Things have slowed down quite a bit since Valerie and Tanner have (practically) finished having babies. I had a couple choices where I wanted to go next with this game and one of them was to introduce the two babies I wanted to use for the next round. Well. I might as well.

First, let’s look at our little boy.

bandicam 2013-07-17 12-55-03-835Male 1

He’s actually our only male. He was cloned when the world nearly crashed but here he is. Since the other is identical, we’ve really only got the once choice here.

***** LOBES *****
121   6   0 Emb   B MutDup       Lobe #= 7 State Rule: thres PLUS type0 PLUS type1 <end> <end> <end>, WTA= 1
Was state.

First things first, this gene controls when the Attention Lobe fires. Normally, the if the neuron hasn’t been fired, it stays in the resting state. Here, it only fires once its value is higher than the threshold. The threshold here is 0, though.

***** RECEPTORS *****
46   3   0 Emb   B MutDupCut   Creature, Drive Levels Hunger, chem=Hunger, thresh=0, nom=0, gain=254, features=Analogue
Was 255.

The change in gain slightly reduces the amount of hunger that is required to create hunger drive. I think. It could also mean that he feels less hunger than an unmutated creature.

50   7   0 Emb   B MutDupCut   Creature, Sensorimotor, Invol 6=’languish’, chem=Sleepiness, thresh=0, nom=0, gain=255, features=Analogue
Was Drive Levels Sleepiness.

This is a tragic mutation. Instead of feeling sleepy because of his sleepiness level, he will instead feel weak all the time. He’ll simply lay down and whimper. Poor guy. :C

***** HALF-LIVES *****
1   1   0 Emb   B MutDup       WakeUpPill 251 <142> 253
Were 255.

Here, WakeUpPill and 142 are metabolized a little more quickly than normal except that it would still take 52 years for them to deteriorate on their own anyway.

That ‘languish when sleepy’ gene is downright tragic. I’m hoping he not only mates but also manages to have children that doesn’t have that mutation.

bandicam 2013-07-17 12-57-43-539Female 3

***** RECEPTORS *****
46 Different in File 2   3   0 Emb   B MutDupCut   Creature, Drive Levels Hunger, chem=Hunger, thresh=0, nom=0, gain=254, features=Analogue
Was 255.

The change in gain here slightly reduces the amount of hunger that is required to create hunger drive.

***** REACTIONS *****
67   10   0 Emb   B MutDupCut   1*Fear++ + 1*<NONE> => 0*Fear + 1*Punishment; half-life = 8.
Was 1 Fear.

Normally, fear increase would cause her to feel not just fear, but also punishment. Now, she will only feel punishment when she has fear increase in her system.

***** HALF-LIVES *****
1   1   0 Emb   B MutDup       WakeUpPill 251 <142> 253
Were 255.

Here, WakeUpPill and 142 are metabolized a little more quickly than normal except that it would still take 52 years for them to deteriorate on their own anyway.

***** INSTINCTS *****
131 Different in File 2   1   0 Emb   B MutDupCut   Verb i/ps Push + (Lobe/Cell=0/2) + (Lobe/Cell=0/0) and I Push => 255*Reward
Was Lobe/Cell=0/0.

This changes which cells are activated. When I open the gene in Genetics Kit, though, it doesn’t look any different in the editor. Go figure?

302 Different in File 2  16   0 Chi   B MutDupCut   Verb i/ps Left + (Lobe/Cell=0/16) + (Lobe/Cell=0/0) and I Left => 255*Reward
Was Lobe/Cell=0/0.

This changes which cells are activated. When I open the gene in Genetics Kit, though, it doesn’t look any different in the editor. Go figure?

By the way, you guys probably noticed the adsense ad at the bottom of the post. From now on, I’ll also be including small banner ads to the bottom of each post. These are text only so shouldn’t been too intrusive to your viewing experience. Keep enjoying the blog and, if you’d like to support it, share it with your friends. Thanks, guys.

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Last time I spliced Discus genes, I only made it to line C before, if I’m honest, it was time for me to go to bed. Now that I’m back, it’s time to check out the other genes. I still haven’t found the genes that affect the Discus’ colors.

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In case you forgot, here’s the box to show the rows I’m editing. Last time we stopped after C, today we’re finishing D through H, time allowing. Also, it turns out I goofed and miscounted the number of lines. My bad!

D

D 25

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Yellow fish! Now we’re finally getting somewhere. Unless I’m mistaken, yellow is one of the two base colors with blue being the other. I’m only basing this on the two discus .fsh files that come with the addon pack. D 50 and D 75 produce the same result.

D 100

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D 100 produces a much darker, more natural looking yellow. We’ll call it canary yellow. I was expecting the color to work in shades, depending on the ‘intensity’ of this gene but that isn’t the case.

Anyway, let’s see how D affects the colors from line A.

A 50 – A 100
D 50

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Changing D doesn’t seem to affect the color of the stripes at all. Oh well.

B only affects the intensity of the stripes and C affects the intensity of vertical bars.

E

E 25 – 75

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Ooh! Red seems like another base color. As with yellow, values 25, 50 and 75 produce the result above.

E 100

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E 100 produces this gorgeous shade of red. Knowing what we do now about this gene, let’s see how it interacts with other genes.

A 50 – A 100
E 100

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As above, B only affects the intensity of the stripes and C affects the intensity of vertical bars.

D 50 – E 50bandicam 2013-07-09 05-50-03-779

When I mix our two color genes, something very interesting happens. The colors blend! This is a gorgeous shade on its own already but, unfortunately, this is the only color we can get by mixing these genes. I don’t just mean orange, I mean this particular intensity is all we can get.

F

F 50

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Ooh! This is a neat color. Of all the colors out there, grey was probably the last I expected to see. Let’s see what happens when I change the value to 100.

F 100

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Black! We have a black discus now. Now that we know what this does to the fish’s base, let’s start mixing it with other genes.

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All have F set to 50. In order from left to right.
A 50 – C 50 – D 50 – E 50 – D 50 E 50

Such pretty fish so far! But I’m still trying to figure out what changes the stripe color and eye color. Since I don’t know yet, let’s press on.

G

G 50

bandicam 2013-07-09 06-11-00-766

Do you remember what I was saying in line C where C and G work together to form bars on the fish? Turns out I misread the site. That’s not til the next line.

I edited the other genes we’ve tested and I still come up with no changes to the fish at all, not even to the color of the stripes, bars or eye of the fish. Frustrated, I did some additional research.

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As it turns out, A and B set to 100produce a blue-green discus.

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Changing G to 50 produces a darker blue. It’s difficult for me to agree with the game’s assessment that blue is a base color since it seems like blue acts more like an overlay color. Maybe they’re referring to the overlay color in the file names. Still, red and yellow are probably more fitting choices though it’s difficult to say that as well since the colors blend and work together. Changing G again to 100 produces the blue-green fish above. Changing A to 50 produces an albino fish with a Halo in dark blue instead of blue-green. Someday we’ll crack this. I found discus online with gold halos and I don’t seem to be able to produce that in FisherMan. I’m stubborn though!

After opening the Gene window in FisherMan, I found that there was a gene that I could not edit. Where my discus with a blue halo had a value of 1 for that gene, the discus I imported with golden halos had a value of 0. This gene, naturally is the second part of H. Even after going through each gene and chaning the values to 1-16, the 16th gene changes back to 1. 1 seems to be dominant.

Eventually, I loaded up a hex editor (in my case HxD, though ResHack works, too) and scrolled down to the bottom. To make it easy for me to spot the offending gene, I spliced some fish to have the numbers 1 through 16 as their genotype. Naturally, the 16th gene stayed 1. I scrolled down looking for the number sequence and voila!

bandicam 2013-07-09 08-38-04-419

There it was, the solution to my problem. The value was originally 01. I changed both fish so that the value was 0 and out came these lovelies (after some edits).

bandicam 2013-07-09 08-44-32-565

Isn’t that a lovely looking fish? How about we try to get gold? Above, G is set to 0. Let’s change it to 110 and see what happens.

bandicam 2013-07-09 08-53-59-826

Bam! G also seems to control eye color. It might be fair to call G an accent color modifier.

H

As I’d suspected, changing H by itself doesn’t actually change the appearance of the fish. Instead, it’s a modifier for the stripes and the vertical bars on the fish. If set to 0, it allows Gold and White stripes. If set to 4 it allows bars to appear on the fish in different intensities than one bar or full bars.

We already know that when you set C to 0, no bars appear on the fish. When you set it to 50 with H set to 1 or 0, the fish gets one bar over its eye.

bandicam 2013-07-09 01-15-23-048

In order from left to right, here are the combinations I used.
C 0 – C 50 H 1 – C 50 H 4 – C 80 H 4 – C 100

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Brandolf – X

Male

***** REACTIONS ****
224 77   0 You F MutDupCut        128   0 Organ# = 12, 1*Oestrogen + 0*Progesterone => 1*Progesterone + 1*<NONE>; half-life = 0
Was 1 Progesterone.

349  87   0 Emb B MutDupCut        129   0 Organ# = 18, 16*Antigen 2 + 1*<NONE> => 12*Antibody 2 + 2*Coldness; half-life = 42
Was 128.

There are those Progesterone and Mutation chance genes again. Sadly, the first of the two automatically disqualifies him from the next round.


Buichirou – X

Male

Let me start off by saying WOW this little guy has a lot of mutations compared to his siblings thus far. Let’s take a look at them.

***** RECEPTORS ****
182 145   0 Emb B MutDupCut        128   0 Organ# = 9, Current Reaction, No Tissue, Reaction Rate, chem=Fever toxin, thresh=0, nom=128, gain=255, features=Inverted Analogue  (0)
Was Organ, Organ, Clock Rate.

This gene affects how Buichiriou’s body reacts to Fever toxin. Normally, this would cause the Skin Cooling function to trigger to help the Creature manage its body temperature. In Buichirou, however, it likely changes the rate that the Fever Toxin reacts in his body. This could mean that the Fever Toxin uses more or less water when it causes him to feel hotness though I can’t say for sure. There isn’t much information about clock rates or reaction rates as they relate to Receptors online. If you can offer any insight, I’d deeply appreciate it.

***** REACTIONS ****
331  95   0 Emb B MutDupCut        128   0 Organ# = 18, 1*Carbon Monoxide + 1*Oxygen => 1*<NONE> + 0*<NONE>; half-life = 30
Was 1 None.

Since the amount changed applies itself to nothing, there’s no real change. If the chemical here changes, however, it means that 0 of that chemical will be produced in this reaction. Either way, there’s no difference.

346  85   0 Emb B MutDupCut        129   0 Organ# = 18, 2*Antigen 0 + 1*<NONE> => 12*Antibody 0 + 1*Histamine B; half-life = 40
Was 128.

This gene has only be changed to be more likely to mutate.

333 New in file 2  80   1 Emb B MutDupCut        128   0 Organ# = 18, 1*Fever toxin + 1*Water => 1*<NONE> + 8*Hotness; half-life = 32

This is listed as a new gene though in the original PearlMaid genome, it’s in place and exactly as shown here. Just to confirm, I opened Buichirou’s gene in the Genetics Kit and confirmed that this gene was duplicated.

***** STIMULI ****
520  49   0 Chi B MutDupCut        128   0 Got machine (91) causes sig=0 GS neu=0 int=0, ,,,0 => -12*Boredom + 2*Hunger for fat + 1*<NONE> + 0*<NONE>
Was 0 None.

Because no chemical is being changed, this does not affect the creature.

***** INSTINCTS ****
456 Different in file 2   4   0 Emb B MutDupCut        128   0 [03: stim] [Cell 11 (Food)] + [Brain Lobe 255] [Cell 0] + [Brain Lobe 254] [Cell 0] and [Hunger for fat] => Cell 12 (Eat); unknown = 31.
Was Brain Lobe 255.

This instinct tells him to eat food when he is hungry for fat. As for the Brain Lobe number, I’m not sure what the change means. Again, insight would be appreciated.

Buichirou isn’t being disqualified for his genes. Well, he is but not for the reason you’re thinking. I’m taking him aside to do some testing to learn about his genetics on my own time.


Bonrou – Kept his name

Male

Except for some pigment changes, Bonrou is mutation-free! Definitely a shoe-in.


Bertho – X

Male

***** REACTIONS ****
224 77   0 You F MutDupCut        128   0 Organ# = 12, 1*Oestrogen + 0*Progesterone => 1*Progesterone + 1*<NONE>; half-life = 0
Was 1 Progesterone.

349  87   0 Emb B MutDupCut        129   0 Organ# = 18, 16*Antigen 2 + 1*<NONE> => 12*Antibody 2 + 2*Coldness; half-life = 42
Was 128.

There are those common genes again.


Berchthold – Finny

Male

Like Bonrou, he doesn’t have any mutations either!


Berthol – X

Male

As it turns out, Autonamer gave me two Berthos. This is Berthol. Don’t worry, I checked their monikers already.

***** RECEPTORS ****
12  10   0 Emb B MutDupCut        128   0 Organ# = 0, Creature, Drives, Boredom, chem=Fear, thresh=0, nom=0, gain=209, features=Analogue  (0)
Was Fear.

Here, this gene normally controls fear levels. When fear is present the body normally tells the brain to increase the fear drive. In Berthol, it increases his boredom drive. Jeb Corliss comes to mind.

***** REACTIONS ****
280  65   0 Emb B MutDupCut        128   0 Organ# = 16, 1*Coldness + 1*<NONE> => 1*Coldness backup + 0*<NONE>; half-life = 18
Was 1 None.

Here, there’s less nothing come out of this chemical reaction than would normally. Normally, the reaction creates 1 Coldness backup and 1 nothing.

Despite his harmless-seeming mutations, I’ve decided to leave him out of this next round as well. Absence of fear is hugely detrimental in the real world and it could be here, as well. Instead of feeling fear when he gets hit by another creature, for example, he could learn that approaching other creatures alleviates boredom and then he’ll approach the threat instead of running away. Oh well.

All of this work leaves us with Berchthold and Bonrou who are mutation-less; Berald who has a powerups related mutation; Battista who doesn’t feel cold and has a minor, almost negligible cholesterol mutation and Bibian who has a minor hunger for fat instinct mutation.

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Hey! I know this is a little unusual but I’m going to crack open FisherMan, a third-party fish and tank editor for Aquazone. What’s going to happen? It’s really anybody’s guess.

Anyway. I took my existing discus tank and decided to make a duplicate to play with today. I opened up Fish tank, hit the Splicing button and changed all of the values to 1.

bandicam 2013-07-09 00-00-26-430I realize it looks like I’ve only labelled the first row but think of the genes this way. Discus are diploid organisms. This means that they’re allowed to have dominant and recessive genes. If I make them completely homozygous, it’s easier to tell which genes produce which phenotype.

bandicam 2013-07-09 00-26-33-551Changing all of the values (A-G) to 1 produces Albino fish. I still have no idea what lines do what, but if the discus genes are anything like the guppies, the way their colors come out will depend on some sort of base gene. For now, I’m going to go down the lines and see what happens when I change each line.

A

A 50

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Changing line A seems to give the fish a striped halo. The lines are in light blue. There are no other changes to the fish. Trying the middle ground (25) between a naked fish and this halo doesn’t produce anything. So far, we’ve seen this pattern in Spartacus

A 100 (max)

bandicam 2013-07-09 00-53-27-921

Here, we have a fish totally covered in stripes. Changing the value doesn’t seem to affect the color at all, just the intensity of the fish’s stripes. I’ve seen this particular pattern in my two female discus.

Now, let’s take the stripes off of these fish and see what happens when I change the values of the next line.

B

B 1-100

The fish doesn’t look any different from the Albino fish above. This got me curious about the relationship between B and A and if there was one.

A 50 – B 50

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Changing B to 50 seems to produce thicker stripes! Changing the value to 100 has the same result. What about when we change A to 100 for full stripes?

A 100 – B 50

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Seeing this has revealed quite a bit to me. It might look, to some, like the base color would be where the light blue is and the white would be accents, but after learning what I have so far, you could consider the base color to be covered by the stripes. Changing B to 100 produces the same result.

So far, we’ve learned that A affects striping and B affects the strength or intensity of those stripes.

Let’s move on to C.

C

C 50

bandicam 2013-07-09 01-15-23-048

Here’s where past research comes in handy for me. Once I learned that line C controlled the vertical bars on these fish, I rembered a page I read on the matter. This line and G control the intensity of the bars but it takes a value of 50 before C produces a single full bar. If you would like to read that page, you’ll find it here. We’ll learn more about C and G once we reach G.

C 100

bandicam 2013-07-09 01-20-05-861

To my surprise, C100 gave me full bars! I have a theory now about how G affects the intensity of C now. I’m guessing that C 50 is the base for G and values G 50 and G 100 affect the intensity of C where C 100 throws full bars regardless of G. We’ll test that theory once we reach that line, though.

Learning what I can about three lines of Discus’ genetic code is enough for me for now and I feel I need to save some for next time anyway. See you with the rest soon!

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