DUSTDEVIL GRENDELS
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The Dustdevil Grendels are a new breed with genetics based on Vampess's CFE genomes, and they come with a variety of agents and a couple of fixes. They hail from the Ettin Desert, but overall have the same personality as your average Jungle Grendel. This breed is based on an original idea and concept art by Gobbo, with additional input from a lot of different people. Peer-reviewed Grendels, baby! :P

The breed pack is for Creatures 3 and Docking Station and was originally released for the CCSF 2012. It comes with seven agents:


Calendar wheel (C3 or DS)
Tells the date and time of day, and emits heat. Injects into the Ettin Desert in C3 or DS docked worlds, or the Norn Meso in undocked DS worlds.

   How it works: The calendar rings rotate so that the current season and cycle period are located at the top. The inner ring indicates which day it is within a season, as indicated by groups of circles; markers on this ring also indicate when it is early moring (rising sun) or late evening (crescent moon). The outer ring tells if it is spring (stormcloud), summer (sun), autumn (owl) or winter (bat).


Crystal skull (DS only)
May have strange effects on Creatures?

   How it works: The crystal skull is a gimmicky accessory for your Creatures to ponder over, but it also has some other properties. Will it infuse your Creatures with the knowledge of the ancients...?


Succulent (C3 or DS)
A sweet treat young Creatures will enjoy.

   How it works: Designed to grow in the new desert nursery, it will also happily colonize the rest of the Ettin Desert or any other dry area to which it is introduced. This succulent is classified as fruit, and thus provides an extra food source for Creatures that are not naturally inclined to supplement their diet with bugs. Or those that just have a bit of a sweet tooth.


Sunflower (C3 or DS)
Turn any dry area into a field of sunflowers. Seeds are a good source of starch.

   How it works: The sunflower is a tall plant that needs to be pollinated by insects. Balloon bugs will perform this role nicely. The Albian Sunflower has the peculiar habit of "following" Albia's sun, despite the fact that they are many generations removed from the disk world.


Thorny devil (C3 or DS)
A prickly, heat-loving lizard that will help keep your desert nice and tidy.

   How it works: The thorny devil is poisonous if Creatures mess with it--but harmless as long as they leave it alone. It likes warm areas, and will occasionally eat stray raindrops and cacbana seeds so that you won't end up with so many of them littering the Desert Terrarium. (The C3/DS "collision script" that tells an agent when it has hit a surface such as the ground, is itself buggy and does not always activate when it ought to; this can lead to agents like the abovementioned raindrops and seeds to accumulate over time.)


Desert nursery (C3 or docked worlds)
Transform that dangerous pond into a friendly nursery for baby Creatures. The Ettin Desert metaroom must be present.

   How it works: The desert nursery transforms that pond on the right side of the Desert Terrarium into a warm, dry place that Ettins and other desert-loving breeds (like the Dustdevil Grendels) will consider home, essentially turning the room's death trap into a nursery. It also re-locates the Ettin egg layer, so that baby Ettins will hatch on a level that hopefully has some food, instead of in that barren lower corridor.

   NOTE: If you were already using the Grettin Switch to disable the Ettin egg layer in your world, and you inject the desert nursery, you may need to turn the Grettin Switch on and then back off to re-set its settings. Or just make sure the Ettin egg layer is active before you inject the desert nursery, and turn it off again after the injection is finished.


New gadget dropper (C3 or docked worlds)
An update to an obscure but very necessary script in the Ettin Desert.

   How it works: This agent updates a hidden script which normally forces Ettins to drop gadgets they're carrying once they enter the Ettin Terrarium--preventing them from simply walking around with the same gadget in their hands forever. There was a drawback to the way this script originally worked, in that it targeted Ettins and only Ettins. Spliced hybrids which are classified as Norns or Grendels but still have the gadget hoarding instinct were not targeted by it. This update ensures that the script will target Norns, Ettins and Grendels equally. It will not target Geats, given that Gaius eats gadgets and it would not do for the script to constantly force him to drop his food. If you inject the desert nursery, creatures will release gadgets properly there, too.

   NOTE: You MUST remove the New Gadget Dropper before you inject it, to clear out the old script version.



Developer's Notes:
All right, here's the deal. I could not get the adult/elder heads to work, but I am not going to scrap the entire breed because of it. So here they are. The Dustdevil Grendel sprite sets are complete for the Baby/Child and Adolescent/Youth life stages, but the sprite sets for the Adult and Elder life stages do not have heads of their own. This means that as adults and elders, they will continue to use the teen head sprites. The teen heads are slightly smaller in proportion to the body than the proper adult and elder head sprites would be, but this is the best compromise I can make for the time being. I'm hoping that the difference won't be too heinous in appearance, and hopefully the agent pack will make up the difference.



 Creator: Ghosthande
   E-mail: weatherfac@yahoo.com
Website: http://www.ghostfishe.net/bbw



Terms:
The Dustdevil Pack may be shared freely whenever the need should arise. I support filesharing wholeheartedly, but would prefer that those who have the means to download my agents for themselves do so from my web site--Breeders Beware. Should BBW ever go offline, then I do hope that others will redistribute, host, and archive this and any of my other creations for future use.
