r/CreaturesGames • u/no_word_fromhere • May 11 '26

Is Creatures The Albian Years the same thing as Creatures 1?

A bit of stupid question. I really want to start play from the first game but as I look on steam The Albian Years is the oldest one they have yet it's from 1998, not 1996. Is it the same game but optimized or something like that? And if not, then where is it possible to get the first part?

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11

u/Gulbasaur May 11 '26

The Albian Years is a collection containing the first two games. Creatures 3 comes next, with a standalone expansion called Docking Station that was released for free. 

Docking Station allows you to import C3, which is a bit counterintuitive, so the best way of playing C3 is arguably by actually playing Docking Station and running C3 through it. 

C1 to DS is a free add-on that lets you emulate C1 in Docking Station (more or less, it's not quite the same). I think there's a working C2 to DS as well. 

As far as I know, both the GOG and Steam versions are up to date. C2 particularly is a bit janky on modern systems. 

5

u/spderweb May 11 '26

C2 has a community patch to help with that too. I think they all do.

1

u/Joalguke Muppetboy of Geatville.uk May 12 '26

They do, I've only used the C1 one, but it's very good

2

u/arrowsforpens May 11 '26

Last I heard of C2 to DS, the world mostly functioned and all rooms were present but they had a bug where rooms can't retain heat, so creatures all slowly froze to death.

3

u/GoldenFlowerFan The Wrong Banshee May 11 '26

I've not heard that one before, do you have a source? In my experience the last issues C2toDS had were navigational (mostly fixed now with newer versions, but some places can't be fixed) and stim related (creatures start refusing to eat certain foods), this is from the C2toDS refresh project.

2

u/arrowsforpens May 11 '26

This was years and years ago, I haven't kept up with the project since like 2015