Part 1 of Sleep Study: Is Calm Balm Bad?

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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.)

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A Change and our first Norns

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Today I made a small change to the game that allows multiple births per pregnancy. The reason for this is that grendels have the unfortunate gene that causes females to grow old and die after their first pregnancy. I’m often lucky if this baby grendel is a female but most times, I have to introduce a new female to make it to later generations, which is unfortunate. To alleviate this, I decided to make litters possible, much in the same way that Jessica did in her C3/DS Social Experiment world.

Anyway, the Grendels were all settled and were all Youths and Adolescents now so I started to flip through the norn breeds in Muco to decide what I wanted.

I ended up picking a huge variety of breeds instead of just two males and two females from two different breeds. Now, I have 3 males and 3 females, all from different backgrounds.

Meet Five Cheese, or just Cheese for short. She’s a Bondi norn and the first female norn in the world. It took me a minute to realize that she wouldn’t be able to learn a full vocabulary in the Norn Terrarium, so I added a Portal Intelligence Core to the Norn Terrarium, near the Incubation area. I was alerted to Bomb contracting a bacteria, which I intercepted with the hover dock, and Cheese here feeling pain from eating chilis but I was soon ready for my next egg.

Loving Wren, this handsome Male Chichi Norn was born just as Obese Bomb got pregnant and laid two eggs. I had to neglect poor Wren for a moment to scoop up her eggs for later. Since both Mac and Giants were nearby and kiss-popping her, I can’t know for sure who the father could be. I think I have an idea who the culprit is, but I can’t know for sure just yet.

Mom looks pretty pleased with herself.

Hopefully, these two hatch and grow up without any problems!

The new eggs got me thinking, though. How would you all feel about an egg-counter?  Not one in game, but one in the blog? I might also keep a family tree, though things may just get out of hand. I’ve installed a population control agent so that creatures become infertile after fathering or mothering 4 eggs. I had originally wanted to limit this number to 2 but with so many different breeds roaming around, the chance for still borns and sliders gets pretty high, and I don’t want to limit myself.

Anyway, let me know what you guys think!

Egg counter?

  • Yes! Keep track of the eggs! (100%, 3 Votes)
  • No, I think we're fine without it. (0%, 0 Votes)
  • Maybe. I'm ambivalent about it. (0%, 0 Votes)

Total Voters: 3

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What about a family tree?

  • Maybe, it would be interesting. (67%, 2 Votes)
  • Yes, definitely! (33%, 1 Votes)
  • No, I'm not interested in family trees. (0%, 0 Votes)

Total Voters: 3

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Grendels, Round Two

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After the recent death of Geese, I figured it was a good time to introduce the next pair of foundation grendels. Since C3 generation creatures are much smarter (pre-programmed to survive and breed well) I left my Banshees to their own devices and hatched these two. Admittedly, it’s going to be difficult for me to tell them apart.

Bomb doesn’t look too happy in her picture but with the name the Autonamer gave her, would you be? Giants looks pretty pleased, though.

Before long, I had 4 (mostly) happy grendels in the jungle, all advising each other to “eat potion” when they’re angry. They’re doing a great job of eating when they need to and sleeping isn’t an issue since calm balm seems to have a soothing, sleepiness effect.

Honestly, I’m glad to have such good sleepers in my grendel population. I’m not sure if it’s common to have creatures who won’t sleep in C3/DS since I’ve only just started reading blogs about peoples’ games but in my experience, it’s actually a pretty common problem.

As I made my rounds to make sure that everyone was happy, I caught these two playing in the grass. Just as I tried to snap a photo, Mac said that he liked Bomb, though they were retreating from each other, Bomb backpedaling and Mack charged forward. If not for their names and speech bubbles, I don’t think I’d have caught them!

It wasn’t long before these two were slapping and kissing each other, though. Maybe we’ll have a pregnancy before long?

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Enter the First Grendels and the First Death

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I would be lying if I said that I wasn’t sure what to expect or that I wasn’t excited! It’s a little difficult to imagine anything other than a Banshee grendel to come out of each of the eggs that I’d selected from Muco or that I wasn’t expecting them to be mutated or mixed. Generally, C3/DS doesn’t allow for that sort of thing.

Anyway, I’d picked out a single male egg and two female eggs. I’m thinking of introducing Boney and Tiger Grendels into the mix soon but I just wanted to play with my favorite grendel breed for a little while, anyway. I also find their voices a lot more pleasant than the Norn voices and wasn’t ready for a headache so early in this play session.

Anyway, let’s move on to our first creature for the game, Macabre Desire, the male Banshee Grendel.

Mac

Cute, isn’t he? He was quick to push the stone of knowledge(?) on the top layer of the jungle. I only had to lead him to it and he pushed it almost right away. Since then, he’s been telling me that “grndl happy” and has started to learn his name, saying that “macabre dethire happy”. I’ve always liked Banshee Grendels and I think they’re more misunderstood than even the original C1 Grendels since they were written up to be the worst grendels alive in the DS Story.

Anyway, I decided to lead him to some food while I hatched the next egg and attempted to teach my next grendel the language.

Geese

Grumpy Geese pushed the stone more quickly than Macabre Desire did (Mac for short). Of course, she shortly told me that she was angry and then attempted to “hit hand” while I took her picture. It’s hard to be upset with her knowing that Grendels in general are hard-wired to be angry. I don’t mind her hitting my hand much but I’ll have to keep an eye on her when she’s around other creatures.

Finally, it was time to hatch my third and final egg for this group of foundation grendels.

Des

Thin Desire is so sweet. As soon as she had pushed the stone and I carried her off to the photo room (Random’s Room with a green screen installed) she started following my hand! She kept saying “get Mom” and when she’d reach me, she pushed the hand over and over, announcing how happy she was. I think I’m in love with this little girl already.

After I’d introduced myself to each of them, provided them with some food and offered up some affection, I decided to let them explore the jungle and meet each other.

Of course, it didn’t take long for one of my creatures to start complaining about something. Mac kept going on and on about how lonely he felt, so I brought Des over to keep him company. Despite my telling him to “approach grendel” he didn’t listen to me and instead kept complaining. Eventually, I coaxed him into pushing a grendel and he started kissing Des. By this point, Des was already annoyed, however and said she disliked Mac. Next thing I knew, they were slapping each other and doing an angry song and dance.

I checked on Geese to make sure that she was alright and I found her walking back and forth in the grass with no direction. I asked her if she was angry and she very strongly said yes. It was time to break out the calm balm.

It could just be that I’m lazy and don’t like running back and forth to the injector to get calm balm but I made sure to bring a giant bottle of calm balm with me in case all of my grendels got angry and I couldn’t calm them. As the description (in the wiki) says that too much calm balm can kill a creature, I try to limit them to how much they can have at a time. One calm balm for each of them did the trick, though and a few of them fell asleep.

My satisfaction with this success was cut short when I saw this, though.

The ATP Decoupler is probably what did her in. I always knew that the jungle terrarium was the most dangerous of all of them (at least the ones installed in this game) but I held out hope that the other two would make it since I’ve had grendels survive to the next generations in the past. In any case, it might be time to introduce new blood since their numbers have already been reduced to two.

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