Creatures Caves

Welcome to the wonderful world of gengineering! It's a whole lot to learn, and it will take a lot of time to master it. In fact, you may never feel like you've 'mastered' it - I know I don't and I first tried it back in the late 90s in Creatures 1!

The best way to learn, I think, is to start by figuring out what specific things you want to make or change and then learning how to do that. Most people start by wanting to make colorful Norns, so they learn about pigment genes. Another common early project is Norns that look like Grendels (or vise versa).

But you don't have to do any of that if none of that sounds interesting to you. The fun part of gengineering is that it's a way to make the Norns, Grendels, and Ettins you want. Some things can be very challenging because of how Creatures works. Most of their behavior is not directly specified by the game, but rather emerges naturally in much the same way that a real (if very simple) animal's behavior does. This makes it harder to make them behave in specific ways than it would be if we just had to directly program them to do things. But it's that very quality that makes Creatures so special.

But other edits are very easy. The pigment changes, for example, or the Norn that looks like a Grendel - those are VERY easy and take only a few minutes. And the biochemistry is relatively easy to edit, though a little complex to understand in its full workings. Still, it's not THAT difficult to make changes to how it works, or to add new biochemistry (such as my Dragons having the ability to digest meat, which normal Norns lack, and their ability to derive a specific chemical from certain foods that allows them to manufacture the chemicals they need to be able to swim or fly).

And that's not to say there isn't much you can do. Far from it! You can do SO MANY things. A lot of things have been already done but maybe could be done better, or even just done YOUR way, which is not quite like that of anyone else. And the game has a lot of potential that has yet to be explored even this many years on. Geat_Masta and I have done some work with the brain recently that, while in some ways it was unsuccessful, is still going to lead to at least one or two entire new genome types (like CFF or TWB) for people to play with.

But it's very difficult to learn to do this in a top-down way, the way you'd study a subject in school. It's much easier to just figure things out from the bottom up by deciding what you want to do and then learning how to do that. The more you learn to do, the more you'll understand how to do things in general, until eventually you're gengineering like a pro.

So the question now is - what interests YOU? What do YOU like to do? What would YOU like to see?