Another pregnant Grendel?

by ⋅ 2 Comments

I had just opened the game when I got two pregnancy indications. Yup. Another pregnant grendel, and this time, I know who the father is!

Yup, Des is the mother this time, and I caught her running from the father to be, Giants. What will hatch out of these two, we’ll find out!

I later caught her being chased after by Mac and thought there would be more babies coming, but she wasn’t having any of it. She didn’t seem to like Mac much, anyway.

I then, quickly, killed all the game’s bacteria and moved on to checking on the norns. The little ones were eating and resting, so I hatched another egg.

This is Scandal. It’d been a few days since I picked out my norn eggs so I’d forgotten what breeds I selected! Silly me.

Since I’d killed off the bacteria, I felt more relaxed about the world as a whole and set out to hatch our fourth norn egg.

Meet Lowe, our Civet male. He took to the intelligence core right away and as soon as he’d learned his words, he was allowed to join the others.

The four of them took to playing on the ground floor of the terrarium, pushing toys and eating everything.

At this point, everything had calmed down quite a bit. I took an inventory of my creatures. I know it isn’t a lot, considering they can take excellent care of themselves, but I still had 6 eggs to hatch! Two more foundation norns, and two eggs from each of my grendel girls. I was about to be very busy.

I took the lull in activity to clean up the Norn Terrarium a bit and clean up magic beans that had made it to inconvenient places, replant some Bramboo near the graveyard, check on everyone’s health and just do some maintenance around the ship, making sure all the ecologies were where I wanted them.

I also managed to snap a photo of Cheese taking advantage of the peace. It was very nice.

There was one issue with Des being eaten by bugs, so I killed the pests and gave her some Calm Balm to get her to sleep. She was angry about the pain and could’ve used the sedative anyway.

Then, as I was getting ready to introduce the next two norn eggs, I got another two pregnancy notifications. Obese Bomb was pregnant again and this time, I knew for sure that Mac was the father.

Sadly, this would be the last time she laid eggs, with my population control.

I wanted to share this picture to 1, show you the proud parents and 2, show you that Boney Grendel females don’t have  a pregnancy sprite! Go figure, right? I’m not sure I’d have a belly at all if I were mostly made of bone, but it’s still hilarious to see her as basically just a floating head and limbs.

At this point, the only Youth of the Norn group was Wren and all the others were Adolescents. It was time for me to start preparing for pregnant norns, but I still wanted to hatch the other foundation norns first. The two girls liked to spend time together but Scandal and Lowe liked to spend a lot of time together and I wanted to finish getting a diverse group started.

Before any more injuries or pregnancies could seize my attention, I rushed to hatch the last two foundation norn eggs. I got a boy Fallow norn I’ll call Kettle and a girl Bruin I’ll call Sour.

Thin Desire had a different idea, though. I’d just finished uploading pictures of these two norns when I got two more pregnancy indications.

This brought our grendel egg total to 8! Hopefully, none of them were stillborns or sliders. That concluded the breeding careers of all of the grendels, though. I felt a little bad for neglecting them so much but since they were all adults, I felt it was alright to move on to the young norns.

  • Share on Tumblr
  •  

Part 3 of Sleep Study: Finale! Calm Balm is Safe!

by ⋅ Leave a Comment

After my endeavors trying to discover why our little bengal norn buddy would only sleep at seemingly random times, I decided to check something that I’d overlooked previously- tiredness.

Before we move on, let’s take a look at the charts from yesterday.

Here is the post calm-balm set. The chart at the top right shows the introduction of calm balm with three sharp peaks. The sleepiness is all converted to sleepiness backup and when the creature rests, it produces sleepase which converts sleepiness into sleepiness back up.

Next, here’s my peek at a normal norn sleep cycle. While it’s less extreme than the example above, with time, sleepiness backup actually does fill up on its own.

But then I wanted to know what caused a creature to fall asleep. If it wasn’t sleepiness or sleepiness back up, what was it?

In the first picture, it looked like tiredness (green) might be what causes him to rest and fall asleep. He didn’t fall asleep despite the sleepase and when he got up to move again, it was all converted back to sleepiness backup.

As sleepiness backup built up in his system, so did his tiredness. He rested here, marked by the increase in sleepase but he didn’t fall asleep.

At one point, though, his tiredness and sleepiness backup and his tiredness got very high and he fell asleep.

He actually continued to sleep long after his tiredness was drained and actually slept til his sleepiness was very low. This looked just like the sleep charts from calm balm use.

Just to make sure I wasn’t completely insane (I’ll admit, I was brutally exhausted when I did the other two parts) I simulated giving him Calm Balm by giving him 3 injections of sleepiness and one of tiredness since, as far as sleep is concerned, that’s all Calm Balm does.

Here, he’d actually fallen asleep. In the first chart, the sleepiness is immediately converted to sleepiness backup.  Once he feels tired, he rests and sleepase takes effect, as in the second chart. If there’s enough sleepiness while he’s resting, he falls asleep and his tiredness and sleepiness both return to normal levels. Really, this isn’t any different from a normal sleep pattern and shouldn’t cause any problems. if anything, this just makes Calm Balm a great sleep aid for creatures who have trouble sleeping!

So go nuts using the stuff! I hope this was helpful and that the entire segment wasn’t a horribly written mess.

  • Share on Tumblr
  •  

Part 2 of Sleep Study: Calm Balm isn’t Bad.

by ⋅ Leave a Comment

I started checking these chemicals as I learned more about sleepiness and calm balm. This time, I’d started with a completely fresh creature who’d never tasted calm balm before. This one was also a baby boy bengal norn.

At this point, I was really confused. I understand that sleepiness and sleepiness backup are converted into each other. In the genome, the equation works like this:

1Sleep bkp + 1 Sleepase = 1 Sleepiness + 1 Sleepase
Reaction Rate: nigh instant.

You end up with the same amount of Sleepase at the end of the equation. It really just converts sleepiness backup to Sleepiness.

The next gene reads

1 Sleepiness = 1 Sleep bkp
Reaction Rate: very fast.

All I could figure was that sleepase wasn’t converting sleepiness back up as quickly as the scanner scrolled and that, maybe, sleepase was only produced once sleepiness reached a certain level. My creature wasn’t sleeping, though, so why was his sleepiness going down and instead being converted to sleepiness backup?

I understood that when a creature says that he’s sleepy, he probably means that his sleepiness is high, not his sleepiness backup. But why was his sleepiness decreasing even after his sleepiness backup has plateaued? Searching for answers, I checked his genome against the C3/DS Standard Norn Genome in genecompare and found no differences in regard to his sleepiness, sleepase or sleep backup genes.

This, I hate to admit, I can’t make any sense of. You can click on the image to see an enlarged version of it. Any advice or guidance on these genes would be hugely appreciated. The first, I’m sure, pretty much means that he’s constantly producing sleepiness, which makes sense. The second, I’m not entirely sure about and the third image I really have no idea about. Determined to find out whether Calm Balm was genuinely bad or not, I just had to do one last experiment.

This time, I just wanted to monitor the creature’s natural sleep patterns.

In the end, I was left with a lot more questions, like why does the creature continue to sleep despite the sleepiness and sleepiness backup being drained all the way down to zero? Did I miss some chemicals while I was testing the calm balm? I had ideas, but in the end, I decided that Calm Balm was completely harmless. In any case, it helps creatures sleep and it calms them down when they’re angry.

  • Share on Tumblr
  •  

Part 1 of Sleep Study: Is Calm Balm Bad?

by ⋅ 2 Comments

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.)

  • Share on Tumblr
  •