Ark World: Grendels on the Move

After a bunch of posts concerning revamps, I think it's about time I resume posting about my Metallophagus Grendel feral run.

First off, the most notable update concerns the Techno-Organic Carrot. After seeing some V1 Metallophaguses attempt to push the carrot seed, I decided that an update for the carrot was in order. Among other things, I altered the seeds such that they no longer grow so readily, which more or less restricted the patches to one area unless helped along by hungry grendels. In addition, the seeds got updated with push and pull scripts - pushing or pulling a seed enough times will make it break. I'll update the pack with the updated carrot at a later date.

I was going to inject this updated carrot into the world, but I decided that the grendels weren't going to be very interesting as long as the carrot remained in the world. So instead of updating it, I completely removed the carrot. In between the botanoid and the Gaius plants, the grendels should have enough food to last them.

The results were profound. Deprived of an easily accessible source of food, one of the females in Engineering decided to head back up to the upper floors. Once there, one of the males caught her eye. Shortly afterwards, the first pregnancy of the run occurred.

The two grendels at the Bridge also were forced to start traveling when the carrot was removed. The female soon migrated down to the lower levels, seeking the food the Botanoids spat out.
The Chyme Plants you see here have also been altered to match the grendel's stims - just as Gaius gets stimmed differently from the unaltered Chyme Plant, these plants stim gadget-eaters differently. However, it's unlikely that the grendels will sample them.

The other two females in Engineering more or less remained where they were when the carrots were still present. They'll probably rejoin the main population sometime soon, or so I hope. If they choose to remain down there despite the drastic decrease in food, I'm probably going to grab them and forcibly re-integrate them.

Somehow, the laying of this egg escaped my notice. Must be a quirk of the Eggonicer to hide the "Egg Laid" event. As the current population in this world was well below the maximum of 20, the egg was promptly sent to the hatching area, where it hatched into the young male on the right. As there's nothing much left for him at the hatching area, I expect he'll bumble around until he matures enough to use the elevator.

This update ends with the bridge female finally snapping out of her food obsession long enough to kiss-pop. This picture was taken the moment she got pregnant. I'm assuming the father is the smiling male sitting to her left - the guy to the right seems to be trying to eat that botanoid sitting at the foot of the cheese machine. Botanoids are classified as machinery, but as they can't be picked up they're the biggest reason that the grendels get turned off machinery so quickly.

With the carrot gone, you can expect to see more frequent updates about Ark World now. Hopefully, it'll get more interesting from here on out.