Creatures Community Chat

Saturday, April 30, 2011

Creatures 1: Trista and Pollen

I have another two Norns today, both females. Although generation one Norns, both these young ladies have interesting mutations that are worth noting.

Trista:




Trista is a bit of an unfortunate Norn. Although she eats well and seems quite friendly with other Norns she has a rather nasty mutation that is having a detrimental effect on her sleeping patterns. Which is to say, she basically doesn't have any sleeping patterns.

Trista, like all the Norns I'm raising now has the usual two mutations that allow her to die of old age, as well as preventing antioxidants from turning into the ageing chemical.

She has a small mutation to the half-lives of one of the unknown chemicals in her bloodstream (226), but considering it's a change from 72 to 73 I can't see this having a dramatic impact on her life.

The nasty mutation is this one:

Instincts:
135: Tiredness + 'I rest' -> 93<048>


This instinct should read:

135: Tiredness + 'I rest' -> 93Reward


Essentially this chemical 048 has replaced the reward chemical emitted when Trista goes to sleep. This means she doesn't get any reward for attempting to sleep and thus is a terrible sleeper. She has just hit adulthood around 1.27 hours and has only slept the once.

For this reason I'm sad to say I don't think I'll be including Trista in the final run of 8.

Pollen:



Pollen also has a nasty mutation, although I don't see it as being quite as bad as Trista's.

Pollen is one of the best Norns I've had when it comes to sleeping. She sleeps regularly and will often just drop down and take a nap without hesitation.

She's not quite so good when it comes to eating, but in the last half hour I had her in the world I pretty much left her to her own devices, and although she ended up being a lot hungrier, she managed to take care of herself. She eats very well when food is brought to her, but doesn't seem quite as good at hunting food down, even when it's only a few feet from her. She tends to get distracted by lift buttons instead.

She also has a tendency to get bored when left alone. With company she's not nearly as bad and hopefully with a few more Norns in the world this won't be an issue.

Her initial reaction at meeting another Norn (Trista) wasn't exactly promising. They first met around the piano near the garden, and Trista was forced to chase Pollen all the way back to the hatchery before she agreed to play nicely. Eventually Trista found one of the beach balls to play with and Pollen reluctantly agreed to join in.



Pollen has a few interesting mutations, although I think a few of them were introduced into the Purple Mountain Norn genome and probably aren't mutations at all.

As with the others she has the mutations in relation to ageing properly. As well as that she has some mutations related to Geddonase, glucose and glycogen, which I believe are the special PMN genes. As I'm not sure what Geddonase does I can't really go into much detail on those.

She has emitter 136 changed into:

Noun i/ps Loose dens/cells, chem: NFP


which I'm honestly not sure what it does. However it used to read:

'I'm asleep', chem: NFP


which by the sounds of it emits 'Need for pleasure' chemical while the Norn is sleeping. This is obviously detrimental, and although I'm not sure what the new gene does I think this is a good change.

The interesting mutation in Pollen is another emitter gene:

154: Emit Crowdedness, 'I am fertile'
154: Emit SexDrive, 'I am fertile'


The top gene is her current gene, the bottom being what it usually is in other Norns. I will have to monitor her closely when she interacts with other Norns, but from what I understand this means that when Pollen is in her reproductive cycle, instead of an increased sex drive, Pollen will actually feel more crowded than usual.

This will have an obvious impact on her ability to reproduce, as she is less likely to want to be around other Norns when she is most fertile. Fortunately I don't see it preventing her from reproducing, and I will try and breed the mutation out of the next generation.


Bob:

We don't hear much about our resident Grendel, Bob, but he's still doing okay. In fact he seems quite happy most of the time and his English has become as good as any of the Norns. He now knows my name and will respond to my commands



That said, he's still not the sharpest tool in the shed which he demonstrates by eating the Laburnum weed. I was quite worried when I first heard the Grendel sneeze, but thankfully he made a fast recovery.

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