Creatures 1 Gen2: Update

I think I spoke a little too soon in my last post. Things have got hectic again, but at least it's mostly in a good way. I did have a bit of a sickness epidemic for a while there, with about half the Norns contracting it. Fortunately the illness itself turned out to be pretty tame and they all healed up pretty quickly, it was just a matter of making sure the virus didn't spread. That was the hard part!

The first thing to mention is that I've exported Enza and imported Beatrice to give her a chance to become a mother. Well she took up the challenge and produced her first egg with Trillo.

Bonza disappeared off my radar for a little while as he seemed to be taking pretty good care of himself and didn't need my attention for a bit. When I finally did get back to him he wasn't in quite as good shape. He and Minimee had taken to the hootch and had been having a jolly boys night out. Despite being surrounded by bananas neither of them took much interest in the food and stuck to the grog. Eventually I decided the two were becoming a bad influence on each other and separated them.

 

Much to my delight Bonza ended up in the music room and rekindled his passion for music. He hasn't really got into the instruments in a world full of Norns, but on the plus side his anger mutation doesn't seem to have done him any harm. Not once have I stumbled upon him in an upset state, so his mutation doesn't seem to be as detrimental to him as I thought it might. It will be interesting to see if his children inherit this gene.

 

I was rather amused to see Techie return to the Island area and take up his saxophone again. Apparently his days as the Strawberry Guardian aren't over yet.

This wasn't the only thing Techie was up to though. It's hard to tell from this picture, but Mayflur is once again pregnant and the culprit is Techie. It would seem strawberries are the way to woo the woman around here.

After my initial flu epidemic, Stephanie caught another cold, although this one was a great deal more lethal. I believe it was an Antigen7 infection. Antibody7 seems to take quite a while to build up in a Norns system, so Stephanie wasn't doing too well.

She has survived and made a full recovery thankfully, but her deterioration made me think it was time to give all the Norns a bit of a break. I've exported them all and intend to build each of them up again before going for another run.

Again I really need to emphasize just how fantastic this second generation is. The Norns are now sitting around 4-5 hours old and this is the first time I've needed to give myself a break to take care of them individually. Totem and Techie in particular hardly need any extra care and usually take care of themselves. With a bit of luck the Generation3 Norns will inherit a good chunk of these genes and traits and in a generation or two more I should be able to run a proper Wolfing run again.

Creatures 1 Gen2: More pregnancies

Things in Albia have settled into a comfortable pace. There's been a couple of new pregnancies and a couple of births, but things have been happening in a less haphazard way.

First off I want to introduce 'Minimee', the new Grendel of the world. I'm fairly sure I have the female Grendel COB installed, but Minimee is another male Grendel. The tiny Grendel sprites are amazingly cute. Minimee has taken to the Norns nicely and as you can see, they've started teaching him their language.

Next up is Mayflur's second pregnancy. As you can probably guess from the picture below, the father is Bonza again. I'm having a little trouble keeping with the number of children the males now have, but I'm pretty sure this will be Bonza's second.

Stephanie has also fallen pregnant again. Shortly after meeting Minimee Totem and Steph found a brief moment to ah, express themselves and another egg was on the way.

 

Astonishingly, Mayflur isn't done for this update. She and Bonza have been spending some quality time together on the Island and as a result Mayflur will soon be looking forward to her third egg!

  

The Norns are all sitting somewhere between three and fours hours and I've officially hit my minimum egg number for the next generation. Well, technically I had a bit of an accident and I've only got seven eggs; one of them hatched and I can tell you that Totem and Stephanie are going to be having a lovely little girl. I was rather surprised to see that she came out of her egg not needing food straight away. I've taken a quick look at her genetics and although there's some interesting stuff I can't find anything that would explain that. A shame, because that would be a fantastic genetic advantage. Hopefully I can find an explanation once I start digging into the genetics properly.

Creatures 1 Gen2: Update

And what an update. I guess when you have 8 Norns running about the world plenty can happen, but it seems like so much is happening. Where do we start?

I guess we'll start with the pregnancies. In the last post both Stephanie and Enza had just fallen pregnant. Since then they've both laid eggs and everything went pretty smoothly. Both laid identical eggs which should make it interesting to tell them apart later. Strangely Enza laid her egg about a minute before Steph despite their pregnancies happening the other way round.

As you can see in the picture above, Enza took a trip over to the Island to have her egg. Bonza, not pictured here accompanied her. Apparently he too has taken to the fatherly ways.
Upon their return to the mainland there was much rejoicing, with Trillo, Totem and Redrum there to great the happy couple.

On the other side of the world Stephanie has taken some well deserved time to herself. Laying eggs can be a lot of hard work and Stephanie has chosen to relax by taken up a new hobby. Apparently the harp is so soothing it just about sends you to sleep.

 

Techie has remained on the Island as the keeper of the strawberry patch. He plays his saxaphone to pass the time and has become quite partial to it. Perhaps he heard somewhere plants grow better if you play them music?

I'm quite happy to announce yet another pregnancy in Albia. Causty is with child again and has already laid another egg. Unfortunately this pregnancy took place in a submarine party and I'm not sure if the father is Trillo or Totem again. Hopefully it's Trillo's first, but both had relatively low sex drives in the aftermath and I just can't tell.

Redrum stood watch as Causty laid her second egg. Regrettably he will never meet the child to spring from the egg as Redrum passed away shortly after. His later 'years' seemed much happier than his earlier life. I think he enjoyed having a world filled with Norns he could play with. The Guardian of the Strawberries gave him a mournful tune as the Grendel passed from this world.

R.I.P Redrum

Creatures 1 Gen2: More pregnancies!

After another hour of playing I have 8 of the Gen2 Norns in the world and for the most part they seem to be doing pretty well. Unfortunately due to the import limit of 8 Norns, Beatrice has yet to be imported. I know there was a reason I wanted to have 8 Norns each generation!

Causty, Stephanie and Enza have all fallen pregnant now, with Causty being the next to lay her egg.

Causty and Techie have shacked up together on the Island. Causty joined Techie shortly after I started playing and the two have been almost inseparable since. Upon Causty becoming pregnant Techie seemed to freak out and jumped on the nearest tunnel cart out of there. I didn't realise Causty was pregnant and brought him back to her. Since then their relationship has matured and Techie seems to have taken to being a future father quite well.

Upon importing Enza and Bonza there was a bit of a group reunion, with Stephanie, Trillo, Totem and even Redrum enjoying the large gathering. This eventually resulted in Stephanie falling pregnant. At first I wasn't sure who the father was, but taking a quick look at his sex drive I was pretty certain it was Totem. This will now be Totem second egg. I'm not sure Stephanie has taken kindly to the pregnancy. Her first reaction was to run away from the group and after a quick nap she seems to have kept running towards the jungle area.

No more than two minutes later I heard another kiss-pop and Enza was also pregnant. This time I was confident it was Bonza, as now both he and Totem's sex drive were drastically reduced. This is great news. Only a couple of hours in and I'm already halfway to my minimum number of eggs. The future looks bright for Gen3.

Watching the Norns over the last hour it's becoming clearer who the best survivors are likely to be. Totem almost never eats, and although his life-force does tend to sit a little lower than everyone elses he's constantly active and never has any complaints. With his second child already on the way I have high hopes for him.

It looks like Stephanie will need a fair bit of extra attention. She only has Horse and Purple Mountain Norn genes, and although she's still pretty good at taking care of herself she struggles to keep up with the energy of the Norns with superior genes.

Causty may need a little extra attention too, although she does a decent job of feeding herself. Perhaps it's just that Techie is always incredibly happy and it's only the comparison of the two Islanders.

It's too early to make a call on Bonza or Enza, but the remaining Norns all seem to be fairly well on par with taking care of themselves, which is to say about average. They'll clearly need a little attention to make sure they're eating and sleeping, but should be alright to leave for short periods of time.

Creatures 1 Gen2: First pregnancy

Well that was quick! Couldn't have been playing more than 15 minutes and we've already landed our first Gen2 pregnancy. The instant I imported Mayflur, Totem walked straight up and the two kiss-popped. It was almost as if the two had been waiting for each other.

Shortly after Mayflur laid her egg under the watchful eye of Redrum. Mental note to self, must remember to reinstall the 'Grendel Friendly' COB. Missed it in my world reboot and poor Redrum hasn't been making too many friends; at no fault of his own.

In other news, Techie has decided the garden patch has become too crowded for him and set off for lands afar. With only four Norns currently in the world (Mayflur, Totem and Causty) it may be a while before he sees another furry face again. Never to mind, he does seem to be having fun on his own and people always say you should make sure to travel while you're young.

Although I've only been playing with these guys for an hour or so, I'm really happy with how they're progressing. Interestingly all four of these Norns are children of Heartly, with the girls being daughters of Lillai and the boys being sons of Tabby. Between them they all have either strong genetics or parents who were good at taking care of themselves. And so far these Norns seem at least as good as their parents. Having the Forest Norn genes they don't need to eat as frequently and sleep better. My Norns do have a tendency to get worse with age though, so we'll see if this trend continues.

Creatures 1: Gen2

The new year is well under way now. The Christmas pudding was polished off weeks ago, so I feel it's time to dive back into Albia and continue my Artificial Life experiments!

Last night I finally raised all the Gen2 Norns to adulthood with Stephanie being the last to make the age bracket.

Annoyingly just as Stephanie reached adulthood I ran into a couple of glitches. I think the problem originated with a fight Steph and I were having with the submarine (she wanted to go to the Island, I wanted her to stay and play with Redrum, the Grendel). The sub dipped into the water, then stopped just below the surface. I managed to get it to rise to the surface again and the sub seems fine, but at the same time the cart rode into the scene in a position it just shouldn't be in.

I haven't yet figured out which of the two carts it is, but judging by its height I think it's the one under the carrot patch in the garden. I tried pushing a button to send it back where it came from and unfortunately it's decided it likes the giant tree root and has lodged there permanently.
If this wasn't bad enough, the game then crashed. Fortunately I only lost a few minutes of play and only had to wait 5 minutes or so for Stephanie to re-age back to adulthood. What was interesting though was how Steph looked when I rebooted the game!

Yes, that blurry glitch is her. Restarting the game didn't fix her, but fortunately exporting and importing did.

So that's my exciting return to Creatures. Annoying as it all is, the timing is actually pretty good as I'll create a clean world before importing all the Gen2 Norns again. Naturally I'll need to export Redrum too, and probably make a note of the COBs I have installed, but restarting a C1 world is vastly more enjoyable than restarting a C3/DS world.

So, I'm going to head off and do that stuff, and I'll let you know how all the Norns get on meeting all their generation siblings for the first time.

Final Breeders score: 13,172
6 Hatchery eggs
24 Natural eggs
Time played: 55 hours, 54 minutes.

Norns need love

One of the things I've discovered in my last few months of playing Creatures is the Norns need for love, or more specifically, tickles.
At times I've found Norns who, despite having all their usual drives in the Health Kit satisfied, still have a big frown on their face and I took to trying to understand why.
Sometimes it might be something random in their chemistry, but more often than not I found a simple tickle or two tends to set them right and figured it must have something to do with the tickling process.
The main gene for tickling Norns is called the 'Pointer pats me' or 'user pats' Stimulus gene and decreases Need for pleasure, Pain, and Loneliness, while injecting a dose of Reward chemical.
I was already checking Pain through the Health Kit, so obviously my Norns weren't in pain. As far as I know Reward only reinforces behaviour and does nothing for happiness levels. So this means that if your Norn's drives have been satisfied and they still look unhappy, chances are they're either lonely or in need of pleasure.
Bringing these two chemicals up on the Science Kit biochemistry graph shows that, at least in my case, the Norns weren't lonely, but were in need of pleasure.

There are many things in the world that give Norns pleasure. Eating. Playing with toys. Pushing other Norns. What I've found though, looking at genes and monitoring things in the graph is that a Norn will fulfill these others needs well before reducing their Need for Pleasure to a minimum. This means that unless a Norn learns to over-eat, play when they're not bored, or push other Norns when they have a low sex drive, they're always going to need to get their pleasure from another source.

There seems to be two ways to deal with this. Either we need to go in and tweak the Norns genetics to increase the doses of Need for Pleasure (or we could do this via new toy/food cobs), or...we make sure to hug our Norns regularly.
Perhaps at some stage if I ever get around to making my own revamped Norn I'll try adding this in, but at least for now I'll just make sure to tickle my Norns more frequently.