Just a Little Update

This is just a little update regarding the downloads pages - for some reason Google Drive decided to private most of them, but this has now been resolved. I have honestly considered moving them to another host as I'm not a big fan of Google and I'd rather host them somewhere they won't have the risk of being made unavailable to download.

Another thing I'd like to announce is that I am no longer hosting the "Big Fat Norns" on my blog. The main reason for this comes from their concept, as I believe it is borderline fatshaming and definitely not something I wish to encourage! For those of you who have already download them, feel free to share them privately, but I will no longer be hosting them on my blog for the forseeable future.

There's not really much else to speak about regarding this blog, though I am looking forward to the CCSF next month. I can't wait to see what the community has been working on! It's almost like a second Christmas!

Creatures Comes to Steam This December!

As I'm sure many of you are aware, it has recently been announced that the entire Creatures series (excluding Creatures Village, it seems) will be coming to Steam next month. I personally think this is long overdue, and will hopefully introduce the series to a new generation of fans!

So far I have been playtesting C3/DS - for this release, it has been retitled as Creatures Docking Station and Creatures 3 will be included as paid DLC, with DS being free-to-play, as it was originally released. There are numerous fixes present, such as the Bramboo fix, which were inspired by those created for the original game's release, and new ones, such as expressive breeds no longer being listed separately in the egg layers and being used as the default breeds.

Probably the biggest advantage this release has is it no longer needs to be installed to My Documents, which was a major pain in the Exodus release of C3/DS, as it meant that if the player installed the game somewhere such as in a folder under Program Files, any files extracted from agent files would be dumped inside a folder within My Documents, and the game would experience errors as it would't be able to find them. I have no idea why this issue is present, but it was most likely a failed attempt at allowing multiple users on the machine to have their own sets of addons and worlds.

Creatures Docking Station will be released on the 6th of December, but there are currently no confirmed dates for the other two games, apart from they will be released in December as well. If you want further news I highly suggest following Critter Consortium (the people behind the port) on Twitter. I may also make further blog posts, so keep your eyes peeled.

New Downloads Added

Just a quick blog post to announce that I have added several of my existing Creatures downloads, along with a new one (the C2 Tomato and Nut Realism Update), to their relevant game pages. There are still a few that need adding, but I'll probably get those done at some point in the future.

On a side note, I've noticed that it is coming up to this blog's 10th anniversary. I'm surprised I've kept it running for so long, as I don't play the games nearly as much as I used to, and I spend most of my time moderating and posting in the Discord (which I highly recommend joining, by the way). 

I have toyed with the idea of bringing back NornHub (new name ideas are welcome) and streaming C3/DS, but quite frankly, I don't really have much motivation. Heck, I've even stopped streaming on my main Twitch channel for the same reason. But rest assured I won't be getting rid of this blog, even if I vanish off the face of the Earth.

Goodbye Discover Albia (2010-2020)

I apologise for somewhat dampening the spirit of the day, but it has recently come to my attention that the beloved Creatures blog, Discover Albia, has now sadly closed for good. I'm unaware of how complete the Wayback Machine has it archived, nor Jessica's policy on sharing her content, but hopefully somebody will have them archived somewhere. Discover Albia was a fantastic resource for all things Creatures and Jessica's passion was truly inspiring, and it was actually her blog that inspired me to turn my current website into a blog, which is now The Norn Nebula

To be perfectly honest, Jessica's 2015 post and 2016 departure left a bad taste in my mouth, especially since the person responsible for making her feel uncomfortable still served as a moderator at Creatures Caves for many years following Jessica's accusations, and very little seemed to have been done to heal the rift in the community at the time. I'm hopeful things have moved on since then. It's just a shame we had to lose one of our best members in the process.

Regardless, one should never say never, and sincerely hope Jessica returns some time in the not so distant future. In the meantime, I urge people who downloaded content from Discover Albia to contact CariTheKitty of Eem Foo's Archive, as there may be content that was lost when the site closed.

 On another note, I hope everyone enjoys the holidays, and has a fun and safe time!

A (Belated) Introduction to Warp Day

Something I haven't yet spoken about on The Norn Nebula is the concept of Warp Day, which is an event that takes place on the discord server every Saturday. The main goal of the day is to encourage as many members as possible to connect their Docking Station worlds to Albian Warp (further information on Albian warp here) and allow their norns to travel across.

Our last Warp Day took part yesterday, and was a roaring success thanks to the efforts of me and the staff team, and I had a lot of fun receiving all kinds of strange and unusual Creatures! Honestly, having a warp system brings so much more fun to the game and I'm really grateful towards Ham5ter for making it a reality again.

The main purpose of this post is mostly to raise awareness, as I know there are a lot of members out there who don't have Discord, and I think it's a really great way for the community to get involved, especially since the Creatures Community isn't as large as it used to be. I am also looking forward to the up and coming CCSF this year - there's a chance I may release something, but I have been quite caught up with real-life stuff recently and not had the time or motivation to do so, but we'll see.

Our next Warp Day will be next Saturday. We've not got anything special planned just yet, but I'm sure the staff team will be able to come up with something fun! During the first Warp Day I actually released an assortment of special, warp-themed norns for people to track and post pictures of in the server when they visited their worlds. It was a whole lot of fun and I might even consider doing it again in the future!

As always, I hope people continue to enjoy this blog and find it useful. See you all soon!

Portal gif courtesy of Malkin