"Garden Box" Mini-injector-- Another sort of opinion poll

So while I was brainstorming the structure and logic of the aforementioned planting-stuff-into-walls agent, I stumbled on an idea that I'm not sure how I feel about.

The goal of this agent is to make world-customizing easier and more interesting, but the way I have the agent currently planned out, it might be a little laborious. If you wanted to plant a strawberry patch, you would have to go to the injector room, inject the strawberry planter agent (assuming you already had the plant-stuff-into-walls-core installed), scroll back to the room you wanted to plant the patch, find the spot to plant the patch (a bit of a pain in large worlds like C2inDS), and plant it. Now imagine you want to plant six, or twelve strawberry patches. You would have to go back and reject the module each time, re-find the place you wanted to plant it, and so on. This, to me, sounds like anything but what the joy of customizing a world should be.

There are a few different ways to make this a bit easier, like creating reusable seed packets that one can just carry around with them to create more patches. I don't know about you guys, but I don't really know what to do with seed vendors once I'm done with them; I don't like to have them imposing on the scenery and if I stick them somewhere I tend to lose them. Maybe that's just me.

My current brainstormed-solution is to, instead, create what I am terming a "Garden Box." This would essentially become and contain the plant-stuff-into-walls-core, and would sit as a little icon in the bottom corner of your screen, that when clicked, would expand into a floating box containing a list of all the garden box modules you have installed. From there all you would have to do is select the plant you wanted, confirm it, and plant your patch. When you were finished, the box could be minimized back to its icon form.

Something like this could be expanded far beyond an easy way to use wall-plantable agents; it could be expanded to contain other seed modules too, and possibly critters, scenery objects, etc., so you would basically have a centralized place for world-customizing stuff. Plants and critters already native to C3/DS would (I think) be fairly easy to add to the box, for easy re-creation in other areas of the world. Creators would have to rewrite any existing 3rd party agents if they wanted them to show up in the Garden Box (hopefully something that wouldn't be too difficult if I can implement it right), so it wouldn't be a universal solution by any means, but it still could simplify things.

What do you guys think? Is there a better solution to this? Does it bother you having to reinject an agent several times? Do you try to avoid having a bunch of seed vendors lying around? Does something like the Garden Box sound worth the wait, or should I just focus on the wall-plantable stuff on its own?

CCSF wrap-up, Advanced Muco Bugs, Looking Ahead

CCSF really, really burned me out, guys. Wow. I've never done so many things at once in such a short period of time. I think I had a total of like fifteen downloads throughout the whole thing. Granted most of them were only a few lines of code, but that's still quite a bit to put out.

I never got a chance to write a proper wrap-up post. After it was over, I furiously scrambled to catch up on my NaNoWriMo story (which I did manage to finish, but wow I have never written a worse story in my life), and well, it's not too hard to tell how creatively exhausted I am right now. Kind of a shame too, considering I really wanted to contribute to the Creatures Community Advent Calendar but I simply had nothing left in me.

I really wanted to thank everyone who made blog posts during the CCSF; I don't know about everyone else, but for me it was really inspiring to see something new happening every day, and went a long way in motivating me to keep up as well. I originally planned on making some little award buttons/banners for the participants, but it was just something that kept getting pushed to the back burner. It's still something I'd like to do, though, belated as it may be.

Also, there have been a couple reports on Advanced Muco acting a little bit funny when used to select creature breeds that have never been injected before. I haven't had a chance to thoroughly investigate this, but in the meantime, if you're having a problem with a breed of creature that you haven't yet injected throwing errors/autokilling muco when selected via Advanced Muco, try using Advanced Muco to select the creature before the newly installed breed, then clicking on muco itself to select the next breed the old-fashioned way. Inject the egg, and hopefully you won't have any more problems selecting the breed normally via Advanced Muco. If you have any other issues with this, do let me know. It's something I'll look into eventually, and it will be be big help if I have some specific details from you guys.

In spite of all this creative exhaustion, my mind is already hatching new ideas for agents. The release of the Biodomes especially got me thinking about pulling away from my current obsessions with norn genetics/interaction/functionality and looking a little more at world customization.

One thing I'm tossing around in my head right now is an agent that essentially lets you plant a fruit or nut into the background/wall. You would select a region of the world (the idea being that you would do this with an area of the background that contains an image of a shrub or tree, but of course you could do whatever you wanted), possibly set some settings (like if you only want the fruit to grow in certain seasons, how often it should grow, etc), confirm it, and then the fruit would just start spawning in that selected area of the background, giving the illusion that the bush (or whatever) is bearing fruit. Kind of like the apples and seed pods grow in the C3 norn area-- they don't really grow on a plant agent, they're just set up to spawn in random areas of the treehouse.Would open up some nice world customization abilities anyway.

What do you guys think? I think I could set it up to be modular, so you could inject the "plant stuff into wall" core, and then individual agents for each type of food-- lemons, justanuts, apples, whatever, so it wouldn't be too hard for developers to make their own wall-plantable foods; it would just be a matter of writing a basic food agent and setting a few variables that sync up with the core. Could be fun? Maybe?

Just a few other things

I have a few last things for you guys, if rough and untested:

The first thing is pretty much useless right now, at least til the warp goes back up, but it's a very simple magic words command, "random contact" that, assuming you are online, picks a random online user and adds them to your contacts list if they are not already on it. Basically a way to add people to your contacts without having to warp out random norns to them. Type it in, spam Ctrl + S a few times, and keep reloading your contacts list until the desired person appears. It's pretty boring and unrefined, and maybe I'll turn it into something better later, but it's not like it's that painful to hit Ctrl+S a few times, Anyway. Download it here. Requires Magic Words Core, as always.

The second thing has been requested a few times, so I've put together a release version of it-- that is the Creature Nametags you see on LNA and in a few of my posts/videos. Injecting this will make your creature's names appear under their feet, color-coded according to gender. If you are online and the creature has warped before, the name of the original breeder will appear as a secondary tag under their name.

If you have Magic Words installed, this agent comes with Magic Words commands to change the secondary tag of the selected creature: "set tag [text]" and "reset tag", so you can label your creatures however you want.

Again, this agent is a little rough around the edges and probably still needs further tweaking, but I'm trying to follow my impulses to just get stuff out there so people can start enjoying it, rather than having them sit unused by the masses because I don't find it perfect enough, hah.
Download Creature Nametags here. (Updated 12/7/21)

Feedback and suggestions are always appreciated!

Note: The Creature Nametags were updated on 11/25/17 with multiple fixes. You can view the update post for more details. If you are having problems with the new version, you can still download the old version here.

Note 2: The Creature Nametags were updated again on 12/7/21 with even more fixes. Here's the release post, and the link to the old version if you want it.

Interactive Egg Script

Tying up most of my loose-end projects with this modified egg script. This script, similar to the critical hit script and crossbreeding script, is meant to just add an extra bit of flavor to the game. It makes eggs a little bit more interactive-- you and your creatures can both tickle and slap them. Tickling (clicking for the hand and pushing for creatures) warms them up a bit and speeds their development, while slapping (shift+clicking for the hand and hitting for creatures) damages the eggs and may injure or even kill the unborn creature. Eggs will also generally hatch a bit faster than normal.

Tip 1: If your creatures have gotten a little slap-happy with an egg, tickling it as much as you can may help the unborn creature heal.

Tip 2: A freshly-laid egg may need to be picked up and set down again before it responds to tickles and slaps.


I have been passively tweaking and using this script for some time now, but it hasn't really been rigorously tested (pretty much no testing at all with grendel/ettin eggs), so let me know if you run into any problems.

Download the Interactive Egg Script.

On Creaturely Inbreeding

Most of us understand and accept that inbreeding is just part of nornish society. Creatures can't generally tell their parents from their children, their siblings from their cousins, and so on. A young, healthy breeding female is just as happy to have a romantic escapade with her grandfather as she is to push the cute little fallow you had lined up for her. It's strange, but biologically, there's no reason for creatures to act otherwise. There are no genetic pitfalls to inbreeding for norns like there are for us, and creatures do not live in structured family groups, nor do they have any sort of social stigma that comes with inbreeding. Overall, it's a little silly to expect such primitive alife to conform to our social code that we have developed over thousands of years when they really have no reason to.

But when it comes down to it, no matter how normal and understandable it is, as humans trying to raise a colony of creatures, it still comes off as just a little irksome when your first second generation norn chooses his mother as a mate. It sort of ruins the cute little ideals we have about raising creatures to be reminded that they really are nothing like the personalities we project onto them.

In nurturing worlds, it really would just be nice if creatures avoided inbreeding.

So forget everything I just said for a moment; now we're going to look at this gene:

This might be a little overwhelming; explaining genetics often is, but try to bear with me here.

This is a chemical emitter. Creatures have tons of them. Essentially their purpose is to emit, or inject, a certain chemical into a norn periodically if certain conditions are met. The Emitter Attachment box indicates the source of input, and the Chemical information box indicates the output.

This is an emitter that I'm pretty sure is common to most creatures capable of breeding, so it makes a good example.

Let's get the Chemical Information box out of the way first. This particular gene is set up to emit the chemical, "Opposite Sex Pheromone." The Smpl rate indicates how often the chemical will be emitted, from every tick to every 255 ticks. The Gain indicates just how much of the chemical is emitted, from 0 to 1. And the threshold indicates how high the input has to be before the emitter kicks in and starts emitting at all, also from 0 to 1.

The center box controls how the input is handled; Analogue means the higher the input is above the threshold, the more of the chemical is emitted. Digital means that it will emit the gain amount of chemical as long as the input is above the threshold, regardless of how high it is.

So what we have here is a an emitter that emits a small amount of Opposite Sex Pheromone as long as the input is above the threshold, which is currently set to 0.

But what the heck is the input? The brain, honestly, can be a scary thing to play in. It baffles even me, but this bit is actually pretty straightforward if you can follow me.

Most of what goes on in a creature's brain is controlled by the engine. This can be a little frustrating to developers trying to change something only to find it hard-coded, but that's another story. In this case though, we are dealing with a certain lobe of the creature's brain, specifically, "situ" or the Situation Lobe.

This lobe contains 16 neurons, most of which are unused. The value set in these neurons is controlled by the engine (though it can also be affected by caos). The neurons are labeled as follows:

0 "I am this old"
1 "I am inside a vehicle"
2 "I am carrying something"
3 "I am being carried"
4 "I am falling"
5 "I am near a creature of the opposite sex and my genus"
6 "I am musically at this mood"
7 "I am musically at this threat level"
8 "I am the selected norn"
9-15 -- undefined

If you're playing close attention, you'll notice that Neuron 5, the one used in the gene we're studying, is tied to "I am near a creature of the opposite sex and my genus". Makes sense now, right? When that neuron's value is greater than 0, the Opposite Sex Pheromone is emitted.

(As for the state, if you're fiddling in the genetics kit, you'll notice you can choose from 0 to 3. That's another discussion altogether, but most of the time, 0 is the state you want; we'll leave it at that for now.)

Now, you should have a basic understanding of how these sorts of emitter genes work. It's a bit funny if you graph this one in action via the Biochemistry Set-- all you have to do is hold a mature norn in the same room as a creature of the opposite sex, and watch the Opposite Sex Pheromone line go up. Move the creature out of view, and it goes down again.

You could, in theory, use this knowledge to create an emitter that triggers on neuron 4, emitting something like fear when falling, or something to increase comfort levels when neuron 8 is triggered.

Or, you could take a look at another lobe, the detl, or Detail Lobe.

This lobe also contains 16 neurons, and they apply to the object that the creature is currently looking at:

0 "It is being carried by me"
1 "It is being carried by someone else"
2 "It is this close to me"
3 "It is a creature"
4 "It is my sibling"
5 "It is my parent"
6 "It is my child"
7 "It is of opposite sex and my genus"
8 "It is of this size"
9 "It is smelling this much"
10 "It is stopped"
11-15 undefined

You might be able to see where I'm going with this.

Turns out, the engine is already coded to trigger certain neurons when a creature is looking at a family member, as detailed in neurons 4, 5, and 6. This makes the job of discouraging inbreeding just a matter of adding in a few receptors, like so:

A creature's fertility works something like this: Opposite Sex Pheromone is emitted by the emitter we were just studying when potential mates are around. Then, when the creature is fertile, Arousal Potential is emitted. When Opposite Sex Pheromone and Arousal Potential are both present in a creature, they convert into Sex Drive, thus making the creature want to mate.

Libido Lowerer effectively cancels out Arousal Potential. So with the addition of these three genes, a creature essentially will have no desire to mate when he or she is paying attention to a family member.

This graph a little further down illustrates the effect of these genes. Sadly the creature at the time was not especially fertile, so you can't see how the Libido Lowerer cancels arousal potential, but you can see that at point A, the creature is alone; at point B, he enters an area where potential mates are milling around, and at point C, he turns his attention to his sibling, spiking Libido Lowerer.

Now, these genes aren't by any means foolproof when it comes to preventing inbreeding. They will prevent creatures from naturally lusting after immediate family, but all bets are off if a creature is artificially made fertile with an agent or script that pumps their fertility so high they don't know what they're pushing!

The other pitfall to this is that it only checks immediate family members; Creatures may still end up attracted to their cousins, nieces, grandchildren, or what have you. But this is something that may be overcome in the future as well; more on that later.

An amusing side effect to these genes is that if a creature is snogging his beloved and happens to catch a glance of his mother walking by, he's likely to lose interest in the act altogether. So these creatures prefer privacy when it comes to romance!

These modifications certainly aren't anything new, Vampess' CFE Family Norns comes to mind as an example that's been around a while (as a disclaimer, I haven't gone poking around in the genomes myself to confirm this, but from the information given about them they seem to operate the same way).

It's exciting to consider what more can be done with these sorts of emitters, and possibly with unused neurons. I mentioned before that these neurons can be affected with caos, meaning a script could run to send a signal to a norn's brain when say, he was looking at a potential mate that was more than an hour older or younger than him. That could trigger similar emitter genes that would prevent creatures from breeding with grandparents or nephews. Another example: a signal could be sent to a creature's brain if he was looking at someone he had previously mated with, which could be linked to emitters to encourage monogamy or diversity.

Branching off from breeding behaviors, a world might be scripted to define certain creatures as being in certain tribes or clans, and creatures might become more angry when encountering creatures in enemy tribes.

Unfortunately I haven't actually tested these waters, and I am inclined to think that a bunch of scripts constantly firing neurons in creatures' heads might quickly slow down the game, but still, I think there's a lot to potentially explore here. I've been poking around a lot in the norn brain in some painfully grueling attempt to understand exactly how it works and open new doors in Creature development; I just hope I can make sense of it all and help it make sense to others, too.