Hah! Once I’d started playing with my new CFF creatures, I realized that it’d been a while and that I didn’t know what the difference between the Vanilla, CFE and CFF breeds were anymore. I decided it might be wise to correct this by looking at the different Astro genes and reading some documentation.
I’ll be keeping the CFF world that I have and we’ll visit our little norns again in the future. For now, I’m going to play around with a population of Vanilla Astros. Playing in the Shee Ark will also give me a more nostalgic experience and I think this particular terrarium is better suited for this sort of experience. The Capilatta is a little too… “test-bedy” for my taste.
After hatching 3 males and 3 females I taught them all their vocabularies through the console, just to make things easier for me. I’d be able to keep track of how they were feeling and they’d be able to communicate their needs with me. Naturally, they used it to talk about who they liked instead. While this “like/dislike loop” problem wasn’t as bad as in the CFE genome, it was still pretty bad.
Yes, I get it. Everybody like everybody, now shut up about it. Thankfully, I had the good sense to mute creature voices from the get-go. Chatty little bastards, but at least they’re cute. After a while, the chatter about who likes who died down and I was able to just watch them. As babies, they still had a lot of learning and decision making to do and so would pace back and forth and try all sorts of things. They eventually got enough experience to advise each other on how to deal with drives, like resting when tired. Things slowed down for a while.
Then, when they were each a half hour old, EES cropped up.
You poor, stupid animal. For those of you not in the know, EES or “Eat Elevator Syndrome” is something that happens to many creatures in Creatures 3/Docking Station. The norns just get so bored, or their brains get so mixed up, or the game’s engine has a hiccup that causes their brains to become unable to focus on anything for a while. They default to “eat door” or “eat elevator” when this happens and they eventually starve to death. A quick slap on the butt is all it usually takes to wake them up but this is quite a problem for anyone running an AFK wolfling or feral run, for example. It’s even tedious for people doing what I do, that is, running the game on the side while I do other things. This was one of the biggest problems in the default game but thankfully, there are several fixes for this, including the CFE edits and Brainfarter, the latter which I haven’t tested yet.
The Norns started to do dumber and stranger things. One male grabbed an egg and just stood there saying “get creature egg” when I asked what he was doing. A pair of females played with an elevator and another male kept walking off of high ledges. Nothing high enough to really hurt and there’s no way for them to detect cliff edges, but it was just dumb looking.
I’ll be playing with this world for a few generations to see what I can glean about the vanilla genome. It’ll be fun to play with the newer genomes after a few rounds of this nonsense, I’m sure.
