Meet the new baby Rhonda! I have to say, I like her colors! Her upbringing so far is no different than her parents’ so far, though. She has trouble managing boredom and actually spends more of her time resting than either of her parents. Her genetics aren’t especially different, however.

An hour in, her parents finally reached adulthood and adopted a red and green color pattern. This really got me interested in Colortrue genetics since I thought this breed was a good candidate for the edits. Rhonda, despite her initially different color started to follow her parents’ colors as she grew up. I was a little sad the color change didn’t seem to stick but that’s how things are.

Rhonda got to witness the birth and soon, she had a sister named Patty.

Sadly, though, she comes from the original Chameleon ettin genome and is pretty… dumb. Like the rest of her family. While her family huddled by the HLM, I decided to check up on the Dragonfly Demon Ettins.

Malachite and Emerald were actually quite self-sufficient. They fed together, advised each other to rest and did some exploring on the upper level of the Meso. It wasn’t long til the two of them got close enough to have their first egg together. And then Lydia had another. With the population limit set to just 6 I wasn’t worried about crowding, but the eggs might get out of hand since ettins tend to be super breeders.

Soon, Malachite was pregnant again. I feel a bit guilty admitting this but I was tempted to remove the Chameleon ettins and play with my updated genome instead. Huddling in a corner of the room doesn’t make for exciting play or writing and the two Dragonfly Demon ettins weren’t likely to match the egg-laying power of dumb, ettin pushing super breeders. Seriously, their pregnancy lasts less than a minute. As if on cue, Lydia became pregnant again, then Rhonda.

Equally tempting was packing up the ettins and moving to a docked world. I opted to do that instead and hatched all of the eggs in preparation for the move.

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I know! Talk about stepping out of my comfort zone! Tell you what, though, this is probably exactly what I need to get back into the swing of things with Creatures.

Before I get started, though, I’m going to nip this in the bud and say no, I won’t be IQ testing these wretched things. I never liked having Ettins in my wolfling runs because they tend to fail over and over and over again but persist long enough to breed and flood the IQ test with sometimes violent failures. It’s tempting to just take a norn, give it an ettin skin and classification and play with a bunch of those instead.

Still, I don’t think I’ve ever given the things a fair chance and honestly played with them in a setting where they were the focus. I’ve had nurture style worlds with Norns and Grendels. I guess it’s the Ettins’ turn.

After combing my impressive collection of just 13 ettin genetics, I decided on two CFE Color Chameleon Ettins. I thought about raising females only to keep the population in check much like one of Amaikokonut’s worlds but there you go. I guess I wanted to go easy on myself.

We hurried our educations with the HLM and started learning about food and toys.

It didn’t take long but just 9 minutes into their lives, they were children and were still just learning about boredom and resting. Unfortunately, they didn’t seem to learn that pushing toys alleviated boredom. Naturally, I had to crack open the genetics kit and see what was up. Their instincts seemed alright and the stimulus seemed to work as well. As I don’t know anything about Creature brains, my investigation had to stop there. Still, it could just bee that they needed more time to learn about toys.

Things progressed slowly (as they tend to with just two creatures in the Meso) but they seemed to pick up on the effectiveness of sleep very quickly. They still constantly complained of boredom but if I’m not mistaken, that’s a problem with most C3/DS creatures.

It wasn’t long (again) til they moved on from their Child stage into adolescence. Still, they complained about boredom but they were surviving just fine.

Little else seemed to happen while I left them to their own devices so I added the growing plants from the Super Food Vendor and some Easter Tribbles.

Next, I added two more ettins, Malachite and Emerald. Since Abner and Lydia already learned some basic life lessons (eating and resting in particular) I decided to watch and see how they could mentor the two new ettins. As they helped the little ones grow (never realizing that toys reduced their boredom) they reached the next stage of their lives.

I even gave them a gadget with no success. Sadly, I couldn’t find a machine in my list of agents. I’m open to suggestions.

No sooner had I finished taking their screenshot above had Lydia become pregnant! Hooray! Soon the egg hatched and Rhonda emerged to greet the world.

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