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*Final Fantasy victory tune*

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Today is a day of great triumph! A happy colony. They were grounded a few seconds before the screenshot, but as you can see they're already getting back to business. Look at all the eggs! Originally, the Flying Agent and the Swimming Agent worked the exact same way - which makes sense because they're essentially the same agent, made by the same person.  (I believe she currently goes by RisenAngel; her old username had the initials G_M but I don't want to use it because it would effectively be misgendering her. Y'all know who I mean. I want to give credit but also be respectful. Hence this clunky note. Anyway. Moving on.)   When a female DuoDragon (and many other swimming breeds, probably also other flyers) gets pregnant, a chemical reaction in her genome causes her to get sleepy. She will eventually fall asleep. When that happens, the flying/swimming agent is supposed to cause her to slowly sink to the ground. When she lands, she will lay the egg. This keeps the flying/

The Strange Case of Pointed Midnight

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 So, I wasn't quite satisfied with the conclusion of my last post. I didn't like not being able to figure out what happened. So I decided to do an experiment. If you read the last post, you know that I had a baby hatch and die instantly - listed as Child age, no less, rather than baby. I thought it must be a genetic problem that killed her at birth, but I couldn't find any evidence of such a catastrophic mutation in her genes.  So today I said to myself, hey, why not go open up the World folder for Arcus Malus, find her genome in the Genetics folder, and respawn her with Genetics Kit? Let's see what happens. If she dies at the instant of birth again, that means there must in fact be a fatal mutation somewhere in her genome and I just missed it in GeneCompare. But if she lives, that means something else went wrong. And I may never be able to figure out exactly what, which is a bit frustrating. But at least she'll get another chance at life. Plus, we can observe her s

O Tragic Mystery

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October was a rough month for me. Sigh. But I'm still here and still running Creatures.  I ran the previous world most of the month until it reached Gen ~50 or so. At that point I had accumulated enough observations to know what I wanted to tweak next in the genome (some instinct repatterning, mostly, so they'd be more drawn to eating bugs and animal eggs rather than fixating so closely on critters only). Plus I got tired of looking at that particular set of metarooms and the problems in C1toDS (especially the tendency for them to get 'stuck' in the left hand side of the larger ocean just past the world wrap spot).  So I made a new world and started again with a new batch of edited dragons to test the edits, using a different set of metarooms. I wanted to go all-out on the Halloween thing but that world kept crashing and eventually died completely (can't be opened). I'm pretty sure it was the Hydroponics Bay metaroom causing the problems, but I couldn't be c

The Devil's Re-Jects

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  Interesting times in the ongoing Imperator wolfling run. I've had it going almost continuously since late on September 30th in the same world, with a max population of 30-35. This is by far the biggest and longest-running wolfing I've ever been able to do. No machine I've owned before was capable of keeping a single world going with that many creatures in it without dying of untenable amounts of lag. Even with a third as many creatures, it would lag badly after a day or two of RL uptime. But so far this one is going fine, though I've had to kill hots and ject 1 a bunch of agents to streamline it (all stuff we're not using anyway, like the Bramboos in the mesa or the mosquitos/gnats/rocklice in the Jungle).  So this world is rather important to me. I've never gotten to observe so many dragon norns doing so much all at once before with so little lag relative to population and world size. They've sprawled across C12DS, the Jungle, the Desert, and the Hydro No

Death of a Norn

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 17 hours and 12 minutes. Meet Ecru Axe. She's been a fixture of my Imperator Dragon testworld for over 17 hours. It's funny when you know for a fact that their end is coming soon, at a specific time. The max lifespan of any Dragon Norn so far is 17 hours 33 minutes. So she's going to die soon. And there's very little I could do to stop it. I could give her a Cupid's Halo, but that's the only way, and if it ever bugged out she'd be gone. I usually bestow that on a pair of Gen1s to keep the bloodline from mutating away from its origins too much, but I didn't this time. Just forgot. So all the Gen1s are long gone. Ecru was one of the first Gen3s to hatch. There are younger ones of course, because of egg piling. It'll be a while yet before the last Gen3 egg hatches, lives, and dies.  Still, though. Her personal time is coming to a close soon. 17 hours, 15 minutes. She pushes a portal and warps through the network, appearing in the Hydro Nornterrarium. H

Eem exmly patient

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 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