Planning an Underwater Creatures World

April Fools’ Day carries with it some interesting traditions. Although I couldn’t think up a silly prank, I did find a slight correlation! The idea of “April fish” is celebrated in several areas of the world, and it was actually most fitting for something I was planning in Creatures Docking Station. Nearly two years ago, I had an aquatic wolfling run leading up to the release of the Colortrue Pearl Mermaid Norns. I was ready to get back into C3/DS, and there was no better way than to start planning a new underwater world! The trouble was deciding on which metarooms to use…

Creatures 1 and Creatures 2 are often relatively simple to start off in: There are decisions to be made, yet only Creatures 3 and Docking Station offer the ability to plan every detail. I started to take a look at the available aquatic metarooms. Some I eliminated right away, not because they weren’t good, but because they didn’t quite fit in with my plans. That’s the wonderful thing about Creatures: There are so many third-party additions that each person can play very differently. I still wasn’t entirely sure if I wanted to have a single species in this world, or multiple species living in separate areas.

Every aquatic metaroom has its benefits, whether it comes with its own set of agents or is completely empty for the ultimate customization. Another major consideration I looked at was the size of each metaroom. My game often has some lovely lag issues, so I was looking at whether I wanted to use a number of smaller areas, or focus on one large environment. As I started testing, I was reminded of how little time I spent working with aquatic breeds! Coupled with the Swimming Agent V2, aquatic Creatures can make use of a much larger area within a metaroom. Even small spaces equate to an enormous swimming pool! I was starting to enjoy the really huge metarooms, yet I could already sense that they would be resource intensive.

With so many Creatures Docking Station metarooms to consider, I was glad when I could use my past experiences with some of them! I was still woefully behind in terms of understanding which aquatic metarooms would work out the best for my purposes. Decisions, decisions! I pared down my list of potential metarooms even further, although I could see this world headed down several possible paths. As I continued on, I managed to narrow down my choices to the following list (listed in order of the screenshots in this post):

• Aquatilis Caverna V4 (Metacore Team): Large with plants and critters
• Aquatilis Caverna 2 (Metacore Team): Large with plants and critters
• Aquatilis Caverna Pod (Metacore Team): Small with plants and critters
• Pearl Ocean (Ghosthande, Razgriz, and Spykkie): Small without plants and critters
• Artemia Sea (Grendel Man and Mea): Large with plants and critters
• Aquatopia (Zareb): Small with plants and critters

Running all of the metarooms in a test world worked for a time, before things really started to slow down. And that was before there were any Creatures in the world! So I was faced with choosing just a few of the metarooms, or even a single one. Naturally, I wanted them all, especially for all of the plants and critters! Setting up a new world can take just a few minutes, or one can plan well into the future and take forever. Any guess into which bucket I belong? Ha! The trouble was that I could see a purpose for every metaroom. That, and I couldn’t stop watching all of the fish swim around so beautifully!

So I may not have plastered a paper fish on anyone’s back for April Fools’ Day… Instead, perhaps someone would like to plaster this post with comments? I would be very interested to hear opinions on these aquatic metarooms, particularly related to lag. I may end up with a single aquatic world, or I might end up using them all, only in different worlds. This is just the beginning of the planning stages for this Docking Station world. In the end, we’ll likely have a bunch of unique aquatic Creatures and possibly even some related releases down the line! Feel free to share any thoughts about this world, not necessarily related to the metarooms. Up next will be a review of some underwater agents I love to use, and then the revealing of the breeds!