The Egg Lottery #1

Remember when I said I have twenty eggs? Well, I've decided to make a start on hatching them. The only trouble is that they are all sitting in the tunnel beneath the garden perfectly unorganised. I put them down here because originally I thought I would never want to hatch them because they didn't have die of old age genes. But recently I went through and altered the genomes of all these eggs to contain the genes to make them die of old age; I wasn't sure if changing the genomes like that would work so I tested it in a new world with eggs from the genetics kit and it seemed to work all right there so let's hope it doesn't somehow break my world over here.

Two of my eggs are stored elsewhere in Albia so there are only eighteen eggs here, but that's still a lot of different possibilities of who will hatch without me knowing what I'll get. And there are some pretty interesting ones thrown in there, but we'll get to that once I start hatching.

To begin with I'll hatch only a couple, and these are the three eggs I've picked out to hatch first, simply because I like these eggs more for some inexplicable reason. Let's start with the one on the left.

...and meet Cosmos! He's the newest addition to my little family and, as you can see, he's already displaying signs of a great intelligence. Wallbonking is so trendy nowadays! He's doing it because of some dumb floating egg so I guess I can't really blame him too much for it.



Genetics-wise, Cosmos actually had me really scared for a moment with his single new mutation. He's the son of Coco and Hat and has inherited this gene from his daddy:

Original gene:

101 Emb B Mut 'Heard creature speak' causes sig=16 GS neu=6(Creature has spoken) int-175,,, Sensed Even When Asleep => 16*Boredom-- + 16*Loneliness-- + 16*Crowdedness++ + 0*<NONE>

Inherited gene:

101 Emb B Mut 'Heard creature speak' causes sig=16 GS neu=6(Creature has spoken) int-175,,, Sensed Even When Asleep => 16*Boredom-- + 16*Loneliness-- + 16*Crowdedness++ + 0*Pain

In this stimulus gene, 0*<NONE> has changed to 0*Pain, which doesn't affect Cosmos but could affect his children if they inherit this and it mutates again.

But that's old news. The new mutation which had me really quite worried was this:

Original gene:

111 Emb B MutDup 1*Reward + 1*<NONE> => 1*Reinforcement + 1*RewardEcho; half-life = 16

Mutated gene:

111 Emb B MutDup 1*Reward + 1*<NONE> => 1*Reinforcement + 1*PunishmentEcho; half-life = 16

The reaction in this gene has changed from reward creating Reinforcement and RewardEcho to creating Reinforcement and PunishmentEcho. When I first saw this I thought it meant that reward would basically have the same affect as punishment, and while pondering how it might be possible to raise such a Norn (and cursing my luck for hatching this little guy first), I stumbled upon what Reward/PunishmentEcho actually do.

Which is absolutely nothing that affects the Norn. I'll quote the genetics kit note for you:

"REWARDECHO / PUNISHECHO are mainly there only to show the existence of reinforcement in a less transient manner, for monitoring tools etc. "

Basically those two chemicals are there just to help people monitor reward/punishment because reward and punishment disappear from the system pretty fast. This mutation actually does nothing that really matters, and in the process of figuring this out I actually learned something about how Norn brains learn, and that I had it wrong about Fandom's crazy mutation. It also got me thinking about what it would actually be like to try to raise Norn where all reward turns into punishment...

Anyway, it seems Cosmos should be a fairly normal Norn after all. I'm not sure if I'm disappointed or relieved.