The Grendel Garden

Recently I managed to set up a wolfling run world, in order to start up a new project. I could just post a picture and a description, but that'd be a bit boring. So instead, have a video:

It's a wolfling run world (well, technically a feral run, but I don't interfere all that often) set in Veridia. I wasn't aiming for anything in particular with the room setup, other than maybe encouraging the grendels to move around more.

Most of the food sources come from the Garden Box. There's four permanent patches; three large patches on Veridia's lower level (apples on the right, explodonuts on the left, and carrots in the middle), and a small patch of mushrooms growing up in the egg hatching area. There's also a number of seasonal patches. In addition to the Garden Box, there's also a few potted plants and vendors scattered around, mostly in the upper level. There are no non-permanent food sources.

The participants are grendels, based on the ChiChi Norn genome. Every ten generations or so, I export a sixth of the population (six males or six females, depending on which gender has the majority at the time) and replace them with fresh firstgens that have additional genes I'd like to add to the main population.

At first, the population only had some edits to make them more grendel-like, but currently I can say that they breed rather quickly and have the same aging rate and lifespan as a banshee grendel. At the time this video was recorded I was trying to breed in resistance to crowding, but so far I'm not certain how that's working out.

Their appearance is a mixture of standard C3 Grendel, Banshee Grendel, and Mask Grendel sprites. I did try introducing Zwergbunt Grendel sprites, but they didn't seem to have stuck.

The max population is 24, and an Ovicidal Machine keeps the amount of eggs around that limit as well. I plan on continuing the run until generation 100.

Since recording a video like this really isn't a problem for me, I'm thinking there'll be more videos like this eventually. However, most of them won't be as long as this one. If anyone has any suggestions, I'd like to hear them.

On a completely unrelated note to all of this, I'm almost to 100 posts on this blog (took me long enough). I may or may not have something special planned for the 100th post....

Until the next one, folks.

P.S.: The music in the video is Agniratha, Imperial Capital, from Xenoblade Chronicles. It's a great game with a great soundtrack; if you have a Wii and come across a spare copy, I highly recommend picking it up.

In which Grendel Man posts Massive Pictures of his Latest World concept.

Well, I said my next post would contain pictures. For lack of a better option, I decided to just post five pictures of my current world concept.

This world, called "The Colony," was heavily inspired by Vampess's documentation of a similar wolfling run on her site. As such, it's a feral run set in a docked where the norns have the entire ship to run around in. The population is set to 20 (though there's 36 norns in the world at the moment, since that's what the population was set to before), and an ovicidal agent keeps the egg count at that level and speeds up generations. The first generation had ChiChis and Zebras in the DS part, and Bengals and Fallows in the C3 part. Every couple generations or so, I'll throw in a pair of norns from a different species to mix things up a bit. Oh yeah, and I mean norns, not creatures. It's a norn-only world at the moment, though I might toss in some grendels later.

With the expository banter out of the way, let's dump some pictures. 

The Norn Meso is one of two possible hatching locations. At the start of the run, it was home to ChiChi Norns and Zebra Norns, and still mostly is (though you can see a Fairyfloss Norn laying around on the lower level). Not much to note, other than that I re-added the default DS life.

The Norn Terrarium was home to the Bengals and Fallows at the start of the run, and was really popular for the first couple hours. At some point, however, the norns ate themselves out of house and home, and moved on to the other terrariums. It's in the process of recovering at the moment (there's only one norn in the room as of this picture, and he didn't make it into the shot).

After the Norn Terrarium was worn out, the Jungle Terrarium became the new norn hangout. For a while, it was so clogged that I eventually removed the main reason for its popularity: the Awkwood Creeper (though there's still Creepers in the Meso). It's still popular, although a fair few norns have moved on to the Desert Terrarium. Speaking of which....

The Ettin Terrarium was empty of creatures until I removed the Awkwood Creepers from the Jungle Terrarium. Then it became another popular norn hangout. I have to say, I'm really proud of the room setup in here - I consider this my best setup of Garden Box decorations thus far, and the wildlife came together so naturally. We'll see how the ecology responds to the nornish presence, though.

Here we have the least popular metaroom; the Aquatic Terrarium. I added a new level with some GB Decos and Magic Words room editing, though that really hasn't drawn creatures here. The aquatic plants are a mix of GB and default plants - due to being more robust, the GB plants are more numerous.

Finally, a shot of the Bridge. Thanks to the norn who brought up some Munchroom seeds, the Bridge is now less likely to cause Eat Elevator Syndrome, and is in fact surprisingly popular. It really isn't capable of sustaining a large population, though - most norns just grab some munchrooms, and then move on to one of the other metarooms.

I could post pictures of the Hub, Workshop, Comms Room, and Engineering, but there's really nothing pointing out in those parts.

I don't plan on posting regular updates about this world; that tends to burn me out (hence why Tevaela rarely gets posts). I might post something about it once every ten generations or so, though. Or if something really interesting happens.

Onto other things: As most people know, the CCSF is now underway. Despite the change in format, I personally believe that this one is shaping up to be one of the best ones yet (though given how amazing 2011 was, it has a tough act to follow). So, I'd contribute a lot to it, right?

Unfortunately, that's not how things turned out. Aquanornia Revamped wound up being my major release this year - after it, the only other things you can expect from me are updates to the GB sponges and the GB Gumin Grass. I've got ambition, but I'm more a schemer then anything - I think I follow up on about 5% of everything I dream up. I might release something independently over the course of the festival, but don't count on it.

Ark World: First Thing We Do, Let's Eat All the Food and Make Lots of Babies!

While this update was actually played out yesterday, I couldn't upload it since my internet whacked out (and today I had to take a bunch of finals...college life, yay). Also, fail Shakespeare reference is fail.

Ark World has certainly gotten a lot more hectic since the last update.

This segment of gameplay started off with another pregnancy. As you can see, most of the grendels who were running around downstairs in Engineering have migrated to the upper floors. Which means even more babies on the way.

Speaking of which, the pregnancy resulted in a little female. Unfortunately, you really can't see her well since the firstborn is obscuring her face a bit, but she features quite a bit in the other pictures.

At some point, the female on the lower floors finally joined the other two on the topmost floor of Engineering. Also, there was another pregnancy shortly before this picture was taken - I'm guessing it was the two on the right, but I don't quite remember.

The resulting egg hatched into another young male. Oh happy day.

As food has become increasingly scarce, the adult grendels have started to get around. Here, who I believe is the oldest grendel on the ship has joined up with the younglings on the upper floor. Also, the baby female gets a better shot taken of her (although she's still partially obscuring her face here).

The firstborn male eventually got crowded enough to go skydiving. While it probably wasn't too pleasant at first, his outgoing nature lead him to some delicious solar flower seeds. Also, I'm pretty sure the Mechanical Grendel's being on the ground floor was also his doing (it's normally sitting by the Egg Receptacle).

The mechanical garden gains another occupant when the little female follows her fellow youngster off the edge of the ledge (more unintentional rhyming, yay!).

This is about where I lost track of the pregnancies. The greenish male on the right is the newcomer - I'm not too certain who the parents are.

At this point in the run, the most popular place on the ship has become the Bridge. All the grendels seem to be cramping each other's styles, though. It was also about this time that I realized the grendels were running out of food - that female on the lower right was suffering from Eat Elevator Syndrome when this picture was taken (I really hate that bug).

Of course, not all the grendels favored the bridge. These two decided to retreat back to the bowels of Engineering. Since there's both genders of grendel down there (and the population is rapidly increasing as it is), I'm not too worried about either one not getting the chance to pass their genes along.





As the Gaius Plants and Botanoid inched ever closer to extinction, I decided that the time was now to reintroduce the Techno-Organic Carrot (updated so that it's not quite so prolific) to Ark World. Right away, the new patch attracted interest.

Right away, the patch drew hungry grendels in from far and wide. It seemed like the food issues had been resolved....

...Only for the grendels to completely wipe out the patch shortly afterwards.
I injected the carrot again, only to have all the seeds get nommed before they could sprout. Several attempts later, and I got patches established in their original growing place, the center of the corridor, and on several levels of Engineering.

Yet another baby male was born during all the carrot madness. Since I don't use a .cos file that disables season-dependent gender ratios, I figure that it must be a season that favors male birth. Either that, or the Grendels are channeling the spirit of Minimordor. One of the two.


Now that the carrot's been re-established, I expect the population to quiet down as they return to constant carrot grazing. At least the time when the carrot was not in the world managed to shake things up a bit.

In case you're wondering, I still haven't gotten around to patching the Metallophagus's .agent file with the updated carrot just yet. I'll make a post here when I get around to it.

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.

Ark World: Mechanical Rythym

I'm liking this world so far. Despite the lack of variety, all the carrots and Gaius plants really make the world look lively, and that's before the grendels started hatching. I didn't take any pictures of the hatching, unfortunately. However, it wasn't anything too exciting (the grendels either fell off the ledge near their hatching area or used the elevator). Afterwards, they spread out over the room. While there was some aggression in the beginning, I warded them off that path and shortly afterwards injected Clucky's Stop Slapping Creatures agent, ensuring that psychopathy would never be seen in this run.

Another thing to note is that documentation of this run is mostly going to take the form of picture dumps - the grendels rarely do anything interesting enough to warrant special notice.

 These two grendels were the only ones to stick close to their hatching area. So far, they haven't been doing anything except nom on carrots (although they're always smiling when I check on them; I assume they grab some gadgets when I'm not looking). The male is indeed shivering; Metallophagus Grendels tend to shiver a lot despite being resistant to cold. I assume it's because the techno-organic carrot doesn't give them much incentive to move.

The rest of the initial eight grendels scampered over to Engineering. These two females decided to stick around in the corridor for a while. No reason to rush when food is nearly everywhere, anyway. I also was skilled enough to snap this picture right as a carrot was being pulled out of the ground. As you can see, it hasn't changed to its "Pulled out of ground" frame yet. This isn't a bug; it just takes a few moments for the pose to change. Also, the tumbleslink seems to have spread out from its initial home of Engineering - it's another case of "plant teleportation," a bug that affects a lot of third-party plants (including my own). I think the only way to fix it is to make the seeds have the same bounding box size as the plant, which doesn't work for the tumbleslink thanks to the way it's coded.

Okay, back to the grendels. Metallophagus Grendels also seem to crowd easily, hence why they seem to be retreating from each other here.

There's another thing worth noting about this picture. I'm not certain how many minds this is going to blow (if any), but I certainly didn't notice that the blue thing that occupies most of this picture was in fact a lung - a real, organic lung. I didn't even notice that was there until I first started testing out the standalone Bridge/Engineering agent that's being used in this run. I always assumed the lung was the green, animated thing that looked like a bellows. Turns out, that's just part of it.
 

Sometime after the previous pictures were taken, this female migrated down to the lower floors of Engineering for some reason I cannot fathom. Maybe she got overcrowded or something.

Metallophagus Grendels can eat machinery, but since most agents classified as that cannot be picked up, most of them dismiss machines and just eat the more portable gadgets. As such, the intelligence core is mostly safe from becoming somebody's lunch.

Here's a really egregious example of the teleporting plant bug: Spigot Plants, in SPACE! The nut that got this group started probably originated in the gene splicer area. Normally, the airlock agent would blown it up before a colony could get established, but apparently space didn't feel like being realistic today.

Funny thing is, sometimes it does cooperate and disintegrate something, but it's never the plants themselves - I think it's usually a water droplet or a nut. Since I really can't be bothered to remove these, I'm just going to leave them there until they die out on their own.

Apparently, whatever drew the first female down there was attractive enough to make the other females in Engineering follow her. The spigot plants have really gotten nuts, much to the detriment of the local Tumbleslink population (according to their code, their seeds won't sprout in the presence of Spigot Plants). Not sure what the grendels think of it, though. They're probably more interested in the carrots.

  It was around this time that the older grendels started hitting breeding age. This male is the second oldest one on the ship at this point (the eldest is one of the two at the bridge). I also seem to have an uncanny ability to snap pictures at the wrong times (this is the second time this post that featured a grendel shivering with his eyes closed).

Note to self: Write a 255 (exception) script for the Whirlies. This error message has popped up so many times now it's not even funny. Speaking of the Whirlies, I found out that they're actually edible despite appearances - not that the meal benefited the unfortunate grendel who sampled one. Metallophagus Grendels can't digest critter meat (or other organic matter such as seeds) all that well. 

To wrap up the post, here's a final roll call:

Grendels in the Bridge: 2

Grendels in the Corridor: 1

Grendels in Engineering (Upper): 2

Grendels in Engineering (Lower): 3

The total amount of grendels currently in the world is eight, forming the initial population of Gen 1s. Speaking of population, I hope those females in Engineering return to the upper levels on their own - down there, they won't be contributing much to the gene pool. However, if they stay down there much longer I'm probably going to forcibly reintroduce them to the males on the upper floors. 

So far, so good.

Feral Run: Ark World

So in my last post, I finished up and released the Metallophagus Grendels V2. Unlike the Waterfall Grendels, the Metallophagus Grendels didn't get a wolfling run. Part of that was because the grendels themselves were working perfectly fine while I was running around coding their agents. However, I also wanted to run a feral run featuring the breed. In my time testing them, they quickly earned their place as one of my favorites (which is a big improvement over the quickly made breed V1 was).

So after three posts of nothing but releases, I resume my regular posting with details of my Metallophagus Grendel feral run, Ark World (a pun on "Arc Words" - yes, I hang around TVTropes too much). This initial post just contains details of how I set up the world. Later posts will be about the grendels themselves.

This is a single-metaroom run, but as opposed to using Annex's Hub (a great place for the Metallophagus Grendels if you're making a general purpose world), this coder went with something completely different:

I went with the Bridge + Engineering from Creatures 3 - okay, maybe this place isn't that much different from Annex's Hub. It's certainly a lot larger, though.

Why did I explicitly refer to myself as a coder? Because this isn't a docked world. I went right ahead and just made a .cos file that injected only the Bridge, Engineering, and the Corridor connecting them (as well as a few agents, namely scenery and the airlock).

The bridge is where the grendels will hatch. By the picture, you can see that there's a bunch of Techno-Organic Carrot patches (which grew up on their own - techno-organic carrot patches tend to separate if left alone. And no, that rhyming was not intentional). There's also the solar flower from the Gaius pack, edited to match the grendels' genomes (Gaius uses the "deactivate" stimulus to get nutrition from gadgets. The Metallophagus Grendels use the "I've eaten something (general)" stimulus instead). You can also see a Whirly, whose code was left untouched.

Here we have a better shot of the bridge's underbelly, including a whole  bunch of whirlies, the airlock, and the potion vendor.

The potion vendor is mostly there for flavor - as usual, no bacteria get injected when I make a new world, rendering its main purpose moot. It and the cheese machines have been edited to not require bionenergy (since this is DS where the stuff doesn't exist).

The corridor is more or less there to provide passage between the bridge and engineering. Those "doors" aren't actually doors, but fancy CA emitters. Like I said, this isn't a docked world - the doors would crash the game if used if they were real. The only other thing to note is the radio from the Portal pack - it's not the only thing from that pack that was injected, nor is it the only radio on the ship. Now that I think of it, I have an idea for a sound change....

Engineering has gone under a complete revamp. The creator, replicator, and gene splicer are no longer here. In their stead are the quasimechanical plants from the Gaius pack, making the entire area look like a jungle. It's pretty awesome, I say.

I end this first look into the world with the grendel hatching area:

 Instead of an Ovicidal Agent (which could easily get taken apart by hungry grendels), I decided to use Balor's Eggonicer. Actually getting it to work was a pain - it won't handle grendel or ettin eggs if you inject it into a standalone world - but I have to say that I like how it injects one egg at a time. Helps avoid the psychopathy that plagued Gardenia Falls. As you can see, it's already at work - however, I forgot to note an exact genome for the eggs (by default, the .cos file I use to inject them just uses random genomes beginning with "gren") and as a result got a bunch of "normal" (I wouldn't call a GoM an example of a "normal" grendel) grendels. They're all getting exported once they're done hatching, and will probably be destined to wind up a part of my next splicing spree.

The Portal Cake and Spook's Ploopa Vendor both provide food for the young grendels. The cake won't last long, but the Ploopa Vendor will definitely have a use. I was going to use the vendor sprite for "gadget fountains" that spit out lightmodules and lightboxes (two otherwise useless gadgets), but the sprite is apparently buggy if you try opening it in SpriteBuilder or GIMP with the Creatures Image plugins.

Setting up this world made me realize that there's a dearth of general gadget agents. If nothing else, some more variety with the mechanical plants would have been nice. Another potential project for another time, I guess.