A Most Terrible Object in Creatures 1

As my fifth generation of C1 Norns drew to a close, the three remaining Norns spread out and had little to do. That was fine by me! Sometimes it’s nice to have a break in the constant activity. This gave me the perfect opportunity to find a test subject to illustrate one of the buggiest parts of Creatures 1. No worries: Preetar was glad to participate, and was not about to be harmed! This was an experiment with the most evil villain in C1, which was cloaked in a harmless orange appearance. What was it? The carrot. The… Carrot?! Arguably the best food source in Albia, the carrot is one of the biggest reasons why Norns and Grendels forget how to eat. Allow Preetar to demonstrate…

Here, it may be difficult to see, but Preetar has a carrot seedling in his hand. Immediately after eating a carrot, the unsuspecting victim in Creatures 1 has the full-grown carrot turn into a seedling. Most of the time, this seedling will be dropped, and then miraculously travels back to the garden. More on that strange phenomenon in a moment! There are two major problems with this seedling. First, Preetar could still look at it and try to interact with it. From his point of view, it was still a food item and should be eaten… Except it can’t be interacted with, except to be dropped. Second, a carrot seedling can start to grow in a Norn’s hand if it is held for too long. It’s quite an odd occurrence, without any logic!

What happens when that carrot seedling is finally dropped? Take a look at what Preetar saw. Remember where he was in the previous images: On the desert island, which is pretty much halfway around the world in comparison to the garden. A Creature will see the seedling he or she was carrying magically transport to the garden… Why? This is another aspect of the carrot that has always baffled me! Although these orange delights have never been known to break a game, there are many improvements that can be made. Hence, my current project!

I learned some CAOS, bothered Amai of Naturing :: Nurturing far too much, and jumped back into some very old C1 programs to get moving. I plan to go into more detail on exactly how to look at the existing scripts in Creatures 1, and how to understand the coding language of Creatures 1. I’m jumping around a bit between various projects these days, yet I’m pretty much to the point of changing a few lines in the scripts and testing. Provided I can get things working and fully tested, the updated carrots for Creatures 1 should be released in the upcoming week or two! I also hope to work on fixing up some of the other items in C1 that can be very confusing for Norns and Grendels. After examining the carrots in more detail, I plan to make the following changes. Feel free to leave a comment with any other suggestions!

• Adjust NFP Decrease: Need for pleasure (NFP) is unrelated to eating, but a carrot contains 70 NFP decrease
• Fix Seedling Planting: Create an unrelated seedling before killing the held seedling after the carrot is eaten
• Make Seedlings Invisible: Only fully mature carrots, which can be interacted with and eaten, will be visible
• Add a New Pose: Full grown carrots that are dropped currently only point to the right, but never to the left

A small part of this update will include concepts from Muppetboy’s Carrot Variety Pack, but nothing will be copied over directly. I will include specific credit when detailing the changes in the original carrot, both in the post and Readme file.