After...what, a year?...I found myself looking at Creatures stuff and decided I wanted to try playing the Steam version of C3/DS again. I'm starting from scratch again with the game almost as it is (so far the one big edit I've done is adding the Activate 1/2 split from Vermidia's Agent Pack Big and Tiny slightly edited to be compatible with the Grendel Upgrade, and the only third party stuff I've added are the CFE breeds and Advanced Muco).
My advice to anyone else using the Steam version: Do not outright replace files in that version. If you need to validate the files for any reason, Steam will replace your replacements with the original versions and undo all your hard work, making you have to remember everything you changed and do it all over again, potentially making you forget what it was you changed in the first place, completely kill your motivation for playing the game, and decide to stop playing completely.
To make sure that doesn't happen again, I'm instead opting to make use of the Patches folder in the Steam version's bootstrap for .cos file edits. Sure, editing old third party .cos files so they're compatible with that change is going to be a little tedious, but the futureproofing's worth it.
Now that I have a gameplan, the next trick is figuring out all the changes I actually want. I've already decided I'm not using the TWB/TCB breeds for the most part. They're an absolute marvel of genetic engineering, for sure, but they're really not compatible with the game as it is and also with all the mods (especially metarooms) created before them that don't account for them. I'm sticking with the CFE instead; they're more compatible with all that stuff while still being a massive improvement over the vanilla genomes.
So that just leaves fixing stuff that's outright broken in the vanilla games. The Steam version patches a ton of stuff just out of the metaphorical box, which as far as I can tell the Community Patch Guides on the Creatures Wiki don't account for. So figuring out what those do and don't fix is going to be a bit of a pain (it doesn't help that those .cos files crash the CAOs Tool; fortunately I can open them up in Notepad+ instead, but that's yet another inconvenience to deal with).
Which, beyond just allowing creatures of the same sex and creatures of different species to have friendly interactions with each other (seriously, C1 and C2 got that right...well, mostly right, C1 still had the thing where grendels always hit even if they try to be friendly, but still. It's something C3/DS should've had out of the box), is...uh. Um. I'm...not actually sure. Fixing the ecology? Giving a bunch of things navigable CA that should've had them to begin with (though I'm kind of reluctant to do that seeing as most patches for them just feel a little clunky to me. Might just be neurodivergency-induced stubbornness, though)?
Well, I do think I should add a Water Eggs patch. And a fix for the death script in DS so you don't need to scroll the camera over dead bodies to make them vanish (vital for me, who's normally a pretty hands-off player). And also change the Birth/Death/Near Death music in DS to the C3 music, because the DS versions suck.
After I figure that stuff out, the next trick is to grab all the agents, breeds, rooms, etc. I want. And there's been a lot of them released since I last stopped playing frequently (special shoutout to the Angler Grendels, who are straight out of younger me's dreams).
And after that...? It may be high time I got back into developing stuff. Maybe. While my motivation lasts. But those plans are for another post.
How long will this Creatures kick last?...I don't know. Knowing me, I give it a week at most. But in a way, it does feel like coming home.
