SAM6: Future Plans

I feel as though I've just about hit on a reasonable formula for keeping a stable population, as well as encouraging the Norns to move about the world. There is probably still some juggling around to find a good number of children each Norn is able to have and I still intend to make the Grendels a more prominent feature in the world, but I'm starting to feel as though I'm close.

I intend now to put the population to the ultimate test and see how well they can survive without me. My hope is that the population will remain relatively stable; somewhere around 40 Norns.

At present the population is recovering nicely, however the down side is that most of my Norns are mingling in the Norn Garden. I'm going to wait until they get overcrowded in there and start moving around the world again before introducing the Grendels to the main ship, effectively cutting off the C1 area.

I'm perfectly happy to have the Grendels go through and wipe out a room full of Norns as long as the overall population survives. The only way to guarantee this is to have tribes set up in each room. I find it pretty unlikely a group of Grendels will be able to wipe out all the Norns if they're separated by such a large space.

So what does this mean?

I think most importantly I'm not going to be able to keep up with the family tree idea. I already have trouble keeping up with all the new births and doubling the speed of the game will pretty much make it impossible. Instead what I'll try and do is keep a rough tab on each generation. I will use the colour coding system to distinguish between generations, which will still provide a visual aid for people wanting to keep up to date on that aspect of things. It will lack the ability to tell which children belong to which parents, but with lines going all over the tree it was nearly impossible to keep track of anyway. And now that the tribes have mixed to such a large degree it becomes less interesting.

It is also probable that I will occasionally miss a newborn here and there. I will do my best to list them all, but some are bound to slip by, especially if they die young.

Once I am satisfied with the distribution of the population I will put the Grendels in the jungle and let them disperse from there. Hopefully by then the Norn population will be large enough to survive Grendel attacks and a natural balance can be reached.

If I can reach that natural balance I will likely open the DS warp portals and see what random dangers the wider community can inject into my world.

Finally, I intend to do a write up some time in the near future of my findings in the world and about the Norns. Hopefully this summery will prompt others in the community to fix some of the bugs/disadvantages of breeds and the world and promote some future development for C3/DS. With some luck it may give people some things to think about should there ever be a Creatures 4.

Random Observation: Even while I've been writing up this post I've noticed my Norns have started spreading around the ship through the use of the portal system I set up. At present they're mostly taking up residence in the desert, but a couple have spread to the jungle. Funny enough only one has made the jump to the Norn Terrarium.

I think if I leave them for a short while they will migrate to the rest of the world, filling each room and effectively thinning out their numbers. Once that happens I will introduce the Grendels again as another population controlling agent.

Here is one last look at the family tree in it's current format: