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.

Pax Albiana

Has it really been nearly two years since I played Creatures 1? Strange how so much time can pass, and yet when I return, it feels like it's been maybe a week. Anyway, when I started the game, pretty much everyone was clustered on the island, so I decided to move some Norns around. Some were more reluctant to leave than others; Cassius continually tried to wrest control of the mover from me to return to the island, but I eventually got him over to the beehives. Eudocia, Gaius, and Augustus were boated over to the Grendel Tree without complaint, and Aurelia rode over to the lighthouse without any fuss either. Eventually only Oriana remained on the island.

Eudocia, who has been quite good about taking care of herself - sleeping and eating on her own - laid an egg in the Temple, surrounded by a gaggle of Norns (and the Grendel), a few of whom made a couple attempts to go down to the deathcap, which I swiftly intervened in.

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. 

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!

The Tide is Turning

It's been a crazy week at work, and I needed something relatively calm to unwind with. Taking a break from working on my Pathfinder mod, I dipped into Creatures 2 for a while. I figured, with generation 1 winding down, I should get a head start on prepping generation 2 for the world, so I coaxed Magni out of the incubator cave and settled him into his new home in the trees above the swamp. 

With the cave free, I could get to work teaching the next generation, so they'd all be ready for the world when their time came. I decided to start with the Mernorns, but there was one catch: they're all male.

A Minor Update

I haven't been playing Creatures much as of late, between work being absolutely hectic and being eyeball-deep in modding Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous. But this morning, being too exhausted from the chaos of my job this week to continue more mentally taxing work, I decided to settle in for a relaxing little round of Creatures 2. 

Nothing particularly wild happened, which is good, because I needed the break. That said, once I get my energy back, I'll be vanishing back into WOTR for a while.

Bjorn wandered in the swamp, Sigurd hung out in the desert, and Magni lazed about in the incubator room. Inga's age was showing, but didn't darken her spirit, and aside from occasionally getting stuck on the airlock door, mostly took care of herself.

I focused on getting Sigurd into a better location, as the desert is not friendly to Norns, and he was quite hungry. I lured him over to the calendar tree, where he made friends with the Grendel. 

I had a brief scare when the Observation Kit reported Magni and Bjorn as sick, but it turned out they'd just eaten some badplants. At some point, Bjorn went up the lift and across the glass walkway, so I activated the teleporter and sent him elsewhere. Ultimately, he ended up joining Sigurd by the calendar tree.

At this point, everyone is well over six hours old, and I suppose Mernorns must age faster than their land dwelling counterparts, because nobody else is going gray yet. They've got quite a bit of time left in them, yet!

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!

All around Albia

After double checking that I'd already taught Aurelia all her vocabulary, I injected my better bees and beelacanth updates into the world, and set about planting the flowers in the jungle and near the lighthouse. Then, as usual, I looked over the Observation Kit and went to tend to whoever had the lowest life force - in this case, Julia, at 30%. She was in a small cluster of Norns on the island, so I broke the group up and shuttled them over to the mainland, but scattering Norns is easier said than done. Making matters worse, at around 20% life force, she got pregnant! Thankfully, I was finally able to get her to eat something, and once she started, she scarfed down several more pieces of cheese.

Meanwhile, Verania was also pregnant and hovering at low life force, but there was nothing I could do about that, so I instead turned my attention to Eudocia, the one Norn still on the island, whose life force was now the lowest on my list. She, thankfully, didn't put up much resistance when I asked her to eat. It's amazing how some creatures are so difficult and others so easy to work with. After that, I made my rounds. Verania laid her egg in the treehouse, then took the cable car over to the windmill. Julia laid her egg in the temple at almost the same time, while Augustus looked on. Cassius played in the garden, and Secundus rode the raft back and forth underneath.

The Last Children

In my last post I mentioned that the C2 Norns produced seven new hatchlings, so I'd split the genetic analysis off to a separate post. And here it is!

The first two hatchlings were from the Mernorns. This makes four, and all of them are male, so for the next generation, I'll have to introduce a new female. First up was Vragi! He has seven pigment mutations and one pigment bleed mutation but all are invisible.

He has a minor brain lobe mutation that I expect won't affect him at all; his decision lobe rest state is 81 instead of 80. He also has a stimulus mutation that makes falling through the air a little scarier for him, but given that he'll live underwater, that shouldn't be a problem!

His brother, Halfdan, may look similar right now, but I expect that to change! He inherited the male pigment bleed gene on both slots, although one has mutated to kick in at childhood instead of birth. He also has several pigment mutations, of which four actually changed pigment values, albeit only from 128 to 129. This may explain why he looks ever so slightly different from Vragi already. Aside from these, he has only one mutation, changing an output value in a stimulus from 0 to 1 - but that slot has <NONE> for the chemical, so it doesn't matter.

Continuing the green parade, Baldur is the spitting image of his mother, Gunhild! He inherited none of Bjorn's looks. He has eight mutations. One of them is a half-life mutation for an unused chemical, and one is an instinct mutation that changes the cell number for one of the unused lobes, so no big deal. There's also a small change in the gain value for the crowdedness receptor, which shouldn't have much effect in practice. And he has a small lobe mutation: a relax susceptibility value changed from 0 to 1, which I'm not even sure has a measurable effect given that the slider in the genetics kit will only jump to multiples of 8. At any rate, the associated susceptibility rule is undefined so it probably wouldn't do anything anyway.

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.

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.

Creatures 2 is broken but I love it anyway

It's always fun when the first thing that happens is the game crashing. It was a sign of things to come, as the whole session was an exercise in C2's jankiness, but boy I can tell my mental state has improved because it's not bothering me so much anymore! So I've got that goin' for me at least.

I loaded back into the world with the babies still exported, and decided to keep it that way. I think for Creatures 2 I'm going to separate the generations; things are chaotic enough as it is.

Once I got back into the game and got my bearings, I saw Magni taking another swim. I sure am glad for the pufferfish! Meanwhile, Gunhild was stuck in the boat, which is quickly rising to the top of my COBbling hit list. I could sink a lot of effort into making it not be terrible, but really, what's the point? Not only do creatures constantly get stuck in it, not only are the controls located where you can't click on them when the boat is occupied, but the boat itself is completely pointless because it leads to a small, dead end patch of island with no food on it. I will likely just remove the boat from my world. Anyway, I eventually managed to get it to cooperate and drop Gunhild off, and began leading her across the desert.

Sharing the love

Well folks, we're officially caught up on the backlogged journal entries! Norns of the Round Table is now live. To celebrate, I streamed today's session in Discord for a group of friends, who had never heard of Creatures before, with a cheatsheet I'd put together to help them identify my Norns in the corner. To my immense surprise, I actually had a small audience! Unfortunately, the first hour of the show wasn't the most interesting, as it consisted almost entirely of trying to convince Tiberius to eat. It was pretty hilarious, though; everyone was cracking jokes about him being on hunger strike, and there was a small commotion in the call every time he picked up a carrot (and inevitably dropped it moments later).

Julia's life force also slowly waned over the course of the session, so when Tiberius decided to take a nap, I took the opportunity to isolate Julia and convince her to eat some honey. Unlike Tiberius, she only took a little bit of coaxing, and was soon happily munching away. After some time I noticed that Tiberius was still asleep, and his sleepiness drive was still high. I gave him multiple doses of Wake-up Pill to no avail, and sensing a bug, decided to quit and relaunch the game. Unfortunately, at this point, "unsticking" Tiberius led to his immediate death.

At this point, I excitedly dove into genetic analysis of a replacement, only to realize just how much baseline knowledge and understanding of Norn biology I had really built up as I floundered to figure out where to even begin explaining to the folks on Discord what we were looking at.

Peaceful times in Albia

 [Originally written July 10 2021]

Albia has given me a break from the chaos, instead allowing me to peacefully make my rounds and convince whoever had the lowest life force to eat.

That started with Julia hovering at 30%, and I couldn’t get her undivided attention with other creatures around, so I pulled her up a lift into the treehouse where I argued with her for a while. Once she got the point, though, she readily ate several pieces of food, and I released her back into the world. Next up was Tiberius, who was… much more difficult. Frustrated with his refusal to eat food, I tried getting him to push the vendor, to no avail.

My attention was drawn away from him by Eudocia, who was pregnant, and her life force was dropping quickly. She was hanging out on the island with Marcellus, Verania, and Secundus. Once again, I couldn’t get her to cooperate with others around, so I lured her onto the boat and over to the jungle, where I was able to get some food into her.

After this, I started eyeing the beehives. I have been meaning to make a better version of the “upgraded” beehives, after all. But I’ll split that out into a separate post!