Destroying My Concept, One Bit At A Time

Hello,

Everything went pear shaped. I am going to document it. This is going to be one messy post. XD I hope you...enjoy? Honestly, at this point, I don't really know whether to laugh or cry. Probably a bit of both. I'm not writing in story-telling style for this but I will attempt to resume that mode when this debacle is sorted out.

To begin with, things were going along nicely. I hadn't changed the chances of multiples yet, so Norns were only having one baby at a time. This is the second child of Neige and White, the team in the Jungle Terrarium. She didn't have a name yet because I was a busy Hand.

 

Busy adjusting the CAOS settings to allow multiples, that is. They were a crucial part of my challenge idea, though I'd forgotten to set it up beforehand. Whoops!

 

Once I fiddled around a bit with the settings, the higher chance of multiples seemed to be working  it's magic, (sort of). Angel had two eggs that she soon laid, while Powder only had one.

 

 

Powder's egg resided in the peaceful caverns of the aquatic terrarium, next to a very peculiar food source and an even stranger toy.

 

No sooner had Angel's adorable twins hatched, giving me cause to think up new names, than I remembered Neige and White's baby, who certainly needed a name first.

 

 

Yet before that could happen, the couple surprised me with another pregnancy on top of the egg waiting to hatch that I hadn't taken pictures of yet. Their first child ended up being called Selena.

 

 

Selena was accompanied in the Jungle shortly after by her new sisters, Pietra and Methis. Sadly, Methis died not long after she hatched, hiding in the tall grasses. I suspect bacteria was the cause, though I hadn't been able to figure out how to get rid of it. Everytime I sprayed it, they came back just as fast. They're really strong too.

 

 

In the meantime, White was sleeping off an illness. She coughed and sneezed a little but appeared to be slowly recovering so I let her be, quite confident that she would pull through since she was eating well and resting.

 

Angel and Blizzard had another egg on the way and I wondered if we were maybe having too many eggs too quickly. It was getting a little crazy trying to keep up with them all. (Although each egg and each Norn is appreciated, it's just easier to document when things are slower and more organised). Who was I kidding with that though? These are Norns.

 

Another egg popped up in the desert, confirming my concerns. Eggs were popping up everywhere.

 

 

Doing a quick recap of which Norns I had where, and trying to tally how many males and females were present, I went through each room carefully. In the Aquatic Terrarium were Seth and his little sister, Sierra. I realised soon that I would have to seperate them to make them do the selection test I had planned, unless I wanted more eggs.

 

In the Norn Terrarium were Betty and Clara (the twins) as well as Cinda, a shy little creature who had spent her whole life hiding up near the door to the Grendel Terrarium, making me wonder whether she needed to eat or sleep at all.

 

Cinda remains out of view, visible only by her leaf mark and nametag. Unless she was eating seeds and critters up there somehow, it was a mystery how she had survived so long. I meant to check on her, I was just so busy!

 

Silk, the first daughter of the four girls born to Angel and Blizzard, was with her Mum in the garden area. She was growing up to be a very sweet tempered creature.

 

In the Desert Terrarium, I had a couple of new boys. Tarse was a little brother to Rathe.

 

Pure was the desert queen in this room, mother to Tarse and Rathe.

 

And Selena and Pietra were still hanging out together in the jungle grass with their pet rocklice. I think Selena is sleeping here. My notes don't say that she died.

 

Pure gave me another egg to add to the population, welcomed into a little house by a very friendly Uglee.

 

 I had moved the egg to a lower level so the baby could be with its siblings when it hatched. Out crawled a tiny female, whom I was trying to think of a good name for.

 

Unfortunately, something distracted me from this and I went to investigate another death icon to find it was her brother, Tarse, who had departed to the realms of the Silicon Heaven. The cause of death was unknown. He ate well and had no symptoms of illness.

 

A peek into the hoverdoc was no more enlightening. His eldest brother and father stared at each other in shock, pondering what could have happened. I noted a small amount of pain and some other things that make me wonder if it had been by slapping. But I've never seen any of these Norns slap each other like that. It was perhaps one of the toxins or bacteria that are difficult to detect.

 

Thinking I had better get my Norns together to pass through the selection test before any more of them died or I had more eggs, I gathered up the females born to each Queen and Tom pair for each of the four rooms and placed them in the starting area, where they quickly scattered all around looking for food and fun. A stoperplant prevented any from wandering into the hallway just yet.

 

The hall, such as it was, posed no actual dangers or distractions apart from Norns wanting to go back to where they started, so I added in sleeping potions, a scary ghost, a frightening skeleton and a sludge gun and some alcohol. None of these things could hurt them unless they played with the sludge gun too much and the sludge hit them. The idea was to un-hide all the doors and let the Norns wander past all the dangers and into a room where they would have a new home with food and friends. It...didn't work out as I planned.

 

All the females were ready at the starting line! The stoperplant was un-stopppered, and Silk was off, leading in front! It looked promising, despite the trouble I'd had rounding them all up and keeping them at the starting line.

 

They began to fan out, some trying to wander back to where they started, which had some food and a few toys. This could have been where I went wrong. If I removed all food and toys, they may have been more inclined to seek out a room through one of the round doors along the hallway. However, this area was meant to be for the Norns who didn't pass the test to live out the remainder of their lives in peace.

 

They started to mill around in the hall and I thought "this is it!". However, all that happened was milling...wandering, and trying to get back to where they started from. I began to get anxious.

At last! One of the Norns had passed the test and ended up in the desert terrarium! Silk had found herself a new home. When I wasn't looking, she became a parent with Rathe as the father, further adding to the bedlam.

 

Blanc, in all the fuss of trying to get the females to stop running into the stoperplant and walk down the hallway to choose a door, went and floated away into the other realms without warning. What was going on?!

 

I was not too surprised to follow a death icon and find the victim in the jungle, although I was saddened. The bacteria are much too strong, yet I need to find a way to remove them permanently. Maybe they were spreading around the Ark?

 

With many Norns dying whilst I was still trying to supervise my females, who were now running amok, I made a split decision to change the plan and use a tried and true method I'd read about from other players. I shifted all my remaining girls to the Docking Station Workshop and made the corridor the new 'challenge' area, along with the potions, ghost and so on. Unfortunately, that didn't work either, because my Norns started dying. I lost Sierra...

 

I lost Selena, which was a real shame because she was a tough cookie who managed to survive all the way to adulthood in a place as uninhabitable as the Grendel Jungle. The rest of the females made it safely to the Norn Meso where they could eat and relax in safety.

 

That awful expeirence over with, I then tried the test with the boys. There were less of these, since we had more females born to each Queen and Tom than we did males. Thinking the test would surely be easier with fewer Norns, I placed them in the workshop area. Seth, the firstborn from the aquatic terrarium, took the lift straight up and headed out of there to the Norn Meso. Meanwhile, Likz and Rathe, both boys from the desert, lingered in the lower area and became obsessed with buttons or complained.

 

Seth trudged along to the Norn Meso with lackluster spirit, imitating the daad corpse's solemn shuffle. He felt as glum about this whole disastrous experiment as I did. Eventually, I grabbed the remaining Norns and shifted them all back to their respective rooms. I removed the stoperplants that seperated males and females and tried to come up with a way to get my original idea to work.

Maybe if I remove the food and toys from the starting area at one end of the bridge in the Ark and place all the food and toys at the end of it where the splicer is, that would be a better test. Any Norns who make it to the end where the splicer area is can live in one of each terrarium. The ones who don't can live at the splicer area which has been set up with food, toys and elevines already.

 

I don't know if I can say 'it's worth a shot' with such a heavy loss of life and mangling of my concept...

 

I do want to try and see if I can get the kinks worked out of it though. If it worked correctly, I have a feeling it would be a really fun new way to play Creatures!