#creaturescaves

A pair of algae plants, anchored to rocks: There’s a small button attached that generate free-growing, living, reproducing and dying instances of the respective plant. I believe the first is a saltwater fleece algae, and the latter is freshwater hair algae.

A dragonfruit ‘tree’ item. Did you know that dragonfruit are actually just artificially grown on posts to make them easier to handle, and don’t actually have trunks? If i recall correctly, this plant would periodically make ripening dragon fruit. Once ripe they would fall off and, if not eaten while lying on the right soil conditions, grow a small new dragon fruit plant! Oddly, for some reason I was asked to provide a way for the tree to also supply macarons (macaroons?) which is what the small piece of technology on the artificial trunk is for, alongside caring for the fruit bearing plant.

Here’s the macaron btw.

A tree bearing shelf fungus! Full disclosure on this one: This particular asset uses a heavily modified version of an official in-game graphic from creatures docking station (I think). It was requested that I make a mushroom related item that would infrequently drop an edible mushroom that could be scavenged by living things. The item also had to gel with the original game graphics. I feel like the vines on the right hand side might have been there to allow a second object to be coded on there. Perhaps it was a grapevine or similar, with assets made by someone else?

A lot of the item dispensers in this particular project were curious in that they were all supposed to produce two things. Previously there was the case of the dragonfruit tree whose life support system ALSO vended macarons for some quirky reason. With this one I was asked to make a machine that vended both a plant and an animal product with a seafood theme. The end result is an eco-pod that raises shrimp and ‘kelp’ (actually eelgrass most likely, I also referenced the hair algae that was made for this modpack as well). Funfact those shrimp graphics got touched up and used in an actual animal further in this post!

Now this was a funny one- Another two-food dispenser that makes a plant and a meat based food, with a theme of humidity and/or ‘water themed, but not underwater’. I went with a greenhouse/biodome that raises treefrogs and grows salad greens. The plant and animal combination inside the dome maintains the carbon-oxygen cycle and also maintains heat and humidity inside. The items vended are a small salad bowl and a frog-leg kebab. I thought for a while that maybe this vended whole frog legs, but thinking back I believe that image was for a respite of the ‘Bug’s Picnic Basket’ 3rd party add-on.

This game series has a big emphasis on biotech, and weird combinations of hard tech and animals: When asked to make an item that would release two freshwater animals into the environment, I opted to put a weird hybrid animal into the graphic for the device. Here it’s a leech-crayfish combo, curled up in their life support tank inside a faux-rock, ready to lay the eggs of either leeches or crayfish at the push of a button! Those shrimp graphics from earlier actually went into making the juvenile stage of the crayfish.

Another one of these ‘two animal’ items: This one dispenses creatures for a saltwater environment, a nudibranch and a species of filefish (oxymonacanthus longirostris, I don’t know why I decided that specific species or named the files that way it made them hard to find later). The ‘nudirostris’ creature hiding inside this tank actually got an out-of-tank graphic that was never used. I think I remember the animal just being considered cute by the coder so they wanted it?

This was intended to be an item that contained all the animals needed for a freshwater life cycle: A plant, an invertebrate and a vertebrate species! It was inspired loosely by a series of brightly coloured palette-swaps of fish by a fanbase user called savannahs11 (I think?). In this case I kept the approximate colours and made a shoal of fictional tetras. They loosely resemble skirt or glass tetras. The other graphics represent floating algae and some to-scale sea monkeys, also called artemia or brine shrimp (although they could also be interpreted as fairy shrimp or other freshwater members of the genus). There’s a distinct lack of free-floating aquatic plantlife in the creatures games, so I wanted to try out something that would allow for basically clouds of tiny plants to float around clouding bodies of water... There’s no semi-transparency in this game engine so I tried to use pixel dithering for a similar effect. This is also what is happening in the dithered sprites for fish, food and animals: It represents the item decaying and would show shortly before the item is removed from the game session.

Another ‘mobile’ plant that didn’t make the final cut is this marimo moss ball! In this case, as it has a large sprite and would have ‘rolled’ along a surface instead of simply free-floating in water with a randomised movement pattern, the issue very quickly came up that it would need a LOT of sprites to show the rolling action correctly as it rolled slowed stopped and changed direction. Rather than try to solve that issue (as well as how to keep it from rolling out of water) it was put on indefinite hold.

This next set is actually all one ‘plant’, at least by the standards of the game code! These sprites were intended to be an expansion to what I believe is an existing but far more restricted version of the in-game item. It detects what body of water the plant is placed in and grows a different set of sprites accordingly. These sprites represent various different add-on rooms and biomes that are currently available, and would have allowed the plant to detect them and grow a graphically appropriate plant to better blend in. I think that topmost plant sprite set might be based on an existing sprite set in the current version of that item.

Now here’s an interesting one, in my opinion!!!! There’s an unused official graphic in c3/docking station for an ‘aquarium’ (really a large fish bowl) that was seemingly supposed to contain a small area filled with water, allowing you to safely move fish and other aquatic life around the game. As it stands, you cannot safely move fishes around and have to grab them and hustle to your next destination while praying that the creature doesn’t suffocate before you get there. At some point, a modder of the games made a functional version of this fish bowl, but it was lost to time and I was never able to find a copy of it. Eventually I said ‘I’ll make a graphic for an actual fish tank/aquarium and approach the coding side of the community and ask if they’re interested in making this’ but nobody ever bit. The game does have an engine that would permit a mobile box of particular biome (it’d be classified as a vehicle hah!) but part of their reluctance was that many had coded their animals to simply freeze in time when carried or inside a ‘vehicle’. An aquarium of modded animals would simply show static images of creatures inside, and in their minds it wasn’t worth it. I still think it’d be cool though, and I’m still happy with the layers of animation over a dithered bg to create some degree of in-game transparency.

Another example of differences in coder and artist preferences is this sprite set: Intended to be a companion an aquatic plant is this set of goldfish. Clicking on the ceramic fish vends little eggs that can hatch into one of three varieties of goldfish, who grow by eating in-game plant seeds. I very distinctly recall having a surprisingly heated argument with the aforementioned coder of this item, who insisted that the ceramic fish produce a very loud cartoon ‘burp’ when interacted with. It took a very long time to dissuade them from doing this, and a lot of insistence that making it jarringly comedic would clash with the related items in the set, as well as feeling rather demeaning considering that this mod required over a hundred hand-drawn sprite images I was rather proud of. Another curious thing of note is that the third growth stage of each type of fish for some reason just doesn’t work in-game, due to some kind of coding issue, so nobody ever got to see their largest most polished sprite sheets.

The companion to these goldfish is actually this little aquatic plant! One of my favorite plants is an amazonian fresh water species that goes by a lot of different names based on country and scientific debate. Sometimes it’s called elodea, or egeria, or anacharis, or densa, or combinations of the above! All you need to know is that it’s an invasive weed in some countries and that it photosynthesises so fast it can be seen visibly bubbling on a sunny day! The coding for this one ended up sadly a little strange as well, launching the seeds produced by the plant through walls, floors, ceilings and sometimes out of bounds, making it hard to keep alive. It makes me vaguely consider if I could somehow figure out how to edit it myself.

Mercifully written by someone else, this set of sprites is for an item that seeds the nearby ground with moss. It comes in four varieties, three of which require soil and nutrients to grow, and one labelled ‘aggressive moss’ that would simply grow a layer of generic moss regardless of the in-game environment. This was made as a failsafe for when 3rd part areas (or sometimes even bugged or overlooked areas of the main game) simply fail to provide data for supporting plantlife... Making sure at least something grew would provide in-game creatures with much needed food.

Also here’s a fun thing to find- a very early prototype of the above moss planting machine!