bucks. Tell your friends!

The most boring colortrue creature ever

It's kind of nice knowing that the Toxic Norns are safe wherever they go. There's plenty of food even in the halls, disease is not an issue, and there are no Grendels to worry about. Of course, that doesn't mean that nobody's going to slap the Norns. Gaius continued harassing poor Foulvenom, despite my efforts to teach him not to. Even after I hauled him off to the training dummy, he would hit it, I'd slap him several times, and he'd just look at me and hit the dummy again.

Turned out, Gaius responds well to reward from the hand but not to punishment. That green spike is when I tickled him for behaving peacefully, and those small red bumps after were me slapping him multiple times for hitting the Norn. And I don't mean each little bump is a slap, I mean each little bump was three or four slaps, and he still barely felt it! No wonder he wasn't learning! Thankfully, the Biochemistry Kit has an Injection tool, so when he hit the Norn dummy again, I just gave Gaius a full dose of punishment! That seemed to do the trick!

With the unruly Geat under control, I turned my attention back to the Toxic Norns. The females gathered in the lower section of the Woodland, while the males wandered off. I eventually found them camped outside the locked Meso door. I'd declared the Meso off-limits because most of the food contains cures that can be dangerous for Toxic Norns, but it occurred to me that there was no reason I couldn't just kill hots the vendors and fill the area with toxic food, so I did that. Even so, I brought the males back to the Woodland, because you're not going to get any breeding if the sexes segregate themselves!

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.

In with the new

My typical routine for C3/DS is the launch the game, launch the biochemistry set (as a substitute for the observation and health kits), and then proceed with gameplay. I have installed Advanced Protective Tub to automatically name creatures using a custom catalogue, but apparently the biochemistry set didn't like that. Sure enough, on line 2358 is "Man-o\\\'-war", and the biochem kit was apparently choking on that escaped apostrophe. I removed it, changing the line to simply say "Man-o-war", and everything was fine. It's not like I'm going to be using that word list anyway, as I've designed the Nature Names catalogue to generate names like Mistwillow or Dawnbrook.

Then it was time to test that name catalogue out with a round of new 1st generation creatures. I hatched ten breeds of Norn that I want in the world - I have all of them, but I'm just not a fan of Bruin, Civet, or Harlequin Norns, and while I like Toxic Norns well enough, it's a huge hassle to keep and interbreed them with other Norns. I then introduced the Grendels (which seem to now be only Jungle Grendels; perhaps it's fixed now). I had to regenerate one name because it happened to come out as Cedarcedar (and yes, Moonmoon is a potential name from this list too), but otherwise I'm quite happy with the results.

Out with the old

After much thought, I made a decision. All eggs would be stashed in my inventory, and once the existing population died out, I'd hatch the eggs and put them up for download on the blog. The world itself would be the same, but I'd be starting from scratch with the creatures.

Fig, Acacia, Spruce, and Sequoia were hanging out in the Woodland, in a very loud feedback loop of opinions about each other. Maple and Sycamore had extracted themselves from the noise and gone to the Jungle for a respite. Daisy had similarly moved to escape the noisy boys and was chilling on the bramboo terrace. Amaranth, Carnation, and Tulip were in the Meso with Dogwood the Grendel, while his brother Coconut was off doing his own thing somewhere.

Alas, my comments about the Grendels behaving surprisingly well were apparently tempting fate, because I was a split second too slow to intervene when Dogwood unexpectedly turned on poor Amaranth and killed her. At least he had the decency to look like he felt guilty about it, something he didn't bother to replicate when he killed Tulip. Carnation, however, with her Hardman blood, could hold her own and gave him what-for when he picked a fight with her. In the moments after that, I got another death notification for Fig, though I'm not sure of the cause in that case.

Glub glub

 I'm starting to see why Jessica separates generations, as it's becoming increasingly clear to me that I'll never get all the breeds in play that I want if I have continuous breeding. While I initially stashed eggs today because I was streaming (though, sadly, to no audience), I'm considering starting from scratch yet again. The Eden world itself is fine, of course, but I have a constant stream of Norns with only five breeds represented, and Magma Norns died out entirely before I could introduce a sixth. I'll be caught forever in a loop of restoring lost breeds instead of adding new ones. So perhaps I should let the remaining population die out and start a new population, with all desired breeds represented. But that's something to deal with later.

After distributing my new honey pot agent around the ship, I checked in on the creatures. Most of them were hanging around in the Woodland or the Meso. I lost a few Grendels in this session; they've taken well to using potions to regulate their anger, but the Hardman Norns have had a little more trouble adapting. I still refuse to give up on keeping them together, though! I have been making steady progress, after all.

As I made my rounds, I kept hearing the low-glycogen music in the Woodland. Sequoia, for whatever reason, holed up in the treehouse and kept running dangerously low on starch. I blame the fact that the pumperspikel seeds don't land on that level. Then again, he should know enough to take an elevator up or down to get starch when he's starving.

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!

Creatures at warp speed

 [Originally written July 3 2021]

Holy smokes, I’d forgotten how chaotic Creatures 3 is. I spent less than half an hour playing and a lot happened in that time.

I’ve been batting around the idea of making a Calm Balm vendor to help out with angry creatures, but once I downloaded the tools for C3 agent making and started ripping apart the scripts for the medicine dispenser and mini empathic vendor, I realized I might be in just a bit over my head. That’s not going to stop me of course, as I’m going to dive into a way-too-complex project in true Shee fashion, just as I did with genetics. But I did decide maybe I’ll do it another day. 

Instead, I returned to the Shee Ark and tried to recall what was going on, besides a lot of noise. Most of the Norns were either in the Woodland or the Meso. I had an egg in my inventory, and Daisy laid another moments after I logged in. Acacia was in the Jungle, sneezing, so I quarantined him, gave him a lemon, and spritzed him with pink fog, but as far as I could tell he didn’t have anything wrong with him, so I moved him to the Meso.

Willow, the grumpy Grendel, passed away, and soon a new Jungle Grendel hatched, who I named Hawthorn. I taught him the basics of appropriately venting his anger, introduced him to Sycamore, and saw that they seemed to be getting along well enough, so I left them to it and went to hatch the two eggs in my inventory. No sooner had I hatched them, though, than I was drawn away by a death notification. Sycamore had turned on his new Grendel friend and beaten him to death, so I swooped in to re-educate him with the training dummy. During this time, Amaranth got pregnant and laid her egg on the heat pad in the Meso, where it hatched.

I told you a lot happened in a short span of time. With three new hatchlings with genomes to analyze, I decided that was quite enough and closed the game.

First up is Peony, the daughter of Foxglove and Pine. All of her mutations were minor. One mutation was a variant change in a receptor gene that isn’t expressed anyway. One gives her slightly better boredom reduction from playing with toys. The gene that causes adolescent Norns to feel crowded by their parents (and thus want to move away from them) kicks in at the youth stage instead. She has two invisible alterations to pigment bleed genes. And her constitutive drive maintenance organ is slightly more vulnerable to damage.

Next is Maple, the son of Daisy and Spruce. He has two minor mutations and two noteworthy mutations. One of them is that the Stress emitter on floating recip-emit 15 has become tied to variant 1. If I’ve read the genomes right, that FRE has a receptor for the “hunger for protein” variant of the stress chemical. So what that means is, when hungry enough for protein, FRE 15’s stored value increases, and should cause the emitter to produce the generic stress chemical. In Maple, the stored value updates correctly, but the emitter only works for variant 1 creatures. Maple is variant 3. 

The other noteworthy mutation is a changed instinct, but Maple inherited his father’s “do not express” flag on this gene, so it won’t affect him.

Instinct

Gene 0854: Push portal when hurt

When… “Tissue 2: noun” “It is <ID 34>^(portal)” …and you “Activate 1 it^(push)”: -0.306 Pain.

When… “Tissue 1: verb” “verb: Default (quiescent)” …and you “Activate 1 it^(push)”: -0.306 Pain.

This, of course, is utter nonsense. The verb lobe handles creatures hearing verbs being spoken, and I don’t think the default/quiescent verb can ever actually do anything in this lobe. If, somehow, a Norn with this mutation dreams that someone tells him to do the default verb, and he pushes something, his dream tells him this will reduce pain. I don’t expect that bizarre nonsense instinct will have any real effect, so this is more noteworthy as the lack of the “go through a portal when hurt” instinct. But even that means nothing for Maple, since he and his father both have this gene flagged as “do not express” anyway.

Finally, there’s Sunflower, the daughter of Amaranth and Sequoia. She is very slightly more susceptible to muscle toxin, and has three invisible changes to pigment bleeds. Otherwise she has no noteworthy mutations, but she sure is cute!

A very delicate situation

 [Originally written November 24 2020]

If there’s one thing I can say the Creatures 3 crowd are, it’s loud. Even with the new genome that discourages excessive expression, these creatures like to chatter. After taking that break and then going to the relatively quiet worlds of C2 and C1 first, it was actually kind of overwhelming!

The two Grendels, Daisy, Ash, Spruce, and Acacia were clustered in the Woodland, yelling at the top of their lungs, so after checking in on them, I fled to the relative tranquility of the Meso, where the creatures were a bit more spread out. Rose continued to chill up by the lemon pod. That seems to be her home, and I don’t expect her to move any time soon. Both of the youngest Norns seem to have found adult mentors, as Foxglove stuck close to Birch on the lowest level, and Amaranth played with Pine on the middle level.

On returning to the Woodland I decided to redistribute the creatures a bit within the metaroom to end the cacophony without significant disruption to their lives. Once my brain had recovered from the auditory overload, I made my rounds and found everyone in good health. Lilac and Ash’s entry into old age was heralded by one last(?) egg. Sequoia has five mutations, two of which are irrelevant pigment bleed changes.

Receptor

Gene 0095: 139 Antigen 5

Organ: “Current Organ^{(043 MITOCHONDRIAL FUNCTION)}”, Tissue: “<no tissue>”, Locus: “Injury”. Chemical: “Antigen 5”.
Analogue: Output = 0 + ((Signal - 0) * 0.255). 

Organ: “Current Organ^{(043 MITOCHONDRIAL FUNCTION)}”, Tissue: “<no tissue>”, Locus: “Reaction Rate”. Chemical: “Antigen 5”.
Analogue: Output = 0 + ((Signal - 0) * 0.255).

Normally, Antigen 5 causes injury to this organ, but for Sequoia it’ll instead alter his reaction rate in some way. The fact that this receptor outputs 0 when there’s no Antigen 5 in his system doesn’t seem to be having any harmful effect – if it caused the reaction rate to come to a stop, I’d expect him to be dead, as this organ hosts the reactions involving the production of ATP.

Reaction

Gene 0364: 091 Ag to Ab 6

1 Antigen 6 + 3 Glucose = 3 Antibody 6 + 1 Hotness.
Rate: 48 (Half-life: 5.8 seconds)

1 Antigen 6 + 3 Glucose = 3 Antibody 7 + 1 Hotness.
Rate: 48 (Half-life: 5.8 seconds)

Sequoia produces the wrong antibody in response to antigen 6. This doesn’t worry me too much based on my previous research, which seems to indicate that the antibodies don’t actually do anything chemically in Creatures 3. If they do anything at all, it’s fighting the bacteria itself rather than the disease, and frankly that’s not a problem when my response to any and all bacteria is the pink fog.

Stimulus

Gene 0535: 058 I have teleported

Stimulus: “<spare action>”, Signficance: “0”. Reaction: “Default (quiescent)”, Intensity: “0”.
-1 Pain, -1 Boredom, -1 Crowded.

Stimulus: “<spare action>”, Signficance: “0”. Reaction: “Default (quiescent)”, Intensity: “0”.
-0.992 Pain, -1 Boredom, -1 Crowded.

The Genetics Kit lists this stimulus only as “spare action” but based on the title of the gene it’s the stimulus of passing through a teleporter or warp portal (I’m not sure whether they have the same stimulus or not). Sequoia gets slightly less pain reduction from teleporting… though I’m not sure why teleporting relieves pain at all.

Edit: I later figured out that this is to encourage creatures to flee through portals when they're being attacked.

Meanwhile, I decided to introduce new blood to the population. I’ve been hesitant to bring in the Hardman breed despite them being tied with Bengals as my favorite, because I’ve already had such trouble with keeping Norns and Grendels together. But I figured that with Oak being as tame as he is, now’s the best time to try it. If any Grendel could get along with a Hardman, it’s him. So I welcomed little Sycamore to the world and immediately introduced him to Oak. This was a very delicate operation so I had to watch them very closely and train them very carefully. As such I spent most of the session with them.

At first I kept them in the Learning Room, with a cookie machine to provide a gadget to smack around and not a lot else, so that we could focus on learning how to handle anger. Once I was satisfied with their behavior I moved both of them to the Meso and kept a very close eye on them, though I did occasionally check in on the others; Spruce and Ash were telling Willow about how much they loved Daisy, while Willow politely disagreed, and Daisy herself was hiding behind the framework by the door to the Jungle, presumably trying to get away from her obsessive fanclub. Pine was hanging out by himself, and Acacia had gone off on an adventure to the Jungle. After a while, I moved Sycamore and Oak to the Terrarium, as Foxglove had just laid an egg and I already had Daisy’s in my inventory, so I figured I could proceed with normal creature management. 

I stashed the new egg and hatched the existing one, welcoming Fig into the world. My world’s naming scheme so far has been to use fruits for the Ettins and trees for male Norns and Grendels, but of course most fruit-bearing trees are named the same as their fruit, which takes out a good number of tree names, so I’m dropping that distinction. All three of Fig’s mutations are inconsequential – two minor nudges to pigment bleeds, and one slight increase in the intensity of the “quiescent” response to the stimulus of playing with a bug.

A brief look into variants

 [Originally written November 23 2020]

I had previously been dismissing any mutation that just changed a variant number, on the assumption that the variant system wasn’t actually implemented fully in C3/DS, and that the value was completely meaningless. But it started gnawing at me, so I decided to test it by engineering a genome where colors are linked to variants, then hatching several eggs of that genome. The result was a rainbow of Norns, proving that while the default genome doesn’t use variants, the script is still in the game. Further, it turns out that the CFF genome does use variants (to determine whether a creature is an angry drunk, a happy drunk, etc). 

Well, I haven’t been paying attention to my creature’s variant changes, so I decided to go through and check each genome, but it turned out that all of my creatures have only had variant changes in their pigment bleed genes, so there’s nothing to be concerned about. This does make me think, however – I’ve seen a few notable color rotation/swap mutations crop up over the years but almost always had trouble getting offspring to inherit them. If variant mutations are this common in the pigment bleed genes, it may be that the mutations I’d seen were variant-linked, and therefore appeared not to pass on because the children weren’t the right variant.

Happy little genes

 [Originally written October 6 2020]

While at this point I’ve more or less given up on figuring out the formula for exact RGB values produced by color rotations and swaps, I do want to dive a little deeper into the genetics side of it. What if you have more (or fewer) bleed genes? What about regular pigment genes?

In my previous exploration of color rotations, I found that the three bleed genes produce the final rotation output by means of the formula Floor((((0.5 * Gene1) + (Gene2) + (2 * Gene3)) / 4) + 16) = Actual Value.

I tried deleting the third gene and did some more experimentation.

Visual
Gene 1	210	170	128	180	255
Gene 2	180	220	255	235	255
Actual	174	184	191	194	223

Using the same formula structure I concluded that this is calculated as Floor(((Gene1 + (2 * Gene3)) / 4) + 32) = Actual Value.

Based on the relationship between the formulas, I would then expect that a single rotation gene would be calculated as Floor(((2 * Gene) / 4) + 64) = Actual Value. Indeed, when I created a creature with only one pigment bleed gene set to rotation 200, I got a creature with a total rotation value of 164 out of it. 

Extrapolating from this, would adding a gene result in the formula Floor((((0.25 * Gene1) + (0.5 * Gene2) + (Gene3) + (2 * Gene4)) / 4) + 8) = Actual Value? I created a Norn with a fourth gene placed before the normal three, in the configuration 255/128/128/128. As expected, the reported rotation was 135. I think I’ve cracked the entire formula!

Do normal pigment genes work the same way? For each of the three colors, a creature has four genes. One of these is labeled “at birth” for each color but the rest (except for red) also switch on at birth; perhaps during development they intended these to turn on at different stages of life. Red is a bit of an oddball, because three of the genes for this color switch on at birth… but the fourth is tied to gender and turns on at adolescence. Why only red? That’s a question only the creators could answer. All I can do is figure out how the numbers are calculated. I decided to leave red alone for the time being and created some Norns with various edits to their blue genes, and swiftly concluded that this is far less complicated than bleed genes – the game simply averages the values.

So… what about those genes that switch on later? Do they replace values, or do they simply get added into the mix? I created some creatures to test both bleeds and regular pigments. One had rotation genes set to 255/255/128 for embryo genes and 255/128/255 for adolescence genes. As a baby, her rotation value is 175. If the genes get replaced, the adolescent value would be 207, but if they get added in, it would be 213. I also created two creatures with their embryo red genes set to 20/100/150 and their adolescence gene set to 255 – one male, one female. I created both because if the genes got replaced, the order could matter. Their childhood red value was set to 90; if the gene got added in, it would become 131; if the gene replaced one other, it would be 168, 141, or 125 depending on which gene it replaced. And of course it would be 255 if it replaced all of them. Indeed, the bleed creature came out at 207, while the pigment creatures came out at 255, meaning that once a new coloration gene kicks in, it replaces the ones from previous life stages.

Everything went better than expected

 [Originally written October 3 2020]

The Meso is a very comfortable area, so creatures seem to not really want to leave it. I expect this is exacerbated by the fact that the only ways out are via portals and the door to the hub; the hub doesn’t have much interesting-smelling in it to draw them through the door, and I don’t believe portals carry smells at all so the only reason Norns push them is boredom or crowdedness. As such, most everybody except Ash, Lilac, and the Grendels were in the Meso (the rest were in the Woodland). Birch at least decided to be adventurous and wander into the Hub, but not for long – he just entertained himself going back and forth through the door.

With everything calm and a large number of young male Norns, I decided it was the ideal time to bring in a new breed, and hatched Daisy, a Fallow Norn. She got on quite nicely with Spruce, and the two were pretty well inseperable.

Rose has seemed pretty content to remain on the top level of the Meso by herself. She sometimes sits by the warp portal but doesn’t go through, although sometimes she gets visitors through it.

Acacia outgrew his younger playmates and became a bit aloof, while still sticking around the area. Perhaps he wants to be seen as the cool older kid? Pine certainly seems to be in awe – either that or he’d just been smacked around a bit by Birch! I noticed he often had a frightened look about him and I wasn’t sure whether it was caused by other Norns treating him as a punching bag or something else, so I gave him a new Cuddly Tree to play with.

Meanwhile, in the Woodland, the stress of dealing with Ash’s incessant attempts to play catch with him turned old Willow gray! Oak was perfectly well adjusted, if obsessed with his gadgets, but I occasionally had to encourage Willow to take his anger out on the objects left laying about for this express purpose. Still, the fact that Oak at least turned out well tells me I did something right with that one. I’m getting my Grendel-taming mojo back!

Lilac wasn’t content to stick around in one place – leave it to the Chichi to teleport all over the place! She decided a trip to the Desert was in order, where she attempted to play with the rocks – classified as toys, yet not something creatures can play with. I can understand why object categories behave so inconsistently in Creatures 1 and even 2 to an extent, but you’d think by Creatures 3 they would have figured it out… Thankfully I found a fix for this on the internet so I’ll inject that for the next session.

Spruce took after his mother, braving the trip through the warp portal to the Woodland. Evidently the climate wasn’t to his liking, or maybe he just liked the feeling of teleportation, since he just went back and forth for a while. 

Meanwhile, Lilac continued her adventure by teleporting to the Workshop, but from there she decided to walk to the Hub and eventually join the gaggle of Norns already in the Meso. This left Ash and the Grendels as the only inhabitants of the Woodland. 

To even things out a little bit, I grabbed a few creatures and moved them to the Woodland. Acacia looked like he wasn’t having any of it, since he immediately headed back for the warp portal, but changed his mind on the top level.

Spruce headed for the drumset, while Daisy went straight down the elevator and in the opposite direction. Just a tip, Spruce: if you’re going to try to serenade a female, drums are not the most romantic instrument to use. 

In the Meso, excessively tall bramboo was getting to be a problem, and somehow they’d started sprouting in the middle level, so I stripped the tallest stalks bare and used the berries to make cookies, which I scattered around at random.

Oak, ever the well-behaved Grendel, made friends with Acacia and enjoyed playing with the rocket toy with him. Now if I can just get all future Grendels to be like this one! Ash, meanwhile, enjoyed the cool breeze from the weather generator.

Spruce had figured out that the drums weren’t doing the trick and went to be a little more direct with Daisy. This time she returned the interest, and soon there was an egg on the way!

Almost simultaneously with little Foxglove’s birth I got a death notification, which momentarily scared the bajeezus out of me, but it was just an Ettin. The little Norn was quite healthy! She has three minor pigment bleed mutations and one change to a receptor. I don’t believe it’ll have any significant effect, but she’ll need slightly more prostaglandin than usual to heal her immune system.

There was a period of not much interesting going on. Spruce, Ash, and Acacia harrassed the Grendels while they tried to sleep. Lilac wandered through the warp portal to the Terrarium. 

As Daisy recovered from her first pregnancy, she gained an entourage of hopeful male Norns, and it didn’t take long for one to catch a lucky break and father her second – this time, it was Acacia, though Spruce was eager to take credit! 

I don’t have the heart to break it to him, but thankfully Norns aren’t smart enough to put together Amaranth’s parentage from her appearance. She has three mutations – two to chemical reactions and one to a pigment bleed. Incidentally she gets two autocorrections when I open her genome. The pigment bleed just has a life stage change, and one of the reactions has a mutability degree change. The third flagged gene has no changes so it must be one of the automatic corrections.