Contents 1 Getting Set Up 1.1 Capillata and the Ark 1.2 What is Creatures Internet Edition 1.3 Before you start 1.4 Installation and set-up 1.5 Registering the Docking Station 1.6 Where to get help 2 Playing Creatures Internet Edition 2.1 What are you trying to do? 2.2 Game Objectives 2.3 How do I do this? 2.4 Getting Started 2.5 Learning your wav around the game 2.6 Using the World Switcher 3 The Six Step Guide to your first Norns Step #1 Name your Norns! Step #2 Basic Norn Care Step #3 Teach them to Talk! Step #4 Breed Them! Step #5 Care for Them! Step #6 Give them a good Burial! 4 The World and Everything In It 4.1 The Ark The Norn Terrarium 4.2 The Capillata Norn Meso Area Atrium Comms Area The Workshop 4.3 Some visitors you may get 4.4 Powering the ships 5 Internet Play 5.1 Getting Started 5.2 The Comms Computer 5.3 Message System 5.4 The Warp 6 Advanced Play 6.1 The Genome and Creatures dDNA 6.2 Digestion 6.3 Poisons and Antidotes 6.4 Immunity and Disease 6.5 Fertility 6.6 The Norn's Brain 7 Product Expansion 7.1 New agents for your World 7.2 Exporting Creatures to a file 7.3 Developing for Creatures 7.4 Internet Resources The Jungle Terrarium The Aauatic Terrarium 8 Trouble Shooting The Ettin Terrarium Bridge and Engineering Creatures 3 Credits Connecting Agents and Blueprints Docking Station Credits The basics of Connecting Agents Linux Port Credits 1. Getting Set Up This is no ordinary game. By playing Creatures Internet Edition, you will be taking part in one of the largest ever Artificial Life experiments. Not only will you be breeding your own unique artificial life forms, called Norns, but you will be able to connect your computer, through the internet, and form a part of a vast online world through which your Norns can wander at will. Who knows who will be living on your space ship in a few weeks time? 1.1 Capillata and the Ark Far back in the mists of time, the ancient race ofShee left Albia, in search of a new home in a huge biological spaceship, the Shee Ark. That, however, is another story... The Shee were not known for their timekeeping skills, and when the huge ship left, one Shee scientist was left behind on an empty planet. He'd been working on a new method for travelling from place to place and only noticed that the others had left when he was satisfied his new device was fully functional. This device would have saved all the work that had evidently preceded the evacuation of the planet - if only they had waited for him! His device allowed you to open up these, er, blue things, and step through. The other end of the blue thing could be configured to drop you out at all sorts of places - but some of the things he saw were a bit warped for his taste. Hmmm - Warp. That would be a suitable name for the blue thing! To be honest he wasn't really sure whether the warp connected places in space or places in time - come to think of it he wasn't 100% sure that the place he was in now was where he actually started either. But hey, it looked very similar and at the end of the day that was all that mattered. Why had none of the others waited for him? He decided he had to follow the rest of the Shee and show them what they had missed, so using various spare genomic bits and bobs from around the planet he built a new living spaceship, which he called Capillata. The last Shee loaded up what supplies he thought would be necessary, and packed some samples to tinker with during the journey. He had a brilliant idea for launching the space station- exploding the old volcano would give Capillata the necessary thrust to leave Albia. Of course, this would destroy a lot of Albia's delicate ecosystem, but you can't stand in the way of the march of science. He'd left explicit instructions with the few Ettins left on Albia for them to clean up after the radiation levels had died down sufficiently. Surely even the Ettins couldn't mess that up! So the last of the Shee travelled on, in his eternal quest for the Shee spaceship, and hopefully a new source of tea, too. Time is a funny thing, however. One day it's moving along in a dependable straight line and then, Bam!, all of the sudden it takes a sharp turn or does a loop the loop. When the Capillata finally caught up with the Shee space ship that had left one thousand years earlier, it too was deserted. Apparently, the Grendels had attacked during the flight and the Shee escaped to their new planet's surface and abandoned the spaceship in orbit. How long had it been here ? The spaceship remains, with its new "attachment", and with your help the remaining Norns can thrive. But watch out for the Grendels, a vicious breed of nasty animals intent on hurting your Norns or even stealing their eggs! To help you you'll find a host of advanced machines, all of which can be plugged together to make huge automated devices. The bridge and engineering contain an encyclopedic range of gadgets to aid you in your quest to protect your Norns. But watch out, even in a virtual universe, there's real danger! 1.2 What is Creatures Internet Edition? Creatures Internet Edition brings you the latest two titles set in the Creatures Universe in one easy to install package: Creatures 3 and Creatures Docking Station. Creatures 3 is set on board the huge Ark on which the Shee left Albia. It contains many species of plants and animals as well as specialist machinery and devices to help you look after your creatures. Docking Station centres around a smaller ship (the Capillata) that was launched many years after the main Ark and has been pursuing it through space for hundreds of years. On board the Capillata are new devices which allow you to communicate with other players, or exchange creatures through the mysterious warp. There are three ways to play with Creatures Internet Edition, allowing you to experience the Creatures universe at any point during the time since the Shee left Albia. 1. You can play with just the Creatures 3 Ark (where the action takes place before the Capillata caught up and docked with the Ark). You will not be able to use the communication or creature exchange functions as these are only available with the Capillata. 2. Alternatively, you can play on board the Capillata (before it caught up with the Ark). You will be limited to the devices only available on the Capillata and so, for example, you will be able to communicate and exchange creatures, but you wont be able to use the machinery on the Ark (such as the Genetic Splicing Machine). 3. Finally, you can play at a time when the Capillata has successfully reached the Ark and is now docked with it. All features are available in this mode. 1.3 Before you start In this manual, we'll refer to a number of phrases such as "right-click on" and "select". When we refer to "click on" or "select" we mean moving the mouse pointer or the Creatures Internet Edition hand object (it replaces your mouse pointer when you're running Creatures Internet Edition) over something and pressing the left mouse button and then releasing it. Right click is the same action, but using your right mouse button. 1.4 Installation and set-up Creatures Internet Edition consists of Creatures 3, Docking Station and the Magma Norn Pack. The following are the minimum system requirements to run the games: • Pentium® II Processor • Linux® kernel 2.2 • 64Mb RAM • 4x speed CD-ROM drive • 16 bit Sound Card, OSS compatible • Video card capable of 800x600 resolution • 400Mb free hard disk space • Glibc 2.1 • GTK libraries For Docking Station you also need the following: • Other common software: Wget or Lynx, bzip2 • Internet connection To install all the products on your computer please follow these steps: 1. Insert the CD-ROM in your CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive. 2. Log into your computer as a normal user, and open a command line terminal window (running under X). 3. Type su to become the superuser, and enter the super user password. 4. If your CD-ROM doesn't automount then type mount /mnt/cdrom or equivalent for your distribution, to mount it. 5. Change directory to your CD-ROM with cd /mnt/cdrom or equivalent according to where your CD is mounted. 6. To install Creatures 3 type sh install-c3.sh 7. To install Docking Station type sh install-ds.sh 8. To install the Magma Norns type sh install-magma.sh 9. Type exit to return to being a normal user. To play the games, log in as a normal user and type the following: 1. Type creatures3intro to view the Creatures 3 introduction sequence. 2. Type creatures3 to play Creatures 3. Under some versions of Gnome and KDE you can also start Creatures 3 from the application menu. 3. Type dockingstation to play Docking Station. The Magma Norns are available from the egg layer within Creatures 3 and Docking Station. Keyboard Tip Help, I get an error message during installation saying Xlib: connection to :0.0 refused by server! Your super user does not have privileges to access the display. Type xhost + before you become super user. There are slight differences between the options available with Creatures 3 and those available with Docking Station or Docking Station docked. Where differences exist they will be explained in this manual and illustrated with these symbols. ; 7) Indicates this feature is on the Creatures 3 Ark. Indicates this feature is available on the Docking Station Capillata. To start each game, log in as an ordinary user and from a terminal window type either creatures3 or dockingstation. To play both games docked together start dockingstation and then within the "Create A World" dialogue in the game click the button to create a docked world. 1.5 Registering the Docking Station In order to use the internet functionality of Creatures Internet Edition, you must first register your user name and receive your password via email. Visit the website at: http://ds.creatures.net and select the "Join" button to access the registration pages. Make sure you choose an unusual, interesting (and clean!) user name - it'll be your name in the game to other users from now on! You will be given a password which you can alter later to something memorable, and be given the option of making your personal details public or not. 1.6 Where to get help For assistance with installation or running the game please check the Support section of the Docking Station website ( ds.creatures.net) . For game play assistance or advice you may find help in the Docking Station Forums which are also available from the website. You can exit the game by using the Options menu on the right of the game screen or by pressing your ESC (escape) key. When you exit, your game will automatically be saved. When you restart the same world, it will resume from where you left off. Note: Occasionally, whilst playing the game you may notice a brief pause. This is the game making a backup copy of your creatures and world, so that if anything goes wrong (such as your computer crashing) it is able to recover from the backup. 2. Playing Creatures Internet Edition 2.1 What are you trying to do? You're trying to successfully breed a population of Norns. Norns are creatures that were created a thousand years ago by an advanced race called the Shee. Norns live for around seven hours, and have their own bloodstream, brains and even a genetic structure called Creatures Digital DNA. Norns are peaceful, friendly animals and they can learn to have simple conversations, they just love carrots and cheese, and they're an endangered species. Why? Because their keepers, the Shee, have left the spaceship and gone to the planet below. Without the Shee's help and attention, the Norns are at risk from all sorts of dangers - from the vicious, dangerous Grendels to invisible bacteria that float around the spaceship on the breeze. With your help, the Norns can thrive. You can protect them, teach them, breed them and even construct vast automated machines that help you in your quest. Ultimately, you may even be responsible for breeding Norns that can fight off Grendel attacks independently of you! It is a tough challenge. Nature's worst is waiting to get in your way ... good luck! 6 Creature Labs creafeugfcs Genetics Kit _-_ ! _ The Creatures Network Corporate Creatures Net Kids Developers Shop Support Log-in Add services Downloading Docking Station also makes you a part of the Creatures Network where you can get access to important Docking Station Network updates, Creatures downloads and forums and advance news about Creatures! After registration you can add to or update your account information at any time simply by logging in and clicking "My Profile" in the top right navigation area of the website. Please Note: As we will be sending you V°ur initial password by email you must ensure that your email address is correct! You'll be able to change your password later. Personal Information This information is needed to help us personalise services and to make you a part of the Creatures Network. First Name: | Last Name: [~ Email address: f Type your email address again to be sure: |~ Gender: r Male r Female Date of Birth: ] day j] month j^ jyea r l\ Post or Zip code: | Country: | United Kingdom Do you have a website? URL: http:// | d Choose your User Name and forgotten Password hints Use your User Name to access all Creature Labs services, including the mall and the Creatures Network. Please use only letters, numbers, and underscores. User Name: For security reasons, in the event you forget your password choose a question and answer only you know the answer to: Personal Question: | What is your mother's maiden name? d Personal Answer: | P Yes! I would like to periodically receive email notification of new game titles and special offers from Creature Labs. Privacy Policy and Terms of Service By registering for this site or service, you are agreeing to the Terms of Service for all Creature Labs websites and services. (If you are under the age of 13, please get permission from your parent or guardian) Please note that your member name, interests and basic geography may be viewable by other Creatures Network members, depending on how you set your preferences later on We will not sell or rent your personal details to any third party. Please see our Privacy Policy for more information. Submit © 2000 Creature Labs Ltd. 2.2 Game Objectives Creatures Internet Edition is an open-ended game - you play however you like to play. There are probably as many ways of playing as there are users of the game. Most players choose to try and maintain a steady, healthy population of Norns, but that is entirely up to you! The Norns of Creatures Internet Edition are living creatures - they have a complex biochemistry, a system of organs, a brain that is capable of learning, and a genome that specifies all of the above. Norns have a computerised genetic code called Creatures Digital DNA. It controls everything about them - their appearance, their ability to digest food, their intelligence and their health. Norns can breed, too, passing on their unique DNA to their offspring. After the first generation of Norns, each Norn is unique - their DNA has been mutated and spliced from their parents'. Who knows what a future Norn may be like? So far in the Creatures series, there have already been some fascinating mutations - immortal Norns, super-intelligent Norns (relatively speaking, of course!), or Norns with brightly coloured fur. Keeping Norns healthy isn't necessarily easy. It's your job to steer them through life, teach them right from wrong, and patch them up if you can't make them avoid the dangers everyday life can offer. 2.3 How do I do this? Norns are based on real animals. They eat, sleep, talk, play, learn, breed and eventually die. Norns are robust creatures, and they have strong survival instincts. Given enough time, they'll figure out how to manage the basics all on their own. However, with your help they can do this much faster and generally live happier lives. You don't directly control the Norns, as they are living things. You can ask them to do something, but they may choose to do something else. Over time, if you treat them well, they'll learn to respect you and listen to you. Your job inside Creatures Internet Edition therefore involves many things, including: • Hatch and teach your Norns Norns will breed by themselves, but you need to start the population with either a Starter Family (pre-taught male and female Norns) or some Eggs (to hatch your own Norns from scratch). Using machinery available on the ships you can teach them basic language so that they can communicate with you and each other. • Care for your Norns Like real animals, Norns can get ill or be injured. You can diagnose problems and treat them with devices available on the ships. • Protect your Norns Looking after your Norns may require you to intervene in their actions, or to move them to safety. Utilise gadgets on the Ark to create defence systems - or limit movement around the Capillata by setting up door locks - to help you care for your creatures! • Breed your Norns You can encourage Norns to breed by getting them together in the right place at the right time. Norns reach adolescence after about 30 minutes, and can breed after about 45 minutes. 2.4 Getting started When you start the game for the first time, you'll be asked to enter a name for your world. The name of this world will be used in all records relating to your creatures. When another player views information on your creatures they'll know which world they came from originally. The choice of names is entirely up to you. SPHf > The "Create a World" dialogue in Docking Station allows you jgjjgL to specify whether the world is Capillata only, or whether it is Capillata docked to the Ark. Click the button to toggle the two modes. r Welcome to Docking Station! Vou appear to also have Creatures 3 installed on this computer. Please name your new world and using the middle button below, decide uiiether gou want to dock the Docking Station Capillata uith the Shee Starship from Creatures 3. When gou have decided, press the green tick to accept and continue. new world The game will then create your new world, and display a progress bar to show you it is doing. Don't worry if it seems to be a taking some time - creating a living ship full of alien experiments can take a while! Capillata and docked worlds now require you to enter your username and password. You have to give these in order to enter the world for the first time. If you haven't already registered then you can click on the link provided to register your version of Docking Station. Once in the world you will be presented with a choice of starting conditions. You can start with two 'ready to breed' adults, called a Starter Family, or you can start with two eggs. Capillata world players will notice one extra option on this front end - 'Just let me in!' Clicking this option will take you into the game without anything being done for you. You can still create eggs when you are ready, but this gives you time to look around the ship(s) and get acquainted. If you have played any of the Creatures series before you may wish to start with the eggs. If you'd like to play around, experiment, and get the hang of the game, we recommend the Starter Family. Be aware that although you can create and hatch more eggs at any time during the game, this is your only chance to have a Starter Family in this world. If you wish to play with a Starter Family at a later date, you can make a new world using the world switcher. If you selected the eggs button: - 1 Two random breed eggs will be produced by the jpf egg layer and sit waiting next to the incubator - one is male and the other is female. Pick up the egg (using the right mouse button) and drop it into the incubator. Dropping an egg into the Ark's Incubator Muco, the disturbingly biological egg layer, will produce two random breed eggs and spit them into the heat - pan incubator area! One is a male egg and the other is female. The eggs will now hatch, the process can take a few seconds so be patient while life is being created! New born creatures will pop out of the eggs when they are ready. Muco - trust him with your Norn babies If you selected the Starter Family button: One male and one female Norn, both of breeding age and both able to speak and understand what you tell them, will be imported into your world close to the incubator area. 2.5 Learning your way around the game It is important to know your way around the game display screen. Below is a picture of everyday Norn life: 1 The Hand This is your in-world presence. You can move the Hand around with the mouse. To activate most objects, click on them. To pick some things you can right click on them. The Norns can see your hand, and will learn to like or dislike it according to your actions! The Hand is an example of an Agent (see below). Norns cannot be picked up, but they can be lead around by the Hand if you right click on them. 2 Agents Agents are objects in the world. All objects in the world, be they plants, insects or doors, are agents. Many agents perform actions. Creatures can trigger many agents without your help. Some agents, however, are purely designed for your use - you interact with all agents using the Hand. This particular agent is a lift button. Left click on an agent to activate it. 3 A Creature Creatures are different from other agents in your world. They are still agents, but they have their own unique brain structures, biochemistry and genes. They can learn and adapt to new situations, in much the same way we do. 4 Currently Selected Creature A little red arrow hovers above the currently selected creature. The camera will scroll to follow this Norn around, and a picture of its head will appear in the HUD (see below). Note that you may also see a little green arrow. This shows what the currently selected Norn is looking at. 5 Heads Up Display (HUD) This shows the head of the currently selected creature, its name and gender. It also has a button for Agent Help (see below). If you have more than one creature and press the TAB button repeatedly, you'll cycle through all of your creatures and this information will change. You can click on various parts of the HUD to perform different actions. 3 4 Click on the face to centre the display on the selected creature. Click on the name to open up the Creature History dialogue which allows you to name your creature. You can also take photographs and add text with this dialogue. You can open the same dialogue by clicking on a creature when in Agent Help mode (see below). Click the hand icon to enter Agent Help mode (see below). Click the button to toggle your online/offline status. This connects/disconnects you to the Creature Labs server, you will still need to connect/disconnect to your usual internet service provider. 6 User Interface Components There are three 'menus' in Creatures Internet Edition: the Creature Menu, Options and the Inventory. Clicking on one of these tabs will open the menu. Clicking on it again will close the menu. Creatures Menu The Creature Menu allows you to see a summary of all of your creatures and their names. 1 2 3 1. You can click on a creature face in this menu to make it the selected creature (note the red arrow in the menu that floats above the head of the selected creature). 2. If you have more than 6 creatures in the world then they will be shown 6 at a time, use the left and right arrows to scroll through the list of creatures. 3. Finally, there are Import and Export buttons (see section 7.2) . Options Menu Playing in the Capillata alone or docked to the Ark, you'll see all these options! 5 6 7 8 9 V / III — -,-r 12 13 14 1. Press the quit button to bring up the Exit Game dialogue. You will be asked to confirm this, and the game will then save. Pressing the ESCAPE key has the same effect. 2. Press the pause button to pause/resume your current game. Pressing the PAUSE key has the same effect. 3. Pressing the about button will bring up a dialogue with information about your version of Docking Station, copyright information and a list of credits. 4. Press this button to toggle the game between full screen and window mode. Pressing ALT+ENTER has the same effect. 5. Toggle between Sound Effects and Music. This button is used in conjunction with the volume control below and allows you to choose which aspect of the sound system you wish to alter. 6. Clicking on this bar will alter the volume level for the aspect selected with button 5 above. Clicking on the bar when it is full will take it to the lowest level of volume, at all other times it will increase the volume by a notch. 7. Turns the sound effects on or off. 8. Turns the music on or off. 9. Turns the creature voice effect on or off. 10. Alters the maximum number of creatures allowed on your ship. You will need to enter a numerical value. 11. Alters the breeding limit for the Norns. Once this limit is reached Norn eggs will stop hatching until room has been freed up. You will need to enter a numerical value. 12. Name the hand. Click here and enter the name you wish the Norns to know you as! 13. Toggles hand colouring mode. The two modes are default and tinted. 14. Alters the coloration of the Hand if you are in tinted mode. There are three buttons corresponding to red tint, green tint and blue tint. Setting the colour is achieved by adding the required amounts of red, green and blue. ■ Options Menu Creatures 3 uses a simplified version of the options menu and when un-docked you will see a limited subset of the above. Inventory Your inventory is a little in-game box you can use to carry things as you move around the station. This is handy for storing machines, food or the other bits and pieces you may need on your daily Norn care rounds. 7 Life Events These show key events that have occurred to your population of Norns, such as pregnancy, birth, and death. If you click on one of them, you will clear that event and zoom to the place where the event occurred, or the creature it occurred to. Pregnancy This is the Life event for a pregnancy. Clicking on the icon will take you to the expectant mother. Egg Laid This is the Life event for an egg being laid. Clicking on the icon will take you to the egg. Birth This is the Life event that signals the hatching of a creature from an egg. Clicking on the icon will take you to the creature who hatched. Death This is the Life Event that signals the death of a creature. Clicking on the icon will take you to the place the creature died. Warning Icons These warnings are used to inform you of important events between your world and others in the warp. Lor example, if a creature arrives in your world from somewhere else then a warning icon will appear here. Other warnings include things such as a friend coming online or a message arriving. Click on the icon to clear it and deal with the cause of the warning. Arrival in Containment Chamber This signals that a creature has arrived in your Containment Chamber. Click on this to be taken to the chamber. Arrival through a Portal This signals that a creature has arrived through a portal. Click on this to be taken to the creature in question. © Message Arrived This signals that a you have received a message from someone! Click on this to be taken to the Comms area. Chat Arrived This signals that you have a received a message in your chat window. Friend Online This signals that one of your friends is currently online. This warning will appear whenever you go online, or if they come online (providing you are online too!). Friend Offline This is very similar to the Friend Online warning above. This signals that one of your friends is currently offline. This will appear whenever you go online, or if they go offline (providing you are online). Online Click here to go online. Keyboard Shortcuts There are several keyboard shortcuts that you can use to help you control your game: TAB: Cycle between your creatures. ESC: Exits the game. This will show a confirmation dialogue so you can be sure you did wish to quit. The game will automatically save.Fl: Toggles Agent Help on or off. F6 - F12 Speech Hot-Keys. You can set specific phrases to each of these six keys by typing in the appropriate phrase, and pressing shift and that Function key simultaneously. From then on, pressing that Function key will repeat that phrase. CTRF + While holding down CTRF (the control key), press the S key. This will repeat the last phrase you S typed. INSERT Force tickle. While holding down this key, any click on a creature will be interpreted as a tickle, and reward the creature. DELETE Force slap. While holding down this key, any click on a creature will be interpreted as a slap, and punish the creature. If you just type on the keyboard, a speech bubble will appear. This is how you communicate with your creatures. Type a sentence such as 'eat fruit', and every creature in earshot will hear it. As long as they understand the words, they'll consider performing that action. If you wish to address a sentence to a single Norn, you can prefix the sentence with the creature's name: so 'Alice eat fruit' will be directed to the Norn named Alice. If you bring up a speech bubble by accident, press the backspace button a few times until it disappears. 2.6 Using the World Switcher Whenever you exit the game or restart it after the first time, you'll be presented with the World Switcher. The game lets you have more than one world in which to play. These are kept totally separate, so if several people in your family are playing, they can each have their own world and creatures. The first time you run the game, you are asked to name your initial world. After that, you'll be presented with a list of all the worlds that you have and you'll get the option of which to load: 1 . List of worlds This is a list of all of the worlds that you have created. Click on the button next to the name to select it. You need to select a world in order to load it, delete it or protect it with a password. Double clicking on a world will select it and load it automatically. 2. Load a world Click on this to start with the currently selected world. 3. Password protect a world You can optionally give a world a password. If you try and load a world that has a password, you will need to enter the password in order to play it. Don't forget your password! 4. Delete a world If you've finished with a world, you can delete it by selecting it and clicking on this button. Remember: If you delete a world, it is gone forever along with all of the creatures that were in it! If you chose a password for your world, you'll need to enter it in order to delete the world. 5. Create a new world Click on this to create a new world. You'll be asked to enter a name for your world, and if you have Creatures Internet Edition installed, you can choose to play either with just Capillata, or with Capillata docked onto the Shee Ark. The text beneath the central button will inform you which version you have chosen. 6. Exit the game Clicking on this will exit the game and return you to your desktop. The Docking Station world switcher uses icons to help you identify which worlds are standard Docking Station worlds and which ones are docked with the Creatures 3 Ark. 3. The Six Step Guide to your first Norns Step #1: Name your Norns! Norns can be named using the Agent Help facility or by clicking on their name in the HUD. Press FI or click on the Agent Help icon on the HUD (at the top left of the screen). The hand object will change to show a question mark. Selecting Agent Help by using the HUD. Pressing FI will toggle help on/off. Now right-click on the Norn you wish to name. A window will open that lets you see all sorts of information about that creature, including major life events (birth, pregnancy, etc.), a photograph album and general information: Click in the name box and type in the name for your creature. ■ pclsiffifekrid Ifegatevoipliomis tokMntodddsndfethoy dasehvailtbeQS earn that toucAii^bufelhe arbaduMng to do. Likewise, when they eat, they y're hungw, they'll go looking for food. HVk I close the window by clicking on the round close button |^~v|b mt ahehtdp right .1 If sy ptoc hsk hyi rdra drdmguaie spmm h j ryp u' 11 n a Norn's nose or head,|Mii|l heaiyci)littte(Xil£itehingiMeiLsM)»sryora feldisjpfayTft rn, and make her feel happier and more relaKEdathikdwisapwlteyDgoamN or dangerous, you can click on her bottom to give her a light slap. Ke®oard Tip Trying to click on a particular part of a moving creature can be tricky! If you hold down the INSERT key the reward 'angel' appears and you can safely click anywhere on a creature to reward it with a tickle. Similarly, if you hold down the DELETE key the punishment 'devil' will appear and anywhere you click on a creature will be a slap. Later on,when you've taught your Norns to speak, you can dispense with the physical contact and tell them about right and wrong by speaking to them (see Step #3). Step #3: Teach them to Talk! Norns can learn a simple language that lets them communicate with you and with each other. In most cases, this takes the form of subject-verb-noun sentences along the lines of "Melanie eat food". Norns are also able to express their current need, so you may also see creatures saying things like "Melanie very tired". This helps you to identify what is the biggest issue for a creature and help them accordingly. You can teach your Norns to speak in several ways: Naming agents Norns cannot distinguish between every single item on the station For instance, they cannot tell a Yarn fruit from lemons - to a Norn, they're both just 'fruit'. All agents on the ship fall into different categories. All edibles for example, are either seeds, fruit or food, to find out the Norn name for an agent, click FI (or use the HUD) to switch Agent Help on, then left click on the agent you wish to find the word for. The Hand will speak the name of the agent, teaching you and any nearby Norns the word for that agent. The Norns might not get the word right straight away, and you may have to click a few times on the agent to get them word-perfect. The appendix contains the complete list of category names available to a Norn. Clicking on an object to name the category Naming actions and feelingsAs well as being able to learn the names of objects, Norns can also express their current emotional state, or declare their current action. These words are slightly more difficult to teach to a Norn, since you can't point at a 'Sad' and tell a Norn to learn the word for it. The Shee, therefore, created learning devices for instructing creatures in language skills. > On the bottom floor of the Meso room, at the far right, is the Holistic Learning machine. This can only be activated by the Norns themselves, although you can draw their attention to it by clicking on the keyboard, and once activated it picks them up in a glow of light and teaches them every word they need. There are two methods of language teaching on the Ark. The first is the Learning f .A Room, which is located just above the egg laying machine. The learning room contains a vast machine specifically designed to teach creatures how to speak. You can get a creature into this room by clicking on the door when they are standing next to it. The learning machine looks like this: 5 1 . Power buttonClicking on this button will switch the learning machine on and off. 2. Word typeThese buttons switch between the two categories of words from this machine: feelings and action words. 3. Change wordThis will change the word you're currently teaching. Just as with agent categories, it may take several attempts before a creature learns it correctly. 4. Auto teacherThe learning machine can be switched into automatic mode, where it cycles through each and every word in the machine continuously. This is a good way of teaching Norns to talk while you do something else. 5. Cheese machineThe cheese machine provides your Norn students with something to eat while they are learning. 6. Exit doorThis door is the exit to the Learning Room and will return you to the Norn Terrarium. The Stone of Knowledge The third way Norns can learn to speak is by finding Stones of Knowledge, such as the one to the right. There are several of these scattered around the spaceship, and when a Norn activates one it will impart all sorts of words directly into the creature's brain. Stones of knowledge are very handy short cuts for teaching - once you've located them! Talk to your Norns! Once you've taught them the words, you're ready to communicate with them. To talk to creatures, move your hand object near to them (so that they can hear you!), and just type something! Press your Enter button when you're done, and the sentence will be spoken out. If you wish to talk to lots of creatures at once, then use a sentence without a creature's name. If you wish to direct something at one particular Norn, just use her name (i.e., "eat food" will be heard by every Norn within hearing range, but "Alice eat food" will only be heard by the Norn called Alice). Here are some examples of things you may wish to do: Attracting their attention to an agent To do this, just type in the name of the agent category you wish them to look at. You can also do this using the "look" word, e.g., "look food", or "Bob look machine". Finding out what they’re doing Type "what". A creature may respond with something like "Melanie approach food" which would indicate that the Norn called Melanie is trying to walk towards some food. Finding out why they’re doing it Type "express". A creature may respond with a sentence like "Lucy hungry". Asking them to do something Typical instructions to a creature might be sentences like "Alice eat food", "Jennie approach machine", or "Dilbert push door". Tip - What category is this agent? If you're not sure what category an agent is, and you wish to use it in a sentence, simply switch Agent Help on, and left click on the agent in question. Its agent category will then be spoken (and as an added bonus, any creature in hearing range will be reminded of the word!). Norns and their actions: Push Pull Approach Retreat Hit Get Drop Yes No Look Perform an action on an agent. Pushing a cheese machine will cause it toproduce a lump of cheese Perform an action on an agent. This is similar to push, but usually has a different action on an agent (Pushed elevators will go up, pulled oneswill go down) Walk towards an agent Walk away from an agent Hit an agent. This is mostly useful for encouraging Norns to defend themselves against Grendels Pick up an agent Drop the agent you are carrying Another way of rewarding the creature for the action it has just taken.Works the same as tickling the creature on the nose Another way of punishing the creature for the action it has just taken. This works the same as slapping the creature Look at an agent Eat Eat something Express State current desires and needs Happy Similar to express - this will ask creatures how they are Left Travel towards the left Right Travel towards the right What Asks what a creature is doing Rest Encourages a creature to take a rest. If a creature is really tired, it may sleep, but that depends on whether it has more pressing things to worry about! Keyboard Tip You will find yourself typing certain phrases fairly often so it is a good idea to set up some shortcuts that will allow you to say that phrase with a single key press. You can assign the phrase you have just said to a shortcut by holding down the SHIFT key and pressing one of the function keys F6 to FI2. For example, type the sentence 'eat fruit' and press RETURN. Hold down SHIFT and then press F6. Now, whenever you press F6 the Hand will say 'eat fruit'. Creatures will build up relationships with other creatures, so you may see your creatures expressing how they feel about each other. Creatures remember whether interactions with other creatures were positive or negative, but don't worry - enemies won't stay enemies forever! You can find out what one creature feels about another by asking it. For example, type "Bob like Lucy" or "Bob hate Lucy" and Bob may respond with whether he likes or hates Lucy. Tip - Norns learn off each other! Norns learn off each other! If you have a baby Norn that does not know how to speak, you'll see it gradually pick up language from the creatures around it. If you're not careful, and a baby gets trapped by Grendels, you may find your Norns speaking in Grendel language. Also, you'll note that Norns can communicate what they've learnt, so you may see a sequence like this: Laura: "Laura hungry for starch" Bob: "Maybe eat seed, Laura" In this instance, Bob has suggested to Laura that eating a seed is a good way of dealing with her hunger for starch. Even baby Norns will make suggestions to their elders, although theirs will probably be based on instincts, rather than life experience. A creature gives advice if it feels it has been in the same situation and knows what helped it resolve that desire. If a creature has no idea how to help it will stay quiet, but that doesn't always mean that the ones that are speaking are right! Step #4: Breed Them! Once you've taught them some basic language, and you're dealing with the moment-to-moment care such as providing food or entertainment for your Norns, you can work towards having your first baby Norn. Norns are usually fertile after about 45 minutes of life. This varies because each creature is slightly different. You can use Agent Help to find out which life stage your Norns are at. 9 Lucy - Female Norn Alive •Vi V • 1 ^ j h i • ‘ \ -.-.j Name: Lucy Birthday: 28 Sep 1999 08:53 Age: Adolescent, 32 mins Description: Generation l My cute baby Norn!; When Norns are fertile, they release pheromone chemicals that other creatures can detect. Mating is a strong instinct for them and usually they'll breed without your help. However, you can certainly speed the process along by encouraging the males to be next to the females at the right time! Likewise, if a creature uses the "push" action (see the word list table in step 3, above) on another creature, that can trigger the breeding action. Try saying "push norn" to a bunch of adult creatures and see what happens! You'll know when they breed, as you'll hear a long Kissssss-pop sound. Lucy is just over half an hour old and is adolescent - almost ready for her first baby! Females will not always become pregnant after mating, as it depends on where she is in her hormone cycle. If she does become pregnant, then you'll see a Pregnancy event appear on the HUD at the top left of the screen. Clicking on this event will take you directly to the creature that is pregnant. Stegosaur When she lays her egg (after about 10 minutes), an egg event will appear. Clicking on this will take you directly to the new egg. You can either hatch this egg yourself in the incubator, or just wait for it to hatch in the wild. In the screenshot on the right, the egg and gender symbols next to the dates for each event in a creature's history can be clicked on. Clicking on one of these symbols will take you directly to the appropriate creature, so you can easily find out information about a child or parents. Step #5: Care for them! Your Norns have a complex internal biochemistry. This includes an immune system that attempts to fight off infections from bacteria. Generally speaking, a well fed, well looked after Norn will enjoy good health for most of its life. However, there are hazards out there the novice Norn breeder should be aware of: • Infection and Disease • Poisoning • Starvation Just like our world, the Creatures universe is full of bacteria. They float around the place, and mutate even more than your creatures do. If a Norn comes into contact with bacteria they may become infected. Although Norns can fight off most infections, some can be deadly, and it is always best to check on the health of your Norns regularly. Poisoning can happen as a result of eating spoiled food, bacterial infection, or even ingestion of something nasty in someone else's world. Norns can also starve if not fed over a long period of time, especially if they get distracted by other Norns, or are suffering from some other malady. The treatment for this is simple: isolate them, and get them to eat something. However, don't lose hope if you have a sick Norn (or even a ship-wide epidemic!); there are powerful medical tools available on both the Capillata and the Ark. Medical Equipment On the Ark there is a dedicated medical bay situated on the ship's bridge. This will require you to explore the world a little. Medical Bay To use the medical bay, first you have to lock the creature into the medical pod and activate the screens. Use Agent Help to find out the details on each object if you're not sure. To lock a creature into the medical pod, get her to stand next to it and click on the pod. You may need to open the pod first (also by clicking on it). Once inside, click the flashing blue light at the upper left to activate the Chemical Analysis Screen. me vre beop Health Short Term digestive Respiratory Long 1 erm digestive Female Reproductive Male Reproductive flttm u :Q j L'O 1 f 1 .. .|] * if You can look at all sorts of information and monitor the chemical concentrations in a creature's bloodstream. Chemical Analysis Screen - This screen includes two modules: the Chemical Graphing module allows you to graph groups of related chemicals at one time. The Chemical Injection module allows you to inject a wide range of chemicals into the creature in the pod. Some chemicals in the Injection Module can be extremely dangerous to a Creature. Clicking on the Flashing blue light on the floor below the Medical Pod will bring up the Disease and Injury Screen. Disease and Injury Screen - This screen allows you to find out how injured or diseased a creature is. There are a few different displays on this screen including: Heart Beat, Injury Level, Bacteria Detection, and Toxin Detector. Only the strongest Toxin is displayed. If you need to identify all toxins in the Creature as soon as possible it is recommended you use the Single Chemical Graphing Gadget and cycle through all the toxins. Right-clicking on the Disease and Injury Screen while Agent Help is selected will bring up some helpful tips on curing common ailments. Heart Beat; Strong Injury Level: 0 Bacteria Detected No Toxin is Detected Use this screen for a quick look at your Creature's health Also in the medical bay you'll find several other useful objects that you can either connect to other agents (see "Connecting agents and Blueprints") or carry around in your inventory just in case you need to administer or diagnose a problem in a hurry. Activating Agent Help and clicking on any object will provide detailed instructions as to its use, but following is a brief overview of some of the most helpful machines. Single Chemical Graphing Gadget - You need to connect this graphing tool to the Numeric Output Tool via the input port in order to control which chemical is being graphed. Without it, energy (chemical 34) is graphed by default. As chemicals are plotted, they send out a signal via its output port. This signal is the amount of the chemical (from 0 to 1.0) multiplied by 255. So for example, if you were graphing the Energy (34) chemical in an Ettin and the current level of that chemical was 0.529 the gadget would send out a signal of 134.895. You will see a small blue egg floating at the top left of the creature currently being graphed. Anti-bacteria spray - This spray is not a cure-all spray, but is a good way to get rid of the bacteria which can attach themselves to your creatures. Antigen Detector - Antigens can be introduced into the bloodstream of a creature from a bacterial infection. The Antigen Detector identifies antigen infection as well as the severity of the infection. Antigen infections can only be cured by the creature's immune system so infected creatures should be kept well fed and rested. Medicine Maker - This machine creates a variety of potions for your creatures. Click on the text display or the arrow button to change the potion selection. Click on the red button to create the currently selected potion. This machine has a bioenergy limit. Below are a few of the most useful potions: Goutjh Syrup Potions Heavy Metal Cure - Creatures with a high degree of heavy metals in their systems are highly susceptible to organ damage in their immune and reproductive systems. These creatures could have great difficulty in fighting diseases and may become unable to reproduce. This potion contains EDTA, which is a useful medicinal chemical that neutralises the effects of heavy metal build-up. ATP Decoupler Cure - ATP decoupler breaks down ATP (an important chemical involved in the release of energy from food) into ADP, causing imbalance in the regulation of the creature's bloodstream which in time can leave a creature devoid of energy. This potion contains a chemical which is able to break down ATP decoupler toxin. t Anti-oxidant Syrup - Some bacteria can quickly poison a creature with carbon monoxide, breaking down oxygen in the bloodstream of the creature. Anti-oxidant Syrup is the best way to stop the effects of carbon monoxide poisoning. Cyanide Cure - Other bacteria poisons a creature with cyanide. Cyanide is a fast-acting poison that breaks down energy and can stop the creature's heart beating. This cyanide cure contains sodium thiosulphate which neutralises cyanide almost instantly. Cough Syrup - Cures coughs and sneezes. It contains Antihistamine which breaks down Histamine A & B in the bloodstream. Elixir of Arnica - Glycotoxin breaks down glycogen leaving your creature quite cold and unhealthy - if not treated in time it can cause death. It can also cause damage to the liver anabolic organ. Arnica is the only known cure for a glycotoxin poisoning. General Cure - This extremely useful potion can cure many different illnesses, all from one bottle. It is quite a weak solution, so you may need to use a few bottles in order to cure anything completely. It can cure [J Histamine A & B, cyanide, carbon monoxide, ATP decoupler, heavy metals and glycotoxin poisoning. In case of serious toxic poisonings use the stronger specific potions. Vitamin Potion - Keep your creatures happy and healthy with this Vitamin Potion. Contains Vitamins C & D which maintain strength and vitality. Once you've got the hang of connecting agents together to make bigger machines (see Section 4.1 ), you can automate the entire process of medical care by plugging a medical scanner into the emergency medical teleporter so that ill creatures are automatically teleported right to the medical bay! HoverDoc The HoverDoc is a Shee constructed creature, capable of diagnosing all known Norn diseases, and suggesting a cure. Simply pick up the HoverDoc, and place it near one of your Norns. It will wake up, and give you an idea of the creature's emotional state. By clicking on the blue slide-out panel, you can also check for bacteria, poisons, or get a detailed read out of the Norn's emotional state. The Containment Area The containment chamber is where new Norns arrive on your station, and acts as quarantine for new creatures. However, you can also place any of your creatures in there to check their state of health. The workshop display screen will give you more technical chemical information on your Norn's digestion than HoverDoc, but otherwise is capable of much the same things. Mora __l i v This is a female adult Ettiiv She is bored and needs to Find some toys % to play ujth. You can normally tell a creature is sick because they will not act normally. Watch out for the following signs: • Sneezing • Coughing • Shivering • Lying down and making groaning noises • Complaining about being too hot • Complaining about being in pain When a Norn contracts a bacterial infection, bacteria cling to them, bringing misery and disease. These bacteria are infectious, and can pass on the disease to another Norn if it comes too close to the infected Norn. There are some simple steps you can take to cure an infection: • Keep the Norn warm • Make sure it is well fed • Keep it away from healthy Norns • Use the bacteria detection and removal sprays produced by the HoverDoc or the Containment Area • The HoverDoc will be able to tell you how to combat any bacterial toxins left in the Norn's blood stream This also generally applies to hurt or poisoned creatures. 'Doing the rounds' regularly with the HoverDoc - checking each Norn's health - is a good way to have a healthy population of Norns. Step #6: Give them a good Burial! Eventually, your Norns will die. The natural life span of an average Norn is about 7 hours. This varies depending on how your creature has been cared for. Remember that they can die early of infection or injury, or even starve to death. There are some dangerous plants and animals out there - some of which can strip a Norn to the skeleton in just 30 seconds. When a Norn dies, you'll get a death event appear. You can click on this to go to the spot where your Norn died. You can also go to the crypt to register the death. The crypt is located above the learning room door. You can enter this any time to look at previous creatures that have died as well as to register new deaths. When you decide to register a creature's death, you have the option of selecting a photograph and writing a few words to remember them by. 4. The world and everything in it This section will give you a tour of both spaceships included with Creatures Internet Edition. 4.1 The Ark The spacecraft was designed many centuries ago by the ancient race of Shee, to carry themselves and their genetic creations (including the Norns and Ettins) to a new, spherical planet. Their previous home was called Albia, which was a strange disc shaped world with very little space to build on. The Grendels were stowaways and caused all sorts of havoc when they appeared in the Jungle Terrarium. The Shee abandoned ship and went down to the surface of their new planet-leaving the Norns and Ettins alone to fight the Grendel onslaught. The ship itself consists of four large terrariums, each housing a particular set of species. Connecting these together is a central corridor with a bridge and engineering section at each end. Key to terrarium symbols: Ettin Terrarium Aquatic Terrarium Engineering Bridge Jungle Terrarium Norn Terrarium Bear in mind that as well as the main doors from the central corridor, there are all sorts of other doors that offer shortcuts to get from one terrarium to another. These can also be used by the Grendels to mount sneaky attack missions on your Norns and their eggs! Each of the four terrariums houses a unique set of plants and animals. There is nothing preventing you from moving them between terrariums, but bear in mind that piranha in the aquatic terrarium could eat all the other fish before you know what has happened because they have no natural predators. Tip - Something is now extinct! And I liked it! What do I do? You'll find seed and egg launchers in each terrarium that will allow you to produce new plants and animals! Each one is different, but here are a couple of examples to help you along: This seed and egg launcher can be found in the Ettin Terrarium. Click on the green buttons to see what living thing is produced! Seed and Egg Launcher (Ettin Terrarium) This rather scary looking device is the seed and egg launcher in the Jungle Terrarium. You may not want to click on this at all, for fear of what might come out! Seed and Egg Launcher (Grendel Terrarium) The Norn Terrarium This is a safe, relatively friendly area where your Norns are hatched. There is enough food here to successfully bring up and breed your Norns. Here are some of the inhabitants and machines that you'll find in the Norn Terrarium: Crypt entrance This is the entrance to the crypt. When your Norns die, you can create a headstone for them in here. Click on the stone door to enter the crypt. The crypt entrance is right above the learning room entrance. Learning room entrance This is the entrance to the learning room, where you can teach your creatures to speak. It is directly above the egg laying machine, and just to the right of the incubator where you hatch eggs. Dragonfly Dragonflies flit around feasting on any insect that passes by, lounging on plants and mating. Once they have mated the females will find a nice spot at the pond and drop their eggs into it. Bees A Bee, as you may know, is quite busy. It will leave the hive, look for flowers and bring back nice, sweet nectar. Don't be misled by its cute appearance though! If a bee is tormented it will chemically call for back up before giving its tormentor a vicious sting. Then, any nearby bees will home in on its attacker. The Jungle Terrarium Originally designed to hold all the vicious, nasty plants and creatures that the Shee didn't want mixed with the others, this was an ideal home for the stowaway Grendels to live in. A Grendel mother lives here, occasionally laying eggs. If any of your Norn eggs go missing, this is definitely the place to look! You'll find all sorts of dangerous things here, from the piranha to the swarming wasps with all sorts of nasty invisible bacteria floating around. Be warned! Piranha A ferocious fish that can strip a creature of flesh in less than a minute. Keep well away from these guys if you like your bones on the inside. Wasps This insect will feed on fruit and is generally solitary. However, if it is picked on it will repeatedly sting its attacker and call other wasps into the battle. Mossie Fly Avoid this little pest! He has a nasty bite and will follow your creatures around. Train your creatures to ignore its incessant whining, and whatever you do make sure they don't try and pick them up or poke them. Rocklice An evil beast that eats insects by burying into the ground and grabbing anything that passes by. It sleeps underground too and can walk, jump and generally be very nasty. The Aquatic Terrarium Albia's oceans were always rich in life. Some of the tropical fish were the Shee's greatest creations, so they allocated a whole terrarium and filled it with marine life. Handle fish Handle fish enjoy swimming with each other, but will move towards food when they are hungry. Handle fish only eat the seeds of the Gumin Grass plant and without certain chemicals found in this seed the handle fish population would soon dwindle down to nothing. Should you ever find you have run out of handle fish, you can create more handle fish eggs by activating the fish egg launcher. You can find the fish egg launcher in the dark, damp rooms between the Eastern and Western marine areas. Rainbow Sharklings The attractive coloration of the rainbow sharkling tends to deceive other underwater creatures into thinking they are among friends - but this sharkling is a fierce and hungry beast of the deep! Rainbow sharklings take great pleasure in consuming fish of all types, and have even been known to take a bite or two out of any underwater Norns, Ettins or Grendels! It is rumoured that the rainbow tint of these sharklings can mutate over time - which means you could end up with all sorts of coloured sharklings - providing they are kept well fed! Clown fish This is a clown fish. Clown fish enjoy swimming with each other, and will move towards food when they are hungry. Clown fish only eat the colourful aquamites and if they cannot find a stable source of aquamites the clown fish population would soon dwindle down to nothing. Should you ever find you have run out of clown fish, you can create more clown fish eggs by activating the fish egg launcher. Fish egg launcher This is a fixed position fish egg launcher. Press the flashing yellow button to turn the power on, then click on the screens to choose a fish species and also how many eggs of that fish you want to make. To get the fish splurter to make the eggs, click on the flashing light blue button. The eggs will be splurted into the fish nursery - to get them out of there you will need to open the circular doors at the end of either subaquatic tunnel. The Ettin Terrarium The Ettins love hot, dry deserts. This desert comes complete with a volcano machine that you can automate using connecting agents if you wish to! If you want, you can design a machine that will make the volcano erupt when a Grendel appears by attaching a creature detector to the volcano activate control. Volcano This is the dangerous Ettin Terrarium volcano. It will erupt occasionally itself, but can be triggered automatically if you wish. The hot rocks coming out can be very painful for your creatures, so watch out! Some of the animals in the Ettin Terrarium feed off the rocks. Automatic Volcano Eruption! This is a picture of the basement underneath the volcano. By attaching another agent to the erupt button on the volcano, you can make it erupt on command! In the above example, this volcano will erupt whenever a Grendel approaches. For added effect, move the detector to the floor above, right next to the volcano itself. Cacbana and Desert Grass The cacbana is perfectly suited to its desert environment because it requires no moisture to live. The only time water is important for the plant is when seeds are produced. The desert grass is a very heat-tolerant strain of grass that can be grown in extremely dry conditions. Gnarler This is the Gnarler, sometimes referred to by its ancient Albian name 'Hungarius Oscari'. The Gnarler was the result of a unique experiment in producing a lifeform who lived off inorganic matter. As a result the Gnarler eats rocks, or more specifically gains nutrients from the minerals covering the rock. Bridge and Engineering The Shee spacecraft has a collection of vast machines in engineering. These perform a number of tasks that you may find useful. They are: Replicator The Replicator allows you to make an exact copy of another agent. This is handy when you're trying to make a large machine out of connecting agents, but you're short of a part. So long as you've got one of them, you can make another using the Replicator. Creator The Creator is similar to the Replicator, except it creates agents from scratch. You can select a number of different things to create and then make them. Gene Splicer The Gene Splicer lets you splice two creatures together. It has two pods to lock creatures in and some controls to influence the genetic splicing operation. If you lock a Grendel in one pod, and a Norn in the other, you can even make your own half-Grendel half-Norn creatures! Connecting agents and blueprints Whilst playing on the Ark, you'll find lots of useful machine agents such as the creature detector and emergency medical teleporter. All of these agents can be connected together to make larger, more complicated machines. This is a powerful mechanism and there is no practical limit to what you can connect together or what you can achieve with your mega-machines. As an example, you could place a Norn smell emitter in the airlock. This would tend to attract Grendels to the airlock. In the airlock, you could have a creature detector agent set to detect Grendels and plug that into the airlock door. You've now constructed a machine that will automatically attract Grendels and then send them out of the airlock to their doom! Another example of a connecting agent would be connecting a medical scanner to the emergency medical teleporter. This could then detect ill creatures and send them straight to the medical bay. By using a creature detector in the medical bay attached to a radio transmitter, you could have all sorts of sirens and flashing lights go off all around the world to warn you that an ill creature has been detected and placed in medical. By making effective use of connecting agents, you can automate many tasks and set up large communication networks to defend your Norns against Grendels as well as keeping you updated on where your Norns are. The basics of connecting agents Step #1: Recognise the machines with ports Machines that can be connected together have an output port and an input port. These are the connectors that allow them to be linked. Output ports have little pins in the middle, so they're easy to recognise. Step #2: Locate your machines! In the Norn Terrarium, you'll find many machine agents that can be connected. Let us construct a simple machine that makes a light illuminate when you press a button. For this, we'll need a light box and a button. There are a few of these around the Norn Terrarium, so they're easy to find. Step #3: Connect an input to an output port To connect them, we click on the output port of the button. If you move the mouse around, you'll now see a dotted line that moves in the direction the flow would go. If this is moving away from the button, you've got the right one. If it is moving into the button, you accidentally clicked on the wrong port - so press the right mouse button once to cancel the operation and try again. Step #4: Finish the connection Now move the hand so it is over the input port of the light box, and click again. If you got it right, you'll now have a line between the two that animates to show direction of flow. Click on the button and you'll see the light illuminate! Congratulations, you've built your first machine. Tip - What does this do? Handle llsh This is a hfiftfPft ffth. HwidlC fJsll 1313rwj ^iMirruMf] ultft nnrJri other, iMit lull rntwr. tnuiSKMfc tcnii when Ihfcij am hiMi^rij. t-Eandln Fa 5 .li Milt) eat the sxeds oF the Cfmei ■Uraas frtant and wt hriiut certain chembcals Imjrd in this seed the lumdle Fish population sajitHI shot dandle douri ti> no-lhinifc. Shuirid ijuu ever Find yum HavA run out irf haftdta fiMh. you bdfl ci-eiitu mdre IWHIrJIa ft&J' Syfljt Ini activating the HhIs cwi laimcher. ¥011 oan find the fish eaa m the dark, damp rooms hrJUKen the and Hester* marine areas. Remember, if you're not sure what an agent does, press FI to switch on Agent Help and right-click on the machine! This dc'-'lce umH detect the [h-cseneH: jwfl nw OF # ■[wrtmiiJar (ijpr of et’i^ntum (tinrn, Oi'«del F [ ttinJ. OcJUuatc It bij ■pressiJHi the hutton nn the tatlDm lelt Dl the machine, then select the creafture iihju tush Id deled uitlt the hutton nn the ftoUum m|RiL nF the machine (ihe sulecteil creature mil Appear in the non dcrplaij). Hh&rt Lhe dotdCiS 41 I.:h' -:r I.n ri n\ mil mu&A if tillMrvrKi sound 3nil thh screrth ui Flash. Thfi dfiuine - r» tuis on inpoi and ■1« 0Ot|hll port. Thfl input purl mil tdaale the machine an or off, pnrt Ihn output port uaH output the Blueprints Once you've constructed your machine, you may wish to keep a reference of what you connected to what to allow it to be reconstructed another time. Likewise, you may even wish to send construction details of your machine to someone else so that they can make it too. You can do this using blueprints. You can make a blueprint of any machine you've constructed. It's simple to do, just select agent help (using FI) and right-click on any of the individual agents that are part of your connected system. At the top right of the window is a button to generate a blueprint, just to the left of the red close button. Click on this to produce a blueprint object, and after pressing this button, close the agent help window and you'll have your blueprint! If you click on the blueprint, you'll get a complete description of what you have to plug into what in order to make the machine. You'll also note the box that lets you type in a name for that blueprint and export it to your hard drive. This allows you to exchange blueprints with other Creatures Internet Edition users. When you save out a blueprint, it will go into your "My Agents" folder. You can find this in your home directory in the folder .creatures3 or .dockingstation, depending which game you are playing If you wish to be able to use someone else's blueprint, just copy it into your "My Agents" folder and use the Creator machine in Engineering (see 4.4) to import it into your world. If you take this blueprint to the Replicator agent in the spaceship's engineering section (see 4.1 ), you can even make all the parts you need in one go. If your machine contained fixed parts such as elevator call buttons or doors, then these will not be created by the replicator. Things you can connect together You'll notice connecting agent ports on many of the agents in the Ark, including doors, weather machines, egg launchers, trapdoors, airlocks and elevators. You could design a machine that opened a door for Norns, but not Grendels, or called elevators for Norns but not if a Grendel was in range. 4.2 The Capillata The Docking Station is a living space station, divided up into different sections with varying uses. It is designed to dock with the Shee Ark, the vast biological space ship built by the Shee to voyage to a spherical planet. Navigation around the space station is by two main methods: lifts or doors. Clicking on doors opens them, and lets through any nearby creatures. Creatures can only click on a door to open it by hand if their species is allowed through. This is to prevent any dangerous residents of your space station from wandering where they like (there are other species apart from Norns roaming in cyberspace - see Section 4.3) . Lifts enable creatures to get between floors in one area of a space ship. They have a call button, to summon them, and then can be pushed or pulled to move up or down. There are four main areas to the craft: Norn Meso Area This is the favourite area of the Norns, an area filled with lots of different food and many plants and animals, plus toys for bored Norns. Muco, the Egg Layer This biological machine acts as a repository for Norn DNA. It can lay a male or female egg of any creature it has a stored genome for. If you have Creatures Internet Edition, you will have a number of different breeds of Norn to choose from. Muco lays eggs directly into the incubating heat pan to its left. HoverDoc This little critter likes to follow your Norns around and monitor their health. To activate the HoverDoc drop it onto a creature and it will open up and produce a display. You can pick up the HoverDoc and drop it onto another creature if you want to monitor that one, or drop it on the floor to close it up. This first page of the HoverDoc shows you the name of the creature, its gender, its most pressing drive and what you can do to help the creature relieve its need. Clicking on the white arrow on the right of the HoverDoc allows access to more advanced pages, detailed below: Drives Display This page shows the state of each of the major drives that make up the well being of the creature. Around each drive icon is a powerbar that shows how pressing that drive is - the more the bar is filled in the more pressing the drive. The creature will be trying to reduce its drives as best it can but there is no harm in trying to help it! Bacteria Monitor This page scans the creature for bacteria and if any are found a close up image will appear in the centre display. The two buttons on this page release smoke - one kind will stain any bacteria that comes into contact with the smoke, while the other kind will kill any bacteria it touches. Toxin Control This page will scan the creature for the presence of harmful toxins in its bloodstream, and if any are found shows you which ones and their concentrations. Clicking on the green tick will provide clues as to how to help the creature recover from this toxicity. Fertility and Breeding This will graph the major chemicals involved in fertility and breeding. If the creature is female and pregnant the indicator on the top left will show this fact. You can increase or decrease the fertility of a creature from this page. Holistic Learning Machine This incredible device will teach your Norns their full vocabulary in just a few seconds. It seems to be a very pleasurable experience for the Norns, too. Empathic Vendor This food dispenser taps directly into your Norn's mind, reading their thoughts as to what they'd like to eat. It dispenses star seeds, yarn fruit, or peaking pie - all good nutritious foods. Peaking pie can even cure some forms of poisoning. You can also activate the empathic vendor using the Hand, creating whichever of the three foods you like. Pods When the lone Shee left Albia he took with him a selection of plants and animals that he had been experimenting on, some of them designed for creature care while others were simply to provide balance to life on the ship. All of these specimens were contained within protective pods. Unfortunately, during the launch many of these pods broke open and the inhabitants were released to roam free. There are five containment pods within the Meso: the Justanut pod, the lemon tree pod, the carrot pod, the Stinger pod and the Commedia pod. Justanuts are, well, just a nut. They're a good source of starch, while Lemons are almost the universal Norn medicine. Carrots are a nourishing food that is able to grow in the wild almost anywhere - as long as your greedy Norns don't eat them first! It is worth remembering that Capillata carrots have some medicinal qualities you will not find in the Shee Ark carrots. The Commedia is a jelly-like life form capable of changing its appearance into anything it fancies. It was created as an amusement for Shee and a distraction for inquisitive Norns! You can click on its pod to release it, or drop it back into the pod to re-contain it. Once near a Norn, it will change shape into something nearby, maybe even something microscopic. Commedia exists solely to please Norns, and the Norns in turn love to play with it. Stingers are a bit nastier - they'll form nests and sting your Norns. The Shee had some odd ideas of what creatures made good travelling companions. Luckily, the stingers are sealed in a pod, unless you choose to release them. If you get a bad infestation of stingers, your Norns may be able to help you get rid of them... Trappers The stinger's greatest enemy, and the Norn breeder's friend. The trappers love nothing better than three square meals of stinger a day, except perhaps six square meals of stinger a day. When very well fed, they release seeds - so, the more stingers you have, the more trappers you will get. Atrium The Atrium is the central area of Capillata. It contains doors to the other three areas of the station, and if your station is docked, it will also contain a lift that will transport your Norns through to the Ark. Comms Area This is the central command area for the station, an area where all the other areas can be spied on, and new items added to the ship through the Creator machine. Camera Displays Around the space station, you may have noticed little spinning metal gadgets that hang in mid-air. These are remote cameras, and can monitor everything happening in an area. There are six of these cameras, and they each have their own screen. The cameras can be picked up and moved by the Hand or dropped onto a creature. Cameras attached to a creature will follow that creature wherever it goes - until it dies or leaves your ship. In the Comms area, click on one of the screens to make it appear on the larger central screen - and control its movement using the cursor buttons that are on the right of the large screen. Each of the camera screens has a button on the frame that will jump you straight to the position of that remote camera. The Comms Computer This giant machine can perform a number of functions that will allow you to contact and communicate with other Norn breeders around the internet. The Comms Computer will be discussed at more length in Section 5. The Workshop The Workshop is the area of the ship in which the generally useful stuff is kept. Here, you'll find the portals used for Internet travel, plus the containment chamber that controls Norn's ingress and egress and monitors their health. Portal Dispenser This machine makes portals, which are doors to other worlds. It can also program them- giving them a name and a destination. When in programming mode, the portal dispenser 'borrows' the screen of the containment area to the right. Once a portal is made and programmed, Norns can wander freely between the connected worlds with no help from the user. If your Norn doesn't like you, maybe it'll decide to leave. Teleporter Base This is the central hub of the Capillata teleport system. There are three movable teleport pads: yellow, green, and blue. These can be picked up by the Hand, and placed wherever you wish. Once activated, these three teleport pads will transport a Norn back to the teleporter base. There are three button controls on the teleporter base, one in each colour to represent the three teleporter pads. Clicking on one of these will teleport the Norn onto the teleport pad of that colour. These can be very useful for providing quick movement around the ship, going from one pad to the base - and then onto a different pad. Training Dummy Got a Norn that does nothing but slap other Norns? This dummy appears to be another Norn to your creatures (Norns are sometimes not all that bright). When they perform an action on the dummy, a speech bubble will appear and tell you what action they performed. You can use it, along with slaps and tickles, to retrain a bad Norn for rehabilitation into Norn society. Clicking on the hat of the training dummy morphs it into one of the other species a Norn could run into (see Section 4.3) . Containment Chamber This is a little room inside a room, into which new arriving Norns appear. Within it, you can check over their health to make sure they won't do any harm to your present Norns, or send the Norn on again if you don't want it! You can find out more about the features of the Containment area in Section 5 . 4.3 Some visitors you may get The Shee created three main species during their time on Albia. In fact, they may have created more which haven't been discovered yet! Norns (Cyberlifeogenis Cutis) You don't know what a Norn is? Have you been reading this manual at all? Norns are cute loveable creatures, who love each other's company, and are very curious - in fact, they have a penchant for getting themselves into trouble. Grendels (Cyberlifeogenis Vicious) With all that cuteness and innocence packaged into the furry Norn the Shee had plenty of nasty material left over and the Grendels are the result! They carry disease, steal eggs, and like to find an innocent Norn and beat it up. Keep them away from your Norns if you possibly can! They can be seriously nasty and even though you can see some short-term improvement in their behaviour towards Norns if you train them, they often revert back to their animal nature. Ettins (Cyberlifeogenis Kleptomania) The Ettins were made to be workers, cleaners and caretakers. However, they have not been kept fully occupied during the long voyage from Albia and their idea of tidying is to remove everything not stapled down! They love hoarding machines of any kind, and can be a real pest at times. However, they are harmless to your Norns, if not very sociable. h You can use the doors in Capillata to keep Ettins and Grendels apart from your Norns, if you wish. Each door has three symbols next to it- one for each species. Clicking on a symbol will make it toggle between red and green. A green symbol means that species can pass, and a red symbol means that it cannot operate the door. Be warned, though- if you operate a door, all creatures will pass through it, regardless of species, if they are near enough! Tip - How do I breed Grendels and Ettins? You can use the Genetic Splicing machine in the Arc to create female Grendels and male Ettins. All of the initial Grendels are male, and the Ettins female, and egg laying machines will continue to create new eggs when the originals die. See 4.4 for an introduction to the Genetic Splicing machine. 4.4 Powering the Ships Chemical energy and recyclers The Replicator, Creator and Gene Splicer on the Arc work using the spaceship's chemical energy. When you use these machines, the chemical energy will drain away and take some time to recharge. Each machine has an indicator on it that shows the chemical energy level in that machine: Monitoring chemical energy Viewing a display of current energy levels There are two ways in which you can speed up the recharging rate: Recycle agents you no longer need Around the spaceship, you'll find several recycling machines. You can drop agents in these and recycle them back into chemical energy by clicking on the recycle button. Increase the efficiency of the machines Dotted around the spaceship are several agents that hold keys to upgrading the Replicator, Creator and Gene Splicer. They can only be activated by Norns. Use Agent Help to find out which machine will be upgraded when you find one and then encourage a Norn to push it. The machines start at 0% efficiency and can be upgraded all the way to 100%. The current efficiency for any machine is shown on the machine itself. L 1 The Replicator has been upgraded. It is now ap e rating at 39% efficiency. Tip - Hey, I found a key and it didn't upgrade a machine! You'll find some keys dotted around that activate other things, rather than upgrade the "big three" machines. Use Agent Help to find out what they will do! There is even one that will allow you to interact with the Grendels and Ettins more directly. Use the Capillata The Capillata when docked to the Ark helps supply the ship with bio-energy and enhancements. The Capillata was created at a later time to the Ark and the energy systems are much more efficient - so much so that there is energy to spare. You will find that when docked the Ark's machinery is now upgraded to full efficiency and bioenergy is kept topped up by Capillata! 5. Internet play Perhaps the most exciting feature of the Docking Station is its ability to link to other online Docking Stations to form a vast web of connected worlds, through which your Norns can travel at will. 5.1 Getting Started In order to connect to the Docking Station, you need an Internet dialup connection. If you can browse the web from your computer, you are capable of connecting to the Docking Station server! You must also have registered your product, as described in Section 1.5 , Installation. Each world you create will require you to connect to the Internet in order to check your registration, but from then on, you can choose to play online or offline as you wish. To switch between the two, press the little green button by the HUD display. When this button is bright green, you are connected. When it is dull green, you are playing offline. Pressing the button toggles between the two states. Note that each time you load a world it will be offline, regardless of whether you are connected to the internet or not - so if you find your friends don't seem to be online, check your little green button! 5.2 The Comms Computer This machine controls all your external communication. Below is an overview of the controls: 1 2 3 4 5 6 y illM h31J , r m (E.U'SL mij rirji'fij from Hrefcnake 2 unread ^ 2D/fc2/2i*l in ft [Hfiilo!) from Grendet ifour (nlios- ^ £0/(i£^-?GQl Select a message, and Itusd dick on the icon to view that message. 1 . Contact List This page displays a list of all the other players within the Docking Station universe that you have made contact with. You can see if they are online at this time (obviously you have to be connected yourself!) and classify them as a friend or as a foe. 2. Message Centre The message centre is where you can send messages, or view messages you have received. See Section 5 for more information. 3. Chat From this page you can start a chat session. See Section 5 for more details. 4. Agent Injector This section of Comms allows you to add expansion items to Docking Station. If you see no items listed on this page then you need to go and get some to download! Section 7 has more information on finding new items and injecting them. 5. Options This page gives you options to control the icons that will appear from time to time to inform you of special events. You can choose which warning icons to display and how many life events to show at one time. 6. Websites This page of Comms gives you access to important web resources for Docking Station. There are a few standard entries that will appear here: Docking Station Central, Creature Labs Support and Creatures Internet Edition information. If you have obtained additional agent files with web site information in them then these sites will be listed here too, this makes a handy list of all the sites you have obtained agents from! Handy Hint So you've got pages and pages of contacts and you decide you want to start a new world, but upon starting it you find your contact list empty! Help! Those two buttons on the left of the contact list allow you to export your current contact list, or import new contacts from a previously exported file. Managing Contacts Don't worry about accidentally pressing 'import' - it won't remove your existing contacts only add new ones from a previously exported file on your computer. Importing a contact list is much quicker if you are not connected to the Creature Labs server. Obviously, once you go online with the Docking Station, you'll be eager to get hold of your friends and show them your splendid examples of Nornhood. You'll need to put all the people you like talking to on your in-game contact list. This will enable you to send them messages, chat to them and send them Norns directly. The first time you receive a creature or message from a player, an entry will automatically be created in your contact book. Similarly, if you choose to send a creature into the warp using the 'any online user' contact then the recipient will be added to your contact book. If you want to add a particular user to your contact book, you'll need to go online and access the Docking Station website. Use the find user link to find your friend. Once you have found the person you're looking for, click on their profile, and then choose the link 'add user to my contact list'. This will add the person to your in-game contact list. If you are online at this point then the entry will appear in your contact book within a few seconds. If you are offline then it will appear the next time that you connect to the Creatures Labs server. Once someone is on your contact list, you can alter his or her status to neutral, friend, or enemy. You will be notified if someone on your friends list comes online or goes offline. Anyone friendly or neutral can send you Norns, but an enemy cannot send you Norns or talk to you at all. Making someone your lifelong friend (or enemy) is simple. Go into the Comms area of the station, and press the View Contacts button on the left-hand side of the main display screen. This will bring up a list of all your contacts, together with a little smiley face, showing what you think of them. Clicking on this face will cycle through the three possible states of the contact. Set each contact to what you wish it to be, and the game will save that person's status. Note that contact lists are unique to each world you create - so if you set someone to 'friend' in one of your worlds, they won't be a 'friend' in your other worlds until you set them to 'friend' there too. An exported contact list retains the status of your contacts, so when you import them they will still be classified as friends or foes. 5.3 Message System You can contact your online friends through Capillata's message system. There are two different communication agents on board the station - the chat agent, and the messaging agent. The chat agent allows you to talk to a person in real time online. The messaging agent can send messages to a single user for them to receive either right away, or if they are offline the next time they log on. The Chat Agent To chat to someone, you must have an entry for them on your contact list. Go to the Comms area, and press the Chat button. This will open up the chat agent. Choose who you wish to chat to, and click the green tick. This will then send them a chat request. They will be able to choose whether to accept or refuse this chat request within the next 60 seconds. If you get no reply, they are probably busy or away from their computer. If they accept, the chat window will appear. Type in the bottom box what you wish to say, and press return. The other person will receive your message within seconds. The Messaging Agent The messaging system works more like an ordinary email service. Press the envelope button next to the main screen, and then press the button to the immediate left of the screen that looks like a pen and ink-well. You must then choose a recipient. Just like in email, type a subject heading, then write the body of the message, and press the green tick to send it. Both the chat and messaging agents can be detached from the Comms screen and wander the ship with you. Press the bottom 'jigsaw' button to make the agent float, and it will stay on your screen. The shrink button above the jigsaw button neatly tucks the agent away so that you can see your Norns easily. 5.4 The Warp The warp is the mechanism by which creatures can travel from one player's world to another. Every creature that travels through the warp leaves behind it a trail that can be tracked from the Docking Station Central web site. From here you will be able to find the current location of any creature that has travelled, find out where it has been, what it was doing and if it has produced any offspring! Each warp creature, and their carer, is also entered into the league ratings on DS Central, with different statistics available for all to see. Warning! It is advisable you don't enter personal information into any of the text areas within Docking Station or Creatures Internet Edition. For example, writing your real name and address in the description section of Creature History is not a good idea if you are going to send this creature out into the warp! It could end up anywhere and will also be visible if people investigate the history of your creature. Sending and receiving creatures from the warp is a great way to expand your gene pool and you could find that your particular creatures are much in demand! Entering the Warp via the Containment Chamber There are two main ways for your Norns to travel to other online worlds. Both use the Warp - a subspace conduit through which your Norns are beamed as pure energy to wherever they are headed. The first route to the Warp is through the Containment Chamber in the Workshop area of Capillata. The Containment Chamber can be used to send and receive Norns from anyone in the world. By default, any Norns sent to your world automatically end up in the Containment Chamber for you to check over before entry into your world - such creatures are now classed as immigrants. You can use the medical facilities of the Containment Chamber to vet these new arrivals' health or administer aid. Chamber Sending Place your Norn into the Containment Chamber, and close the door by clicking on the lock icon between the screen and the chamber. Choose the 'Configure the Chamber' icon from the top of the screen and you will see a list of your contacts. Select the face of the creature from the display and click on the name of the person you wish to send the Norn to. Then click the left pointing arrow by the 'Send to' window to add them to that column. The Containment Chamber can only have one person specified in the 'Send to' column but portals are different (see next section ). You can't clone Norns by sending them to lots of people at once! Click the single green tick on the left of the screen to send the selected creature to the person specified in the 'Send to' column. Depending on the speed of your connection, the game may pause at this point until the Norn has been sent. someone by selecting theta- entry from the contacts list to the right and adding it to the •send to" column. When uou any on line user •send to* column. When you click the green single tick on the left that creature uiD be sent to the user specified. If you have an entry In the "send to" box and click the green double tick then aB creatures in the chamber uall be sent. V Angevin You can also choose to send your Norn to 'any online user'. The Norn will then be sent to any user who is online at that time. Once the creature has been sent the screen will display the name of the player the creature was sent to, and they will be added to your contact book for future use. Sending your Norn to 'any friend' only works if you have already have contacts you have classified as friends using the Comms computer. If you have a number of people classified as friends then the creature will be sent to one of these people randomly. They do not have to be online for you to use this option as the creature will be waiting for them next time they log on. Chamber Receiving By default, your Containment Chamber can receive Norns from any online user, but you can alter this to only certain people on your contact list if you wish. Select the contacts you want to receive from and add them to the 'Receive from' column. Immigration When you receive a Norn in the Containment Chamber you will receive a notification. Clicking this icon will take you to the Workshop screen. You can find out more about where your visitor came from by selecting the creature's face in the Workshop screen and clicking the immigration button. You can choose to either accept or reject this Norn using the single tick or cancel buttons at the left. Accepting the creature removes its status as an immigrant, while rejecting it, will send it back through the warp to where it came from. You are unable to open the door to the chamber while there are still immigrants waiting clearance to come in. From immigration mode you can either deal with creatures individually, by selecting their face and viewing the information before clicking the single tick, or you can grant access to everyone in the chamber by clicking the double tick. Using the Portals It is also possible to connect your world permanently to another person's, using the portal system. Unlike the Containment Chamber, portals are a method Norns themselves can use to cross between worlds. You cannot force a Norn through a portal - you have to ask them to 'push portal'. Of course, a Norn may decide itself to go through a portal without any pressuring from you! Portals, therefore, are both powerful and a bit dangerous. You may lose your favourite Norns through a portal if they simply don't like where they are. However, it does mean you can transport any Norn anywhere in your world without first directing them to the workshop area. You can have up to 10 portals in your world at any one time. To create a portal, go to the workshop area, and use the portal dispenser. You'll find the portal dispenser in the top left area of the workshop. Click the create button to make a portal - it will appear and tendrils from the device will wrap around it. Click the configure button, and the game will zoom to the workshop display screen. You can then choose how to set up the portal - who it will send Norns to, and who it can receive Norns from. Warning! Norns can enter your world at will through portals and bypass immigration - they will not arrive in the containment area, so you will not have a chance to check or reject them. However, an event icon will appear if a Norn warps into your world through an open portal. Setting a portal to receive from f any online user 1 makes your world utterly open to all other online worlds, and should be used with caution! You can choose more than one contact for the 'Send to' column and the final destination will be chosen at random when a creature activates the portal. Once a portal is programmed and named to your satisfaction, press the release button to remove the portal from the programming device. Clicking on this portal will now open it. If you are online and the receiver of the portal is also online, a blue Warp entrance will appear in the middle of the open portal. This portal is now active and ready to receive or send Norns wherever they wish to go. 6. Advanced Play This section is for players who want to know a bit more about the internal workings of the average Norn, and perhaps learn to understand some of those readouts a little better! If you're not interested in the more scientific side of the game, miss this chapter out. 6.1 The Genome and Creatures dDNA All creatures, be they Norns, Grendels, Ettins have genetic information in the form of Creatures Digital DNA, or dDNA for short. This controls everything about the creature - its internal biochemistry, appearance, even behaviour. If you took a Grendel genome, and gave it to a Norn, the Norn would, quite simply, become a Grendel. When an egg is laid in the game, a unique genome is created for that creature only. These are kept in the My Worlds/name of world/Genetics/ folder. You can find this in your home directory in the .creatures3 or .dockingstation folders. If you look in there, you'll see some incredibly long filenames, such as 001-haze-t4bgg-dzwur-efsuf-a5yl3.gen. This is one of your living Norn's genomes, saved to your hard disk. Finding out which of your Norns owns this particular genome is simplicity itself. Use Agent Help on your Norns, and turn to the advanced information page. This is the last page of the Norn agent help. There you'll see that the Norn's moniker is displayed - this is the filename of its genome. The genome of a Norn is also stored within the game- so if you switch the file names of the genomes of two of your Norns, you won't get them swapping all their characteristics. However, the genome files are used to make the Norn's offspring, so any babies will inherit the crazy mixed up genome you fiddled with! As you may be aware, humans have 46 different lengths of DNA in their genome. These are called chromosomes, and are each packed to the brim with genes and various other useful stuff. Norns have just a single chromosome - one continuous length of DNA. When two Norns breed, the baby Norn's DNA is a mixture of the two parent's. This is achieved by a process called crossing over. The two parental chromosomes are laid out side by side, and then they switch sections of DNA, so that you end up with two mirror image chromosomes. One is thrown away, and the other is kept for the baby. What happens if one of these cross-over points is in the middle of a gene? Well, more often than not, the gene is changed in some tiny way - it is mutated. Poss ib le. Mutations Father’s Genome Crossing-Over Between the Genomes Mother’s Genome Child's Genome This is why the genome of every Norn you breed is unique - the probability of a cross-over appearing in exactly the same place twice, and causing the exact same mutation, is very small, and that's only with the exactly same parents, anyway! 6.2 Digestion If you have played the game by now (nobody reads the whole manual before having a go at a new game, do they?), you will have noticed that Norns have three different forms of hunger: hunger for starch, hunger for protein, and hunger for fat. There are, indeed, three different food groups within the Norn's diet. A Norn should get a mixture of all of them to be healthy. The nutrition any individual Norn gets from its food depends upon its genes, but as a general rule, generation 1 Norns get starch and fat from seeds, protein and starch from fruit, and fat and protein from food items. It is important to realise that foods with fat in aren't 'bad'. Fat is just an important a source of energy as protein and starch. Once the Norn eats starch, fat or protein, they are broken down into smaller molecules - glucose, fatty acid and pyruvate respectively. These are then used to power all the Norn's actions, and used up in the process. However, if the Norn simply turned all food straight into energy, they would either collapse, or have to eat continuously, just to stay alive. Therefore, they store glucose, fatty acids and pyruvate as glycogen, adipose tissue, and muscle tissue respectively. As they expend energy, they use up these stores. As glycogen gets low, a Norn gets hungry for starch, as adipose tissue gets low, the Norn gets hungry for fat, and as muscle tissue gets low, the Norn gets hungry for protein. If a Norn is low in glycogen, they'll often lie down and groan. This is a good sign that your Norn has not been eating enough, and it's best to isolate them and give them a good feed. Female Norns that have laid a number of eggs often need isolating in this manner, to give them a chance to rest and eat! Fruit Food ■r * V Glucose * Pyruvate T G/m>gt J /7 Mac# Tissue Adipose Tissue Used up to make energy As a rule of thumb, a Norn with a high amount of glycogen, adipose tissue, and muscle tissue is a healthy, well-fed Norn. 6.3 Poisons and Antidotes Even a healthy Norn can fall foul of some of the nastier influences in the world, and one of these is poisoning. Many of the bacteria produce various toxins, and creatures can get ill from eating things that they shouldn't. For instance, detritus is really not a good diet for a Norn! It is also possible to have a Norn born with a mutation that results in chronic poisoning. Here is a list of all toxins, their effects, and the antidote: POISON EFFECT ANTIDOTE Heavy Metals Slowly destroys the immune system, and causes permanent infertility if not cured. EDTA Cyanide Slows down the Norn's mitochondria - the main energy producing organ. In large doses, can cause instant death! Sodium Thiosulphate Belladonna Slows down the mitochrondria, and upsets the Norn's emotional state and chemical regulation systems No cure - Belladonna slowly decays over time Geddonase Reacts with adipose tissue, removing it from the Norn's system Slowly decays over time Glycotoxin Reacts with glycogen, removing it from the Norn's system Arnica Histamine A Causes sneezing. Often a sign of illness Antihistamine Histamine A Causes coughing. Often a sign of illness Antihistamine Alcohol Found in fermented detritus. Affectsthe Norn's emotional state, and can cause long term damage to the liver. Dehydrogenase ATP Decoupler The nastiest poison there is, this stops any energy production in the Norn's body. Often causes instant death. Luckily, it is very rare Medicine One Carbon Monoxide Prevents uptake of oxygen during breathing Anti-Oxidant ' jSjSf iW If you wish to watch the effects of an antidote, or keep a closer eye on your poisoned Norn, take it to the Containment Chamber. Once sealed within the containment pod, click on the Norn's face in the view-screen above the pod, and then click on the red cross to the right of the main screen. This will activate the health scanning facility. Click on the bones symbol to access a graph of your Norn's toxins. 6.4 Immunity and Disease As if poisons weren't enough, there are bacteria floating around the ships that your Norns can catch disease from. These bacteria are capable of breeding and mutating, changing in numbers and disease severity over time. The symptoms of disease are highly varied, ranging from a mild infection that you won't even notice your Norns have had, to diseases that can kill in a few minutes. When a bacteria is infecting a Norn, it injects it with one of eight different antigens, named antigen 0 - antigen 7. Some of these antigens react with the Norn's biochemistry, producing toxins such as the histamines. All the antigens can affect long term health by causing withering of the Norn's internal organs. However, this only becomes a problem if a Norn has many infections during its lifetime, so don't panic! The antigens have a good effect, too. They stimulate the Norn's immune system to produce one of the eight antibodies, appropriately called antibody 0 - antibody 7. The bacteria themselves can also inject toxins into your Norn's bloodstream. If you find a Norn with an odd case of poisoning, the chances are it has had an infection at some point. Since the bacteria evolve, you never know what symptoms a disease will cause. 6.5 Fertility For many people, the objective of playing with Norns is to breed more Norns. A knowledge of the ups and downs of the Norn's hormonal systems is very useful for this. All Norns become fertile when they reach youth. In male Norns, fertility depends upon the testosterone chemical. The level of testosterone depends upon the Norn's age and general health. The larger the amount of testosterone, the more fertile the Norn. Female Norns also have a similar chemical, oestrogen. However, the levels of oestrogen cycle from high to low and back again. The female is only fertile when oestrogen is high. When a Norn is fertile, it needs to find a mate in order to breed. They do this using pheromones. When a Norn is ready to mate, it produces an internal chemical called Arousal Potential. If a Norn is not ready to mate for any reason, it produces Libido Lowerer, which removes any sex drive and arousal potential from the Norn's system. If a creature of the opposite sex and the same species is near, their pheromones trigger production within the Norn of Opposite Sex pheromone. This reacts with Arousal Potential to create the Norn's sex drive. When the two Norns are 'friendly' enough, they will kisspop, and the female might get pregnant. During pregnancy, progesterone rises constantly. When it reaches a peak, the Norn will lay an egg. Progesterone, as well as tracking pregnancy, prevents the Norn being fertile while pregnant, and thus prevents multiple pregnancies. For a while after giving birth, the female is infertile, and slowly recovers her fertility over time. 6.6 The Norn's Brain Although there is no way to look at a Norn's brain directly within the game, knowing a bit about its inner workings does help us understand why a Norn acts like it does. There is a free tool for Windows called the Vat Kit. It can be used to see the neurons in the brain firing and decisions being made. Further information on the Norn brain can be found on the Creatures Developer Network website http://cdn.creatures.net. Norns are not programmed in the same way a computer is programmed - they have no internal instructions telling them 'When A happens, do B'. Instead, their behaviour is emergent - that is, it results from a set of certain conditions. As you no doubt know by now, Norns have a set of emotions or 'drives', such as tiredness, hunger or boredom. The Norn's behaviour at any one time is always an effort to reduce one of its drives, normally the highest one. It has to figure out for itself how a drive can be reduced - what action to take, and what agent to involve in this action. The Norn's brain is neural network based to allow them to learn how to reduce the drives. Neural networks are a model of the way our own brain works. Our own brains are basically a series of fine connecting wires, down which pulses of energy can be sent as messages. As we grow and learn, the shape of the net and the connecting points change and migrate. The same thing happens in a Norn's brain, albeit virtually. Anything that strongly alters the Norn's drives, raising or lowering them, strengthens the current connections in the neural network, so that momentous events, such as getting stung or eating something tasty, are 'remembered'. The Norn can remember events as bad or good, and know to avoid or perform that action in the future. You can encourage this memory process by slapping or tickling a Norn, as described near the beginning of this manual. But if a Norn's brain is randomly wired at birth, how come they don't perform entirely random and nutty actions when they first hatch? Well, if they did they'd probably die pretty rapidly, so like us again, they have instincts. A Norn's instincts are genetically encoded 'ideas' of what will happen given a certain action. For instance, there is an instinct that suggests that eating a piece of fruit will reduce hunger. These instinct genes are processed while the Norn is in the egg, and during sleep. It could even be said that Norns dream. Some instincts are not processed until the Norn reaches maturity. You will notice that a baby Norn will not be able to give good advice to a 'friendly' adult Norn - Norns do not process instincts involving breeding until they reach the youth stage of life. 7. Product Expansion Creatures Internet Edition is designed to allow easy expansion and development for players of the game. If you wish to, you can learn more about the inner workings of the game, and make new agents to add to the variety of the game. You will be able to find websites made by fans of the game from which you can download new agents for your game! 7.1 New agents for your World As well as importing Norns, you can add new agents to your world, either ones made by Creature Labs or by other players. New agents can be downloaded from the Internet as '.agent' files (for example, "newfood.agent"). Not all agent files will work with Docking Station when it is in Capillata only mode - the older ones usually require you to be playing Creatures 3, or Capillata docked to the Ark. The web page you download from should let you know which mode of operation they work in. When you have downloaded an agent file you need to place it somewhere that the game will identify it and enable it to be injected into your game. For Creatures 3 put the file in your home directory in .creatures3/My Agents. For Docking Station put it in .dockingstation/My Agents. ) Injecting the agent is different depending on which mode you are playing in: 1. Turn on the Creator machine in Engineering so that an image appears on the main screen. 2. Use the arrow keys to cycle through the agents you can inject until you reach the desired agent. 3. Press the Inject button to add the agent to your world. 4. If you want to remove the agent from your world you need to press the X button twice. Once to open the cover (so that you don't accidentally remove agents!) and the second time to press the button underneath . 1. Press the Agent Injector button in Comms so that a list of agents appears. 2. You can use the left and right arrows underneath the screen to scroll through the pages of agents to be injected (assuming there is more than one page!) 3. Click on an agent to see an image of it and a short description. 4. Click the green tick if you want to inject that agent, or the red cancel button if you want to remove it. 7.2 Exporting Creatures to a file The Norns of the Creatures games are unique entities - each one is the result of dDNA it inherited and the experiences it has lived through. They have free reign to travel across the Capillata, the Ark and other, as yet unknown, ships and areas of space. They can even travel through the warp and enter other worlds while retaining their unique identity. To remove a creature from this universe and onto your hard drive breaks that continuity and opens up the possibility of reality fracturing events such as file duplication. To prevent this each creature is only able to remember the history of its life, and the events that took place, while it remains within the universe of Docking Station. That said, it is possible to export a creature to your hard drive but the history of events for that creature will be erased - so think carefully about whether you really need to remove the creature from its universe before deciding to export one. If you want to send it to someone it is much more efficient to use the warp as this retains the information for this creature and allows it to record its achievements on Docking Station Central. You can export a creature to your hard drive using the export button on the Creature Menu. This will turn your Norn into a file that you can email to someone, or simply keep for later use. To Export a Norn 1. Open the Norn Selector 2. Ensure the creature you wish to export is selected (has a red arrow above it) 3. Click on the 'minus' button To Import a Norn 1. Open the Norn Selector 2. Ensure the creature you wish to export is selected (has a red arrow above it) 3. Click on the'minus'button Exported Norns will go into your 'My Creatures' folder. This is in your home directory in the folder .creatures3 or .dockingstation. 7.3 Developing for Creatures The agents in Creatures Internet Edition are called "autonomous agents". You can develop your own agents using a special programming language called CAOS. If you’re interested in learning about CAOS, then you can join the free Creatures Development Network (the CDN). See http://cdn.creatures.net for information on the CDN. This will also allow you access to the Creatures Internet Edition development team to answer your development questions. If you don’t wish to learn programming, but you are interested in other aspects of fiddling with Creatures Internet Edition you can play with their Creatures Digital DNA (dDNA). This can be achieved naturally using selective breeding or by using the gene splicer on the Ark or by editing the dDNA directly using a gene editor. Try searching the Internet for tools that let you edit the genome. A Genetics Kit for Windows is available to buy on-line at: http://mall.creaturelabs.com . It is always worth searching around on the Internet to see what other players have created, as there is a wealth of exciting and useful information, agents and alternative types of creature available to download. Please note: Creature Labs cannot be held responsible for the content of any third party creations for Creatures Internet Edition. 7.4 Internet Resources ds.creatures.net www. creatures. net support. creaturelab s. com cdn.creatures.net The Docking Station Hub where all the statistics live. The Creatures Network - you’ll find all sorts of interesting things about Creatures products here. In-depth help for all Creatures products, including a searchable Knowledge Base. The Creatures Development Network. www.creaturelabs.com The home of the developers of Creatures Internet Edition. mall.creaturelabs.com Creature Labs online mall. If you’re interested in finding third party web sites, then try typing "Creatures Norn" as keywords into an Internet search engine. Alternatively, the Creatures Network Community Centre has a special search engine for third party website. 8. Trouble Shooting You can find troubleshooting information in the following place: • In the Creatures 3 folder on the CD there is a README file. It contains lots of information about the game, including performance, video and sound card suggestions. • After installing Docking Station look at the file /usr/local/games/dockingstation/Readme.txt . It contains useful information about the game. • On our website http://support.creaturelabs.com there is a FAQ page for Linux. Go to the "Docking Station" section and choose "Linux Help". This includes information about installing Docking Station when you don’t have root privileges. Please note that both games require that your X server and your sound card have been properly installed and configured. For more information read the documentation for your Linux distribution. Third Party Agents and Creatures Many agents and Norns are available from third party websites and other users. While you can normally be assured that third party objects will not harm your game, some can cause problems. We can not be responsible for any damage to your game or your computer caused by agents or creatures from third parties. If you experience problems after injecting a third party agent or creature, please contact the developer of the agent or creature. We suggest you use a suitable virus checker to ensure that downloads are not infected by viruses. Further Support If you experience a problem playing the game, check the support website for FAQs and Hints and Tips. You may also find the answer to your problem using the website's Knowledge Base. Use the keywords function to quickly search for details relating to your query. As a general rule: • If none of your trouble shooting helps to resolve the issue, try creating a new world • Try un-installing and then re-installing the game completely. Your previously saved games should still be present on your computer, so don't worry about deleting them. However, it’s always safe to back up! • Check the Support site for updates and new add-ons - there may already be a fix for the problem you're experiencing. If you still don't know how to resolve your issue, get in touch with Customer Support by e-mail and explain exactly what problems you're experiencing, including detailed error messages or screen grabs. You may wish to check the "Help Us to Help You" section of the Support website for hints and tips on getting the quickest solutions when contacting support. Most importantly, attach the log file called "creatures_engine_logfile.txt". All errors that occur whilst playing C3 will appear in the Creatures 3 folder, whilst those that occur when playing Docking Station (Capillata only or Capillata docked) will appear in the Docking Station folder. These are in your home directory and called .creatures3 and .dockingstation respectively. E-mail: customer support@creaturelabs.com Web: www.support.creaturelabs.com Creature Labs Customer Support is a technical resource to help get your game working, and as such we cannot answer questions relating to gameplay directly. Creatures 3 Credits Creatures 3 Concept and Design Toby Simpson Additional Design Claudio Berni, Mark Ashton, Robert Dickson, Francis Irving, Barnaby Green, Ashley Harman, Lee Singleton, David Bishop and the Creatures 3 Development Team Lead Programmer and Physics System Robert Dickson Lead Agent Engineer Mark Ashton Lead Artist Claudio Berni Software Engineering and Francis Irving, Guy Tristram, Daniel Silverstone, Gavin Buttimore, David Development Tools Bhowmik Neuroscience and Biological Components Gavin Buttimore, David Bhowmik Additional Core Engine Development Alima Adams, Ben Campbell Agent Engineering Barnaby Green, Ashley Harman Additional Agent Engineering John Ferguson Art Director Colin Swinbourne Artwork Claudio Berni, Timothy Mews, Colin Swinbourne, Sean Nicholls, Ceri Llewellyn User Interface Visuals Nathan Thomas Additional Graphics Nathan Thomas, Paul Simon, Oliver Dunn, Barnaby Green Genetic Engineering Eric Goodwin, Helen Burchmore Additional Neuroscience Dylan Banarse Introduction sequence concept Colin Swinbourne ©2001 Creature Labs Limited. All rights reserved. Creatures is a registered trademark of Creature Labs Limited. Linux is a registered trademarks of Linux Torvalds. All other trademarks are the property of their respective holders. Docking Station Credits Sound Effects Additional Artwork Additional Engine Programming Website Design Website Imagery Website Scripting Website Forums Network Architecture Design System Programming Ashley Harman and Mark Ashton Matthew Jeffery and Ruthine Burton Alima Adams, Gavin Buttimore and Mark Bennett Darren Cantell Nathan Thomas Francis Irving Chris Dewey Mark Stamps Mark Stamps, Francis Irving and Dr Jo Brook Server Design, Construction and Testing Wayne Stallwood, Mark Stamps and Dave Clarke Quality Assurance Manager Paul Dobson Quality Assurance Pete "no R" Morrish and Dave Carter Additional Website Testing and Nit-Picking Dominique Whitman Manual Author Lis Morris Manual Editing and Butchering Mark Ashton Man in Suit Howard Newmark Director of Development Ian Saunter Marketing Manager Lisa de Araujo Marketing Assistant Gill Collins Director of IT Mark Stamps Linux Port Credits Producer Francis Irving Original Idea Ben Campbell Porters Ben Campbell, Francis Irving Additional Porting Jo Brook, Daniel Silverstone Man in Suit Ian Konrath Marketing Manager Sarah Reardon Marketing Assistant Gill Collins Linux Market Research Lisa de Araujo Beta Testing Thanks to everyone in the Linux and/or Creatures Community who made this possible, including Aaron Kemp, Adam "Spud" Wolf, Adrien Beau, Beebe, Brandon Barker, Chani, Christian Schaller, Christian Zander, Chunky Kibbles, Ciprix, Clemens Eisserer, Corey Espich, Dan, Dane Jackson, Daniel "The Pest" Dayon, Daniel Mewes, Daniel Woods Bullok, Daniel Mantione, Dave Swegen, David Deephanphongs, Diamon, Ed Champion, Ed Sweetman (safemOde), Eliane Roeschter, Geert-Jan Van den Bogaerde, Glenn Attwood, Greg Gilbert, Heiko Garrelts, Henrik Nordhus, Henry Stern, Jande Roox, Jason Huebel, Jay Jacobs, jeff, Jeff Howell, Jerome Campbell, jfacey, Joshua Kleiner, Klaasjan Brand, Larry Hignight, Lis Morris, Marc Haisenko, Mark 'Nurgle' Collins, Matthew, Matthew Johnson, Matthew Walton, Meikel Brandmeyer, Melanie "geekgirllOl" Hoyle, Michael "emmel" Filz, Mika 'Bostik' Bostrom, Mike Dombrowski (Luke-Jr), Mike Mikkelsen, Moonlite, Moritz Moeller-Herrmann, Nico Kuhn, Noah Karrer, Philipp Wollschlegel, PKiela, Richard Lovison (Sylv), Siegfried, StarTux, Steve Herrick, Sven M. Hallberg, Thom Goodsell, Tina Hirsch, Tony Hoyle, Vadim and anyone else we missed. We couldn't have done it without you!