Eem exmly patient

 So. Been a long time, hasn't it? Life's been hard. I didn't have a computer capable of running Creatures for a long time. Went through a lot of RL stuff I won't bore y'all with (is anyone still out there? Sure you are!) But I've got a laptop now and I'm getting back into the game. Because of course I did. One of the first things I did when the laptop arrived was to go to GOG and download Creatures Exodus. I've forgotten most of what I knew, of course, but with practice I'm sure it'll come back to me.

I rescued a Duodragon1j genome. I think I've lost the TWB version I was working on, though. Will have to start on that again sometime. In the meantime I've been tinkering with the one I've got. I always had plans to make variations on the Abyss Dragon, so I began working on the Imperial - flies, swims, and eats just about anything. They're lusty beasts of great appetite in all directions. 

Oddly enough, they're more behaviorally carnivorous so far than the genome I started with. The way they're set up, they get more nutrition from eating animals than plants, but they do get some benefit from plant-eating, unlike the Abysses. I haven't noticed any obsessive seed-eaters as would pop up with the Abysses. Of course, I'm sure that's partly because they won't starve to death doing that the way Abysses do, but still - I see a lot of casual critter-eating, even to the point of depleting the population of the typically-unstoppable balloon pigeons and zander fish. They're also fat as heck, but that doesn't seem to be stopping them from living over 10 hours, so I'm not too worried about it.

Been trying to make a vendor agent for the Shee Shrooms, but agenteering has never been my strong suit. I decided to take a break when looking at the CAOS started to literally make me dizzy. But I'm not giving up, dammit. The agent I want already exists, and there's another vendor I can borrow the graphics and such from (the Rainbow Shrooms agent). I just have to combine them to make an agent that spits out Shee Shrooms rather than Rainbow Shrooms. That should be easy. Right? Right...? *nervous giggle*

Another fun observation is that the Imperial Dragons are engaging in... well, not quite pack behavior, but probably the closest one can get out of Norns. They still have a tendency to form settled colonies, but this machine can easily handle populations of 20 or so without meaningful lag (at 20 Norns with 20ish eggs in the world and lots of agents and such, it lags about as much as it did on my old machine with a brand new world and six creature in it, and new worlds with six or eight critters run so fast - I can finally see the game with no lag!) 

They like to hang out in groups of four to six or so; sometimes pairs or trios. Unlike the colonies I used to see, though, the groups don't necessarily stay in one general area. Instead, they all sort of wander in more or less the same direction for a while. These groups can last anywhere from ten minutes to a few hours. Eventually they tend to split up and reform as the groups encounter either settled colonies or other roaming groups and the new interactions cause a shuffling of the social boundaries. 

But the important point is they almost never wander off completely alone and stay that way, nor are they as prone to stay in one place clumped up together. I really wanted to create this kind of grouped roaming behavior in years past, but it never quite worked out - I generally got either singlet/pair roamers or settled colonies.

Could the difference just be the lack of lag? Is that allowing them to express different behaviors than they did existing under moderate to heavy lag at all times? I know that stuff like pushing toys back and forth between each other is definitely more possible without the lag, and the fire ant queens are a lot more difficult for them to catch without lag. So some stuff is different, no doubt. But it's kind of amazing that the lag could matter that much. You'd think it would run the same, just slower. But no, it seems like it's more complex than that.

Welp, that's all I've got for now, but I'll be back, just like the old days. At least as long as I'm able to be. I have dragon Norns to intoxicate, after all.

See y'all around!