More disillusionment

 [Originally written September 11 2020]

Creatures 3/Docking Station used to be my favorite of the games but I’ve been having a hard time getting into it lately. 

Edit: Looking back, this loss of interest in something I once enjoyed should probably have been a big clue that I had then-undiagnosed depression. I am now doing much better, but let this be a public service announcement: just because you're functioning doesn't mean you're not depressed! If you lack energy and motivation, find that nothing is fun anymore, and generally hate yourself... talk to a doctor. Treatment is a game-changer.

I tried to dive back into my world, but I swear it’s coming apart at the seams. Things began rather normally; Thor decided to hop through the portal to the Meso while I was trying to coax Saga into pushing the Holistic Learning Machine. I noticed that the tubas had somehow gone extinct in their original environment (which I’ve never seen happen before, especially with so few Norns about) and made a mental note to reintroduce them from the Desert, where they were thriving.

Suddenly, I got a death notification – Lorenzo, who had been hanging out in the Jungle, had died without warning. I opened up the holodoc and got quite a nasty shock. I’ve never seen ATP decoupler appear in the world before! The holodoc reported bacteria on his body, which were likely the source of this nightmare poison. I immediately set to work scrubbing down the area in pink and yellow fog, rattling off curses the whole time.

To make matters worse, Baldur and Thor wandered into the Jungle, and I could see some of the yellow-dyed bacteria floating toward them. I actually gasped, and grabbed the Norns to haul them away from the potentially-lethal dots. I later realized that Tamora was also in there, in her favorite spot by the chili pepper plant. Thankfully, she stayed well out of the line of fire, and I got the situation under control without further deaths.

Helena decided to make her home in the Meso for a while. I’m actually a bit surprised the creatures haven’t spread out more; I expected the portals to see more actual traffic between areas. Mostly an individual goes through it back and forth a few times and then comes back out to the Woodland, having gotten their warp jump fix.

Loki, Thor, and Freya reached adulthood; Thor remained in the Jungle, while Loki was content to play with Rosaline in the Woodland. She’s such a sweet Grendel, and gets along perfectly with the Norns. 

Freya also remained in the Woodland, filling it with the low-glycogen music. She is without a doubt the worst eater I’ve ever had, and that’s including Creatures 1 and Creatures 2. I have to remove literally every inedible object from the vicinity before she’ll even look at food, as she will try to eat absolutely everything and anything else before actual food. I’m not even joking; I had to take her to the learning room by herself just to get her to eat, and she still tried everything else first.

Baldur continued his adventures, travelling to the Bridge and the Desert, taking good care of himself the whole way. He eventually returned to the Jungle where he walked in on the scene of a crime, as Tamora had beaten an unfortunate Ettin to death. 

Rosalind continued to be much better adjusted than Tamora, and proved excellent company for Heimdall.

It was around this point that I started to see signs of some rather odd diseases. I would hear coughs and sneezes, and the hoverdoc’s toxin list would come back with results – histamines, antigens, stranger things like alcohol… But bizarrely, it would claim no bacteria were detected. I’m not sure what’s going on with that – is my world broken? Is my hoverdoc malfunctioning? Are there viral diseases in this game? 

While making my rounds, I discovered Tamora had one of these weird illnesses, so I gave her some medicine… whereupon she promptly dropped dead! 

I was briefly shocked, wondering if I’d somehow killed her with cough syrup, before I noticed one of my biochemistry set graphs. I don’t know how she was so horribly injured – was it the sickness?

The weirdness continued from here. An attempt to take a picture of Saga when she wandered all the way to the Jungle led to some very strange results, where the background didn’t appear in the photo. I’ve also caught a few Norns stuck in loops where they march back and forth like soldiers guarding a gate, which requires picking them up and moving them to another room to snap them out of it. 

I’ve been playing this game for years, and I don’t remember it being such a train wreck.

On the non-glitchy side, my population control is working too well – I might just switch to rolling a four-sided die for everything if pregnancies continue at the same rate. Also, the man-o-war fix has backfired on me, leaving me with massive numbers of the dang things and practically no fish (because they’re eating them all!) so that won’t be going into future worlds.

Honestly, at this point, I am considering starting over yet again, perhaps with the CFF genomes this time. 

RNG population control

[Originally written September 5 2020]

I returned to a mildly improved C3/DS world – I’d installed a few fixes to the DS lifts (so they should be able to carry adult Grendels now), man-o-war eggs (so they hatch), and Capillata umbilical (so creatures looking to exit the room are more likely to use it). I also now had a system in place for population control, which went into immediate use on the egg in my inventory – the roll came up 11, so into the airlock it went. I then began making my rounds.

Without me attempting to keep everybody in place, they moved around quite a bit, although some were more prone to moving than others. 

Tamora started out hanging around on the bramboo terrace by herself, while Rosalind was a good Grendel and started smacking gadgets and toys as needed despite being surrounded by Norns, including Thor and Horatio, who were napping nearby.

Lorenzo reached adulthood and acquired a small shadow in the form of Baldur, who apparently needed a fellow stripe-bearing Norn to look up to. The little Bengal was quite content to follow his big foster brother around as he went about his business, which mostly consisted of riding the lift up and down.

Freya took a rather nasty fall off the treehouse deck, and it must have knocked her a bit senseless, because she decided to wade deeper into the pond, expressing her intent to push the balloon bugs I use to keep the trout fed. She could have drowned attempting this, but luckily I was there to pull the soggy Norn out of the water.

Thor had decided to stress tess the offline warp portals, and it kept him quite amused, but my attention was elsewhere. Baldur was hanging out with a very reluctant Tamora, when he announced quite cheerfully that he was ill. Suffering flashbacks to my war with the bacteria in the previous world, I immediately doused both the Norn and the grouchy Grendel with pink fog, then went over the whole bramboo terrace area with yellow fog – just to be sure!

Meanwhile, Helena was suffering a case of Eat Elevator Syndrome, so I exported and reimported her, then prodded the robot toy in front of her, which seemed to do the trick. While in the Meso, I found that Freya had joined Thor in playing with the warp portal, and both had grown into adolescence. Their brother, Loki, however, was quite happy to stay put.

Lorenzo and Baldur finally dragged Tamora down from her perch in the corner of the Terrarium as they went up and down the lift by the Learning Room, and Baldur unfortunately discovered the music box, which he was overly keen on activating. Repeatedly. I airlocked it pretty quickly and replaced it with a ball.

Tamora, in her quest to get away from the troublesome Norns, went all the way to the Jungle, but even here she couldn’t escape, because Lorenzo followed her on her grand adventure, much to her distaste. So she headed out to the bridge where she finally got some peace and quite.

Helena seemed to have no taste for wandering, but she had plenty of taste for carrots! Baldur, who seems to be everywhere at once, joined her on the bramboo terrace for a bite to eat. Horatio is the one Norn I wasn’t surprised to see still in exactly the same place. Treehuggers are not known for their inclination to use doors or lifts. Still, it was good that he was staying out of trouble…

Speaking of trouble… I actually didn’t notice this odd little trend until I was looking over my screenshots! I was too busy trying to convince Freya to eat some fruit, as she’d apparently decided that gadgets looked more appetizing. After some coaxing, I convinced her that apples were better.

Despite Lorenzo’s presence, Tamora returned to the Jungle, where she picked up some bacteria. Thankfully she had the sense not to return to the Woodland and spread it, so I was able to handle that issue with some pink fog.

Horatio expressed boredom, to which Rosalind suggested he get a creature egg. Which he most certainly did as soon as he found Helena! The dice also decreed that this one should be airlocked, but he didn’t seem to mind.

With all of the other creatures grown to adolescence, I decided it was time to import the other two Norns in the backlog. This meant it was time for some genetic analysis, as I’d previously just hatched, named, and exported them without so much as writing down their monikers.

First up was little Heimdall, visually a perfect inversion of Loki.

Receptor

Organ: “Creature”, Tissue: “Sensorimotor”, Locus: “Special gait 6^(limp)”. Chemical: “Injury”.
Digital: Output = 0 + 0.937 if Signal > 0.251.

Organ: “Creature”, Tissue: “Sensorimotor”, Locus: “COMFORT”. Chemical: “Injury”.
Digital: Output = 0 + 0.937 if Signal > 0.251.

Heimdall will never limp, but if injured, he’ll be very homesick. An odd mutation, to be sure, but it could be worse.

His next interesting mutation caused me a bit of confusion – the report says he has an insertion at 400, but it looks to me like it’s actually a deletion. The deleted gene in question is a stimulus for things approaching… but I’m not sure if the gene in question is actually used! First off, the stimulus itself is called “[It approaches DEPRECATED]” which in theory indicates a piece of code that is no longer used. Further, all stimulated chemicals in both parents are flagged as silent, and in Horatio, the gene is flagged “Do Not Express” so it shouldn’t have any effect. On the other hand, in Helena it’s not flagged DNE.  Still, the fact that it’s DNE on Horatio means the lack of it shouldn’t be a problem for Heimdall. Similarly, the rest of his mutations were minor and shouldn’t affect him.

Next up is Saga. Despite her pure Treehugger appearance she is indeed half Chichi. She has a few half-life changes that shouldn’t make a difference, but which are a pain to track down… I will need to make a script for that. Her few mutations were all minor and not worth discussing, from what I could tell – some of the reporting was a little wonky.

Settling into a new home

[Originally written August 21 2020]

Things went pretty well for a time after the migration! Loki and Freya performed the cutest drum duet together, while their mother preferred the ball. Horatio chilled on the lower level, as Treehuggers are wont to do, and Thor rested quietly in the treehouse. Lorenzo was a bit bolder, and got his kicks from exploring the Bridge.

Determined to keep the Bengal genes in the population and not thinking things through, I hatched a new first generation Norn, Baldur, whose birth also confirmed that the world’s notifications were still broken.  So I packed everyone up a second time, and moved once again to a new world. Once again, I had eggs in my inventory that I didn’t want to leave behind, so I hatched and exported them – but I’m not going to reimport them right away. Rather, they’ll just hang out in my export folder until I would normally hatch an egg.

This time I didn’t bother with intercepting eggs, I just went straight to the Comms room, injected and deleted the Banshee stone to update the Grendel voices, imported Tamora and Rosalind, removed the teleport pad, and locked the Meso door while I went to set up the world. I didn’t bother with putting grass in the Jungle this time, but I still set up the Aquarium, rescued the rhino beetle from the Jungle and moved it to the beach in the Aquarium room, added the awkwood creepers, put chili pepper pots in the appropriate places, put copies of the mini empathic vendor where desired, brought some balloon bugs to the Woodland to feed to the fish, introduced bramboo to the Woodland and Desert and tubas to the Jungle and Desert, stocked my inventory with my typical “medicine cabinet” of potions and cheese, and banished the C3 camera doodads to the “noisy corner” of the Bridge, near the ship’s lungs. Finally, I reimported the creatures and moved them to the Terrarium. Setup is intensive!

I had a brief balloon bug infestation in the Woodland – that tends to happen if you’re not careful about the bug you select to bring in. For some reason, balloon bugs can be effectively used as permanent fish food in the Woodland, but if you pick up the wrong one it’ll reproduce like crazy and some of the bugs will escape the pond. I was able to catch the escaped ones and move them back to the Desert, and eventually had things under control.

I also took the opportunity to add Grendel Man’s offline warp portals to my world – one in the Meso and one in the Terrarium. See, when playing Creatures I’m generally pretty obsessive about keeping them all in one safe place. Maybe that’s why I have historically favored the Meso. This time I’m actively trying to fight that tendency and let them wander a little more. As such, I have unlocked all the Capillata doors (except the ones leading to and from the Comms room) and put the Workshop teleporter pads in the Woodland, Aquarium beach, and Desert.

Genetic analysis continues

[Originally written August 16 2020]

With Lorenzo fully analyzed, it was time to move on to the three new children of Helena and Horatio. I started with Thor, the first of the two boys. Oh man, did he have a doozy of a mutation to start with.

ATP is the vital life force of creatures, the molecule that allows them to have the energy to do things like move or have their organs function. In normal creatures, the toxin ATP decoupler basically expends all the creature’s ATP at once, leaving them with no energy. It’s effectively instant death.

Receptor

Gene 0087: ATP decoupler

Organ: “Current Reaction”, Tissue: “<no tissue>”, Locus: “Reaction Rate”. Chemical: “ATP decoupler”.
Analogue: Output = 0.973 - ((Signal - 0) * 0.937). 

Organ: “Current Reaction”, Tissue: “<no tissue>”, Locus: “Reaction Rate”. Chemical: “Carbon monoxide”.
Analogue: Output = 0.973 - ((Signal - 0) * 0.937).

Yikes! If I understand this mutation correctly, it means that the response usually triggered by ATP decoupler would instead be triggered by carbon monoxide. Thankfully, I don’t think carbon monoxide poisoning is common in Creatures 3.

While digging through his other genes I found out that my mutation reporter doesn’t report insertions of exact copies of genes correctly – I only discovered this because one of his genes later was one number off from the typical slot it was in, and a manual search nearby revealed an extra copy of gene 0360, a Vitamin C receptor. 

The duplicated gene did show up in my report, but it showed as an alteration, which confused me initially because the gene did not appear to be changed. This isn’t really anything I can fix, as it’s not my script that’s at fault; my script just parses and compares the outputs of the official tool, and does not directly view the genomes. 

Other than that, there was nothing of note to report, so I moved on to Freya. Look closely – she does have some indication of her mixed ancestry, as she has the Chichi tail! Freya had a few invisible changes to some pigment genes but otherwise her only mutations were four pose changes. One of these was a slight alteration to her limping gait, which might look strange but I don’t expect it to be problematic. One was a change to the angle of the head when angry. And the last two were alterations to metadata (variant number, etc) rather than the pose string itself.

Finally, there was Loki. I started my examination by looking at the pigment gene alterations, and he actually has a very large mutation! Sadly, it was to the mutability value rather than pigments themselves. It changed the usual value of 255 all the way down to 31, which means that his greenness at birth gene will likely not mutate further. If only such a large mutation had been in the color itself!

Receptor

Gene 0167: Attend to self when tired

Organ: “Brain”, Tissue: “Tissue 3: stim”, Locus: “Neuron(0) state(1)”. Chemical: “Tiredness”.
Analogue: Output = 0 + ((Signal – 0.502) * 0.333).

Organ: “Brain”, Tissue: “Tissue 2: noun”, Locus: “Neuron(0) state(1)”. Chemical: “Tiredness”.
Analogue: Output = 0 + ((Signal – 0.502) * 0.333).

I’m not sure what the effect of this will be. If I understand this correctly, normally tiredness stimulates the “self” neuron of the stim lobe, and now it will stimulate the “self” neuron of the noun lobe. Based on my research it looks like the stim lobe is activated on sensing an object, while the noun lobe is activated on hearing the name of an object. This may mean that there is no notable change, since tiredness would make Loki think he heard the word “self” and presumably then focus on himself, indirectly achieving the same result.

Reaction

Gene 0349: Ag to Ab 2

16 Antigen 2 = 12 Antibody 2 + 2 Coldness.
Rate: 42 (Half-life: 3.2 seconds)

16 Antigen 2 = 13 Antibody 2 + 2 Coldness.
Rate: 42 (Half-life: 3.2 seconds)

This looks like it should be helpful but I can’t find any indication in the genome that the antibodies actually fight the antigens at all; they seem to just be produced as a byproduct of having the antigens in the system. 

A quick test on a Norn in my lab world using the biochemistry kit to add and remove antibodies confirmed it. The spike roughly a third of the way in is where I maxed the antibodies out, and the drop halfway through is where I removed them. In both cases there was no effect on the decay rate of the antigen; the antibodies are simply produced whenever the antigens exist. It’s possible the game engine is coded to kill the bacteria themselves when the antibodies reach a certain level, but they certainly don’t affect the actual antigens.

The remainder of Loki's mutations were extremely minor.

A whole new world

[Originally written August 15 2020]

After much preparation, I had a brand new C3/DS world set up. I had modified the bootstrap so that the game would use the birth and death music from C3 rather than DS. I’d set up ecosystem stabilizers. I’d intercepted Grendel and Ettin eggs and put them in water to keep them suspended. I’d planted tubas and bramboo (selecting different colors for different locations while I was at it). I’d stocked my inventory with lemon cookies and a few potions. And there were no pappuses this time. 

All that was left was to migrate the Creatures – and decide what to do with the Ettins.

Ultimately I decided to hatch the Ettin eggs. I still don’t have any particular interest in them, but for reasons I can’t articulate, I just feel they should be there. Also, hatching them would verify that the bootstrap edit worked and did not break the game.

With Huginn and Muninn hatched, taught to speak, and dropped off in the Desert, it was time to import my Creatures. There were the three named Norns (Helena, Horatio, and Lorenzo), Caliban, and three unnamed baby Norns, of course… but there were also a few Grendels who didn’t get their fair shot in the previous world – three males and two females. I figured instead of hatching the Grendel eggs in this world, I’d work through this queue first, starting with the two females. Caliban would be the first male reintroduced, after the females had their go.

Importing Helena gave me a bit of a surprise, as I’d forgotten she was pregnant when I exported her. She immediately rang in the new world with its first Norn egg, which I promptly stashed in my inventory for the time being. I then imported Horatio and Lorenzo, who immediately began sneezing. I took them straight to the Workshop to be isolated and doused in Pink Mist, while I left Helena in the Meso so I could do the same to her and everything around her with the hoverdoc. I was not about to deal with a repeat of the Plague from Verona.

Then I brought in the three babies, who had been exported immediately after hatching. I named each one according to the new naming scheme, then brought Tamora and Rosalind into the world. Just when I was about to hatch the first egg, I got a notification – Helena was expecting twins. Good lord, Norn, slow down! You don’t need to outbreed the Grendels this time! With this knowledge I decided that maybe the fourth egg should stay in the inventory for now.

Only, it turned out she only had one egg. The notifications were acting funky, which I figured out was due to having a backup copy of the .cos I’d modified still in the folder. Hopefully, removing it will fix the issue in the same world. Otherwise I’ll just have to export everyone and migrate to a new world again.

But for the time being, I had genetic analysis to do! First I checked Tamora and Rosalind against the gentle Grendel genome and the Banshee Grendel genome, to see if there was anything I’d missed in my initial examinations. And indeed there was. Because I had previously compared the Grendels to their actual parents rather than the base genomes, any inherited mutations slipped past. 

Notably, Tamora turned out to have the same receptor mutation that leads to immortality. I would need to manually force-age her when it came time. She also had a strange pose gene alteration for one of the poses when hitting the ground after falling, which changed the X in the “what direction am I facing” slot into a Y. I have absolutely no idea what that means. There were a couple more pose mutations but they just changed the angle of the body in a couple inconsequential animations so should not be a problem. Rosalind, on the other hand, had nothing to report.

Before starting on the new children, I took a good look at Lorenzo, who had never had a proper genome analysis done. Right off the bat he had something interesting to see!

Receptor

Gene 0017: Drive 16

Organ: “Creature”, Tissue: “Drive levels”, Locus: “UP”. Chemical: “Up drive”.
Analogue: Output = 0 + ((Signal - 0) * 1). 

Organ: “Creature”, Tissue: “Drive levels”, Locus: “UP”. Chemical: “Disappointment”.
Analogue: Output = 0 + ((Signal - 0) * 1).

I’m not sure whether the “up drive” is the drive that says “I’m too high up” or “I need to go up” but either way, it looks like this drive will actually be linked not to the drive chemical but to disappointment. The result should, in theory, be a Norn that feels a need to extract himself from the location when he’s disappointed. Although it will likely have no noticeable effect in practice, I can’t help but have the mental image of a hilariously disapproving Norn staring judgementally at the others as he attempts to ride the elevator away from their antics.

Reaction

Gene 0234: Anger creation

1 Anger + 1 Adrenaline = 2 Anger + 1 Adrenaline.
Rate: 41 (Half-life: 2.9 seconds)

1 Anger + 1 Dehydrogenase = 2 Anger + 1 Adrenaline.
Rate: 41 (Half-life: 2.9 seconds)

Now this is a neat one! Normally, if a creature is angry and has Adrenaline in his system, he’ll get even angrier. In Lorenzo, it’s not Adrenaline that causes this reaction but Dehydrogenase – a chemical that counters Alcohol. After a few minutes watching a Norn in my test world, I’ve concluded that this chemical is rarely, if ever, actually encountered naturally, which means that this mutation has effectively just silenced this reaction. Even if he does get some Dehydrogenase in his system, because only one side of the reaction mutated, it would quickly be converted into Adrenaline, which wouldn’t kick off the anger-producing reaction anymore.

In other words, Lorenzo isn’t mad, he’s just disappointed.

He also had a half-life mutation, which made my heart sink. Every chemical’s half-life is stored in one gene, so there’s no telling which one mutated without just scrolling through all of them. Thankfully, I only had to go down to Air to find it – it’s a couple seconds shorter, but that shouldn’t matter as he hopefully won’t be holding his breath.

Pose

Gene 0572: tired appr

"Tired 2": ?00 322 000 01 01 01X

"Tired 2": ?00 332 000 01 01 01X

He also has a pose mutation that affects walking, specifically when tired, which initially worried me, but it turns out this may actually be helpful, as it gives him a longer stride and allows him to move a little farther.

Another, more worrying pose gene change was that one of his Downhill poses mutated – not the pose string itself but the pose ID: Downhill 1 became Downhill 2, leaving him with two Downhill 2s and no Downhill 1. I’m not sure how this will affect him.

Boy, Lorenzo was enough of a case study in and of himself!