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Creatures learn but WHAT can they learn?   
Gulliver

Gulliver



  6/21/2021  1

Other than vocabulary, obviously.

I know that they can learn that certain actions are good or bad, so if you spend time with a norn teaching good eating habits they'll generally retain them.

Can they learn room layouts (or rather, smell layouts)? Do they learn contextually, like IF X then Y?

Also, when a creature suggests something to another - "Maybe blah blah blah" - how does that work? Does the creature learn from it, is it a command, or is it just kinda there?

 
Papriko
Peppery One

Papriko



  6/21/2021  3

It really depends what games you are talking. With that in mind, I wanna mention that I never played C1 or C2.

I'm pretty sure that in C3/DS, the creatures are not able to learn the layouts of rooms at all.

As for context-based stuff, I don't think they can actually learn that either, but I'm not 100% sure. It's all pre-made into their genetics.
They essentially just go down a flow chart until they find something they can actually do. Try to eat food. No food there, push vendor. No vendor there, follow food smell. No smell available, wander around until something's there that fulfills one of the other points.
Reward and punishment mostly shuffle around priorities, or adds/removes them.

There might be third party breeds with bigger brains which address these points, but that should be about status quo in the base game.


As for suggestions between creatures, they pretty much work the same as the hand's command, but with a much lower weight. Suggestions are made based on the speaking creature's flow chart. If a grendel mentions being angry, and a norn is nearby to answer, the norn will presumably tell it to verbalize their feelings or beat other grendels, since that's what the norn would do.
A really impressionable creature may actually consider following such advice, but from what I can tell, that is typically unlikely to happen and they just continue to whine about whatever troubles they have and/or simply do their own thing.


Lets play plants! Photosynthesis... Photosynthesis... Photosynthesis...
 
ylukyun
Patient Pirate

ylukyun

Manager



  6/21/2021  4

Newer third-party breeds can learn whether an individual creature is "friend or foe" based on their actions - hitting, tickling, and wanted or uwanted (based on sex drive) kissing/kisspopping. This causes a love/like/dislike/hate preference to develop. This was a core feature that was meant to be implemented in the original genome but was only half finished, and one of the earliest third-party genome overhauls, leading to the Creatures Full of Edits or CFE, was an attempt to correct this. Most newer third party breeds now use the CFE genome or one of its many derivatives as a base. I imagine these derivatives (CFF, 2017, TWB etc.) include other learning-related edits.

Edit: Some creatures will also develop a preference (usually dislike) for the hand.

 
Jabber

Jabber



  6/21/2021

I think an interesting question to ask alongside this is: what COULD creatures learn?

If they had some kind of location-based memory, they could learn where objects that fulfill their needs are (ex. when hungry, being able to navigate to a vendor that's out of their line of sight, and maybe even in another metaroom entirely if that's the closest one they know of), or maybe even specific rooms that have properties that fulfill their needs (ex. navigating to a room with a lower temperature when they're hot). I think CA smells accomplish something sort of like this, though. I'm pretty sure at least some aquatic creatures have instincts to seek out bodies of water, which they do by tracking the CA smell that corresponds to bodies of water; they don't need to have any concept of location or distance, just follow a concentration gradient and try to go "down". Pregnant creatures going home to lay eggs is the same, but following their corresponding species home smell CA.

 
Dragoler
Wrong Banshee

Dragoler


 visit Dragoler's website: TWB Development Thread
  6/22/2021

Unfortunately creatures cannot navigate to bodies of water using the water scent CAs. In order for a creature to navigate they have to have the CA associated with an object in their minds, the home scents are associated with invisible home objects, but there is no water object to navigate towards.

Creator of the TWB/TCB genome base.

 
Jabber

Jabber



  6/22/2021

Huh, TIL. Is the water scent CA used for anything, then?

Maybe more knowledge of location could be kludged together with the use of invisible objects like that... this is the only case I can think of to use that for, though.

 
cyborg

cyborg



  6/24/2021

I think water CA is mostly used for plant agents when the creator wants their plants to consume water.
 
Malkin

Malkin

Manager


 visit Malkin's website: Malkin's page at CWiki
  6/24/2021

There are two kinds of water CA - one for atmospheric moisture, one for bodies of water.

My TCR Norns
 
SpaceShipRat

SpaceShipRat



  6/25/2021  1

I think if you had to sum it up, they learn which is the best action to take in response to a certain drive. Which is why many long time players find c3/DS norns "boring" since they have much stronger instincts and basically already know to eat when hungry and sleep when tired, while c1 norns need to be babysat and taught.

This is also why i sucked at raising c1 norns, it didn't really click until much, much later that one shouldn't always reward "good" actions like eating or playing or whatever, because unlike in "Black and White" it doesn't help if the norn's desperately pushing a ball in response to his need to sleep.

 


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