Creatures Community Chat

Friday, July 1, 2011

Creatures 1: The run

Well I most definitely did leave my wolfing run going over night, but due to life constraints I haven't been able to do a write up on it until now.

Regrettably the run didn't last the whole night. At some point my computer decided to do Windows updates and rebooted my computer. Fortunately it did last long enough for me to learn a few things and gather results.

Unfortunately the run went pretty much as I expected. I awoke the morning after, and after being upset at finding my computer had reset I opened Creatures to find the world nearly deserted. Judging by the age of the couple of remaining Norns the run had last 3-4 hours before the reboot had occured.

At this stage I need to say I'm not at my usual computer (spending the weekend with the parental-units) and I'm writing this on my Mum's laptop. This means I'm trying to recall all this information from memory, so forgive my fogginess.

Upon returning I believe there were 5 Norns still alive. Only 3 of these Norns were newborns. Two Norns remained from the older generations. Grace was an ancient surviver and one of the males. If memory serves me correctly it was Jake who survived.

The three new Norns were all decendants of the latest generation of Norns. Billy, Beatrice, Tracey and Abe are all parents, although I can't recall which child has which parents.

I played with the children (2 males, 1 female) for a short time to see how well they faired. Unfortunately during this process one of the males passed on. He seemed to have no concept of moving about the world. Although he could walk he chose not to, and had no concept of eating. The other two seem slightly stronger and may still be useful. I will take a closer look at their genetics at some point and make a decision based upon that.

So sadly I'm going to have to call this run a failure. I've ended up with only two Norns which is unlikely to be enough to breed a large population from.

Now I will turn to my fallback plan. I will take a greater roll in the breeding process and try to match Norns up at the correct times to try and get a large number of eggs. To make this work I will only import 2-4 Norns at a time, allowing me to take good care of each Norn and enhance the chances of a happy pregnancy.

I will do this for a couple of generations, choosing breeding partners and the healthiest of the offspring to try and breed hardy Norns that can take good care of themselves as well as be succesful breeders.

This will take a great deal more effort and time on my part and progress will be slow. On the plus side it will mean more detailed blog posts for you guys, so it's not all bad.

On a side note I've started playing Creatures 3 again. Although I don't have the same fondness for the Norns in C3 they are vastly better breeders and populations change at a faster speed, which keeps things interesting from scientific view. I've always had a fondness for the Treehugger Norns, and I think I will attempt to create a population that are better breeders and don't have such fears of crowdedness. At this stage I'm not committing to such a task, but I will keep you posted shoud anything interesting develop.

Perhaps at some stage I can create a world specifically for people to send Norns to. We could create a community world and have people submit Norns to try and achieve some kind of goal. I've no idea what goals we would aim for, but it's an interesting concept. Why not take it a step further and make it competitive? Have people only submit two breeds and see which one outbreeds the other?

There are unlimited possibilities. Let me know your thoughts!

3 comments:

  1. My ear is itchy... (that was my thought)
    Here is my other thought:
    It's kinda sad your pc updated (stupid windows) and your run stopped. but on the other hand... a new population will come!

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  2. It's great to see another Creatures 1 fan! I hope to catch up on all of your posts sooner or later, but I've found it nice just to see a few C1 screenshots. Windows has a nice way of deciding to install updates when you least need it to: I disabled automatic updates for this reason. I find it better to just check for updates every couple of days, or at least let the system alert me when updates are available. Oh, Windows, why encroach on Creatures?!

    I look forward to your new C1 world and updates! I will be starting over sometime this weekend, which means Discover Albia will be back to its normal busy self in no time.

    Like you said, there is just something about these original Norns (and Grendels) that begs for attachment. C2 Norns were a little less easy to get attached to, and I found the C3/DS Norns to be very difficult to fully enjoy. Thank goodness for the developers in the community who have made C1 Norns possible in the newer games!

    I hope to install Creatures 3 at some point down the line, but I do like your idea of having a community world with goals. Good luck with everything!

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  3. Oh I wish this wasn't an older post. I really love this idea! Guess I'll have to keep reading to find out whether you've done it yet or not. :)

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