Current state of affairs

[camwyn]

Well, according to the scrolls in the temple, my creature is now age 2. I'm not sure how to change his name; I'd like to alter it, because at the moment it's 'Camwyn', and that's my name. I downloaded a few programs to unlock other creatures. Nothing against the cow, mind you. I like the cow. She's cute, she's intelligent, she's friendly, she's not very aggressive. (I know the documentation assumes maleness in the creatures, but a) no dangly bits of either gender and b) a male cow is what we in the business like to call a 'bull'.) No, I wanted a different avatar, so my active principle in the world is now represented by a gray and white dappled horse.

The horse has learned how to fish. In fact, the horse prefers to fish. I gave him some grain when he was hungry, and he put it down, then ran out to the fish farm and scooped up fish and ate them instead. Mind you, he does his best to help out the villagers who're fishing, too - he hasn't learned to take things from the village store yet, but he's learned that he can pick up a fisherman's catch and run back to the village store, then throw the fish into the store for distribution. He can also pick up pigs and throw them into the store. I think I got him to pick up sheep and simply put them down near the shepherd, or at least just put them down, but I'm not sure - we've rounded up 8 out of 9 sheep, so there's really nothing left to test on. (The ninth sheep, according to the game notes, is supposed to be 'behind the big gates'. I have yet to see hide nor hair of this sheep. I fear the horse may have eaten him at some point on the trip back from the creature breeder, as I overshot him by mistake and found him carrying one of the wild horses when I came back.)

He's still controlling villagers at times and I have no idea why, or what he's supposed to be having them do. They seem to get up with shovels over their shoulders, but I'm not entirely clear on whether they actually go forth and build or dig things or whether that's only temporary. I thought he had learned how to dance - I found some villagers dancing in front of him - but he still isn't clear on that. I caught him kicking a villager a while ago, so I'm afraid I had to smack him pretty thoroughly, but he made up for it by learning how to cast the Water Miracle. He's taken to watering villagers' fields on a semi-regular basis - I say semi because he uses the miracle quite a bit to water trees, too. I'll be teaching him the Strengthen Miracle next, most likely, as that's the other miracle seed dispenser I have.

Problem is, for whatever reason, my horse's learning is only 37% complete. I thought I followed all of Sable the Creature Trainer's directions, but apparently not. Now I'm not sure what I have to do to get that challenge listed as completed. At least the horse is making himself useful... Oh, I think he's learned to pick up villagers and put them down without mucking with them, too, I caught him picking up a kid and looking at it last night, then putting it down.

The horse has a tendency to poop under trees or against fences. Considering training him to poop in corners, a la ferrets, but there are more important things to do. I'll be retrieving some toys from the creche for him soon, just to see playfulness go up. Right now his alignment is listed as 'decent and true', and he believes that I am on the side of good. He's listed as extremely compassionate and not easily frightened, but rather greedy. I'm going to run him around for a while doing stuff. Once I teach him how to use the village store - for retrievals, not for dumping - I'm going to check on that rock I placed in the middle of the village. As soon as I catch villagers dancing around it, I'm leashing him to the rock with the Leash of Learning, and once he's learned how to do that... well, if he's big enough I'm trotting him over to the Hermit; if he's not, I'll take him to visit Nemesis' creature, the Big Fecking Sheep, for the lesson in casting the Food Miracle and in combat.

I'm not entirely sure if I can cast miracles I haven't seen yet. I'm going to have to try that when I get home with the Cure Miracle, because I caught a villager on her hands and knees coughing horribly, and then she died. Allow me to note that, unless you actually SEE the villager die, it is EXTREMELY unnerving to have them die - because the game informs you of deaths by a digitized voice whispering 'Deaaaathhhh', and since I was playing this at night with my earphones on... yeek.

Fortunately our births outnumber our deaths. I've created one female Breeder disciple and a couple of male Breeder disciples. The males are more useful, because they can run around and get female villagers pregnant without taking time out to be pregnant themselves. Apparently my villagers have no concept of monogamy. The fact that there's a creche for village childrearing is a pretty good indicator of this, too. I have one other Disciple, a woodcutter; I think I might create a Fisher and/or Farmer disciple or two, as the only desire flag at the village store is for food. (They ran up a Mercy flag a while ago, but I think that was because someone was in the way when I slapped my creature for kicking a villager, and the flag's gone down since.)

We'll deal with other silver scrolls later. I wanna get my horse taught and grown first.

Comments

[pelogrande.livejournal.com]

Watering trees is handier than you might think. Early on lumber probably isn't a huge concern, but in the later stages you'll be trying to get yourself a huuuuge Norse wonder so you can cast the Wood Miracle as effectively as possible. Watering trees makes them grow bigger and more populous, thus more for your villagers to cut.

[camwyn]

Ah, cool.

I've found a couple of downloads that I really like the look of. I don't have the 1.1 patch yet, so I can't install the soccer field thing, but I did manage to pick up a set of creature tattoos - the Chinese astrological animal characters. Gonna swap a few of them in and put them on my horse, although I'm going to leave his forehead tattoo the same - it's the dragon-looking thing that came with the game, and Camwyn was a background character in the Paksenarrion books whose symbol was the dragon. I also found a training map for beginners to use to strengthen their Creatures, so I plan on downloading that and trotting the horse over there for a while - it's set up very much like Land 1, but it's got all kinds of miracle generators and stuff, so you can show your Creature everything it needs to know before returning it to the game.

Cheat, schmeat. The horse's AI still has to learn all the behaviors. if they can have The Gods' Playground to learn your control skills, then I think a training map to teach a Creature what to do is just as fair.

[zou.livejournal.com]

Ha! I found the 'deeeeaaaaaath' whisper really scary, too, before I quite realized what it was for. I also had to play with headphones.

[camwyn]

Me, I was wondering - I'd heard that if you used the name of certain members of the design team as your own name, you sometimes got entertaining whispers... so I was wondering if there was some kind of sicko Easter egg for 'camwyn' in the game. (Not to mention that I had heard the radio commercial for The Ring earlier in the day!) Then I realised what was going on... pheew.