Incredibly Old Creatures Ideas

Alongside the story of Bibblita, in my folder of old, dusty documents, I came across this little gem-- an ancient file called "creaturesideas.txt" containing the following text:

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 I always thought DS needed some more excitement to it. I mean, a lot of people are perfectly happy breeding norns and letting them run amuck, but to me that can get dull. The creatures can practically run around without a caretaker; as long as you leave out enough food for them they'll breed like rabbits and fill the world within a few hours. In Creatures 2 it wasn't that simple, you had to actually care for the creatures...but that quickly got frustrating, for the norns were so stupid that if you left them alone for a few minutes they'd all throw themselves into the sea and drown. I think with a little tweaking, DS could be a little more interesting, with twists like having to plant and grow food in the spring, then harvest it in the fall and store it for winter, and other foods would grow at other times and the like, instead of just having infinite food vendors, etc. Just having an advanced cycle of plant growth could make the game much more interesting. Of course there would be a backup food source incase you got lazy and the crops were frostbit, but it would be something like hard tack--it would sustain the norns through the winter, but they wouldn't like it. I always liked the part in Creatures Adventures where you could plant a garden (not that it mattered because you had infinite cakes anyway, but hey..)

I'm aware DS takes place on a spaceship without seasons. But this is brainstorming. Such a thing doesn't matter right now.

Anyway, that's just one thing that could change tons about the game. It could even get more advanced--certain berries could be mixed to make healing potions or grendel poisons, or perhaps not only could you raise vegetables, but animals too as a food source.

The food source stuff, actually, is very possible (as far as I know) for 3rd parties to create as an agent. It would have a script to remove all the plants, animals, and vendors. Then it would need to replace it with new and improved plants and animals with the life cycles needed. Some plants would grow when others wouldn't, certain animals would need to eat certain plants to live, and then there could perhaps be a machine to put harvested foods in, similar to the Deep Freeze agent (can't remember at the moment who made this..), which stops the agent's timer script so it wouldn't rot (at least that's how I understand it, I'm no CAOS expert). The animals would also need to be properly prepared for eating, and perhaps the machine could do this simply, using scripts similar to those of the quirky cookie machine. You'd drop in the animal, out comes meat and perhaps some warm fur. As an added bonus, just because it's DS and we can do what we want, a plushie toy of the animal would be created too. If we wanted to, we could make it possible for people to do things such as drop a norn or grendel in the machine, which would obviously kill the creature and produce meat and a plushie as with any other creature. O.O; That might disturb some people though, I'm sure, but my snowball is getting bigger and bigger, I'm getting more ideas the more I type. 

So while that addition is perfectly feasible...many of my ideas aren't, but I'll type them up anyway. More possibly disturbing things are ahead though, I warn you.

I'm sure this has been debated many times over, but Grendels should be able to eat norns and ettins. Not just slap them to death, they should be able to drag them off and eat them, and gain nourishment from them. Grendels should be meat-eaters, only eating norns, ettins, and critters. When desperate, maybe they would eat bugs, or perhaps eachother. They also need better hunting instincts. As it is now grendels and norns play with eachother if they're in a good mood. That's not right. Norns need to be afraid and flee at the first sight of a grendel, and a grendel needs to hunt down and kill any norn he/she sees. There's two major ways this predator/prey thing could work that I've come up with. First off, there could be one grendel that hatches..oh say, every two hours or so. He would be the great enemy whom everyone fears--big, strong, bloodthirsty. The norns would know to flee, so the difficulty of the game wouldn't tremendously increase by having the burden of shooing all the norns to safety. But some norns would not run fast enough or be sleeping at the time the predator 
approaches, and they would be killed and eaten unless you could save them. This one grendel could be killed by poison or other means, and a new one would not hatch until the next two-hour cycle. Another way this could work is similar to the way the Banshee grendels work now-- a male and a female would hatch, be only a bit bigger than the norns, and be able to breed and reproduce as normal, but would still have hunting instincts. The only big difference between this and the one grendel system is that the herd of grendels would hunt together as a pack, but one alone would not be as deadly and easily overpowered by two or more adult norns.

Also, this somewhat ties to the grendels, creatures should be able to pick up other creatures smaller than them. This could be interesting in that parents could pick up their children, and grendels could take norns prisoner instead of just killing them on the spot.

As far as the 3rd party possibility of the grendels, I don't think it's possible. But the single huge predatory grendel might be able to be simulated with a highly advanced agent.

I just get sick of the easiness of DS sometimes and thus come up with these ideas. I generally play the game hands-off to make it more interesting, meaning I touch the creatures as little as possible, and use verbal commands to guide them to flee the grendels or hit them. It's more interesting than just picking up the grendels and tossing them into the sea. Where's the adventure in that?

Ah, if only I had the skills...I could make my Creatures dreams come true....
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Just kind of interesting to see how my wishlist (and writing-style, for that matter) has changed over the years. And yet, the core of my ambitions hasn't changed much-- adding danger is a great way to make ones' creatures more valuable to the nurturer, and thus more attachable. I might be able to learn from this.