Sheesh, has it really been almost a year since my last post here? Guess rambling over Discord's been better for the ol' instant gratification.
Anyway, RAS. Anyone remember that? It was the project I spent most of this series documenting the development of. I based it on the 2017 genome, eventually creating something I felt happy with. Then I realized there was still work to be done, explored a bunch of other avenues, before winding up back with the 2017 genome and polished it into something even better...before realizing it was prone to vanilla genome-levels of stupidity, having no idea why, and just giving up entirely.
Despite that, however, I have been still messing around, trying to create a base genome I can truly call my own that works as I intended. With most of them I've had a similar amount of luck as I did with the 2017s; they started out promising, but devolved into stupidity for one reason or the other. Sometime in the future, I'll go over those past attempts.
In the process of working on those, there was one genome whose features I kept coming back to: the CFF. Long time readers of this blog might remember me feeling a bit of hype aversion towards that genome in its time. If I'm honest, there really was no good reason for that; it was just petty envy and misplaced pride. Having remedied that now, I've realized that I like basically everything that it introduced. Heck, I've even somewhat come around on the thought randomness, having played with genomes like the Dark Devil Grendels, the Berry Grendels, and the Dart Grendels as well as Arnout's various CFF conversions. As far as I can tell, they can all take care of themselves perfectly fine.
The 2017 genome is based on the CFF, of course. But even outside of my past attempts, I've noticed that 2017s tend to be not great at taking care of themselves. It was something I noticed in my initial testing run, and later in a run featuring the 2017-based Infernal Grendels. At the time, I chalked that up to the aforementioned thought randomness...but the normal CFF breeds I've tried don't seem to have the same issues. So whatever's going on seems to be an issue with the 2017s specifically. Another thing to consider trying to figure out in the future, I suppose.
So I went back a couple steps to the CFF 1.0 genome. They didn't have the thought randomness (or tryptamine suspectibility, for that matter) of CFF 1.1, but were identical in every other way. The only thing that desperately needed fixed was the broken alcohol receptor that kept them from properly storing glycogen and other long-term energy stores (and I also nuked the heart attack gene while I was at it; I've concluded that it basically had no benefits but "realism" and "being in C2"), and once I did that, I was extremely impressed with what I saw. CFF 1.0 norns were extremely good at taking care of themselves. They barely even pinged the medical monitor, and when they did it was because of fights and not because they started starving to death en masse. Honestly, I could see why evolnemesis added the thought randomness in the first place.
Since the base was this strong, I eventually decided to start tweaking it some more...and I'm pretty happy with the progress I've made thus far, enough to say that the RAS project has been properly reborn, at least in name.
Though I changed the name somewhat. RAS now stands for Risen Angel Standard, since I feel that's a little less clunky of a full name than "RA's Standard" was.
With all that being said, there's still a lot of work and testing to be done, so I'm not quite ready to go into depth on the new RAS. Maybe if I'm lucky, I'll have something out for the CCSF 2025, but I make no promises. But in the meantime, there's a pair of testers you can play with, that in addition to being the first examples of the new RAS also feature an interesting tweak that I've also seem to be having success with so far.
Maybe there'll be some more development posts between now and the proper release of the new RAS, maybe not. Either way, until the next one, folks.
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