Recommended C3/DS Patches and Agents

I meant to post this yesterday but underestimated the sheer amount of formatting. Anyway, between updating an old agent and releasing a new one, I finally finished reinstalling C3/DS. While reinstalling, I also put together a list of agent I installed and backed them up for later. After I realized just how many agents I had found links for, I decided to turn it into a blog post. I should probably mention that my particular play style features a lot of metaroom customization and third party downloads. Depending on how you play the game, you might not find this list useful. If nothing else, I hope the list of patches/fixes is helpful. Finding some of them can be a real pain.

Download: Critter and Bug Smells v1.2

Critter and Bug Smells simply adds smells to all critters and bugs to help creatures find them easier. More specifically, it gives critters and bugs CA 0. There's also a few tweaks to let CA 0 travel like other CAs. Otherwise it wouldn't travel properly. Since it uses CA 0, and only CA 0, it doesn't conflict with agents that use CA 19, like the New Toy Smell. It also has an auto-recovery script heavily inspired by the one from Snap out of it. So any unknown bugs don't stop critters and bugs from smelling.

If you're upgrading from version 1, either start a new world or remove the old version of the agent before installing the new one. I'd recommend starting a new world but that's mostly because I don't know if CACL can connect more then one agent type to a smell. If so, you might have some very confused norns if they look for a critter/bug and find a toy instead.

Edit: 11/2/18: I've updated it to version 1.2 to fix a problem with the auto recovery script. I've also probably fixed the main problem this time. If you haven't updated it from version 1.1, please do so.

Here's a Creatures Caves download and an alternative download.

Download: Sound Emitter

I noticed while playing in the Oasis metaroom that rooms with background noises were more relaxing. So, with some sprites from Doringo, I created this agent to fill other metarooms with noise. There are two parts to it: the console and the actual sound emitters. The console creates sound emitters and also toggles if they're shown or hidden. The middle part of it lets you type in the sound you want a sound emitter the play.

The sound emitters themselves have a play/pause button, let you toggle how frequently they play the sound, and a button to delete the sound emitter. The sound emitters created by the console only play one sound, but an additional agent in this pack lets you play multiple sounds. They're also fairly easy to customize just by changing a catalogue file around. Other then that, they work like the regular sound emitters do.

There are a few quirks with this agent though. The console only accepts four characters for the sound's name and both sound emitter types only play sounds with four characters in their names. The game only plays sounds like that, so not much I can do there. If you create a sound emitter with a sound that doesn't exist and try to play it, the emitter will either disappear or spit out a "Sound file missing" error. This shows up in sound emitters created by the console and the customizable ones.

Here's a Creatures Caves download and an alternative download.

A new direction for the Ray

Regular updates to the ray stopped a while ago and it's likely going to stay that way. I have various reasons for it but the main one is that documenting nurture worlds has become more of a chore then fun. So I'm not going to do that. Instead I'll likely switch to writing about wolfling runs or Caos projects. I've been meaning to write about Caos here most of the year and now is a good time to do so. I'm itching to start a new project or two and my current ones are some where close to being done. I'm pretty sure I said that my projects were nearly done earlier this year though. So maybe take that with a grain of salt.

Besides messing around with Caos, the only other Creatures-related thing I've been doing is reorganizing folders. Exciting stuff, I know! It's only beaten by the excitement and fun of reinstalling C3/DS and tracking down various agents. My old install was a couple of years old and was bloated by agents and sprite breeds I never used anymore. So I decided to just backup the old one and start fresh. It's surprisingly renewed my interest in it. Or maybe that's just the world-eating butterflies I've been playing with.