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| (C3DS) In depth ecology setup guide? | |
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Malymin

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5/30/2026 | 1 |
I'm wondering if anyone has made an indepth guide to screwing around with the different biome terrariums? Obviously fanmade patches to fix common issues exist, but I'm more talking about... what's possible before modding enters the picture. For the record, I'm playing the steam edition, which has a small number of ecology patches already in it.
For one thing: what plants will grow in each terrarium, and what animals can be happily transplanted.
Also, animals and plants that need the terrarium settings adjusted to actually be able to thrive (like hummingbirds not being active unless the light settings in the norn terrarium are boosted to max), and animals and plants that will become inactive or go extinct if settings are changed from the default.
Discover Albia and Norns of the Round Table both had blog posts about their "world setup," which inspired me to want to do my own. I've been trying to read the COS files directly to understand what exactly the flora and fauna want, but I don't always understand what I'm even reading.
Things I've noticed:
- Tuba seems to be able to grow... basically everywhere? I looked into the COS file and it seems it literally doesn't have any requirements for light/heat/water/nutrients the way other plants do.
- Only the top left hill of the Norn Terrarium is hot enough to grow C3 or DS carrots (they're technically different objects), but they seem to also do okay-ish in the desert - as I discovered after I used the CTRL+SHIFT+E trick to feed some hungry ettins.
- I can get a dragonfly population going in the desert by putting some larvae and a chili pepper pot in the cave pond, but they quickly overpopulate. Nothing seems to eat adult dragonflies, and the nymphs' only predator (the stickletrout) seems to have a tendency to get stuck on the edge where the water meets the land and die when transplanted to the desert pond. Pirannahs don't have this issue, but they also don't do anything about the dragonfly population problem.
Disclaimer: I know Garden Box exists, but I've been doing things either via "natural" vanilla gameplay (manually picking up seeds/critters/etc and plopping them in new locations) or via ingame cheats (CAOS commands, etc) when possible. |

voidirium

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6/3/2026 | 1 |
I don't have much useful information for you, but I spent hours and hours and hours doing exactly what you're doing as a kid, lol. The ecology side of this game was far more interesting to me than the creatures themselves. I also spent a lot of time seeing what I could transplant from modded rooms like the norngardens, and establishing functional ecosystems in modded rooms that previously had no life at all.
If you haven't figured it out already, you can hook up a pulse gate to the volcano in the C3 desert so that it continuously fires, this prevents the gnarlers and subsequent uglees from going extinct.
and if i recall correctly, the steam release specifically has some ecology fixes that had bugged the game since the 90s, like the beetles in the jungle always going extinct really quickly. |
 toxic biohazard
Freylaverse
   Moderator
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6/8/2026 | |
I don't think the Uglee ever go extinct, do they? I think they just fly around, starving forever. Which... May be a worse fate now that I think of it. ![[ngrimace] [ngrimace]](/images/smilies/emot_grimace.gif)
But yes, I also would manually try to populate ecosystems when I played as a kid! It was half the fun!! Before I learned how to install agents, I'd also use the CAOS command line to make the water plants in the Norn terrarium pick-up-able and move one to the Jungle pond for the dragonflies.
Science is a beautiful gift to humanity; We should not distort it. |
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