Not even 30 minutes old, Fiona passed away. The best guess I had about her death was that she had either become ill and I simply lacked the knowledge or experience to find out what she was ill with. Poor girl. I hoped that the same wouldn’t happen to the others.
Unfortunately, it happened to Gary as well! He was fine one moment then the Observation kit told me that he was starving. Just seconds later, all of his organs were starting to fail. I think I found part of the problem. I checked the science kit again and it showed that there were no bacteria attacking my creatures. How bizarre!
Finally, just to make sure it wasn’t the babies that I had created, I hatched some brand new Nova Subterra eggs, striaght from the download. In about 20 minutes, I would find out whether they were like this, too. I remembered that Jenny had a similar problem in the previous run and I was worried that I might have snagged some bad genetics when I tried to get a copy of the Nova genome.
Gary meanwhile was dying and I chose to let him pass away while he was unconscious. It seemed like I wouldn’t have been able to do anything anyway. Unfortunately, this did mean that Liana and Pancho, my other two starting Novas would have to pass away soon, too.
Gary passed away and as he did, Liana collapsed to the floor. She didn’t even feel hungry and I never got a “starving” warning from the Observation Kit. Her line in the kit even said “Healthy”. Then the same happened to Pancho. It was all very distressing to watch. Once the four passed away, I had to keep an eye on the four brand new Nova Subterra babies. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone else having this issue with them, so I wasn’t sure what I’d find. Even Jenny, who was a new generation 1 Nova Subterra had this issue.
According to the archives of alt.games.creatures, some things that help with organ failure in C2 are ‘the purple mushrooms’ (that come with the game, I think…), the Advanced Science Kit (get it with a powerup), the Universal Antidote by Lis Morris (http://www.seeyou7.net/creatures/shee.demon.co.uk/default.htm) and Mr nStuff’s HoloDoc (http://www.webpetz.com/creatures/toolsc2.php)
In this particular case, it was just bad genetics. Similarly raised creatures with different genes had no problems. This batch (of 5) just happened to have some weird, freak mutation that caused them to KO and die at about 30 minutes old.