Update: C3 Ecology, DS tweaks, and the question of body data.

We just set a new update live. This contains the first part of our planned C3 ecology changes (fixing aspects of C3 ecology that were not working correctly) and also contains a few new tweaks and small features for DS.

Please also check out the bottom of this post where we talk about potential complications with an upcoming fix for redundant body data files.

Here is a list of the changes:

- Man-o-wars quickly died out due to their egg script not working correctly. This has been fixed.

- Meerks had an unintended behavior where they could burrow into walls and get stuck there when being picked up while in the middle of the burrow animation. This has been fixed.

- Meerks could show up unexpectedly in photos due to the location of their hiding place. This has been fixed.

- Dragonflies died out quickly in the Jungle Terrarium due to a lack of plants in the pond and nymphs being unable to leave it. Plants have been added to the jungle terrarium pond to fix this.

- Mossie flies in the Jungle Terrarium could lag and crash the game due to its population control script not working correctly. This has been fixed and their population limit lowered slightly as even when working correctly it could severely slow down worlds.

- The total creature population limit, breeding limit, and extra eggs allowed variable defaults have been increased by 30. This means in a new world the default breeding limit is now 36 instead of 6. While the former two variables can easily be changed by players in the options, the default limit of 6 (which meant eggs would stop hatching when there are already 6 creatures in the world) was still extremely low for modern computers.

- Upon world creation, one copy of the mini empathic vendor is placed in the DS containment chamber. It does not show up as injectable agent, so more copies could only be created with tools like the Creatures 3 replicator or CAOS commands. We added an agent so more copies of the mini vendor can now be injected with the agent injector.

- Toxic cookie recipes showed up in the injector list despite them working by default in our builds already and not needing to be injected. This was confusing as trying to inject them regardless resulted in an error message. This behavior has been addressed and the toxic cookies recipe agent does not appear in the injector list any longer.

- Desert Ettins and Jungle Grendels can usually only appear due to eggs being laid by the grendel and ettin mothers in the desert and jungle terrariums. They are now selectable in the egg layers like any other breed for owners of Creatures 3.

- A random breed option has been added to the egg layers.

Phew! These changes should further improve the experience of playing the game.

Another fix we wanted to implement was to get rid of redundant body data files that interfered with installation of third party breeds.

We have investigated the issue and found out that removing the redundant body data files from our builds will cause files with the same names to be removed from current installations once, even when they have been overwritten before. This means third party breeds which overwrite any of the redundant files will have to be re-installed afterwards.

However, after this process has happened once and our build does not contain these files any longer, the issue would effectively have been dealt with for all current and future installations.

We are investigating possible ways to work around this behavior, but in case we can not find a way to avoid this, we recommend players with third party breeds back up their body data folders to avoid having to re-install affected third party breeds.

The breeds affected seem to be those that use a Grendel or Ettin breed slot of the same letters as some official norn breeds, meaning breeds using Ettin and Grendel slots D, E, F, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O.

We are planning to deploy the body data fix at the beginning of April, so please keep that in mind!