Creatures 1… On Windows 11??

I don’t know if anyone still reads these but it’s fun to write :)

I recently got myself a real PC instead of the laptop I’ve been using for the last 10 years. As part of going through and installing everything my PC will need, I thought it would be fun to see if installing Creatures 1 would work. I was not particularly hopeful, considering how old the software is, that this would work without some kind of issues, and I was entirely correct, although I encountered fewer issues that I expected.

For reference, I am also using an older version of the installation pack from GOG, from 10+ years ago before GOG Galaxy was a thing. So note that there may be different issues when trying to install from GOG Galaxy, I am not sure.

I tried to boot it up from a completely clean install, without porting over any worlds or anything. This actually worked surprising well, even without installing the remaster patch. Everything seemed to work. So naturally, I tried to port in my old files and…

Well, it crashed immediately. I tried again a couple of times with different worlds that had, but I unfortunately couldn’t get it to work with my old worlds. I am unsure exactly where the problem was, if it was the case that there was some missing files that I didn’t transfer correctly that caused the crash, a broken COB somewhere, maybe the worlds I had were just too big and weren’t going to load correctly on Windows 11 no matter what. In all honesty, it’s probably a good thing to start off from a completely clean world. It’s been that long since I played Creatures that frankly I have completely forgotten who all my Norns were and the different experiments I was doing. A clean slate is nice sometimes. Frankly, I have also forgotten a lot about this game! Going back into the file system felt completely foreign. Lowkey I forgot how to install a COB but I managed to figure out, and I installed the remaster patch, the updated genetics that age properly, the black hole patch, as well as friendly Grendel and some carrot patch COBs I found in my files from my old laptop.

I booted up the game again after doing this, with great success! I have two new Norns to look after, their names are Foxy and John, maybe I will share some more about them later. For now all I have done is teach them verbs and the word food; I am still learning how to play this game again. Maybe I will write some more about that, I am not sure.

Microsoft Sucks

There is one other thing I encountered with the installation that is worth mentioning.

Windows 11 is pretty stupid compared to its predecessor, one interesting thing that I noticed is how Windows 11 stores its documents folder compared to Windows 10. The first thing I did when I setup my PC was uninstall as much as of Microsoft’s stupid bloatware as I possibly could. This included uninstalling OneDrive. Something that I didn’t realise when I uninstalled OneDrive, is that by default Windows 11 stores the Documents folder inside the OneDrive folder, rather than just in the user directory. I think I actually made a mistake by uninstalling OneDrive right away before trying to change its settings, because my Documents folder was stuck saving inside a folder named OneDrive. I had to edit the registry to fix this and get a proper Documents folder, saved just inside my user. I may have been able to fix this through the OneDrive settings, if I had not uninstalled it first, but I am not sure. Either way, this was way too much effort. I guess it’s good that I know how to edit the registry now? I’m Learning?

(I changed the icon to at least make it consistent!) 

Anyway, this is still relevant to Creatures, despite that had changed all this, the portion of Creatures 1 that saves in the Documents folder would not save into my regular documents folder, it continued to save into OneDrive → Documents → Creatures → etc. I have no idea why this is happening but I can live with it being this way. It’s just quite bizarre.