Natural Learning & Natural Curiosity

::----- README.txt -----::
Natural Learning & Natural Curiousity 1.0
by Amaikokonut

May be found at Naturing :: Nurturing (https://naturingnurturing.blogspot.com) and/or Naturing :: Nurturing :: Static (https://naturingnurturing.songua.com) and/or a friendly community archive near you! It's also possible this got finished in time for CCSF '23, in which case, happy CCSF!

If you rehost this file, please keep all provided all files including this readme intact. Thank you!

If you have any comments, questions, bug reports, or just want to chat, email *****@songua.com

:: Installation ::

This zip comes with both cosfiles and agent files, but you can use one or the other. If you want these mods to apply to all new worlds, merge the files in the Bootstrap folder into your game's Bootstrap folder. If you want to inject them as-needed per-world, you can put the agent files into your My Agents folders.

Keep in mind that Natural Curiousity requires Natural Learning to work, but Natural Learning can function just fine without Natural Curiousity. 

If you use the cosfile versions, there are some easy-to-tweak values in the Natural Learning cosfile that you can edit if you want to change the pace at which creatures learn (or turn it off completely, if you just want to just use Curiousity without the Learning.)

:: About ::

These are both mods designed for the nurturing playstyle-- for players who enjoy the process of hand-rearing and hand-teaching their creatures without the holistic learning machine or other auto-vocab agents. It is intended to be used alongside other gradual teaching agents such as Magic Words Hand Teaching.

Natural Learning is a mod that will allow creatures to gradually learn words 'on their own' when you're not watching them. so you can have the opportunity to hand-teach your creatures with less risk of it becoming too burdensome/tedious later on in the game when you have a lot of creatures to juggle.

Natural Curiosity is an optional add-on to Natural Learning (it requires it to function) that allows creatures to ask "what dis?/what dat?" when they are looking at an agent they don't know the word for, and  'why' when they have a high drive that they don't know the word for. If another creature is around who knows the word the creature is looking for and is in a good mood (no high drives) they might teach it to them!

:: Notes ::

Natural Curiosity pairs with Natural Learning to keep track of the words that a creature knows. If a creature is artificially taught words via the HLM, Knowledge stones, or auto-vocab agents, they may still show curiousity about words that they already know for a short time while the Natural Learning agent catches on. You may also notice this behavior in recently imported creatures that were exported from a world without Natural Learning installed.

Natural Learning will output a text file to your journal folder called "RANKS and stuff.txt" You can ignore this, but if you are curious, it can give you an idea of how quickly your creatures are learning via Natural Learning. Pace of learning depends on a number of factors, such as population density and how much time your creatures are on-screen (they will not learn unless they are off-screen, by default), but a large factor is Natural Learning's TICK, which you can modify in the cosfile if you like.

:: Additional Thanks ::

Mea, for testing.

:: Changelog ::

11-30-23: Gotta actually write a readme if I'm getting this out in time for CCSF!