Links To Other Parts Of My Site
Starting Your Albia
First of all, there is a mistake in the eggs that came with the C2 game. The norns do not sleep or eat well. But there is an update genome pack that updates all the eggs in the hatchery so that your norns can survive better. Available at Creatures 2 .
Once you've done the update for your world, you might want to consider hatching a female first then, a male later. Because females take longer to reach adolescence. Bring her to the computer to the left of the incubator to teach her words and tickle her often when she repeats the right words. Another computer can be found at the floor below. It teaches expressions like "cold", "friendly", "angry".. etc…
If you do not want to use cheats, (see Cheats for more info.) then, try to get the round things floating around Albia as soon as you can. Those are called Applets, and are explained in the Kit Applets paragraph.
Another thing you might see is the yellowish thing floating above a creature's head even though it's not sick or unconcious. That's your creature indicator. It tells you that is the creature you've selected at the moment and is nothing to worry about. Just turn it off by clicking the button on the left of your toolbar with the picture of the disc.
Feeding & Training Your Creatures
Getting your creatures to eat and sleep properly is the first step to ensure their survival. Once you've got the update ( the one mentioned in the first paragraph), you should be able to train your creatures to be pigs like mine.
It might be easier to export all the others and train one at a time because they're easily distracted like two-year-olds when there's a bunch of them.
Make sure the norn sees and repeats the words "sleep" and "eat" from the computer because those are the two most important words. Or you can use teaching aid cobs (see COBS if you don't know what they are) like J Dino's learning computer, or Slink's wonderful Encyclopedia Nornica that teaches every word in Norndom you'd want your norns to know.
To download EN, click HERE. Many thanks to Slink for allowing me to post this cob here. Here's a link to Slink's Site .
*Note: A lot of Jay Dino's cobs are mentioned here. If you wish to download any of them, please go to his site .
To go on, once your norn knows what is "eat", the next step would be to put some food near him, and call him by name and say "eat" eg, "Andrew eat food".
You might have to wave the food in front of him to make him focus on it, and repeat the command several times (ctrl+S to repeat). If he takes the food from you and eat it tickle him for a long time. He'll learn to eat by himself in this way. Another great cob to download for this is the Tasty Shroom Patch by Jay Dino . It can be sprinkled all over Albia, on any kind of ground, and is so tasty, norns just cannot resist it. It even rewards norns for eating it.
As for sleep, he cannot sleep if not he's tired. So watch him. When he falls asleep, tickle only once or better still try not to disturb him, but tickle him a lot the minute he wakes up. Same goes for doing things you like. The keyword is "tickle" and reward him a lot when he does things right, and he'll keep doing it.
In the same way, you have to train him to "push" or "pull" objects, as this could be important for his survival later. Use toys and push them for the norn to see, and give it to him, e.g, saying,"Andrew push toy", and if he obeys, reward him as usual.
Kit Applets
These are the floating discs you see, e.g, in the space to the left of the incubator room, next to the elevator is the applet for the science kit. Scroll around a bit more to the left and you'll see the advanced science kit and neurology kits in rooms around that area. You'll have to get your norns there to push them. Then you'll be able to use them. Very useful for sick norns.
Someone suggested you push your norn into the sea, so that you'll be able to pick him up and hold him next to the applet until he pushes it. But be careful about doing this because norns will drown or get sick when they're in water, especially for a long time, and you might want to use other methods to get the activates. See Cheats for more details.
Exploring Albia
Help For Drowning Norns
A lot of people have problems of norns drowning and don't know what to do to stop them, so I have included this as one of the topics here.
The simplest way would be to get the electric gate from Spirit's Creatures' Shack or the porcupine pufferfish from Albia 2000. The former just saves every norn that jumps into the ocean, the latter saves only LAND norns, and leaves mernorns that MUST live in water alone.
*Note: Also check out the Ocean Bridges cob by Jay Dino at his site
Cheats
There are basically two major cheats in C2. One is the Blueberry4$ cheat, and the other is the Coconut cheat. And there is also a NO CD cheat that allows you to play the game without a CD. All three can be found in Bobcob, the utility for making cobs (see cobs for more info).
All you need to do is download Bobcob from Frimlin's site and open it. Go to tools-> preferences-> cheats-> select the cheat, ok, and open your game.
You should have the cheat installed for you.
If you decide to edit your registry (only if you know what you're doing!!), then open up regedit, go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE ->SOFTWARE->CYBERLIFE TECHNOLOGY-->CREATURES 2. You should see a file named 1.0 below that. Open it and you'll see a lot of values in the right coloumn. Look for "privilages" or "Millinium", and change the value to "blueberry4$" and you'll have the cheat. If you can't find "privileges" like in my pc, you better go get the Bobcob like I did.
The blueberry is great because you can pick up your norns and have many worlds at the same time. But the world needs to be saved manually every time you exit or you'll lose all progressions in your game. And you can't select your creature by right-clicking any more because that is used for picking them up.
The cheat that can be found at Cyberlife the game state controller, in their object pack 2. It activates all your science kits and stuff for you without you having to wait for your creature to push the applets.
Another option is to get the pick the creature up cob if you don't like the blueberry. It can be found at Madame Mim's site You can use the right and left hand push buttons to pick the norns up instead of right-clicking on them. See COBS if you're not sure about them.
Another option would be to use the Cheatmachine. It has lots of cool options like making your own norns and injecting them into Albia. The freeware version is available at Stephan's site. But be sure to have your windows display at 800 by 600 pixels when you want to unzip it and while using it as well.
COBS
These are short form for "Creatures Objects" and can be placed anywhere in Albia if you know how to use them.
You have to put the right files in the right folders for them to work. The files are named, cob., gen, s16, wav at the end. The cob files go into your creatures "Objects" folder, the gen. into your "genetics" folder, the s16 into your "Images" folder and wavs into your "sounds" folder. Some cob authors (like me) have the files built into a setup.exe program that will install the files into the right folders automatically. But ONLY if your creatures directory is the default c:\program files\Creatures2 directory. Otherwise you'll have to change the directory when the installation program opens. So, to be safe, always check the directories before you install the cobs.
If you're interested in making cobs, you can always find good tuitorials around, like at The Norn Underground or at Helen's Norn Adoption Clinic or Spirit's Creatures Shack. The first two sites also have the utilies for making the cobs, which you might be interested to download.
Sometimes, you might find problems with cobs crashing your game or cobs not even appearing in the injector kits. Relax, it happens to nearly everybody at times. We authors certainly do not wish that to happen. But everybody experiences different things on different computers. Like say, the same norns do not always hatch on different computers. So it's the same with cobs.
One cause of a crash could be that two different cobs have the same class numbers, and that could cause a crash because the game is confused about which files to use. The other reason could be wrong macro. That one is the least likely to happen, because normally, cob authors test out the cobs on their own computers before actually putting any on their sites. But there is a small possibility, with more complicated cobs (and those are the more interesting ones, too) that the authors might have forgotten to put in some macro, and so, when an action occurs, say a creature pushes the object, and the game cannot find the macro for what should happen when the creature pushes it, the game could crash.
The other reason is one of the most common, and almost everybody experiences it. Some people get the error message "…images could not be found.." A good point in case, is Cyberlife's own Christmas 1998 pack. The image files appeared to be missing, but they were actually embedded and hidden. So the solution for such a problem is to get Bobcob , the cob utility that enables the files to be seen. Availble at Frimlin's site. You open Bobcob, then click on "Embedded Files…" You should see a window with an s16 image file name in it, choose extract, and your Creatures2 Images directory, and the file should be saved there. All the images should appear when you inject the cob now.
Now on to the problem of cobs not appearing in your injector kit. Normally, no matter how many cobs you have in your kit (even up to a hundred) they should appear. But a lot of people mistakenly put in some cobs for Creatures1. It causes the Creatures2 cobs to go missing as well. Some might get the error message, "so-and-so is not a Creatures2 cob". But the solution is to take out all the C1 cobs. Remember to take out the images as well, they are called spr. files in C1. Wrong images may not harm your game, but I personally feel they're wasting space since they cannot be used in C2. You might want to consider getting the cob converter if you feel like having a C1 cob in C2. Available at Creatures Developers Resource. Thanks to Chris Double for making it!
Machine With Colored Liquids
This machine only has all the same chemicals as the advanced science kit. So, it's not very useful, unless you know how to mix the chemicals in the right proportions. The Creatures Developers Network has some information about mixing them, but generally, even the Creatures oldbies do not bother to mix them when we can inject them right off the science kit (^_^) The wrong concoction could prove fatal!!
The Statue
Grendel Splicer
Creatures & Your Website
Now that you are a cobbler or have some really cool creatures you want to put up on your website, you might want to learn how to make it work. This is the place for you.
To put your creatures on your page and make them downloadable by just a click on it, you upload the file onto your server, and make a link to it, like just any hyperlink, only it might look something like this…. < a hr… and all that… www.yourserver/yourpage/Norn.zip > to make a connection to that particular file.
A lot of people must see the creatures to decide whether to download them, so, you should try to take a picture of them with the owners' kit and click on export.. to save the picture in bmp format. Then you can convert it to a browser-viewable format from there.. eg. jpg or gif. If you really want the Creatures to pose nicely but can't wait the whole day for them to do so, or if they just refuse to pose properly for you, don't fret. There's a really good utility out there called NornPose by Lummox Jr, available at The Norn Underground . It can take any creature you have in your world and pose them in almost any position you want them to and save those pics in bmp format. Only you gotta know the moniker of the creature, or the filename, eg 5WXT etc… (the name can be found in the science kit) or the backup files. Select the creature you want to pose, look at the science kit for the moniker, open Nornpose, type in the moniker, and start posing the creature. In the same way, you can make cool gifs for your site with NornPose and a gif editor.
Miscellaneous Tips & Tricks
