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General Forum |
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| (C3/DS) Malymin's food research | |
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Malymin

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6/2/2026 | |
I've been trying to research the different food, fruit, and seeds in the game to the best of my ability, despite my limited understanding of the COS files. The "stim writ" sections are, at least, comprehensible when I browse through the files.
When something says, for example:
****seed eat
scrp 2 3 16 12
lock
snde "chwp"
stim writ from 77 3
wait 1
kill ownr
endm |
I understand that stim writ from 77 3 means "trigger the stimulus for having eaten a seed, and multiply its strength by 3".
The stim-genes in a creature control chemicals it receives or loses when it takes an action: in eating-stimulus genes, nutrients gained are chemical injections, and hungers reduced are chemical retractions. I assume, therefore, that a seed with stim writ 77 3 in its get-eaten script provides three time the satiation and three times the nutrition (in terms of both starch and fat), compared to a seed with stim writ 77 1 in its get-eaten script. Furthermore, because creatures learn from having drives reduced, I'm guessing the stimulus provided reinforces eating seeds to satiate starch & fat hunger three times more than the base stimulus would. Please tell me if I'm wrong, but...
Now, here's the thing. As far as I can tell, no official fruit ever asks for stim 78 to get triggered more than once: not in Creatures 3, not in Docking Station, not in official DLC. Two "foods" trigger stim 79 at double strength (Docking Station Carrots and Quirky Cookies), but none have triple-strength.
(As for consumables that take two bites to finish, such as Cheese? As far as I can tell, they don't provide more than a x1 stimulus per bite.)
Meanwhile, here's the list of vanilla, official ecology seeds that have a 3x stimulus strength:
- Grass Seed
- Pumperspikel Seed
- Cacbana Seed
- Tuba seed
As far as I can tell, this x3 strength makes them more fat-satiating and fat-nourishing (and rewarding) than the majority of food-genus edibles in an unedited Chichi, Bruin, etc genome?
Grass seeds, Cacbana seeds, and Tuba seeds are all sort of difficult to "get," so I assumed the hightened stimulus is intended to be a reward for successfully grabbing them in mid-air. The Pumperspikel seed is an outlier, though. Cacbana seeds are always bouncing around willy-nilly, and grass and tuba seeds appear to germinate into a new form the second they hit soil. But Pumperspikel seeds just kind of... lay there, big and easy for both creatures and the hand to grab. I've never even seen one rot.
...I have no idea how useful this information is, but I felt like it was worth sharing. If anyone is interested, I can try to compile and analyze other information for general use! |
 Peppery One
Papriko
    
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6/3/2026 | |
I was vaguely aware that stim writ can have a strength multiplier, but back in the day I was given some vague explanation that while it gives more nutrients, it can influence learning negatively somehow...? I'm not sure on the details, it's been a while. I pretty much just settled for 1x power in the things I made.
It's pretty neat to have a breakdown like this, though!
Do you have the CAOS documentation or do you reverse engineer all of this just from the cosfiles alone?
Lets play plants! Photosynthesis... Photosynthesis... Photosynthesis... |

Malymin

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6/3/2026 | |
Papriko wrote: I was vaguely aware that stim writ can have a strength multiplier, but back in the day I was given some vague explanation that while it gives more nutrients, it can influence learning negatively somehow...? I'm not sure on the details, it's been a while. I pretty much just settled for 1x power in the things I made.
It's pretty neat to have a breakdown like this, though!
Do you have the CAOS documentation or do you reverse engineer all of this just from the cosfiles alone?
The most detailed explanation I've found is on the wiki, which isn't very detailed on how the stim trigger psychologically effects creatures. It's just this:
Note: In C3/DS, you can also stimulate creatures with other amounts of the stimulus, such as 0.5 or 1.5. Giving a stimulus of 0 will give the same chemical amounts as for a stimulus of 1, but without the learning normally associated with STIM WRIT.
I've basically just been cross-referencing between the genome, the COS files (more recently using this for C3), and a list of C3DS stimuli on the wiki.
I'd *like* to learn more about how stims affect learning. I've been told that, for example, mixed or mismatched stims confuse creatures. For example, the Awkwood Creeper pellets, which are categorized as food, both stim for "eaten food" and "eaten plant (seed)", and thus can falsely teach creatures to seek "food" genus items for starch hunger.
I imagine that using stim writ 0 could let you get the positive benefits of mixed stims without negatively impacting learning, if you really wanted... I can't tell if anything official actually uses it yet, though.
Weirdly, some critters seem to have x4 "stim writ" multipliers for the "eaten animal" stim...but I haven't found any evidence in gameplay that hedgehogs, hummingbirds, etc can actually *be* eaten by creatures. |
 Peppery One
Papriko
    
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6/3/2026 | |
Yeah, that's about the extent of explanation I was expecting. It's certainly more than the official documentation, which is in many cases more of a cheat sheet for the commands rather than fully explaining them. You can find a copy on Breeders Beware, though these days it only seems to be available via direct link, and not from the navigation menu...
You could always just save the page to your disk, or extract your own copy straight from the game.
Overall good work, though. It's great to this kind of interest in the games even after all this time.
Lets play plants! Photosynthesis... Photosynthesis... Photosynthesis... |
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