Dev Logs: Hallway Grendels (Attempt #2)
GOAL:
Establish a genetic breed based on the image I use for making sure the sizes of pathways in metarooms are wide enough for the largest possible vanilla sprite combination (Bruin body and Jungle Grendel head, arms, legs, and tail). It has to be able to breathe both on land and in the water, as well as successfully make use of a swimming agent to reach all areas of aquatic rooms. The ability to breed on their own, take care of themselves well enough, maintain good health on normal foods, and generally be adaptable to many room types is important. Some pretty colors and "stabilizing" their genome for additional use is a bonus. Nature should be allowed to select for the best traits, but going in at certain stages to ensure certain features is fine if it's required.
WORLD INFO:
Name: AutoWolf-Hallway
Type: DS (Undocked)
Additional Metarooms:
- Artemia Sea
- Deep Abyss
Mobility Options:
- Walking
- Swimming
Other Features:
- Egg collecting and timed hatching setup
- Population Control Panel
- Supersplicer and Eggernator II for splicing
- Autovocab
STARTING GENOMES:
- gren.aqua.swimming.17.gen
- Taou_001_dark_gju62_ev8zw_bk5da_3ngk7.creature
- norn.cs.bruin.hardy.gen
DEV LOGS:
Session 1:
- Setting this up a lot like last time, but with Artemia Sea and Deep Abyss instead. Just going to inject a few individuals of each genome around the place while I settle in.
- Using a combination of the Eggernator II and Supersplicer to see what I can get...
- I'm not satisfied with the level of mixing between all the different genomes, but I have consistently got water breathing. For now, I'm going to lightly separate the populations based on how close they look to what I want so I can weigh appearance against behavior/other desired traits. Should make it easier to isolate individuals that would be best for breeding.
- After a long session of tossing grendels between rooms as needed and keeping an eye out for solid founder individuals, I'm starting to get some homogenization in Artemia Sea. If it can't swim, it's been exported safely into storage.
- Left the game running for a few hours while making a sewing pattern. Looks like they're breeding just fine, and not nearly as many signs of aggression. Time to go to bed and continue this project again tomorrow!
Session 2:
- ... And so we continue! I've quickly noticed there are over 50 creatures in this metaroom, and that's unacceptable. I should have a working setup to export excess creatures, but maybe I've got a strange proportion of males vs females. Seems the Population Monitor agent really only removes by "pairs" - one male and one female. This is something I've noticed in the past but never got to throw into a dev log. Basically, say the population is set to maintain at 5 pairs and you have 20 creatures. It'll only keep removing down till you have, well, 5 pairs! If you have 5 breeding pairs in the world and then 10 extra males, it won't bother to export them.
- I've performed Le Exportation and am now re-importing the most recent generation - generation 14. If something proves to be wrong with this gen, I'll buff out the population with gen 13 too.
- Actually, I do think I'll import gen 13 again specifically so I can screen for individuals with, uh, more organs. I think I've got enough of these at this point that I can Treat Myself and do that. It's left me with 8 creatures with only 2 of those being females. Well, let's see if they can breed out of this alright.
- Seems to be working okay, though I don't feel safe leaving them alone until after they have another couple of breeding females. I'm going to age all of these up to adults so there's a better base population to keep working from. If they look stable after some carefully monitored wolfling, I'll leave 'em to it again. Let's give it over making and eating dinner lol.
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Pictured above: The grendel breeding ball that currently exists as of the last bullet. |
- I'm seeing a lot of "eat grendel" all of a sudden.... Also a bit vexed because they're not really swimming anymore. Maybe something was lost along the way? After dinner proper, I'll see if I can fix that.
- I'm still waiting on dinner to finish cooling, but while I do, I have a specific plan to re-introduce the right traits into this population. I'll likely build a "stabilized base" by pasting down one of their component breeds (in this case, swimming aqua grendels) on top of a default creatures breed (jungle grendels) just to absolutely make sure nothing is lost or misplaced. After this, I'll sample some genomes from the current population and paste those over the stabilized swimming aqua grendel base, once again, to make sure everything that has equivalent genes is put in the right place, while extras are tacked onto the end where they can do the least harm during out-crossing with dissimilar things.
- I'm going to try and go forward with the above plan. I've exported all of the grendels, and it just so happens that there are exactly 2 of generation 18, which is the highest gen here so far. If that doesn't work, I'll sample from 17.
- And now, I've got two genomes to use as parent genomes for Geneloom! They're labeled as "gren.hallway.v0.1.hail" and "gren.hallway.v0.1.wood". I've spawned in some and spliced them together to make a new starter population. They seem to be happy and swimming around, so that's a great sign!
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| The new kids in town. |
- Did the grendels a favor and added some of those mini nut plants, tucking the mother plants into some of the raised shelves of Artemia Sea so that only swimming creatures can properly access them.
- I leave them be to breed and frolic. I look back. I see a death. My blood runs cold.
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| Ghosts of Attempt #1 come to haunt me in realtime. |
- It's happening again.
- Well, hopefully it's NOT happening again, but I'm keeping my eyes absolutely laser focused on my notifications so if anyone else dies soon, I can check if it's due to fight club antics. Also, despite having seasonal gender bias off, it's really just males right now with very few females. Maybe I'll use this as a chance to gently slip in some genetic edits?...
- Adding 4 new females to the run using slightly tweaked versions of the parent genomes of the most recent set. Added a new battery of gait edits (thanks for all the help, Risen Angel!) that should cause some fun swimming behavior if I got it right. We'll see!
- Happy to say that it seems to work! That's actually my first time making and hooking up an alternate gait, so I'm thrilled to understand the process now. Have some cryptid quality footage of one of the altered babies swimming by.
- Lol, I may still have to tweak the water-to-land gait transition, but this is at least very amusing in the interim.
- There are far too many grendels already, both from them breeding and me injecting new versions of the swimming pose edits and similar. I Must Splice All.
- A few splices and additions later, I'm going to throw all of these on land and remove any individuals who get stuck swimming on land.
- Update: After many, many tweaks of the exact times the chemicals spike and activate the gait, I think I've finally got something I'm satisfied with. I'm going to just kinda flood the run with females that have the desired animations and let everything meld together.
- After several hours of meddling with the exact setup of the swimming settings (and thank you again Risen for pointing out how the nominal actually works in emitter genes), I've finally got it in a state I like! I've decided to just back up to the two stabilized genomes I added these edits to and start there with a few creatures of each sex.
- I'm doing laser surgery on the genome to remove the "children make you old" gene because... it's just not fair. Adding some grendels in that have that fix to help them out.
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| They seem to like making little stacks. Are you seaweed? Little bean stalks?? Bamboo??? |
Session 3:
- A new day, a new session! Going to start it by exporting all the 32 creatures in here and paring it down to the most recent gens. Shooting for like... 10 pairs or under. Nevermind that, we've got a fairly good spread of 6 creatures. Let's do it! Aging them all to adult to give them all an immediate and equal chance to contribute.
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| I really wish the exporter was more consistent... |
- Now, I've found myself at a crossroads. These creatures do seem to be doing alright, but it seems like the game is really selecting against organs - like, in general it hates organs. I have also noticed that the x-ray kit isn't consistent about its readouts. I took the genomes of some creatures from the current gens that had supposedly had less organs, and then compared them to the original stabilized genomes. Organs that were treated as missing were totally normal and placed where they should be. If it was, say, mutations, that made any organ harder for x-ray to ID, I figured it'd just show there was an organ that didn't have a specific name other than its organ number. It seems it will outright omit it. In hindsight, this makes me feel awful because there may legitimately be creatures in past runs that I exported because I thought they were missing entire chunks of their biology. I'm happy to be logging this, because I really feel this information will be important to other people doing these runs. Shame though, because manually screening every creature is an awful pain. My best bet is to enact some manual intervention and set all organs to be unable to be cut or duplicated. I really wanted to let the current pop keep going without intervention for longer, but...
- To be continued
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