Addicted to CAOS - A Creatures Blog

All right, this is a log I'm keeping in Notepad as I watch, pause to type, and unpause to watch again, in more or less 'real time'. I will post these words with illustrations to Addicted to CAOS later; if you're reading these words, obviously, it's later! :p Dreameater visits Dusk in the C12DS house. Since unpausing I have remained focused on Dreameater, since she's been in the game less time than Dusk and since Dusk still appears to be focused on that nonexisting door I mentioned last time. At first she seemed pretty reality-oriented, but for the first time her attention has begun to waver. She also noticed Dusk for the first time and made her way toward him, thinking 'pull Norn'. However, on her approach, she also, briefly, thought 'push grendel home' as shown by the CRC, while the HealthBar showed 'push self'. Aha! Her first hallucination that lasted long enough to be detected and recorded. Unlike Dusk, who experienced a few d

My two testers, Dusk and Dreameater. Dreameater has become interested in the clock. At least she's paying attention to reality; Dusk has been standing there obsessing over a nonexisting door for a few minutes now. While the rest of the world is having fun with their cellphones and their Pokemon Go, my non-cellphone-owning self has had to find other things to do. One of those things is a somewhat more formal study of the 130 Dragons. For those who may not have read earlier posts, this is a version of my ongoing Dragon Norn genetic breed project that has been given a 'Pineal Gland' organ with a 'Psychosis Generator' emitter that produces chemical 130 at all times from the moment of birth. In short, they are constantly hallucinating and therefore 'insane', at least as much as a Norn can be said to be such. I have done wolfling runs both of pure 130 Dragons and mixed normals with 130s, and both have been very interesting. I have written on the Creatur

Icebound Hole, a Dragon Norn tester with a funny Protective Tub name, has caught a Balloon Pigeon. I've been testing the removal of the old 'hunting' stuff in their genome thanks to my new Prey Scent agent. I forget if his Gen1 ancestors are from the 'before' or 'after' batches, but it looks like he finds 'get critter' to be quite entertaining, so he probably still has the old 'chase' and 'get' instincts active. Dragons are predators. Well before I began working with their sprites and a similar genetic concept, the original Draconian Norns were set up to seek out bugs and critters for food instead of the normal food, seed, and fruit class objects. I've changed the way my Dragon Norns' digestion and such works - they're a lot more interested in food type objects than the old Draconians were, for example. Also, they can survive entirely on just critters OR bugs, one or the other, and no other edibles, due to both trigge

Sooo I spent today working on my dragon Norns for the most part, tinkering with little aspects of their genome. I also made my very first working agent today! I'm finally beginning to understand CAOS! I'll make a proper post about that later, because I'm pretty proud of it even if it's a very simple thing. For now I've got something else to cover. That poor C2 Norn from the post before last has been analyzed. A couple of people were kind enough to point me toward Slink's D-DNA Analyzer, which helped greatly in deciphering the mystery of this Norn's problems. I was going to do this tomorrow, after sleeping... but heck with it! Let's dive in. File 1 is the mutant Gen2 Norn, and File 2 is what I used to create her Gen1 parents. Firstly, as I suspected, she is suffering from a brain mutation: 621 Different in File 1   6   0 Emb   B MutDup      128  Lobe #= 7 State Rule: state TRUE type0 PLUS type1 <end> <end> <end> <end> <en

Possible notes toward the readme.txt for the next release of my dragon Norns... First and foremost, the most important thing that people who are used to keeping more 'normal' strains of Norn need to know is this. These Norns are predators. This means several things. Firstly, although they are excellent at caring for themselves in general, they have some special needs and problems that normal Norns lack. Specifically, they are very poor at navigating, much moreso than normal Norns, despite their lack of obsession with buttons and lifts. This is because most Norns rely a lot on food smells to navigate, but my various dragon Norns are carnivores, and unfortunately, critters and bugs do not emit a scent of their own. They don't even seem to emit the protein scent given off by fruit. The result is that these Norns will often appear to be much stupider than they really are if you try to put them in situations that require them to be good at navigating by scent. For exam

How is it possible I haven't posted since April?? Where did the time go? Yikes! Well, today I'm posting because I'm pretty mystified. I've been playing with C2 today since it's the version of the game I've spent the least time playing as a rule. I edited the basic 'norn.gen' file a bit and made some Gen1s. One of the Gen2s from that group is really odd and since GeneCompare only works for C3DS Norns I haven't yet been able to figure out what's wrong with this Norn. Basically, she hatched lying down and never moved. She never looks away from herself. Other Norns have come up and interacted with her both positively (tickles, talking) and negatively (hitting) with no effect in terms of getting her to move. She also began shivering shortly after birth for no apparent reason. She makes no attempt to take any actions except to speak, and once after I tried injecting her with a metabolism transplant she sat up for a few seconds, then fell asleep for

I haven't posted in a few days. I've been really preoccupied with my projects, and often too tired to actually talk about them once I've done working on them. But the plus side is I've made some real progress. I already announced and posted them on CreaturesCaves.com but it doesn't feel quite official for some silly reason because I haven't done it here yet even though probably no one reads this. So - Abyss Dragons v2.0 are finished (for the moment anyway) and released. I love the little wings they have now from using the Gargoyle arm sprites. I know I'm far from the first person to do that but I still really like how it looks. Plus they start out anyway with dark colors (though breeding of course tends to lead to a lot of color mutation - they do tend to stay darker colored for the most part in the earlier generations at least), so that hopefully makes them stand out from other winged dragon designs a teeny bit. They're TWB Norns only right now, b

Yes, it's another song lyric (ERB is life) but it could just as easily apply to these projects. I suppose the answer is 'whatever bizarre cocktail constitutes my natural neurochemistry'. I'm no stranger to drugs, I think I've said that here before, but none are particularly involved in my life at the moment beyond weed (I'm a native-born Californian; for most of us, weed is not just medicine or a drug, it's a proud local and often family tradition - in my case, both) and legally prescribed (and taken-as-prescribed) pain pills, so I can't blame my weird fixations and obsessions on anything but my own psychodynamics. Such is life I suppose. I guess that's part of why I like Creatures so much. I feel something of a kinship with creatures so heavily influenced by drives and chemistry they were born with and can't help. Ahem. Enough of that. I don't think much of anyone reads this anyway, but just in case, I won't bore you further with that

Oof, this is a bad blog to fall back into that old 'title posts with a line from the song you're currently listening to' habit. Ah, well, it's apropos in a way, given what I did to those poor testers yesterday. Ahem! Development of Abyss Dragons v2 is coming along very well. I've finally fixed their problems with nutrition, adipose tissue, and premature mortality. I can now consistently establish breeding, self-sustaining wolfling colonies and the Norns, while not usually actually making it as long as they theoretically could, are now typically dying between four and five hours of age, which isn't bad at all - and to tell the truth, it's not unrealistic. I mean, humans have the theoretical potential to live 120 years, but how many of us actually do? They're still not quite as pack-oriented as I'd like. They spend more time trying to retreat from each other than I want them to, sometimes rather obsessively. Slap-fights are common, too, but oddly e

So, I officially began work on Abyss Dragons v2.0, starting with the Norn version. I'm going to make a Grendel version too for people who like Grendels (myself included). The Grendel version will be mostly the same as the Norn version only with the species references in its genome reversed. I might try to give the Norns and Grendels some unique traits but I haven't decided yet, and if so, what those might be. For now I'm just trying to get the basic Norn version working. Detritus is presenting a problem. In the original version, I made them seek out critters for protein, bugs and pests for carbs, and food for fat. This worked fairly well, but with a couple of problems. First, there are less bugs and pests than I thought there were, because some things I thought were bugs are actually critters (such as the dragonflies in the Norn Terrarium). This isn't a huge deal, but it irked me. Secondly, since I fed them largely on Zander Fish and the two kinds of Stickletrout avai