A Dramatic Story! (Not Really)

(Preface: I've been cleaning and reorganizing my Creatures folder recently and I found this story in an old notepad file in between old genome ideas. It was written before the Stinger Norns were posted, so early 2013. I think I was deleting some old worlds, like I do, and got caught up in roleplaying my Creatures. Rare was my first GoM queen, and Balmora was, and still is, my favorite Grendel. I thought it was to neat to leave rotting on my computer, even if it is slightly terrible.)

Rare sends her people through the warp to a new spaceship, as the old one is sucked into a black hole. She will mourn this old ship or hers, but knows that there is a whole world out there for them.

The Mobula Ray sends out packed escape pods full of Norns to the reaches of space as a fire destroys it's interior. The spaceship will be fine after it rebuilds itself, but all that it was is lost. Each Norn population goes to a different planet. The bananas get dumped into C1, the blues get dumped into a strange aquatic land where they can breath, and the Peacock Norns get dumped into a place that time forgot.

The Banshee are there to take advantage of the situation and take quite a few of the escape pods hostage. At least half of the Creatures die on the way to their destination, and its left to the survivors to well survive.

The other ship under the Mobula, the Remora Ray, also sends it's creatures to another place, though they are luckier. Balmora herself is on this ship, and rides an escpae pod by herself to an alien world, full of Stinger Norns. One Stinger race lives a long time, and doesn't require as much food, the Anai. The others live less long and can't digest their food quite as effectively, they are the Rikori.

A New Mobula Ray

 Every once in a while I like to delete a few of my worlds and start over. My main world, usually called the Mobula Ray, is restarted every few months. Before I delete the world, I hatch and export any creatures. They either end up in my splicing folder, or get added into the new world. Why bring this up, you might be asking? Because I redid my main world a few days ago, and felt like it could make for an interesting blog post. Also there's a video of it, because why not? I was sort of brain dead when I recorded it so it's longer then I'd planned on. I probably won't write about these guys to much, just do an occasional update whenever anything interesting happens or when a new generation starts.

I didn't raise any aquatic creatures last year, and I've missed raising them. So most of this world is dedicated to amphibious creatures There's a part of the world for almost any sort of creature. Artema Sea is for my swimming creatures, Aquanornia and Past Seas are for my normal amphibious creatures, and Scielence Falls, and the Meso of course, are there in case I was to raise some normal creatures. The population limit is set to 30, and that's about how many I want to keep in this world. Otherwise it might start to lag quite a bit.

There's a small family of golden Chameleon Norns in Science Falls. My current goal with them is to get them to breed gold adults all of the time. Then there's my collection of purple Stingerish Crabish... Norn things. They were spliced from some old gait experiments of mine and some Stinger Norns. This didn't work out to well, and it took a few generations of splicing to get Norns that weren't utterly stupid. This current group seems fairly smart. Sootpad likes smacking everyone around though.

The "main attraction" of the world is Artemia Sea and my colortrue Mermaids. I've been slowly breeding out the green color from them, and have actually gotten quite a few gorgeous Norns from this current generation. They are quite a fertile bunch, and I've gotten over 50 eggs from a past generation. I've cut down this current group a bit, so maybe I can avoid hitting the egg limit for once.

The last, and most interesting for me, is my group of Grendels. I've called them Goat-eyed Grendels and they've actually inspired a breed that I'll get around to making eventually. These guys are nothing like my idea though. They are your average Grendel, slightly angry and pretty adorable. They were products of random splicing, and I'm fairly happy with the results. I'm a sucker for blue Creatures.

Pardon the dust?

I've always been terrible at keeping up with writing, and this blog will probably be forgotten about from time to time. So pardon the dust as I try to figure out what I want to do with this blog. I sadly lost the migration world I was going to do. I think I accidentally deleted it when I was cleaning out my worlds. I don't keep more then four worlds usually, and the old migration world probably got caught up in that.

So instead of that world, I'll probably be writing about what ever world I'm running at the time, or some experiments I'm messing around with. Currently it's my longest feral run ever, and maybe future CCSF submission. It's currently up to the 320th gen and not much has changed in it for the past 50 or so generations. The only exciting thing happening is a killer Grendel that helps the generations move a little faster by killing Norns. To be fair, there's almost always 20+ extra eggs just laying around.

Seasonal Migration Worlds

Seasonal migrations are exactly what they sound like, worlds were the Norns have to migrate each season to survive. I like to think of it as a continuous IQ test, even for the adults. In a normal feral run you can really only test the children, but with a migration world you test all of them. It's also pretty interesting to watch a whole population move from one area to another, and, with the addition of seasonal flowers, it can also be really beautiful. Setting them up is another story though.

 

Choosing Metarooms

There's two parts to setting up a migration world, the metarooms and the patch plants. I'll be going over the metarooms first. I've found that using 2-4 metarooms is the best, depending on how large the metarooms you use are. It's completely possible to set up a migration in one metaroom, or even use more rooms then four. Large metarooms like Ainardia or C2toDS are probably perfect for seasonal migrations. I've only used Chione in a migration world, but it works out great.

If you use more then four metarooms, then setting it up will harder then just 2-4 rooms. It's completely possible to set up a migration world like this. The very first migration world I set was utterly confusing to me, but the Norns were just fine. Plus it might make your game lag a lot, depending on your computer. Patch plants are surprisingly laggy if you have a lot of them.

As for choosing your metaroom, I like to choose the rooms based on what season the patch plants are going to appear in that room. For example Veridia is perfect for a Spring or Summer metaroom, and chione would be perfect for a winter room, if it wasn't so big. I chose the North pole room for this blog's migration run, but it requires the Norn Terrarium to install it. So I chose the Norn Terrarium as my spring room so I could have both of them. Size is really important as well. A room like Tulu isn't good if you want a large population(18-28ish), and a room like Veridia isn't good if you want a small population(8-16ish). You will have to experiment with population sizes for your migration world, as each combination of rooms is different. I had to lower my current migration world's limit from 28 to something like 20 because Tulu was to small for my population to live in comfortably.

 

One Metaroom Migration runs and Linking Rooms Together

In case you don't want to use a lot of metarooms, or if your computer can't handle it, then migration runs can easily be done in one metaroom. Just choose your metaroom, decide which seasonal patch plants go where, and then add them. You might also want to use just one metaroom if your using the larger metarooms like Ainardia or Chione.

Linking rooms together requires the Magic Worlds room edits agent, other wise your Creatures won't travel between metarooms at all. You might also want to use the Interporter instead of the Torii agent. With the Torii, Creatures tend to boucne from one room to the other, and not stop until they fall asleep. The interporter also has some problems, but at least Creatures can use it properly. make sure to set the interporter to door mode, so the creatures don't get confused. You can click on the portal/door part to see which mode it's in. There is one other door agent, the Archways, that might not have the "bouncing Norn" problem the Torii has, but I don't know for certain.

The Patch Plants

There's two main ways I've set the food sources, one where there's barely enough food, and one where you just put patch plants where ever. With both ways, it's probably best to use food that decomposes, and doesn't stay there indefinitely. This usually makes the Norns migrate a bit sooner, and makes sure there isn't any leftover food that could confuse a Norn. "Perishable" patch plants include the explodanuts, the spikeball things, the Eggstravaganza eggs, the plums, and the Aubergines. Patch plants that don't decompose work just as well as those that do, I just tend to prefer ones that disappear.

Anyway, one way to set up the patch plants is where there is barely any food each season, or where the food diminishes a lot each season. The first one really only fits in a world like Chione or a desert metaroom where you might not want to add a lot of food sources to fit in with the theme of winter wastelands or deserts. This can be very frustrating if you don't want to have a lot of food, but it also makes the world very challenging for the Creatures. The second one is really simple, you just lower the density of the patch a certain amount when you add it. A normal patch plant starts out at 50%, and I've found that a nice amount to go down each season is 10%. That means it's 50 in Spring, and ends up at 20-25%. This has the benefit of making food scarcer as the seasons go on, but isn't as annoying to set up.

 

The other way is to not change the density when you add the plants to each season/room. This is the easist way to set up a migration run, and has the added benefit of making sure Norns have enough food. Some patch plants might need to have their density lowered anyway so they don't flood your world.

 

Three Metaroom Setup

One specific setup, that I haven't personally tested yet, would be the three metaroom setup. A common problem with migration runs is that eggs tend to pile up in all of the metarooms, and it isn't always easy for a baby Norn to navigate their way to food. The three metaroom setup solves that, sort of. You would choose three metarooms like normal, and then use the middle metaroom and put two seasons in there, instead of two separate metarooms. I would put Summer and Fall in the metaroom and Spring and Winter in the other two. Then you would put an egg finder connected to a timer in that middle room. This puts the eggs in one specific spot, and makes the babies travel less to get to food. Plus it's less metarooms and probably less patch plants, so there might be less lag.

 

Problems with the Concept

There's a few problems with migration worlds, some major, some minor. Having a lot of patch plants can cause your world to lag ever so often, and I haven't found a way around that. Even in my current migration world, the game will lag ever so often. The game runs fine, and is fairly fast, it just lags sometimes. Your computer might not have this problem with patch plants though? I don't know if it's just my game or not. Another problem with the patch plants themselves. They might crash your game if you add them to close to a solid metaroom boundary. There really isn't a way around this, you will just have to keep room boundaries in mind when adding patch plants.

Eggs tend to build up in the metarooms, and the only way to fix that is to add an egg finder. You could do the usual trick of setting up an egg find and making them go through an IQ test, if you hate eggs laying around everywhere. The last problem might be that your computer can't handle having a lot of metarooms, or patch plants. Migration worlds tend to run a bit faster then a world filled with patch plants, though it also seems to have lag spikes. Plus setting up the migration worlds takes a bit of planning and some experimentation. It's a weird way to set up a world, but hopefully this blog post has made setting one up slightly easier.

Some random tips:

• Choose your metarooms carefully
• Try putting rooms in a certain order(I like to follow the seasons, from Spring to Winter)
• Don't put patch plants to close to a rooms boundaries or the game might crash.