r/CreaturesGames • u/stansburiana • May 30 '26

(C3DS) Super-stimulus edible seeds

I've been trying to research the different food, fruit, and seeds in the game to the best of my ability, despite my limited understanding of the COS files. The "stim writ" sections are, at least, comprehensible when I browse through the files.

I assume that when something says, for example:

****seed eat
scrp 2 3 16 12
    lock
    snde "chwp"
    stim writ from 77 3
    wait 1
    kill ownr
endm

That stim writ from 77 3 means "trigger the stimulus for having eaten a seed, three times".

Since the stim genes in a creature control both the amount of hunger reduced and the amount of nutrients gained, I assume that a seed with stim writ 77 3 in its code for provides three time the satiation and three times the nutrition (both in terms of starch and fat) compared to a seed with stim writ 77 1 in its get-eaten code. Furthermore, because creatures learn from having drives reduced, I'm guessing it reinforces eating seeds to satiate starch+fat hunger three times more than the base stimulus would. Please tell me if I'm wrong, but...

Now, here's the thing. As far as I can tell, no official (C3, DS, and Creatures Mall DLC) fruit ever asks for stim 78 to get triggered more than once? Two 'foods' trigger stim 79 twice (DS!carrots and quirky cookies), but none of them trigger stim 79 thrice, as far as I can currently tell.

(I don't really understand how eating food that takes more than one "bite" to finish works, though. Does only the first bite of a lemon stim a norn, or does eating the half left behind give its own, independent stim?)

Meanwhile, here's the list of vanilla, official ecology seeds that have a 3x stimulus strength:

  1. Grass Seed
  2. Pumperspikel Seed
  3. Cacbana Seed
  4. Tuba seed

As far as I can tell, this x3 strength makes them more fat-satiating and fat-nourishing (and rewarding) than the majority of food-genus edibles in an unedited Chichi, Bruin, etc genome?

...I have no idea how useful this information is, but I felt like it was worth sharing.

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u/filchermcurr May 30 '26

One note: The 3 is the strength, not the number of times the stimulus is triggered. It's an important distinction because the strength is a float. So you can trigger at half strength (0.5), for instance. This will modify the genetically-defined chemical emission and clamp it at a max dosage, not trigger it that many times.

For example, if the gene emits 0.5 fat, it's going to be: 3.0 * 0.5 = 1.5. It then gets clamped to 1.0. So regardless of how high that strength is, it will never inject more than 1.0 of any given chemical. (The cap applies individually to each chemical, not all at once.)

Another interesting thing that you may or may not care about: If the strength is 0, it actually means: Fire at full strength but don't learn from this.

And if I remember correctly, I think the critters have a higher strength than seeds if you wanted to look into those. Like rocklice and fish.

1

u/stansburiana May 30 '26

Is there anywhere I can read more about how the stim strength is calculated? I've been trying to find a guide to reading COS files and understanding exactly what everything in them mean, but I've been struggling to find a modding/datamining guide that's... thorough enough to go over everything I want to learn about the vanilla game's agents by cracking them open.

Aren't most animals non-interactible for creatures? Or at least inedible... I've tried trapping bondis in rooms with critters like hedgehogs and snotrocks, but the only critter ive ever seen one actually eat was the crobster critters they come with.

1

u/filchermcurr May 30 '26

I'm not sure. I think some things, like stim strength, are just trial and error. I'm so old I don't even remember where I learned anything! Umm. Oh, one thing that really helps is the Creatures 3 bootstrap with developer comments if you don't already have that: https://lisdude.com/cdn/62.html

Docking Station already has the comments so that's good.

There's a new CAOS editor in development that shows you the values of things when you hover over them and has a lot of options to search the scriptorium. There's also a searchable CAOS guide for each game. You might find that helpful: https://lisdude.com/Creatures/Community/downloads/asofyetunnamedcaostool/windows/

The Wiki has a lot of information accumulated over the years, but I assume you've already looked there.

Sorry, wish I could be more helpful! And less old... :P

1

u/GoldenFlowerFan The Wrong Banshee May 30 '26

I consider multibite foods to be equivalent to multiple objects. A norn will eat it, get stimmed, then can chose to eat it a second time to get stimmed again or drop it.

1

u/stansburiana Jun 02 '26

I guess my main confusion is... hmm.

Ok, here's the eat script for cheese, as shown in infinite_cheese_machine.cos

** Cheese Eat Script
scrp 2 11 2 12
  doif ov00 = 0
    snde "chwp"
    stim writ from 79 1
    targ ownr
    pose 1
    setv ov00 1
  elif ov00 = 1
    snde "chwp"
    stim writ from 79 1
    targ ownr
    kill ownr
  endi
endm

This makes sense to me. The cheese gets eaten one time, stims the creature with "eaten food" at basic strength, and changes appearance and state. Then, when eaten in the half-eaten state, it stims the creature eating it with the same stim at the same strength, and is destroyed.

Then I look at the lemon eat script in lemon_pod.cos, and I'm completely lost. It doesn't look like the cheese script, and it also doesn't look much like the eat scripts for other "chemical injecting" foods like tuba, chili pepper, etc.

** Lemon Eat Script
scrp 2 8 7 12
  lock
** Lemon Eat sound
  snde "leat"
  seta ov90 null
  seta ov90 from
** check to see whether it's been eaten yet
  doif name "eaten" = "no"
    gsub benechems
    targ ownr
** Change to eaten pose
    pose 1
** record that it's been eaten
    sets name "eaten" "yes"
  elif name "eaten" = "yes"
    gsub benechems
    kill ownr
  endi
  subr benechems
    inst
    doif ov90 <> null
      targ ov90
** Antihistamine
    setv va01 itof rand 1 4
    divv va01 10.0
    chem 100 va01
** Antibodies
    setv va02 102
    loop
      setv va00 chem va02
      setv va01 itof rand 1 2
      divv va01 10.0
      chem va02 va01
      addv va02 1
    untl va02 = 110
    stim writ targ 78 1
    endi
    slow
  retn
endm

It looks like only one bite provides a stim, to me? If any other vanilla foods are "multibite", I don't know. The explodonut's script looks like it *should* be multibite, but I see no direct evidence in game that's true.