Hey! Remember how I said I was taking a break from Creatures? Well, that’s true, but I was serious when I said I wanted to get articles and updates out about other sim games, like one of my favorites, Aquazone. Don’t expect regular updates about this game, however as I intend to play this game at the “realistic” pace that was intended for it. I’ll be doing some FisherMan wizardry at the very start, but after that, it’s all about doing things the slow, steady way.
By the way, for anyone curious where I learned most of my Aquazone knowledge, check out these sites. They’ve all been invaluable in helping me grasp a lot of the care and genetics behind these fish.
Don’s Attic
AZ Genetics
Effenwright’s Aquazone ArtifactsCaryn’s Aquazone Ocean
To start off, I have a goal in mind. I’m going to breed discus. I don’t know how many fish I’ll be keeping in this tank to breed my discus in, but I need to set up and cycle my tank before I can do anything else anyway.
The (mostly) empty tank you see on the left is my tank. It has some gravel and the “Bogwood” accessory added to it. I’ll be adding plants in a bit, before I can do that, I need to adjust the volume of the tank. After closing the tank and opening it up with FisherMan, I adjusted the tank’s volume from a lousy 12 liters up to an impressive 200. For those of you less metrically-minded, that’s just a little less than 53 gallons. That’s not as big as you think when you consider that many aquarium hobbyists have a 55 gallon tank at home, myself included.
Once that’s done, I open the tank again and set the simulation time to 100x the regular speed. Supposedly, this helps cycle the tank. Normally, I skip this step, but since I had other things to do and had to kill a few hours anyway, I decided to try this to see if it made a difference. I doubt it will.
Once that was all taken care of, I added my plants. In general, I like to have a few taller plants to “break line of sight” for aggressive fish and I like to have low plants to give fish someplace to spawn.
The light I had set up automatically shut off but I still wanted to get my fish in the water before I closed this entry. Naturally, I decided to choose some discus. Rather than set any particular goal, I wanted to breed two discus together and see what strain I could develop from them. Let’s meet our fish.
I took two discus from the original files. The female is black with a blue halo and the male almost looks more like a butterfly fish with his yellow body. I’m excited to see what kinds of babies I can get here! I was tempted to try adding a “white based” fish because I’d spliced some together earlier today, but playing with some of the original fish seemed more fitting to me for some reason. It’ll take a lot of time, especially since I aged them down to their juvenile state, but let’s see what we can make!
Huh. I wonder if my old guppies are still alive. I think I was working on some copper or purple ones, but it’s been a while since I looked at it. I usually do the whole FIsherMan + speed breeding thing, but maybe I’ll try it your slow/steady way.
Also do you have to run AquaZone in a virtual machine as well? It didn’t install on my Windows 7 the last time I tried and I had to install it on a Windows 2000 VM.
I’m giving slow and steady a try because time warping stopped working on my game for some reason, even after reinstalling.
I am running it on a virtual machine, windows XP specifically. I could never get the game to work on 64-bit systems but I got it working on my husband’s 32-bit Win 7 laptop.
(My guppies were all dead. Turns out I left them all of 100x warp speed for like two months…) Taking it slower might be a nice change of pace for me. It’s pretty weird that time warping stopped working for you though. Maybe it’s just a quirk of running it in a VM?
Makes sense it wouldn’t run in a 64-bit system, it’s a pretty old game.
It probably is, but I haven’t investigated it very well. On top of that, the old computer was pretty unstable towards the end. It’s pretty likely that if I get into some serious breeding projects, I’ll try time warping again.
By the way, do you still have Buzzie? 🙂
I don’t have Buzzie, but I can hex a new one for you. What color do you want his/her eye to be? 😀
Aww, that’s sweet of you! Would a shade of purple be ok?