I’ve already discussed in earlier posts that creatures are capable of learning that those nifty calm-balm potions are effective at decreasing anger and that once grendels learn about it, they’ll drink the potion when they get angry.
The wiki states that calm balm can kill a creature if they have too much of the stuff, so am I really better off letting them slap the hand or each other? Am I better off letting them yell all the time to release their stress?
This bit of research sets out to find out why the wiki might state that the useful potion is dangerous.
I took a normal bengal norn and stuck it in the infirmary. In my previous tests with calm balm, I noticed that the only things that changed were anger and sleepiness.
First, I needed a baseline to go off of. I hatched a baby Bengal Norn and watched his chart, without giving him anything.
He wasn’t angry and he was newly hatched, so I wasn’t expecting either of these to get very high.
Next, I introduced some calm balm into our situation.
After observing my grendels falling asleep after having calm balm, I was expecting this. Each little peak corresponds with a sip of the potion. The sleepiness steadily decreased on its own.
Since I haven’t had a creature over-dose on the stuff, I decided to go ahead and go nuts, and let the little norn have as many potions as I could cram into his mouth.
Here’s what happened here. He fell asleep right away and his sleepiness decreased steadily until his sleepiness was low enough for him to wake up on his own. The dips are from me picking him up. The room doesn’t detect him if I’m holding him up. Otherwise, he seemed perfectly happy. This is when I started to feel frustrated. I then started ‘resetting’ our little norn friend by letting him get the calm balm out of his system. Finally, I just had to check to make sure that his anger was being affected by the potions. I injected him with anger and gave him a potion.
I injected him with a lot of anger but one potion was enough to get his rage down to a much more manageable level. So far, all I could see were benefits. I was still pretty curious about why the creatures wiki said that the potion “can kill other creatures if they take too many”. (http://creatures.wikia.com/wiki/Calm_Balm) I kept digging.
I checked every chemical from 0 to 138. I just had to stop here, and you’ll see why in a minute.
Um. What? Sleepase and Sleepiness Backup were doing what I thought they were supposed to. I couldn’t be completely sure so I dug still deeper. (I’d forgotten to check tiredness, but we’ll get to that at a future date.)
