Creatures Caves

Hello all, this is my attempt at putting together a guide on getting Creatures 2 to run as well as it can on Windows 10.

I haven't tested any of this with Windows 11, but I would assume it works just the same (or so I hope).

I've only had luck getting the Steam release of Creatures 2 running so far, so if you only have the GOG version, you may need to re-purchase the game, unfortunately. :
Even so, if you want to play C2 on modern hardware, this guide should totally allow you to do that!

You can either do the following or use this CMD file written by lisdude to automatically set compatibility options for C2 (make sure to run it as an administrator).

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You'll first want to install Creatures: The Albian Years on Steam, obviously.

After that, right-click the game in your steam library and hover over the "Manage" option. From there, select the "Browse local files" option.

This should open your file explorer to the Creatures The Albian Years install directory.

From there, open the Creatures 2 folder, and then sort the files by "Type" (should be between "Date modified" and "Size" ). This will group all the EXEs in a list, making the next step much more straightforward.

Now, do the following for each EXE:
Right-click, open "Properties," click the "Compatibility" tab on the window that pops up, check the box that says "Reduced color mode," and select "16-bit (65536) color." After that, simply click "Ok" to apply the changes.

After applying that compatibility option to each EXE in the Creatures 2 directory, launch the game through the Steam interface. The World Switcher should appear with a default "World.sfc" already in the list. You can either use the default world to play, or you can create a new world. NOTE that the game may take a few launches to load a world properly. I have yet to find a solution for this, but persistence will pay off! I have never failed to load a world after setting compatibility settings!

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One final note! If you are having trouble with the world switcher being janky and not letting you create new worlds because the name is already taken, run this CMD file in administrator mode that lisdude wrote to reset the Creatures 2 registry entries! Note that this can be destructive for your saved data, and you will probably need to restart your computer after running it (just to be sure things applied properly. The registry is a PAIN to work with)