Creatures Caves

Just for funsies and !!SCIENCE!!, I hatched a party of five Gaiuses and tried putting them in various places around my testing ship to see where it would crash.

Places the crash occurred:
Random's Room (3 Gaiuses)
Aquarium, small rooms above the fish egg maker (2 Gaiuses)
Capillata Hub (2 Gaiuses; of course, you don't want them in there anyway because of the autokilling-the-doors issue)
Bridge airlock, door closed (3 Gaiuses)
Bridge, lower and middle corridors (i.e. the ones with the umbilical and the medical pod) (4 Gaiuses)
Bridge, upper area (by the camera screens) (3 Gaiuses)
Bridge/Engineering, central corridor (4 Gaiuses)
Norn Terrarium, room with the Learning Center door (3 Gaiuses if connecting door is closed, 5 if it's open)
Norn Terrarium, bottom corridor (3 Gaiuses)
Ettin Desert, bottom room (3 Gaiuses)
Ettin Desert, middle corridor (3 Gaiuses)
Ettin Desert, main area (5 Gaiuses)

Places I was able to put all 5 Gaiuses:
Norn Meso
Workshop
Norn Terrarium, main area/treehouse

At this point I'd spent more time on this than it probably merited and I was getting pretty bored and frustrated, so I didn't test any other metarooms.

Sometimes the crash occurred immediately, sometimes it took several seconds and would crash as I was in another room retrieving the next one.

Seeing as it was happening immediately on hatching in the previous tests, it's probably not related to any interaction between the Gaiuses. The game just doesn't seem to like that many geats in one place. And it's not as consistent as to the size of the area as I expected: I thought the Hub and the upper sections of the Bridge and Desert would be perfectly safe.

Either there's some sort of problem with my installation (though I have no idea how this would happen) or the rule of thumb with Gaiuses is either very small groups or very large open spaces, unfortunately. Or just edit the genome to treat them as "norns", which takes some of the fun out of it and means you can't use Edible Gadgets (which wasn't installed in the test world, btw.)

I hatched a pair of Gaiuses classified as "norn" and plopped them in the small aquarium room to confirm whether this is limited to geats or just a problem with Gaius's unusual size. It didn't crash even after several seconds (and a slapfest), so I think it's a geat thing.

Also, I got one "mystery" crash while testing the norn-Gaiuses, when there was only one "Gaius" in the aquarium room and an egg that couldn't hatch because of the breeding limit. There were four Gaiuses in the meso and one in the workshop at that time.

tl;dr: this is puzzling and discouraging.

Freedom Project probably is the way to go- thanks for the tip, Jessica! I suspect Veridia would work as well, although it's not a thematic fit.