Toasty Test Rooms are metarooms that make me hungry for toast every time I read the name. (I probably should have eaten before writing these posts.)
But, seriously. These are essentially your run-of-the-mill test rooms, except they come pre-heated for TWB friendliness, and perhaps more interestingly, you can inject multiple of them, allowing you virtually limitless (well... except within the limits of the engine) space to run large experiments or several smaller experiments within the same world. If you really wanted to, you could even set up CA links, elevines, and dovines to chain them together like little ant farms. If you do anything creative with them I'd love to hear about it!
These rooms are sort of an expression of something I have been playing with a long time. I first proposed the concept of Adaptive Metaroom Placement (AMP for short) on the now-dead Discover Albia forums back in 2016, yet this is the first time I'm actually releasing anything that uses it! A lot of trial and error and caos has led up to this, so even though it's just a humble test room, it's a pretty exciting day.
I've been doing a fair bit of work with gadgets lately (I keep saying gadgets, but technically many of the connectable agents in C3 are actually considered "machinery." I really should be calling them 'connectable agents' instead, but gadgets is just... easier), and it really is such a shame that the amazing possibilities for machine-building available in C3 were just... nullified by the fact that creatures would just break them apart so quickly it was barely worth building them.
I guess I get it. In vanilla C3 there were a handful of 'player challenge' elements. Bioenergy limits, power-ups, and so on. But DS did away with those, and I figure it's high time we do away with the gadget 'challenge' too, and unlock the all the potential gadgets connectable agents have to offer!
I don't think many people really check this blog anymore. There's not a usually any reason to, not when there's direct download links on the youtube videos and the CCSF pages. But if you do, know that I appreciate you, and that you are getting access to all these little backstory tidbits that no one else is! So thank you. I wish we could bring blogging and forums back but... that's a whole other discussion.
Anyway, fun fact about this script: it was originally designed as a way to break the "like loop" that creatures in a group tend to get into where they just ramble loudly about who they love/hate forever because they keep echoing each other. Since creatures couldn't get into those loops if they didn't know the words, the original concept for this script was to teach creatures every word except Like, Dislike, Love, and Hate. But then Verm came up with the Like Loop Fix, which is thankfully much simpler. So this script instead morphed into a much slower paced, more general-purpose vocabulary helper.
Which, honestly, has been so helpful for my playstyle. Hand-teaching my creatures is one of my favorite things in the beginning of a world, but the first thing to start feeling like a chore as the population grows. I love that this script doesn't necessarily take hand-teaching away from me or make it pointless, but it doesn't require it of me either, because creatures will eventually learn the words even if I don't get around to each baby. Left alone, they naturally learn some words, but not all of them, and still benefit from a little hand-teaching here and there without needing to drill the entire verb and noun list. I feel like I'm finally finding a balance with this.
I don't know how many people actually play creatures attentively these days. It seems like most players just have the game open and occasionally glance at it like a fishtank. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I guess I'm just acknowledging the... narrow-ness of the audience for something like this. Still, I felt like it was at least cute enough to warrant a public release. And it's possibly the only release I have that's actually kind of sort of on-theme for CCSF, since the desire to reimplement "what dis?" and "why" stem directly from my C2 nostalgia.
Anyway, if you still enjoy playing creatures attentively, maybe leave a comment? There's more of us out there, right?
This is probably the tiniest update I have, but now you can make love time or war time continue on forever! Or until you stop it. I don't even remember what prompted this update, it's been sitting in my Pending folder for probably a year and a half. I think I just got tired one day of spamming ctrl-S while using love time!
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!
