Lonely Norns—Update

Just checking in real quick to let y'all know that the Lonely Norns are available for download now, and a full list of their genetic modifications is up on their pages too. You can get them from here.

Have fun with them :)

Lonely Norns

Dr. Shoy is back! Sorry for the absence.

The idea behind the lonely Norns was to create a breed of Norns that would avoid each other's company, but would still have a trigger that would fill them with sex drive so that they would still want to breed. Guess how that turned out???????

Yep. So, Monty, Erin, Quella, and Cornelius are all Lonely Norns. There's quite a few changes in their genome so I'll merely summarise the changes rather than listing every edited gene compared with the original version. Keep in mind while you read this that the changes probably don't have all that much logic to them as I knew very little of genetics when I made these.

A main feature of the Lonely Norns was my attempt to make them change from hating each other to horny in an instant - which was going to be done by slapping and patting them. Patting was supposed to make the Norns sex drive go down and slapping was supposed to bring it up. That at least did work, but at the time I didn't realise that saying 'yes' and 'no' have the same affect as physically patting/slapping the Norns, so I didn't realise that this would leave me with no way to punish and reward them without putting other chemicals in that might affect their learning.

The other main aspect was controlling three chemicals: loneliness, sex drive, and crowdedness. Of course, being the inexperienced little mad scientist that I was back then, I'm not sure I fully understood what I was doing. It seems I was operating under the assumption that these three drives, upon being changed, would automatically convince the Norns to act in different ways, when that's not the case; the drives affect the neurons in the drive lobe (which can be used to form concepts) and punishment/reward is used to reinforce the concepts.

Beach Party

They grow up so fast!

Here's Cosmos, already forty-four minutes old. It feels like time just flew by. His download is now up so if you'd like to play with him you can get him from here.

In sadder news, Michelle passed away aged 9:28, sooner than I'd expected. The odd thing is that when Asper - her mother - died it was of old age and she died surprisingly early too. I wonder if this is in some way linked to their modified genes? Whatever it is, Hat stayed with Michelle the whole time, as you can see from this picture.

Recently I was thinking about the Norns in my other world and I realised that it's been a long time since I visited them, so I thought I'd drop by and see how they all are going. And they seemed to be doing pretty well, all with life forces higher than 70%.

But why is it that every other time I play this game someone ends up eating deathcap? It barely made a dent in Erin's life force as she ate some cheese right afterwards, but you'd think Norns would learn. Though I suppose every Norn has to try it at least once before they realise it's not a good idea.

I'm really quite proud of Tessa for this. Despite the changes I made to her poses, which didn't at all do what I wanted them to and made it incredibly hard for her to walk, she made it all the way to the lift instead of just being stuck near the incubator. And then she fell asleep. I guess going places is hard work for a Norn like her.

If you've been keeping up with this blog you'll remember that Monty, Erin, Cornelius and Quella were actually part of a genetic experiment to try to make Norns dislike each other's company. In my notes about it, the project is labelled 'Lonely/Lone/Lonesome Norns' because I couldn't pick which version of the name I wanted to use. I don't have time now to go into their genetics and what about them didn't work, but it's the next thing on my to do list, especially as this is a genetics project I intend to finish one day.

One last thing: beach paaaarty!

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.

Seven Genetic Mutations

Wherever Norns are, genetic mutations are sure to be too. And while you can already find a list of each Norn's genetic mutations on their pages - which you can get to from the 'Norns' link under the header - I thought it would be good to highlight some of the more interesting ones in a post. In total there are fourteen mutations, which is far too many to go through without making everyone bored, so I've selected the seven which I think are the most intriguing.

Before I continue, I'd like to say that that the downloads for the Norns that are not genetically modified or descended from genetically modified Norns are now fully functioning! Each zip file comes with the Norn's genome, the exported Norn (if the Norn is still alive), and a text file with information about the Norn, its genetics, and its appearance genes.

Back to mutations! Here's a lovely one from Hat:

Original gene:

122 Emb  B Mut Lobe #=8 State Rule: Anded0 <end> <end> <end> <end> <end> <end> <end>, WTA= 0

Mutated gene:

122 Emb  B Mut Lobe #=8 State Rule: Anded0 <end> <end> <end> <end> <end> <end> <end>, WTA= 1

The mutation has switched on WTA (winner takes all) in this gene, which is for the concept lobe. WTA means that only the neuron with the highest state value will fire. I'm not exactly sure (I never am) about what this does, but I'm fairly certain that normally many different neurons in the concept lobe can feed through to the decision lobe at once, thus allowing for cases where more than one concept can
affect decisions (eg. the Norn is hungry and food is nearby but the Norn also has high sex drive and there's a pretty lady nearby) but with this mutation only the cell with the highest state value will fire, meaning only one concept can affect decisions at any given time. I think.

Asper & Co.

Asper was my first attempt at large-scale genetic engineering and she came out surprisingly well considering. The aim of this experiment was to create a norn that eats more often on its own, and while this goal wasn't achieved it did produce some interesting effects. I hatched Asper in my world with my non-modified Norns and she has two living descendants - Michelle and Aladdin - and four unhatched ones. She's dead now, but as my first real experiment she holds a special place in my heart.

Now let's get into her genetics. I'll give you a warning first though: when I made Asper I knew almost nothing about genetics and some of the changes don't really make sense. Let's start with a couple of simple ones:

Original gene:

91 Emb B Mut  'Pointer pats me' causes sig=32 GS neu=0(I've been patted) int=255,,, Sensed Even When Asleep => 64*NFP-- + 16*Pain-- + 16*Loneliness-- + 16*Reward

Edited gene:

91 Emb B Mut  'Pointer pats me' causes sig=32 GS neu=0(I've been patted) int=255,,, Sensed Even When Asleep => 64*NFP-- + 16*Pain-- + 16*Loneliness-- + 51*Reward

Original gene:

135 Emb B MutDupCut Drive i/ps Tiredness + (Lobe/Cell=0/0) + (Lobe/Cell=0/0) and I rest => 93*Reward

Edited gene:

135 Emb B MutDupCut Drive i/ps Tiredness + (Lobe/Cell=0/0) + (Lobe/Cell=0/0) and I rest => 155*Reward

The first gene is the stimulus for being patted by the hand and the second is an instinct gene that encourages the Norn to sleep when it is tired (note that it's tired, not sleepy, they're different drives). The only thing I've changed in these genes is that I've increased the amount of reward Asper gets.