Hera: New Blood

There are still two groups of spliced creatures that I intend on eventually pulling offspring from, but I was really eager to introduce these two girls into Hera. I decided to start them off in the little glass domes under the sea, a place untouched in the world by creatures until now. They seemed pretty happy until the realized there was nothing to do there, and proceeded to whine about being bored.

I kept suggesting they pull the elevator, but they paid me no mind... I thought this might be the beginning of another episode of frustration, when I remembered that this dome was located right on the world-wrap seam, meaning they might not even be able to see the elevine at all. Sure enough, when I led them over so the vine was in their view, they were more than happy to listen. That was way more of a relief than I expected it to be. I'm still having nightmares about retraining norns to listen to me.


The girls were off, and traveled their way eastward and upward until they ran into Amina. Looks like they're not shy at all about meeting the natives! I was a little surprised to notice that both of them had aged pretty quickly-- Elm especially, who had already advanced to youth age at a very young 25 minutes. Even though she's of age now to put her genes forward, she's got a bit of work to do to lower her score. I'm not sure that anyone will be able to compete with Amina though; she's probably going to keep mothering little ones as long as she's walking.

Trusting they could care for themselves now, I went to briefly check in on the status of the other creatures. Lilac was hanging out near the bridge, taking a nap. Ever since I put my bias aside and gave her some attention, she's been doing pretty well, hanging mostly around the tree, where she has access to a well-balanced diet and a nice variety of toys. Her score is pretty respectable too. Considering her slow-aging, I think she'll be with us a long time.

Rishi was still hanging out in the incubator den, feeling a bit lonely (my, this looks familiar) but otherwise satisfied as she stuffed her face with bramboo berries. That den seems to be a bit of a trap for creatures, doesn't it? It's too full of delicious things for anyone to want to leave, yet it's such a lonely place.

Speaking of lonely though, little Kayla is still aimlessly wandering the swamps, seeking companionship. You know, it's a little sad that norns can't sniff each other out when lonely like they can when they're searching for food. Norns emit a CA smell, but sadly a norn can't tell the difference between her own norn smell and the smell of other norns. But it got me wondering-- might a lonely norn not know any better and still try to "approach norn" by scent? This could go a long way in explaining why poor Rishi and Kayla tend to sit in one spot as they grow more and more lonely. It might warrant further research!

Lastly, Kindi has already reached youth, and is hanging out with Amina (and you can't see it, but Elm and Cyana are just off to the left side of the screen; they didn't seem to want to come together for a group shot.) I'm not too alarmed by her high-ish score yet-- since it gets automatically set to 100 at youth age, she's still working it down to something reflective of her true survival abilities.

It's kind of funny how we have about half the creatures grouped together, and the other half completely strewn about the world. We'll have to see how this develops!

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!

Splice Quest

My DS splicer is so, so poorly coded. When I wrote it I was just fumbling through things, barely understanding how they worked and using cheap work-arounds to fix errors rather than find the source of them. Still, it was the first major thing I ever scripted, and the overwhelmingly positive response I got from it gave me the confidence to keep developing even more complex agents. Maybe that's why I enjoy using it, even if it is rather dated and buggy.

I recently learned that between my personal creatures folder and my LNA exports folder, I have nearly 5000 creatures lying around. For some reason, I've always felt ... odd about deleting export files; I would rather them have a death in a world than a simple deletion. So when I feel the need to pare down my massive collection, I enjoy splicing them.

It wouldn't be too difficult for me to just write a script now to just auto-import all my creatures and mass-splice them, but it's just more engaging to fire up the DS splicer, setting the auto-splice, and watch the whole process. Especially for the purpose of this project.

See, I'm trying to find some new genetics to introduce into the gene pool of Hera. So I'm planning on splicing a bunch of creatures, keeping an eye out for any interesting looking females, which will be set aside. Then I plan on letting the girls loose in an undocked DS world with the scenario script running, and letting them go completely feral for a few generations to weed out any bad genes. Hopefully the resulting creatures will do well in Hera, and in the meantime, I'll get to test how well the scenario script works in a feral/wolfling setting.

There's just something fascinating about watching the results of a mass splicing. Especially when I'm watching my own creatures getting spliced, and remembering all the various wolfling runs and other projects that generated the creatures to begin with.

I've put together a quick video here, just showing off the splicing process a little to tide you over until things get interesting in Hera again:

 

This is pretty terrible music for it though. It reminds me of those really depressing clips about factory-farmed animals that are created for the sole purpose of dying horrible deaths so we can eat them. Don't eat factory-spliced norns, kids. Free-range, carrot-fed norns are much tastier!

Okay, now I'm just being weird. Back to the splicing!

Hera: Everyone Dies (or so it feels)

Man, this is going from exciting to just...depressing.

First, we lost Loorea. She had gotten separated from her trio of traveling friends and with a still upsettingly high score, passed away alone in the desert. It really is a shame she never got to pass on her genes to the future; she had so many interesting visual traits, even if she was...well... not of the highest intelligence.

Then, I noticed Stella's score had become even worse, and, desperate to save her, I dropped her back in the barrel room for some intensive "eat seed" training. But she didn't even survive that. Looking at her drives, it's really very sad.. she generally wasn't too bad at taking care of herself, but she just couldn't understand where starch came from. At least she got her genes into Rishi, who passed them on through her genetic children, so Stella will still live on, in one form or another.

But life continued on in other parts of Albia. Rishi continued her journey throughout the world, and Lilac followed, through every elevine and door-vine. They didn't split up until they reached the incubator room. No one had walked those halls since Amina had when she was first brought into that world. Rishi chose to stay there, resting in the grasses and munching on the apples, while Lilac chose to go to the surface, heading west towards the island.

 It came to my attention that maybe I've been a little biased against Lilac, considering her harsh treatment of Rishi. Her score was edging higher, and I hadn't really put much effort into helping her out. Lilac and Amina were the only two of the original six left, and Lilac deserved as much help as the others (Not that Amina needed any help while her score sat at a record 35).

Luckily, she didn't seem as affected by aging as the other creatures were-- I remember it took her over two hours just to get her to adult, and now, at a little over four hours, she retained her adult status.

I set about giving her some food and encouragement, and she made her way past the island, across the sea, and climbed up the tree to the platform PinkiePie once lived on. There, she was joined by Kindi, who had just turned adolescent. These norns grow up so fast!

With Lilac well on her way to a more acceptable score, I felt a little better. Of course, with so many deaths in the world, the script fought to catch up, and soon Rishi was carrying another splice of herself and Amina. But this one wasn't going to stay in the world. After naming her Kitty, I went ahead and exported her. Maybe I'll reimport her later, or save her for something else, but I don't think this world needs yet another Amina/Rishi cross, as genetically promising as they may be. I want to keep some diversity in this world-- but genetically strong diversity, still. I've got a bit of a plan to accomplish this, but it's going to take a bit of time!

Hera: You miss a day around here...

Wow. This has been quite a day! I honestly can't remember the last time I had this much fun playing this game. I don't know if it's the script, or just the circumstances, or the fact that I'm blogging about it and get to have all kinds of interesting discussions with you guys, or maybe just that these are seriously interesting creatures, but I am honestly loving this world and the creatures therein. 

But I've got a lot of events to cover, so we'll get started. It was no real surprise that PinkiePie was chosen to be the carrier of the next egg, considering she was all alone up there in that tree, resting her life away. But I was surprised to see another astro head poke out of the egg! Could it be that Stella contributed yet again? But no, on further examination, this baby was a product of Amina and Rishi!
To be honest, I was hoping for a little more genetic diversity, but fair is fair-- it looks like Amina has some promising genes-- she's now both a genetic grandmother as well as a genetic mother. Who would have guessed, considering all her stubbornness in the beginning! I named the new baby Kindi, and she instantly took quite a liking to PinkiePie. PinkiePie seemed to like the newcomer just as much, and seemed to nearly give up her resting habit! I had high hopes for her score recovery, and went to work on my next task: getting Rishi out of the swamp.

The swamplands, I am reminded, are a big, big place, and Rishi seemed to want to stop and rest a lot. But I kept encouraging her to go right, and after quite a bit of traveling, as we approached the pond on the eastern edge, I noticed her bulging belly. What must it be like, I wonder, to be on a long journey, preparing to leave your homeland, and suddenly finding yourself pregnant! Rishi didn't seem to mind at all, laying her egg with quite a smile, before wandering over to munch on some pears.

But I was distracted from this newly-laid egg when I noticed an unfortunate death notice. I cringed, hoping it wasn't another case similar to Ginger's. But no, it was PinkiePie, whom I guess had finally managed to rest herself into a permanent slumber. All signs pointed to a natural death due to lack of the Life chemical. I'm not sure how much of her aging is genetics (considering she pretty much skipped the Old stage, I think that is a factor) and how much is the script, but I do wish she had been able to snap out of her rest addiction a little sooner and buy herself some more time.

I was surprised to see Amina there with her, approaching her for company. Not to keep gushing over Amina, but she's turning out to be a quick traveler as well, considering the last time I saw her, she was at the other end of the bridge. Then over in the corner, Kindi was resting. Oh dear. I do hope she's actually tired and hasn't just picked up poor Pinkie's fatal habits

I noticed that Stella, below the bridge, had also joined the ranks of the aged. It's just a little sadder, knowing that this old age could have been postponed had she only had the foresight to eat seed instead of eat ettin. Gladly though, we should hopefully be seeing a lot less of this premature aging in the future, since the altered script is quite a bit more forgiving, and creatures shouldn't be stuck with debilitating scores of 100 so often. 

I went ahead and lowered the breeding limit back to seven. Two new babies in such a short time was enough, and even with the population slots empty,  I didn't want a third just yet. This hatchling, yet another Rishi/Amina cross, was all alone in the swamps. I called her Kayla, and hoped that she would either find company, or be able to raise herself well, as Rishi had already moved on in her journey.

Yes, Rishi, oddly enough, made her way into the volcano to find... Lilac had beat her to it! I don't know what caused this burst of wanderlust in Lilac... perhaps she is just determined to keep Rishi nearby. I am still a little suspicious of Lilac's motives considering her violent behavior in the past, but I'll just keep an eye on them for now. I'm hoping to guide Rishi up towards the surface of Albia, in hopes that she will finally get to meet others of her kind. As always, we'll just have to see what happens.