Addicted to CAOS - A Creatures Blog

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/...

 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...

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...