Furry Little Creatures

[malymin]

Well... I caved and got the full Docking Station + Creatures 3 combo. Hey, six dollars USD is a good price, especially for a game that was not that cheap when it actually came out.

I'm learning the game the roguelike way - that is, through repeated failure, as I did in Caves of Qud, and learning from that failure.

First of all - there's two environments that are considered "Norm Home" - relatively safe environments that pregnant norns will migrate towards to lay their eggs. In the standalone Creatures 3, this was the Norn Terrarium - a wide open extremely British-pastoral biome full of european birds and insects and hedgehogs and alien pig things - and no predators or disease that can hurt a norn. (Although there is a small pond norns can drown in if they're really desperate to die.) In the standalone Docking Station, this is the Norn Meso - a smaller and more overtly artificial area with a tiny bamboo jungle as its most natural subregion, though rich in both food-dispensing vending machines and foragable foods, and equipped with a machine that helps instantly teach creatures the user's human language for easier communication. (There's also no pond for them to drown in.)

In a combined game, norns prioritize the Norn Meso over the Norn Terrarium as "home." This is fine, actually, because Grendels - goblin-like creatures that are covered in disease and love slapping Norns to death - can get into the Norn terrarium, but are locked out of the Norn Meso by default (you can change this if you want) at the start of a new game. This makes the Norm Meso a much safer "nursery" for norns than the Norn Terrarium.

Nonetheless, I've discovered that a lot of norns born in the Docking Station love to teleport into the big Creatures 3 area, and then they encounter grendels and get beat to death. I can take deaths (I am expecting deaths), but I want some of them them to at least reproduce before dying. The door out of the Meso is unlocked by default; I'm locking it until my norns reproduce and start building up a population, at which point I'll unleash them on the rest of the ship.

The exception is the Hardman Norns I hatched; after watching one beat a grendel to death with its bare hands, I decided they could wander the Creatures 3 region of the fused game to their hearts content. First-gens are already calibrated to be more survivable against poison and disease than the average norn, and they're also the only Norn breed whose homing instincts tell them to lay eggs in the Jungle Terrarium (which is the Grendel Home, and full of diseases and toxins) instead of in the standard "norn home" areas.

The house-arrest population consists of two adult Chichis and two young Bondis. The Chichi breed are relatively "generic" norns, and the original default breed in Docking Station; when you tell the game you want to start with pre-trained adults, you are always given Chichi Norns.

The Bondis... I thought it would be interesting to mix some genes for longevity into the population. The two breeds that already start with longevity genes are Bondis and Treehuggers. Both have longer lifespans, and lack a homing instinct and will lay their eggs anywhere they feel like. They sort of remind me of animals that evolved on islands, as they're both from alternate universes where Albia (the native planet of Norns) has no native norn predators.

It's the areas where Bondis and Treehuggers differ where I thought Bondis would be better addition to the breeding stock. Treehuggers are more susceptible to injury, disease, and poison than the average norn; they also, from what I understand, just don't understand doors and elevators as well as other norms, making it harder for them to navigate the spaceship-ark the player will be raising them on. Bondis, meanwhile, have some potentially useful traits in their gene pool. For one thing, they're omnivores, able to derive nourishment from small fauna (such as crabs and fish) as well as edible plants and manufactured food. They also stay satiated after eating food longer, and thus need to seek food less frequently. And, though not exactly aquatic, they take longer to drown than other breeds. Overall, the Bondi seems to have more useful qualities to mix into a Norn gene pool than the treehuggers.

Henceforth, I will continue to inject new breeding stock of non-Hardmans via the incubator in the Meso (where the norns are under house arrest until I let them out), and inject new breeding stock of Hardmans via the incubator in the Norn Terrarium... where they can freely migrate to the Jungle Terrarium if they please.

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[stepnix]

yessss Creating (pronounced "creaching") has commenced