Mobula Ray: Grendel Trouble

After attempting to cure a plague of histamine and giving up, I regretted making the Jungle such a hot spot. If old age didn't kill these creatures, the bacteria in the Jungle would. Old age claimed a life first, though. Antonio, the first gen male Grendel, was the first to die around 4 hours and 38 minutes. Since my world was at the population limit, a little gen 5 male grendel hatched. Not a second later, an old gen 1 male Stinger Norn died of starvation. This left the Norn Terrarium group without a male, though there were two or three in the Jungle. Even the stinger baby who hatched was female.

Amusingly, my norn home smell emitter was still active and confusing Norns. A female Stinger named Kanako decided to lay her egg in the Ark's hallway. She really didn't know what to do with herself. She picked up her egg, tried to hit it, but ended up dancing around with a teacup. The newest Grendel joined her for a while before traveling to the Desert. He was the latest member of the Grendel group to make that journey, with Isolda being the first.

While watching the Grendel, one of the gen 1 Stingers, Miai, died. She died of starvation in the Jungle, which had more then enough food. A little stinger male hatched, and I moved him into the Norn Terrarium. And then Tsiyi died of apparently nothing. He wasn't old, diseased, or starving. Living in the Jungle might have gotten to him though. He was one of the sicker ones when the histamine plague hit. I then noticed that there weren't any Grendel eggs.

Slightly worried for my favorite group of creatures in this world, I decided to export the latest baby, just in case the whole population died out. All of the Grendels were older then an hour, and a decent amount of the were in the old stage or higher. There were two or three Grendels still below old age though. I also moved the Jungle Stingers to the Meso, since the Grendels and Norns were getting into little slap-fights here and there. To both breeds credit, neither side had killed one another yet, they just didn't like each other very much.

Mobula Ray: Genetic weirdness

I'll admit, my interest in this world died a little bit when Isolda died. Because of this I decided to stop blogging the world when most or all of the first generation died off. Considering these first gen Stingers were close to the three hour mark, that wasn't far off. Anai Stinger usually live 10ish hours, but I had forgotten to length this version's lifespan. So they had the regular lifespan of about five and a half hours. The Ettins were over three hours old at this point, and the rest of the first gens weren't to far behind. The only surviving gen 1 Grendel, a male named Antonio, was over 3 hours old and already in the old stage.

It wasn't any of the first gens who died first though. Instead it was a second gen Grendel who died of starvation. I was quite disappointed to see that, since the room was filled with food, and I was fond of dumping food near them. There really wasn't a good excuse for him starving. Still, his death meant that there were only three males left, and one of those was the first gen. In another part of the world, Christian, the ex-loner Stinger male, finally had a child named Fidelio. Sadly, that child ended up being a fastager and died quickly.

Slightly weirded out by the Stinger dying, I copied down the fastagers moniker and compared it's genome to the base genome. Before I got very far in it though, I noticed that the Jungle Terrarium couple, Ezura and Sassacus, had a baby. As if that wasn't enough, the newest Stinger baby quickly suffocated to death... on land. So I added her moniker to the list to compare. I also noticed the first gen Grendel had histamine, so I moved him to the medbay to cure him. While doing so, I found Christian trying to eat an elevator. So I moved the both of them to the Jungle and paused the game. I was tired of the interruptions and was dying to know what happened to the babies.

Finding out what happened to the fastager was easy. The initial concentration of life was set to variant 1, which meant that this Stinger was dead when it was born. I debated if I should to fix this in the base genomes or not, and went with yes. This sort of mutation is unrealistic and mildly disturbing. While the first baby was easy to figure out, the second one was much harder to pin down. It didn't have any obvious mutations like the last one. I did eventually find out what happened, and it's even more interesting. File 1 is the baby who died, and file two is the original genome:

 150 Different in file 1 176   0 Emb B MutDupCut        128   0 Organ# = 6, Current Reaction, No Tissue, Unknown Locus: 2, chem=Antigen 5, thresh=0, nom=0, gain=68, features=Analogue  (0)
 150 Different in file 2 176   0 Emb B MutDupCut        128   0 Organ# = 6, Organ, Organ, Injury, chem=Antigen 5, thresh=0, nom=0, gain=68, features=Analogue  (0)

This mutation, if it was connected to a less vital reaction, wouldn't be fatal. It's supposed to injure an organ when the Norn is infected with Antigen 5, but it's mutated to shut off the reaction entirely. If I remember correctly, this sort of receptor setup speeds up or slows down a reaction, depending on how much of that chemical is in the Norn's body or if the chemical passes a threshold. It's been a while since I've messed with receptor genes, so correct me if I'm wrong in the comments. The only thing I know for sure is that the baby dies even with antigen 5 in its system. The only way I got the poor thing to live was by silencing the mutated receptor. Once I did that, her clone was fine.

When I unpaused the world, Ezura and Sassacus had another baby, a healthy female this time. After checking on the rest of the world, I noticed some of the second gen Grendels were getting old. Also that the Jungle was getting quite crowded, with 9 Grendels and 4 Norns. The Norn Terrarium was also a bit full. So I lowered the population limit from 40 to a more manageable 32. Seeing as the world already had 32 creatures in it, any new eggs wouldn't hatch.

And then, like Creatures worlds usually do after such an eventful time, they go silent. Eventually, I got bored and used the airlock glitch on a scent emitter. I think it confused a norn, because Ditte left the Terrarium to come check it out. It shocked her so much, she went grey! Or at least that's what I like to think. Really it was just her unusually short lifespan kicking in.

Mobula Ray: Distractions and Death

Last time, everything was going pretty well. So well in fact, that I felt confidant I could leave the game running while I took care of something else. When I came back Sayo, one of the gen 1 Grendels, and one of the gen 2 stinger males were dead. Isolda had apparently had enough of the heat and Ettins and moved back to the Jungle. Some Stinger had tagged along with her, and now the Jungle had both Norns and Grendels in it. Also Miai and Isolda had their first babies. Miai's baby turned out to be female while Isolda had twins, one male and one female.

Christian had moved down to be with the rest of the Stingers, and Ditte had another female child. It didn't take long for one of the Stinger males, Sassacus and Isolda's male baby, Tsiyi, to move to the Desert terrarium. One of the Ettins, Uda, was still in there. So perhaps the Grendel wanted to keep him mother's childhood friend company. One of the Norn garden gang has also decided to move to the Meso, a mountain Norn named Xerxes.

After a while, Tsiyi moved back to the Grendel Jungle, probably to pass on a message from the Ettin to his mother. The Norn garden gang had another baby, which I moved into the Norn Meso to give Xerxes some company. I was regretting my choice of marks for the grendels at this point. All of the swords tended to merge when they were all together. Also regrettable that I forgot to pause the game when the phone rang and I was distracted for a while.

When I got back, Isolda was dead. She was fine when I last saw her, but a full dose of Antigen 6 was to much for her. Even sadder was the fact that she was pregnant when she died. There was still hope for them though, her daughter had laid an egg and I was also able to use the eggernator to get Isolda's last egg. Isolda's egg hatched into a male named Guregori. He was immediately swarmed by flies. So I moved him to safety and notice that Sassacus had moved into the Jungle as well. And one of the Stinger had twins! Despite the deaths, the Stingers were up to 12 members, the Grendels still had 10 members, and the Norngarden Gang were up to 8 members.

Another Mobula Ray Update

Considering the large gap between the last update and this one, a small update is probably in order. I honestly don't feel like explaining what happened here, so I'll just say life got in the way and my interest in the games died for a couple of month. Real life has gotten somewhat better, and even if it hadn't, writing for this blog has always been enjoyable. So, as of this blog post going live, The Mobula Ray will likely be updated once or twice a week. I say likely because it really depends on how much editing I complete and how much I'm actually playing the game. Currently the only other world I have is a wolfling world, and writing about the same run every week would get old fast.

With that out of the way, I've reinstalled C3/DS recently. I finally got tired of waiting 5 minutes to import 1 Norn and decided to completely reinstall C3/DS. This has left me without any worlds to mess around in, so I decided to go with my old default of Mobula Ray. In case anyone is wondering, the old Mobula Ray ended up being a confusing whirlwind of hatching, naming, and exporting babies and trying, and failing, to keep up with a large population. It ended up being a confusing mess that was interesting to watch, but a pain to write about and so I stopped working on the world. It did teach me that I prefer blogging about worlds that have already reached some sort of end point.




Which brings me back to the new Mobula Ray world. The world setup isn't as complex as my usual one and it doesn't even have seasonal food sources. It's just a simple docked world with Norn Garden 1 and a few extra agents in it. Even the Creatures in it are gen 1s, with some CFF Stinger Norns in the Norn Terrarium, Lavender Grendels in the Jungle, a random assortment of Norns in Norngarden 1, and two default Ettins that hatched while creating the world. The only thing I've done differently is add familial marks to everyone, with the individual marks only being passed on by females.

Even with a simple setup, I had one interesting thing happen. The group of Grendels already had one of their gen 1 females die of disease, and she only had one descendant, little Isolda. The rest were descended from Sayo, who was much more fertile than the other Grendel was. Isolda had apparently had enough of the Jungle though! She decided to visit the Desert Terrarium and make friends with one of the local Ettins. In the other parts of the world, there were some happy Anai Stingers, which was nice to see considering I hadn't tested them that thoroughly yet. There was one main group of three, and one loner named Christian who decided to camp out near the Crypt. The group in the Norn Garden was also doing pretty well.

Stinger-induced Hiatus

Month long gaps are probably just going to be a thing with this blog. Sometimes I have no interest in playing the games, and other times I don't have any interest in documenting a world. The last hiatus was for a slightly different reason though, Stinger Norns! I've been planning and slowly working on a new version of them for ages now. I had sort of hoped to get them done by their second anniversary, but that isn't very likely.

And by a new version, I mean a completely new version. The old Anai genome, which I actually converted Gizmo myself, is being dropped for a tweaked version of Kezune's CFE Gizmos. Plus they, and the Rikori, are getting some of the CFF genes. Add in a few weird edits of my own, like a new lifespan and stimuli, and they are going to take a while. Not that I'm complaining though. I've sort of re-found my love for Norn genetics... just not for actually playing the game... or testing things. I still hate the testing phase.

I might start uploading some of the results of my experiments, or some other things I've been writing soon though. Maybe.