Vitra Canny Alpha Release

Vitra (Old Norse, "wisdom") Canny is a Creatures 2 genome. This is a developmental release of an ongoing project to understand and extend the Akamai Canny genetic base. They're not perfectly stable but they add enough features where I'm excited to share what I tried. This version of the genome was made in April 2024 and polished up in December 2024.

Vitra Canny Alpha/VCA Overview

- More frequently live to max Akamai Canny lifespan (~11h8m) if bugs don't kill them first
- Able to recognize and escape top/bottom of elevator shafts and narrow rooms, and generally learn to stop trying useless actions.
- Creatures prioritize survival-related drives thanks to rebalancing of lesser drives like crowdedness.
- Many small changes to improve chances of learning survival skills described in depth below.

- Different wallbonking stimulus approach + fully implement JayD’s wallbonking solution (broken in some breeds)
  - You’ll still see young creatures wallbonk. I made the intincts kick in later to help retain eating/sleeping.

- Gender-linked appearance genes inspired by Rainbow Feliz.
- Extra tail/arm animation added to adult tired, wander, and scuttle animations (no damage was done to the actual gaits!)
- Shoving by the hand is now experienced as petting, which is comforting to the creature but doesn't give reward.
- Descriptive gene names (including those introduced by Canny but weren't documented well) for geneticists

In more depth

- Genetic defense against these bad behaviors:
    - Bad drive prioritization: Reduce Echo chemical from some reactions to make common, unimportant events like walking past a crowd or recovering after being hurt less significant to the brain.
        - Loneliness and Crowdedness also now cancel each other and decay much faster.
    - Stuck in locked sleep scripts with nonzero Sleepiness: Sleeping periodic stim produces 1 Sleepiness to ensure the 3 Sleepiness reaction can always eventually end up at 0 instead of killing the creature. This can't solve being locked into bugged, unstimulating sleep.
    - Cloud-chasing: No cloud obsession. Creatures are periodically forced to lose focus on weather objects to avoid associating them with unrelated drive changes.
    - Useless actions: Creatures percieve Disappointment, allowing them to learn when an action is not implemented by an object. This is not automatically punished to allow them to form their own conclusions based on context, but you can use this stim in Instinct genes to discourage behaviors. I did this in VCA for to encourage using lifts in the opposite direction when already at the terminal stop. Boredom increase is also used as a deterrent instead of simple punishment.
    - Wallbonking: Wallbonk stimuli is no longer painful because too many common travel situations involve walls. In other genomes, wallbonk stimuli still applies in lifts, causing any time they're in a lift to be hugely painful and truamatic.
        - JayD's wallbonking genes rely on the Turnase half-life being 48, which is missing in pretty much all other breeds which try to implement it!
        - Wallbonking is now beneficial in helping the creature decide to prioritize vertical travel to avoid starving in tiny rooms.

- Brain lobe changes
    - Canny Search lobe overhaul – cells are now susceptible to punishment. This allows young-adult creatures who have Concept lobes full of good learned information ignore unhelpful Search lobe connections which were made during embryology. These would otherwise be permanent and not based on heritable traits.
    - Concept and Decision lobe Strength "Gain if" rules get bonus added during sleep, making instincts more likely to stay learned even in stressful times. Maybe.
    - General Sensory lobe – new receptor: Disappointment stimulus made learnable (uses General Sensory cell 27)
    - Attention lobe - new receptor: periodically zero out Weather cell value to prevent lifelong obsession with clouds.

This is a developmental release and most of the work/testing was done in April. There are a lot of features that were experimental that didn't make it in yet and there are more unique genetic breeds I would really like to make next.

This was one of several release candidates and I didn't have time to re-test all of them. There was another variant with more % deaths caused by old age, but also higher youth mortality.

Some Bugs

- Some will still be stupid adults! While working on these guys I discovered the cause of random stupidity in Canny base creature brains, and they can have it as I haven't been able to fix it yet. This is alleviated by my Search lobe change, but doesn't solve it. Individual lifespan when running wild will vary widely but will still usually be longer than Akamai Canny.
- Don't use Community Edition tick speedup. Creatures will occasionally be killed by the Community Edition engine due to having illegal brain state. This seems to be able to happen to any genome given enough time.
    - Dying in sleep when using tick speedup. I wanted them to be able to "kick awake" if they get stuck in a bugged, unstimulating sleep cycle as this sometimes still happens in my game, but I couldn't make it work in just the biochem. I've lost WR VCA creatures at 3-11hrs old due to this but I think it's outside the control of the genetics. I need to do a full reinstall to see what's going on.
- Generally sometimes get reaped by "Sudden World Loading Death Syndrome!" but this can happen to any genome.
- This breed can still be affected by Lunacy, which is a bug present since C1 where the creature makes a non-Rest decision while in a sleep cycle.

Care tips

- Lift-related instincts might not be visible until they've gotten familiar with lifts and buttons, and wallbonk instincts don't set in immediately to give creatures time to learn how to eat and sleep.
- Wandering may settle them into places with no prospective mates.
- Living to senility massively depends on lack of confusing stimuli. If there are objects near walls in your world, or confusing foods are available, that will break any genome given enough hours of exposure. I have fixes for default food source COBs coming to help as I realized some existing fixes still have an oversight.

Download

Available in 16 natural-ish colors! Only norns for now. The custom appearances were added to the normal appearance genes, plus the extra sex-linked ones. Thank you to bedalton for the Quick Appearance Editor which made this 100x faster.

Download Vitra Canny Alpha Genome Pack

• Note that only the main genome file "VITRA-CANNY-ALPHA.gen" has a matching .gno file, so edit that one if you want to see gene names.

How to inject an egg into your game

Quick note on travel

This project taught me a lot about C2 room design and where creatures get stuck. Varied classes of objects should be arranged in the world to be landmarks and the attention target of travel decisions, particularly at the ends of long contiguous areas. For my own world I'm building, I will be putting lifts closer to walls. Here's a rough drawing of what I learned which might help you set worlds up...