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.

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!

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!

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.