Creatures Caves

So just in case anyone was wondering, I did end up downloading a few manky agents. The Sake one won't work for me for some odd reason (a lot of agents that seem to work fine for others are fussy for me and I can't figure it out) but the Christmas one, with the champagne and stuff, worked perfectly.

So I made a brand new world, withdrew all my Grendeltail Z-names (26th gens, in short) from their breeding world Arcus Infinitum, and plopped them in the Norn Terrarium in their new world. As a control, I also imported an A-name. That is, a fresh 1st gen, the kind that comes out of the egg layer or when you export a genome from the Genetics Kit; I specify since I've noticed some people use the term 'first gen' to refer to what I'd call a second gen and I wanted to be clear. I left the babies and such in the Norn Meso and took everything Adult and older to the Norn Terrarium. (I wanted to see how the adults handled it before testing the little ones in case they died since I can afford to spare the older Z names who've already bred in other worlds much more than I can the new ones.)

One of the Z-names discovered the huge pile of booze pretty much immediately. The others stuck to their usual clumping social behavior so I had to drop some bottles near them before they found them. One of the clumpers immediately grabbed a bottle as soon as they were nearby. The others had to be prompted, albeit just once, with 'eat manky'.

So there was some variance in terms of actual drive to drink. Two of the four Z-name adults went for it like starving Draconians on the last fire ant in the Desert, while the other two had to be prompted (though, again, it only took once, whereas I usually have to tell this stubborn, obsessive lot of Norns several times to do anything before they listen. Not all my colonies are so difficult but the high-gen Grendeltails sure are. On the other hand, they're excellent at taking care of themselves - I suppose they just figure they know better than I do LOL)

In other investigations with this group I have determined that they are NOT in fact immortal. They DO die, fairly regularly. However, they seem to be specifically resistant to being slapped to death. They do complain of pain sometimes, so they must be feeling some, but regardless of whether they seem to feel pain or not, they do not die when slapped, period, full stop. I put one single higher-gen Grendeltail alone, not with one Grendel, not even with one especially mean Grendel, but in the middle of my entire COLONY of specially bred and engineered vicious crazy Grendels. The ones who I'd trained with sliders and Ettins to attack repeatedly, quickly, mercilessly. No fewer than six or seven full-grown adults tried to tear that one Norn limb from limb and he walked out of there UNSCATHED. Mind you, he also failed to damage the Grendels, but I'd engineered them to take less wound from being hit so I expected that. What surprised me was that a whole GROUP of my ultraviolent Grendels (my babies <3 still improving their genome in some ways, but they're turning out pretty well so far) wasn't able to SCRATCH this guy, much less bring him down.

However, after watching the Grendeltail colony wolfling for a while without interfering with the action, I noticed they did seem to die at appropriate intervals, or at least what would be appropriate intervals for normal Norns. (These guys breed a lot so their reproduction was still well ahead of the death rate. Even with me stealing 100 or more eggs into the hand inventory over the course of the first 26 gens, they still collectively produced hundreds of offspring during that first run. God I wish I could get that Productive Tub autonamer to work!!) I'm not 100% sure, but it seemed to me that most of the deaths were caused either by simple age, or by starvation due to a few different obsessive behaviors, the most pernicious being the left- and right-movers. The obsessive clusterers usually did fine because they'd make sure to cluster in a food-rich spot, and would pause to eat between kisspopping/hitting each other constantly. So their intense flocking behavior was weird but not actually maladaptive in terms of being able to survive without my help (other than the extra agents and such that I used - though I will say that the only difference those agents make is the proportion of the group that survive. Even in a bare, unagented docked game, a core cluster always survives and breeds and eventually fills up the world, assuming grendels don't get in during their more vulnerable early gens - it just takes longer). But still, a few would get way too caught up in the flocking behavior - either the kisspopping, the hitting, or just plain flocking, sticking close to other Norns and making sure to follow them all the time. So they'd fail to eat - meanwhile their functional brethren are vacuuming up everything edible within reach, to the point where the game sometimes sounds like a constant loop of hitting, kisspopping, giggles, and munching sounds, running all at once.

In brief, the conclusion I drew was that the ones whose obsessions did not include eating died, often without reproducing - I'm guessing not eating might be hurting their fertility because otherwise I'm not sure why the ones who were obsessive flockers didn't breed much, or even not at all in some cases. The left/right-movers, I get, since they were isolating themselves, but how did the ones in the middle of that sadomasochistic orgy manage to NOT participate? I guess I can imagine the males, but the females? Seriously, HOW? They're kisspopping everything in there. EVERYTHING.

Meanwhile, no matter what ELSE a Grendeltail might be obsessed with, so long as their list of fixations included food, they'd survive, because they'd try their best to do everything all at once. (There's really some remarkably chaotic, complex behavior in my Grendeltail worlds. o.O) This type tended to breed until they either died of old age or were felled early by breeding exhaustion. The latter of which happened less and less as the generations went on, incidentally. There was also a small amount of sudden random mortality due to apparent genetic flaws, but almost all of that sort of thing happened at hatching or shortly afterward so I didn't count it.

So with all of that in mind I made a new world specifically so I could observe this experiment without the rest of the original colony distracting the test subjects, or adding complicating elements to the test, or even just blocking my view. I put the Z-gens in a situation where I knew they'd be able to form a happy beating-mating cluster, so they wouldn't be distracted from the tempting manky by any pressing needs other than the hunger for protein or starch that I knew would tempt them to it.

This is when things got interesting. Like I said before, two of them basically went for the booze the instant they noticed it existed, while the other two needed prompting - but only once, which was noteworthy with this stubborn lineage. I suspect the difference was simply that two of them were hungrier than the other two, but I don't actually know. Naturally the lineage is pretty inbred, but a lot of mutations can happen in 26 gens, and they're haploid anyway, so the different Z-names aren't always all that closely related to each other, or at least not as much as you'd think given the whole line basically descends from six or eight A-names and has not been at all restricted from happy consanguinity. So it's less likely, but possible, that there's some small genetic difference between the eager drinkers and the ones who needed a 'eat manky' command to get started.

What I found fascinating, though, was how they acted once they got started. All four of the Z-name adults were identical once they got going. They drank, and drank, and drank, and drank. It was actually rather alarming how quickly they poured that stuff down. Not only have they not died yet, they don't even seem drunk - yet they DO seem to be affected by it somehow. When I have time I intend to go through their genome with a fine-toothed comb to figure out what exactly is going on here, but it seems like the Maybe Eat Manky mutation is in fact a polygenic phenomenon. It seems to me like at least two genes have been changed or deleted. Firstly, if they're getting drunk, it's not very apparent, so either their direct reaction to alcohol as a chemical has changed to a neutral or beneficial reaction or it's been turned off entirely. Secondly, it is clearly satisfying some drive, or at least they think it will, because once they pick up a bottle each they have yet to put it down. They stop drinking now and then to eat and do their usual cluster-hitting-kisspopping thing, but they're ALWAYS carrying the bottle. I've never seen anything like it before - not in any Creatures game. Even my trained Linus Dracos put the sun cozy down after a while, usually when they start feeling hot instead of cold. So while they might not -actually- be getting any direct benefit, they sure as hell think they are. And as far as I can tell they're not being poisoned, at least not in any way that's visible in the short term.

Meanwhile, the A-name I induced to drink took a little more prompting - he was nowhere near as eager to check it out. The 'maybe eat manky' behavior showed up midway down the line, several generations after I exported him, so I was using him to see if any amount of this behavior was due, unwittingly, to any of the simple-seeming mods I'd made using EasyGMS, since that was how I originally made the Grendeltail genomes. Each color also had a slightly different set of traits and I wondered if any was particularly contributing the manky thing, so I was going to test each one by one.

What's interesting is that the A-name, once he started to drink, took it a little slower than the others, drinking obediently but not straight-up chugging it, and he got visibly drunk fairly quickly. Before he could drink enough to risk poisoning himself, he fell over and went to sleep. So his reaction to alcohol was more or less normal, in short. He seemed a bit tougher to it than usual, maybe; I've had more fragile breeds get sick from the amount he consumed. But it wasn't dramatic, and he certainly didn't seem particularly attracted to manky like the others. So it's clearly something that either came from one of the other A-name parents, or something that developed later down the line, and honestly I'm betting on the latter since I can't imagine how the simple changes I made on EasyGMS could result in such a complex, weird behavior.

Meanwhile, I plan to allow the test group unlimited alcohol access to see what happens in the long run. They may eventually be able to hurt themselves, but we'll see what happens. This is fascinating. Now that I've been told how to find the genome files for C3DS I'm thinking of uploading a few of these guys to the Adoptions section here so other people can play with them. They're definitely a weird race of Norn. (Incidentally, the grendel tail is cosmetic only; they are genetically based on Magma Norns IIRC and are 100% Norn by heritage. I just changed the Tail Appearance gene to Grendel A.)