Thursday, December 7, 2023

CCSF '23 Release: Friendly Fireflies


Grab the download here!

Happy CCSF all! I tried to tie up as many little projects as I could over the last month. It wasn't as many as I would have liked, but I hope you'll all enjoy these and what's to come over the next few days.

Anyway, to the matter at hand: Friendly Fireflies is an agent that produces tiny warming fireflies in any cold areas of your world which will heat them up to a comfortable temperature. They can hard to spot and light up only very intermittently, so see if you can catch a glimpse!

This was intended as a sort of "quick fix" solution to a problem I hear often repeated, that folks want to try out True Warmblood genomes, but aren't really up for the challenge of keeping them warm. While there are patches and heating-agents aplenty, ultimately a lot of older metarooms still don't have heat emitters, and not everyone's playstyle is heavy into world-setup.

I do have some mixed feelings about this agent, because I feel like it sort of 'flattens' some of the complexities that True Warmbloods are capable of. But then, I am chiefly a nurturing player (or at least some combination of nurturing and closely observing), so my priorities are different. I find creature behaviors just more interesting to watch when they are reasonably challenged. It's really cool to me how TWB activity and eating habits vary based on their environments, how they can mitigate lower temperatures by eating more fat and even get fat cravings if their environment is too cold. So while I would recommend using the Fireflies if temperature issue is the only thing keeping you from trying them out, I feel like I still have to throw out an encouragement to consider trying playing without them if observing creature behavior is an enjoyable part of your playstyle!

One last thing to keep in mind is that because this impacts the heat in your world, it may have an effect on any plants, critters, and other agents that take the heat CA into account! Another thing to remember is that this only creates heat, doesn't remove it, so extra hot areas will still be a hazard. Luckily, there aren't too many of these.... glaring at the C2toDS volcano

An extra thanks to Mea for helping me get the coloring on the sprites right. The way I was initially doing them were easily mistakable for bacteria!

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