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.

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!

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!

Grand Botanical Overhaul I: Cacti

I've recently begun my most ambitious project yet: the Grand Botanical Overhaul for Creatures 2. The plan here is to do something similar to my Creatures 1 Herb Update, to improve consistency in plant behaviors and streamline their use for creatures, while also including some quality of life improvements for the player. This includes:

• Including launchers for the plants that don't have them
• Making sure the main plants (pear, triffid, trumpet, aubergine, tomato, and acorn) have proper life cycles including plants, fruits, seeds, and detritus. This includes fixing any bugs in their life cycle.
• Ensuring that anything inedible is invisible - both plants that are naturally inedible and plants that simply aren't ready to eat yet.
• Implementing behavior similar to my updated C1 Herbs: creatures eat directly off the plant, hand pushes plant to pluck the fruit.
• Reclassifying harmful members of edible classes into badplants.

As I go through this process, I'm thoroughly analyzing the code for each plant, so this will be a series of in-depth looks at the CAOS involved. I will be going into the changes I've made, but won't put anything up for download until the project is finished. I'm beginning with the cacti - technically badplants, but still in need of some fixes.

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!