If you haven't played with Creatures, Creatures 2, or Creatures Adventures before, read the User Manual before you begin, and refer to it the first time you play the game. The booklet contains lots of helpful information.
When you first begin the game you are asked to type in a name for your new world. If you are sharing the game with other members of your family, each person can create their own world. (We are still in the habit of naming things alphabetically, so we are naming our worlds in alphabetical order; thus, we can tell the older ones from more recent worlds. This is helpful because we keep adding and modifying more .cos files. Existing worlds are not affected, but new worlds will have the new .cos files in effect.)
You have a choice of starting with eggs or adult Norns. If you are new to Creatures, we recommend using the adult Norns until you are familiar with the game. They already know all of their words, so they can activate the power-ups for you. (You have to get your Creatures to activate all the power-ups at least once, before you use the cheats!) When you feel comfortable with the game, have fun hatching out the other types of Norns. There are cute Norns with tiger stripes and cow spots.
Each world contains four terrariums: the Norn Home, the Grendel Home in the jungle, the Ettin Home in the desert, and a shark tank in the Ocean. These four terrariums are connected to the central part of the space ship, which has an Engineering Room on the far left, and the Creator/Replicator/Splicer Room on the far right. There is also a Learning Room within the Norn Home. Each of these areas has an icon corresponding to it. Once you have found a room, its icon floats to the top of the screen. Thereafter, you can click on the icon to quickly go to that part of the space ship. This is similar to the Favorite Places in C1 and C2.
Each terrarium has an environmental control panel hidden in something that looks like the roots of a tree. It is possible to change the amount of light and rainfall in each terrarium, although the help screen advises against it.
There are three User Interface Components along the right side of the screen. If you click on them, they open up like drawers. The top one shows you which creatures are currently in the game and allows you to import/export creatures. The middle one allows you to pause or quit the game, turn the music and sound effects on or off, and allows you to name the Hand Mommy or Daddy, or whatever you want to call the Hand. The bottom one is empty, but you can put things in it and take them to other rooms.
In the upper left corner there is a Heads Up Display that shows which Norn is currently selected, the and the Agent Help. If you click on the Agent Help, a red question mark appears next to the Hand.
If you don't want the Ettins and Grendels to be in the game, get rid of them by exporting them...or feeding them to the Piranhas, or sending them to outer space. hehehe Then wait at the egg laying machines for the two Ettin eggs and two Grendel eggs to come out. Put them in the water so that they won't hatch.
Hmmm...I wonder if Kobolds can swim...?
If you want to cheat you can get Worlds with the eggs already sequestered away at Jay D's Creatures Workshop or at Brian Hershey's My Creatures 3 Breeding Results.
There is a list of chemicals on the CD-ROM. It is different from that of Creatures and Creatures 2. Right-click on the CD-ROM icon so that you can look at what is on the disk without starting up the game. Open up the folder labelled "Notes" and open up the file labelled "Chemical Names". There is also a ReadMe file on the CD-ROM.