Ettins? Yeah. Ettins.

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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.

bandicam 2014-06-21 22-24-48-087After 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.

bandicam 2014-06-21 22-33-45-333It 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.

bandicam 2014-06-21 22-48-22-981It 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.

bandicam 2014-06-21 22-59-30-185Next, 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.

bandicam 2014-06-21 23-05-25-913I 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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Ghost_Norn Trade World Generation 4, Part 3

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bandicam 2014-06-20 20-02-12-058

Lavender started to gray and John, I’m sure, would follow close behind her. After all, Lavender is 13 minutes older than dear John here. 🙂

I opted to let them live their lives without any more children and to start hatching the babies and preparing them for any future trades or uploads. All ten were then hatched and exported to be put through the classic IQ test later. All this test really does is make sure that they can walk and find food (whether by tracking down a smell or by chance) normally.

One half hour later, Lavender was still gray (and managed to get pregnant again) but John was still bright red and blonde! I opened up his genetics and found that his Life half-life was 101 where Lavender’s was 99. A very small difference but that was the only change I could find in his life-related genes.

It took a while but finally, at 4 and a half hours old, John was starting to grey a bit himself.

After that, I left them alone to live their lives together in the relative peace. Their 11th child was put through the IQ test with the others. The result of that is coming up next. 🙂

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Ghost_Norn Trade World Generation 4, Part 2

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No sooner had I started the game than John and Lavender made a new egg.

AlbertIt was cute to see them practically glued together but Albert seemed to prefer solitude and lemons to the company of his companions.

Unfortunately, Lavender cannot produce enough progesterone to lay her egg naturally so some CAOS intervention was soon in order. After going back and reading my last update about this group, I realized I should have picked up on this sooner. Oh well! Her egg count was now up to 3.

LavJonAfter the egg commotion, there was yet another lull. Such a small population has its disadvantages. I decided to grab a bite and see what happened when I returned.

Al

Life carried on this way for a time – at least 3 more eggs were laid but tragically Albert passed away alone in the C1toDS world, where he preferred to be. He didn’t live a long life but he seemed content til the end. He hadn’t even moved since his last picture and every time I set him with the others, he would travel back to this spot.

John and Lavender, meanwhile, just kept making babies, which was good. It’s always good to have a large pool of babies to choose from for the following generation and, hopefully, none of them had the natural generation-killing gene that Lavender had. The one that prevented her from laying eggs is a potential disaster.

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How To: Creature Species Limits

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Note that this tutorial is for DS and will work for both docked and undocked worlds.

Relax, I’ve made the edited “DS creatureBreeding.cos” available for download. This is a mod of the updated breeding script. You still need to apply the edits to “!DS game_variables.cos” yourself. 🙂

ideaWhat a good idea!

I decided to take this idea and see how I could get it working. A greater variety of creatures would be a good thing for the stream and I’d already edited my Norn, Grendel and Ettin mothers to lay 6 eggs instead of just 2.

I figured out how to get this working but now I want to show you.

You can use notepad for this tutorial (or a similar text editor) but I’ll be using CAOS Tool.

First things first, go into your Docking Station>Bootstrap>010 Docking Station folder and open the files “!DS_game variables.cos” and “DS creatureBreeding.cos”.

The first one we’ll be editing is !DS_game variables.cos.

When you open it up, you’re going to want to find this code.

* Population checking (replaces C3 population check system)
setv game “breeding_limit” 30
setv game “total_population” 32
setv game “extra_eggs_allowed” 4

We’re going to be adding the following to this section.

setv game “total_norns” 6
setv game “total_grendels” 6
setv game “total_ettins” 6
setv game “total_geats” 6

Keep those red numbers in mind. You can edit those to change the maximum population of each species of creature.

Save the file and close. That’s the easy part out of the way.

Now, open up DS creatureBreeding.cos.

Look for the section that opens up with

************norn egg timer

And scroll down from there until you find this.

* Check the Breeding limit!
setv va98 0
enum 4 0 0
doif dead = 0
addv va98 1
endi
next
setv va99 game “breeding_limit”
doif va98 ge va99

Now change it to this.

* Check the Breeding limit!
setv va98 0
enum 4 1 0
doif dead = 0
addv va98 1
endi
next
setv va99 game “total_norns”
doif va98 ge va99

Easy, right? Now we just have to do that for every other species.

To start, you want to look for the grendel/ettin egg timer section. Mine was renamed so look for something similar.

**grendel/ettin/geat egg timer

Now, just like with the norn limit, you want to change the check breeding limit section. But you also want to change the first line after the comment shown above.

scrp 3 4 2 9

This makes it apply to grendel eggs only.

* test max creatures limit
setv va98 0
enum 4 2 0
doif dead = 0
addv va98 1
endi
next
setv va99 game “total_grendels”
doif va98 ge va99

And you’re done! Sort of. Now you want to copy everything from the section title

**grendel/ettin egg timer

all the way down to the end of this script

   endi
endm

and paste it below. Then you’ll want to make the following edits for ettins.

scrp 3 4 2 9

Should be changed to

scrp 3 4 3 9

Then the population check section can be edited from

* test max creatures limit
setv va98 0
enum 4 2 0
doif dead = 0
addv va98 1
endi
next
setv va99 game “total_grendels”
doif va98 ge va99

to

* test max creatures limit
setv va98 0
enum 4 3 0
doif dead = 0
addv va98 1
endi
next
setv va99 game “total_ettins”
doif va98 ge va99

Then paste the section from above again and apply these edits for geats.

scrp 3 4 4 9

and

* test max creatures limit
setv va98 0
enum 4 4 0
doif dead = 0
addv va98 1
endi
next
setv va99 game “total_geats”
doif va98 ge va99

Save and you’re done!

If you want to apply these edits to old worlds, you need to open up the console (Shift+Ctrl+C) and enter the following.

ject “!DS game_variables.cos” 7

Push enter. Then enter this.

ject “DS creatureBreeding.cos” 7

Push enter. You do not need to do this for new worlds unless you change the variables after the world is created. For example, I created a world to test these script edits and decided I wanted fewer geats and more of the other species. I had to re-inject the variables script.

I apologize if the script isn’t very efficient or the tutorial isn’t well written but there you go. Sorry about the rambling. 🙂

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