Alimentation

As you might have noticed - if you have ever bred Creatures 1 norns - it is much more difficult to keep a Creatures 2 norn healthy and happy. If you only trust the health bar, you will soon have some nasty surprises, because this thing only measures the glycogen level like in C1. The life of C2 norns depends on many more chemicals.

There is a fundamental difference between the metabolism of a C1 and a C2 norn: Not only C2 norns have about 800 genes compared to the 320-340 genes of a C1 norn, but there are a lot more chemicals involved. Food in Albia 1 consists mostly of starch which is converted to glucose which is converted to glycogen. The latter is the long time energy resource of C1 norns. This starch-glucose-glycogen cycle still exists in C2 norns, but if they don’t eat any food that also contains fat, vitamins and proteins, they will slowly starve to death.

The first thing you should keep in mind is to assure to give your creatures a balanced diet. It’s just like in real life: if you only eat hamburgers and french fries and never fruits and vegetables, you will end up with some serious health problems. In C2 there are two more essential chemicals besides glucose and glycogen that should never reach really low levels: muscle tissue and adipose tissue. It’s interesting that C2 norns don’t die immediately when their glycogen level is very low or even zero, but they pass out when there is no more adipose tissue in their bloodstream. I’m not quite sure why this is, but I think that it prevents other essential chemical reactions from taking place. If you have ever bred Sandra Linkletter’s C306 norns, you might have noticed that their health bar often flashes but that you have almost always enough time to isolate the norn and to get it to eat. A low glycogen level is not always fatal. In my fourth generation I had a female with a mutation in one of the glycogen reaction genes, her health bar flashed red during all her life time because she was unable to produce bigger amounts of glycogen. Nevertheless she has reached the senile stage and died only when she was about 4 1/2 hours old.

So, what should you give your norns to eat? In C1 cheese was the most nutritious food, but in C2 the original cheese only contains starch and 20 units of fat, which classifies it rather as junk food. Better are the various fruits that grow all over Albia, many of them contain 50 units of fat, some also have healing capabilities like the herbs in C1. If you have a norn that is very low in adipose tissue, feed it coconuts or Sandra Linkletter’s cream cheese. But be careful, it has been said that very high levels of adipose tissue can cause heart damage (just like in real life :-)). I have never had any norns die from heart attack so far, but you never know. In the original C2 genome that comes with your CD, it is even worse because it causes damage to the uterus of female norns (unclassified organ in females). In the new genomes this has been fixed. If you have a female that has this unclassified organ greyed out, it means that she is unfertile. It has happened to me once in the offspring of a norn that I had downloaded soon after the release of C2 and that must have been a mix of the old and the new genome. I have made the experience that norns with 50-70% of adipose tissue are the most healthy, but even very fat norns always live a happy life in my worlds.

So the different fruits are a very important food source in Albia 2. They contain vitamins and some of them have healing capabilities, especially the strange gelsemium fruit that only grows in one place, in a small cavern above the underwater tube in the dark ocean. Creatures can only get there by using the spring toy in the tube. If you want to know what all the plants and animals do to your creatures, please visit The Truth about Grendels, an excellent site that has an illustrated guide to Albia 2 among many other useful things. If you just want to know if an object is good or bad for your norns, hold the mouse pointer above it and see what is indicated. Poisonous plants and animals are classified as bad plants, bad critters and bad bugs (in the original vocabulary). Spoiled carrots, potatoes and fruits are also poisonous, punish your norns if they eat them. A very nutritious food are the fishes in both oceans which you can either catch with the fishing rod or simply with your hand. The caterpillars are also edible.

But my norns won’t eat, they just complain how hungry they are, you will tell me. This is a well known problem to most breeders, especially in C2. They just stand there, stare at food and tell you '<name> intensely hungry, get food‘, over and over again. Please get Martha Brummett’s wonderful No-need-Cob from the alt.binaries.games.creatures archive that changes the extra say need script in the world file. Your creatures will stop to tell you how miserable they are and start to do something against it - eat, find a toy to push when bored, explore the world etc. You will see that life in Albia will become more peaceful and a lot easier.

If you have tried everything but your norn still does not eat, there is always the option to inject it with liquid food. However, you should keep in mind that it will perhaps become dependent on these injections and never learn to eat by itself. In the worst case you may end up with a population of norns that are unable to satisfy even their most basic needs. I would recommend to use Lis Morris‘ brain friendly food cob instead of the injections from the science kit. It consists of glycogen, muscle tissue and adipose tissue and will prevent your norns from passing out for a while. And since there are no chemical reactions involved, the norns don’t get any reward from it. But don’t overuse it anyway, a norn that won’t eat and/or won’t sleep should not reproduce. It may sound cruel, but to a certain point, you should let natural selection take place. This does surely not mean that you should let a sick norn die, but serious genetic (or behavioral) defects should not be passed on to the next generation. You can find some basic information about genetic defects and still births on the following page.

Last changes: 10/04/03