Playing Creatures

This section of the help files guides you through the birth and early stages of your first Norn. Once you've worked through this, the next section will give you more details of Norn care and information about living in Albia.

If you need more information, you can access Creatures 2 on-line help by pressing F1 or selecting Contents and Index from the Help menu.

The Creatures 2 display consists of a main program window, a status bar, toolbar buttons to allow quick access to program features and some menu options. When you start Creatures 2 for the first time, you'll get a Tip of the day. You can turn these off by un-checking the "Show tips at startup" on the tip of the day dialog window. The main window looks like this:

Window onto Albia. (1) Shows a view of Albia, normally centred around your selected Norn. You can scroll this around using the scroll bars, but you can only scroll a small distance away from the selected Norn.

Toolbars. (2) Allow easy and quick access to program features. Unavailable items are ghosted out.

The Hand. (3) This is your representation inside Albia. Norns can see the hand just as they see other objects.

Incubator. (4) If you drop Eggs into this object then they will start hatching!

Current Norn status. (5) Shows the physical status of the current Norn, including health levels and heartbeat.

Event bar. (6) Each time a Norn is born, an egg laid, or a Norn dies, an event appears here. You can double click on an event to clear it and jump to the area where the event has occurred.

Albia status. (7) Shows the season, game year, time of day and ambient temperature.