Reproduction oddities: Grendels

Reproduction in creatures has always been quite straightforward. Kisspop, pregnancy, laying an egg, egg hatches into a baby. This has been the way since the first creatures game, right? 

Well, here is our first deviation. Grendels could, at first, not reproduce. Instead they came out of the grendel mother. Now, I have theorised about this in an older post regarding grendels here; but it never really clicked with me until I read the design documents for creatures 3d: that grendels reproduce like eusocial animals. One queen mother to produce all offspring. Now in c3d it was supposed to be a little more extreme, as the grendel mother could corrupt norn eggs brought to her as well.

Eusocial breeding tactics exist in many different real life animals; from beetles, roaches, wasps, shrimps and even vertebrates like mole rats. Some have attempted to represent behavior like it in the game, a notable example would be dragoler’s and verm’s hive norns. I have not yet experimented with them but will report on any interesting finds once I do.

Now this was never implemented in any of the creatures game, both the eusocial reproduction nor the egg corruption, but it does give food for thought. Either could be implemented via caos, and either would lead to very interesting situations.

In the case of egg corruption I would personally go for a mix of the creature gene in the egg, spliced with some stock grendel gene. This way the corruption would show, rather than simply replacing the egg with a mutable grendel gene which would only be interesting from a gameplay point of view.

A eusocial grendel queen would require some more steps. To produce offspring like an egg layer is simple enough, but genetic heredity requires breeding rather than a stock gene. So, rather than a simple machine she would actually need to be a living grendel. Immobilised by the weight of her abdomen and ovipositor, her children would need to bring her food. Males would also need to actively seek her out to kisspop her.

An agent would need to change the gender of eggs laid depending on either the age of the queen or the balance of male/female grendels in the world. Once the queen would die the next eligible grendeless would be turned adult, where an agent would otherwise have them skip the fertile phase and turn them directly from youth to old age.

Perhaps this would merely slow the generation and evolution of the world’s grendels, perhaps it would actually give interesting wolfling run results, but in any case would give interesting flavour to the world.

https://creatures.wiki/Hive_Norn_Agents

https://creatures.wiki/Creatures_3D