Tips & Bugs

On this page you will find some tips that I thought I'd share. I hope you will find them useful, I can't offer any miracle solutions, I just have some suggestions about how to cope with some of the annoyances of Creatures 2. You won't find any tips about norn care here, please take a look at the section about Advanced Norn Care if you are looking for tips about how to care for your creatures.

Creatures 2 is supposed to run on a Pentium 166 with 16 MB of RAM, but I have realized very quickly that it didn't even run decently on a P200 MMX with 64 MB of RAM. I think one should have at least a PII to run it in real time - on my old machine the difference between albian time and real time was about 50%. This means that it took me twice the time to raise a norn to breeding age, and there is nothing you can do about it, the only solution would be to buy a new computer. I have also noticed that the screen always froze for several seconds each time I selected another norn - if you want to speed up the graphics you should have no background image for your desktop, especially if you use the MS Plus desktop themes. Those bitmaps eat up too much RAM. After removing the background image things were a little bit faster on my old PC.

Someone at Cyberlife gave me the hint to run the program in full screen mode, because the game refreshes more often in this mode. I don’t know why this is, but it works. If you have a slow computer, you should also be careful with injecting cobs, because every script that you add to your world consumes CPU time.

Since I have written the lines above, I have upgraded my computer first to a K6-2/400 with 128 of RAM, then more recently I bought a brand new machine, an AMD Athlon 600. Now the game runs in real time, even with 20 norns in the world. Unfortunately, I had to install Windows 98 because I could not get Win 95 to run correctly with the new hardware. I have gained speed, but the program lacked stability. It crashed much more often than on my old machine. Things have become a little bit better since I have installed the OLE update from Microsoft. If you have problems with frequent crashs, you should get this update from the Microsoft Windows 98 update page. The installation of Internet Explorer 5 has also added to the stability of Creatures 2, so even if you are a Netscape fan you should consider installing it on your machine because it includes a number of system updates. If you have Windows 98 SE, the above mentioned problems should not occur.

Gaming tips

If your world is overrun by cacti, you can use Sandra Linkletter's nocactus cob to remove them. If you want some back later, you can always reseed them with the seed launchers. In my Albia the norns like to play with the launchers, so if you don't want them to seed cacti all over the desert, move the launchers to a place where they are unlikely to reach them or where cacti won't grow. Throw them in the ocean or in the little pond in the incubator room where they cannot do any harm.

If you can't get your norns to activate all those powerups to get the additional kits or if you don't see why you should pass hours searching for them, get the quickpower cob from the Norn Underground. It will activate all the applets (including the gene splicer machine) automatically. In Cyberlife's second object pack is another object included that will do this for you, the game state controller. This object is useful if you i.e. have the unlimited scrolling activated but don't want it. With the game state controller you can switch any applet on and off as you like. Lately, I exclusively use the game state controller because Quickpower tends to crash my agent injector - very weird.

The object packs from Cyberlife contain a number of patches that must be injected into the world. If you often create new worlds, you will have to do this each time. It is easier to customize a world and save it as a new eden.sfc. If you install the upgrade to version 1.0.38, your eden file will be modified and contains from now on all the necessary updates.

Since I didn't want the grendels and ettins which are automatically generated, I have removed the grendel and Ettin machine from my world. You can get a cob that will do this for you at the Haunted Creatures Shack. If you want grendels and ettins later, you can always import some, there are even breedable pairs of both species available at The Palace of the Evil Shee.

The grey mushrooms in the ettin area between the volcano and the swamp are highly poisonous - they contain glycotoxin that will kill your creatures over time if they eat them. You can get a remover for this weed at the Haunted Creatures Shack.

If you don't like the default words from the computers, you can now edit the world list if you install the latest executable (1.0.38) from the Cyberlife website. There will be a file called "vocab" in your Creatures 2 directory that you can edit using notepad. Simply change the words that you don't like, but never change the word order or fill in the "blanks". The list will be loaded the next time you start Creatures 2.

If you still want to get rid of the inbuilt computers and of the doozers (and if you have Alexander Laemmles COE for C1), you can do the following: Activate the cheats, BobCob can do this for you, if you don't want to edit the registry yourself. Then left click on the unwanted object while holding down the shift key. Choose "kill edit" from the menu of COE's cob compiler. Any object you are holding when you do this will be deleted from your world, including original objects like the doozers, hehe. You can also download some cobs from this site to delete a number of the original objects, they have the advantage to clean out all related scripts, too.

If you have installed the egg update from Cyberlife, you will get norns that have about 200 genes more than those which are provided with your CD. They behave a little bit better, but I think there is still something wrong with them. They age too fast. Even with a time delay of 50% on slow machines, adulthood is a very short life stage. Better download some more advanced norns like the Canny Norns available at The Palace of the Evil Shee. The fast ageing process is due to the half life of the life chemical which decays too fast. For those who don’t know it: the decay rate of the life chemical determines how long your norn will live. It binds to several receptors that switch on the different life stages, the last of them will fire when it reaches the value 5 (initial concentration = 255), this is the moment when your norn dies of old age. In C1 these receptors are not mutable, but in C2 they are. This is why you can breed norns that won’t die of old age, I had one of these in my second generation, he lived nearly nine hours. If such a gene spreads in your population, you can end up with an overaged population like in C1 before the release of the Life Kit norns.

The decay rate of the life chemical has been fixed in the genome of the Golden Desert norns which are available with the Life Kit #1. They live about twice the time of your ordinary hatchery norns. You can download Golden Desert Norns or mixes from various sites all over the net.

A very useful object is the pufferfish to save drowning norns. The bad news about them are: you can only have a limited number of them and all they do is provide your norns with air until they reach the surface of the ocean. Since the norns don't get any punishment when they jump into the water, they will never learn that it is bad to fall off cliff edges. At the Haunted Creatures Shack you can download a new version of the pufferfish that will save your norns just like the original ones do, but that will also give them a good dose of fear and punishment to speed up their learning process. And you can put as many of these in your oceans as you want.

A big annoyance of C2 is the rowing boat that travels to the island of love. Sometimes creatures are stuck in it for ages, and since it does not stimulate them in any way, they will never try to activate it by themselves. On Jimbo's Creatures Page you can download two very useful scripts that modify the rowing boat: one of them adds a stimulation to encourage norns to activate it, the other one allows them to walk off it instead of waiting for being deposited on the shore. Highly recommended!

At the end of 1998 Martha Brummett has posted another very useful script to alt.binaries.games.creatures, the no-need cob. This script modifies the extra say need script in the world, so that creatures can care for themselves. Since I use it, most of my norns have begun to feed themselves, to use the lifts and especially the teleporters. Instead of telling me all the time how miserable they are, they now find the time to do something about it. You can get this cob at the alt.binaries.games.creatures archive, it is really worth a try.

Unlike C1, C2 deletes the sprites of deceased creatures, so that they won’t clutter up your hard disk, but this function does not work if you have activated one of the cheats. While I used the CoconutGrove cheat, these files accumulated in my images folder and I had to delete them manually. They use up a lot of disk space, since the sprite file of a C2 norn can be about 1 MB big. BTW they are easy to identify, because they have the same name as the creature’s moniker (i.e. 0abc.s16).

If you want to recover norns from a crashed world that would not load, open up the backup folder in the Creatures 2 folder. It contains a file called gamelog where all the information that shows up in the history kit is stored. There you will find the monikers of all the norns that have ever lived in this world, those who were actually alive when the world crashed have their names near them. All you have to do now is to write down the moniker of the norns you want to recover and clone them using Chris Double's genome injector.

Well, that's all for now, if I find out something else, I will post it on this page.

Last changes: 10/04/03