Creatures Caves

What I like doing, personally, is to set up a 26-generation feral/wolfling run. You can start with hatchery eggs, basic normal genomes, or with modified ones you've made with Genetics Kit or somesuch - either one works.

It's 26 generations because I use a naming scheme for generations and at 26 you hit Z. Plus, 26 gens for Norns is plenty of time for weird mutations to crop up and get emphasized. To keep any particular set of Norns from overly dominating the group genetically, and to isolate the best breeders for future use, I periodically (no sooner than once an hour or two) come in, name all born offspring (none of the autonamers have wanted to work for me yet) and check their parents. Any Norns found to have two or more offspring (for females) or three or more offspring (for males) are exported from the game. These are, generally, successful Norns and I will use them in future projects. Meanwhile, the rest get left in the world until they either breed enough to get exported themselves, or die. This continues until 26th-gen or Z-name Norns start being born. Those get exported immediately. The rest I allow to live, exporting all Z-gen and high-offspring Norns as previously described, until they've all either been exported or died.

I also steal a LOT of eggs along the way and hide them in the hand's inventory, if this is a C3DS run. Oftentimes I'm running multiple groups of Norns in isolated rooms, and so I'll steal as many eggs as I can when I'm present at the machine, switching them around so that eggs laid in Room 1 hatch in Room 2. This way I can sometimes mix the genes from the rooms to keep the bloodlines from getting too stale or extreme. It also keeps the rooms from wildly overpopulating when a batch is especially successful. (I like to keep my limits high because I don't like artificial limits on breeding because it messes with my setup - I'm watching for the effect of more natural selective forces and my own decisions, not which Norns breed fast enough to get in before the cap forces what amounts to arbitrary sterility on everyone until someone dies.)

Now I take out the Genetics Kit for whichever version of Creatures I'm running and examine the genomes of the Z-name Norns, plus any particularly interesting successful breeders or other weird mutants I exported along the way. For example I have one Norn in C3DS right now who seems to be an eternal child - he hasn't aged up despite being eight or more hours old. The same run that produced him also produced a few sliders, most of which also had the fascinating additional mutation of being immortal - or at least not needing to eat. So unlike your typical slider, who dies pretty quickly from starvation, these Norns will sit there for hours, motionless, yet not seeming to suffer - there's always a smile on their face. The same population of Norns have also developed very violent tendencies, yet, again, are very happy and almost never look unhappy unless they're very tired and/or sleepy. And they don't seem to ever feel crowded, at all. So I'll often see them standing in big clusters, smacking the piss out of each other with huge grins on their faces. (And unlike the masochist genome I made for C1, this is NOT something I deliberately set up!)

In short, you can get plenty of interesting fodder to play with in GK or other genetics editors this way. But the really fun part is the -second- run. You take the most interesting Z-names and import them back into the empty world. You might also include some of the older gens with similar or complementary genes of the sort you're trying to encourage. For example, let's say I find some Norns among the violent group I described above who are specifically inclined to smack other Norns around and some who are just generally angry and like to hit things, period. Say I want to see if I can produce Grendel killer Norns by encouraging this line and setting them up to direct their aggression against the Grendels rather than each other. I take the latter group of Z norns and raise them in the Jungle surrounded by Grendel Home smell. Then when they're adults, I allow the Grendels to hatch and let them loose in the Jungle with the adult Norns.

Or if you're more interested in aesthetic stuff, this was a high-color group I did last. The starting Norns all had a single fixed color their whole lives, but it didn't take more than two or three gens before they began changing color all over the place as they grew. This became the rule for the lineage, except now and again I'd notice a Norn whose color was more or less consistent all its life - within the context of its fellows, a mutant. If I wanted to encourage that trait, I would export those Norns as they appeared, then, once I had enough of both sexes for a decent group, I'd set them up alone in their own isolated room to try to perpetuate the trait.

Or you can just repeat the randomizing stage by importing all the Z-gens, plus whichever of the old ones it amuses you to include, and run another 26-generation free-breeding cycle. After a few of those, things can get really weird.