Hera's Candidates

So several hundred splicings later, I had snatched about a dozen girls that I thought had, if nothing else, interesting appearances. I decided, instead of dropping them all into one world, I would divide them into groups of four, and run the groups one at a time through an undocked DS world.

I didn't bother giving them names, as these aren't the creatures that are going into Hera anyway-- it's their offspring. My plan was to not put too many rules on the length of these runs; I pretty much planned on just running the scenario script on these groups and letting them carry on for a few generations. The creatures that were already pretty adept at self-care would put their genes towards the future, and after a while I would hand-pick a creature or two (depending on the diversity of the appearance) to bring into the genepool of Hera.

Group one consisted of a gaius cross, a pink-tinted grendelish thing. a treehugger/ettin cross, and bright blue bengal. Sadly, the gaius cross and the bengal died off pretty quickly, leaving the other two to populate. When I checked back after a few hours, their offspring weren't looking half-bad, but I chose to let things run a little bit longer. Even though I didn't turn creature nametags on, I was watching the scores through the debug window, and well.. they were pretty terrible. The DS meso isn't a hard place for one to care for oneself, and if these creatures couldn't manage scores below 90 in such an easy zone, there was no way they were going to make it in Hera.

However, things only seemed to get worse as they went on. Over seven hours into the run, nearly all the creatures had scores of 100. Most of their high drives were related to hunger, the most basic and easily-solved of needs. Bad blood was only going to breed more bad blood, so I took a chance and reimported a clone of the little blue bengal, on the offchance that she originally died from being beaten or some other unnatural cause. I hoped she might grow up healthy this time around and add some superior genes to the pool. I guess I was a little biased too and wanted to give her a second chance; she was just so pretty!

But what originated as a choice made on personal bias turned out to be exactly what the failing tribe needed. It took a while, but when I checked the world again at the 14 hour mark, all of the creatures bore some trace of the little blue one's genes, and most of the scores hovered between 40 and 65, with the original norn's score dropping as low as nine!

Even at seven hours old, this nameless heroine was still just an adult, a good example of how the scenario script rewards norns that care for themselves with a longer lifespan.

In the end, I picked out two norns I thought were suitable for Hera: an excitable youth who was a pretty exact clone in appearance to our original, and a newborn hatchling with a more subtle tint and a little more treehugger in her. Meet Cyana and Elm!

These two girls have quite an adventure ahead of them-- life has been pretty relaxed here in the norn meso, with food and toys never far out of reach, but the much, much larger world of C2inDS is going to be quite a test of their skills of adaptation. Let's wish them the best!