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An attempt to define Wolfling Runs, Feral Runs, and IQ Test play styles that people use with the Creatures games.

Wolflings and Ferals and IQ Tests, Oh My!

So you're confused about what a Wolfling is, or a Feral - these are different play styles that people use with the Creatures games.

In Wolfling Runs, people let the Norns do what they want after they hatch, and give them no instructions, no training. In short, people let all the eggs hatch and then just observe without interfering. Wolfling Runs are named after the Uplift novels by David Brin, and were first mentioned on alt.games.creatures in about May 1997. The world has no extra COBs or agents in it, aside from game patches/fixes, the Hand cannot interfere, and you cannot teach your creatures. The time is determined by the player, but commonly people leave the game running overnight or while they are at work, and check on them later. The hope of a Wolfling Run is that it will produce very hardy, independent, creatures.

Variations on a Wolfling Run include a 'relaxed' Wolfling Run, where additional COBs, agents, metarooms or worlds are added, but the Norns are uneducated, and you cannot intervene in their lives until the run is over. A "Forum Wolfling Run" is where members of the Creatures Community donate entrants and the gamemaster updates a forum thread with their progress. A "Global Wolfling Run" is a Docking Station-only variant, with a team of players with commonly-agreed-on rules and only warp Norns to each other.

The Wolf Control utility was introduced in C3 which allows you to increase the speed of the game to 'fast ticks', and enable or disable Autokill for agents, allowing you to tweak the efficiency of your Wolfling Run.

Common outcomes of Wolfling Runs include returning to a pile of corpses, returning to a pile of immortal Norns, or returning to a pile of Norns who hate traveling, as staying near food and mates is encouraged.

A feral run is like a Wolfling Run, but the first generation is educated, and additional COBs and agents may be added to the world - creature comforts such as more food or a medicinal herb, or preventatives against drowning. More suggestions for additional COBs and agents can be found in the C2 Must Have and C3/DS Must Have resources.

An IQ test, developed for Docking Station un-docked, is where Norns are deposited in the bottom of the Workshop and are expected to navigate back to the comfort of the Norn Meso. If they can't do that within a reasonable amount of time, they are considered unfit, and exported. The IQ test can be made easier by locking the doors so that a one-way path is created, adding a small amount of food halfway, instructing creatures on what they need to do next, testing males and females separately to prevent a baby boom, and changing the Training Dummy to a different, not-so-attractive, species so that creatures don't feel it can sate their loneliness. Adding Macrobacteria or the Bubonic Bugle to the Workshop can make the IQ test harder, as it will infect the Norns that remain there too long.