2017's: Eggs

I was enjoying my time with this world so far. The metaroom, the Other Lone Shee's Ark, was well done for a metaroom largely made up of sprites from the games. The area's that weren't from the games were rather pretty, especially the underground pond. Plus it had locking doors. That made it quite easy to section off the room and put different types of creatures in there. The genome I was messing with, the 2017 genome, didn't act that different from a regular creatures. This wasn't a bad thing! It meant that the creator had seamlessly added the digestive tweaks into the CFF genomes. So well, in fact, that I sometimes forgot they weren't regular CFF norns.

Anyway, Ocelot greeted me with another egg and I moved her back with Lion. Everyone in the main group had bred at least once. So I wasn't to worried about the next generation. One of the more interesting norns from the group, Tiger was still in his favorite area. He was quite cold up there, but he wasn't starving up there. Perhaps he was more of a Siberian tiger then a Bengal tiger? He certainly wasn't as interested in breeding as the other males. As I was writing that, Puma laid another egg and Bobcat was the father this time. She was quickly followed by Caracal, who actually tried making it the norn home this time. The father of that egg was also Bobcat. Then it was Ocelot's turn to lay an egg. I didn't move her back with Lion this time. She would have to make her own way back to him.

Then Puma and Bobcat had another baby. Amusingly, Caracal went with Puma to the norn home. Maybe Puma was trying to show her where it was or tell her that the door was always open. Lion, meanwhile, was already quite lonely. I felt sorry for him, but I wanted to see if he would find the elevator up. His old mate, Ocelot, was slowly warming up to Bobcat. There was the occasional kissing noise from them, but they mostly ignored each other. Neither seemed extremely interested in each other though. I was secretly hoping she would find her way back to Lion. They were pretty cute together.

2017's: Growing Up

Last time I was comparing the 2017s genome to a regular CFFs. As I was doing that, the norns decided to move around and age up. I returned and everyone had aged into adolescence. Most had decided to join Tiger in the snowy area. Puma, Ocelot, and Bobcat were huddled together to stay warm while Tiger dealt with the cold on his own. Caracal was still in the main hallway. Lion, meanwhile, was staring at some critters and feeling quite lonely.

Which reminded me, I had learned a few interesting things from the gene compare. Unlike regular CFFs, the 2017s get lonelier faster and can't reduce their loneliness by pushing critters, bugs, and plants. This forces them much more likely to seek out other norns when lonely instead of playing with critters or bugs. Digging into the genome inspired me to try a few of my own tweaks on the 2017s. So I soon had two amphibious critter-eaters living in the lower-right area of the world. (I apparently couldn't stay away from testing things, even in my non-testing worlds.)

Around 45ish minutes in Ocelot and Lion had the first egg. I moved Ocelot back to Lion's area after she laid her egg and I hid the egg underwater. I wanted to focus on the adults in this world, not their children. I also discovered that the baby undine's were starving. Turns out my great edits weren't as great as I thought. While I tried to figure out what was wrong with the Undines, Bobcat and Caracal had decided to move back into the main hallway. Lion and Ocelot also had their second egg.
 
Everyone aged into an adult while I continued to fiddle with the Undine's genetics. To celebrate this, Puma and Tiger decided to have their first egg! Puma also made the journey to the little norn home/nursery I had decorated. A few minutes later, Bobcat and Caracal also had their first egg. Caracal didn't bother going all the way to home to lay the egg though, and instead laid it next to a norndoll toy. Both of their eggs were quickly moved to the underground lake before they could hatch.

Trying a New Genome

For future reference: the norn home is on the left, the main hallway is in the middle, and the snow are is on the right.

Fiddle with a genome or bit of caos code, test it, fiddle with it some more, then get bored or have to do something else. I spend more time working on a mod or agent then I do playing. I enjoy tinkering with thinks but it does get old. Especially when your current test ends up going terribly like my current one has. I've been testing a Stinger subtype/sub-breed and it's going badly. I'll save that rant for another day though. This time I decided to just mess with other peoples' creations.

There were two interesting genomes I hadn't played with much: the True Warm Bloods (or TWBs) and the 2017 genomes. The TWBs have a number of changes to them, the most interesting of which is an actual body temperature. The 2017s, meanwhile, have some interesting hunger edits. I was more interested in the 2017's hunger edits, so I decided to go with them. I also stuck them in a new metaroom that was released this year. I named the world Anaptyss for reasons I can't remember anymore. Then I clicked on everything in the room multiple times because I was excited to have a new metaroom to mess around with. After filling the room with agents, it was finally time to add the norns.


Six norns were hatched and named after random wild cat species. Almost immediately Lion went for the stingers and Tiger tried playing with one of my weed agents. I moved Lion away from the angry stingers and let Tiger deal with the weed himself. Word must have spread about the fun little pests because Caracal and Ocelot tried playing with them as well. I ruined their fun by removing the stingers and spreading the group out some. Tiger, Ocelot, and Bobcat ended up in the snowy area. They spent a lot of time shivering, but that didn't seem to ruin their fun any. Lion, Puma, and Caracal stayed in the main hallway. Pretty soon everyone was a child and I decided to teach them some basic words with the hand teaching agent. After I was done, I couldn't resist looking at the 2017's genome anymore. So I let the world run while I opened up gene compare and explored their genome.

The blog is alive!

I didn't have a fitting picture, so here's SimEarth instead.

The Creatures blogosphere is somewhat dead at the moment, so let's see if I can change that by posting. Starting next week I'll have a regular Wednesday post for at least a month. Most of the posts are going to be about a nurture world I started while taking a break from my seemingly endless Stinger Norn tests. I've also been considering branching out into writing about other Creaturey things like ripping apart some of my cos files or documenting my ever constant struggles with genetics. So there might be a few random posts here or there.

The blog itself has also been updated somewhat. I finally tweaked the Mobula Ray's layout a bit and gave it a new background. There's also two new pages for my downloads and a links page. The downloads page is slightly out of date, and the links page is completely empty for now. (Both will be updated eventually.) I've also redone some of the tags since a few posts didn't have tags and I figured why not.

I suppose I should post an update about my projects I wrote about during the CCSF as well. The Simpler Hoverdoc is basically finished and, hopefully, bug-free. I ended up with two versions of it: one that follows the currently selected norn and one that you can attach to multiple norns. In my own play-testing I've found that I use both of them for different things. The first one is good for wolfling runs or worlds with autotab in them. The second one is good when I want to monitor more then one norn in any sort of world. It's currently waiting on me to get un-lazy and send it to a few people for some final testing.

The other major projects from that CCSF post were two genomes, a swimming ettin breed and an update to the Stinger Norns. I worked on the ettin breed a bit but forgot to write down what changes each of the different versions had. So it's on the back burner until I get bored enough to sort through the different version. Meanwhile the Stinger Norn update is going.. very, very slowly. The base genomes have been finished for months now, but I've run into some trouble with the first sub-breed I tried making. I'll save that for another post though.

For now I'll end this update by saying that I started a Mobula Ray Tumblr thing months and months ago. I have no idea why I created it, but it's become the occasional dumping spot for large screenshots that didn't end up on the blog or other random Creatures pictures. And that's pretty much it.