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!

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

Ali's Response + My Views On Paid User Content

As anyone who read yesterday's blog post will know, I recently got in touch with Ali regarding the Chao Created Online store and the current status of the paid metarooms. Rather surprisingly, I received a response:

Hi C-Rex

Thanks for getting in touch!

I’m actually having an entire month off over the Summer, and I intend to dig through my old CD-ROMs and Zip disks and bring all of my Creatures downloads back online. I’ll likely still have Montu/Ostrova as a premium items, but all money raised will be donated to Child’s Play.

I’m quite looking forward to digging through everything! I miss the community (and the game!) a ton.

Best wishes,

Ali

To put it bluntly, I've never agreed with paying for fanmade mods, especially when they're almost twenty years old and while I do appreciate the money being used for charity, it seems that charging money, or at least the same amount they were sold for last time, would be a waste of them due to low demand, as Ostrova's graphics are incredibly dated now and there are far better-looking metarooms out there which are available for free. Personally, I believe the right thing to do would be to release a statement allowing members to share the metarooms privately between them, much like the official breed packs, because let's face it, the community isn't what it used to be, and unless Spil bother to release Creatures Family, we're likely to be in this situation for quite a while.

Do you agree with paid mods? Feel free to leave a comment discussing your views! 

A Chaotic Situation!

Once upon a time, several members of the Creatures Community decided to sell their metarooms on Chaos Created. They were: NornGarden 2 (which I actually reviewed on The Norn Nebula in 2012), Ostrova, and Montu, and continued to be sold on the website at a heavily inflated price up until around 2014-ish, when the Chaos Created store stopped selling them.

As the store is closed now, and efforts to contact Tomtschek, creator of the NornGarden 2, have been fruitless, I am going to plan on emailing Ali, the owner of Chaos Created, directly. Hopefully then we will be receive an answer on whether or not we can finally share these elusive metarooms!

Image courtesy of Tomtschek.

Nearly a Decade of The Norn Nebula

Due to my interest in Creatures hitting a bit of a low, along with real life commitments and not being able to think of anything to talk about, The Norn Nebula has been left silent since around August last year, and while I don't have anything particular to announce, I think it would be nice to have another blog post after such a long period of inactivity.

My main issue with writing blog posts is motivation, along with thinking of things to write. Usually I have loads of thoughts swimming around in my head during the day, but as soon as I sit down at my computer they completely evaporate and I sometimes find it a bit difficult to think of things to talk about, which can be quite frustrating. This has been a problem for quite a while and I have no idea if it is mental health-related or not, but I've still tried to soldier on regardless.

Earlier this year I was busy working on a new genetic breed, which are essentially a C3 edition of my Albian Ant Norns which I released years ago. Unfortunately I lost interest in them, but their files are still up so I can resume them when I suddenly feel the motivation to do so. It might be nice to have them out for the Norn Nebula's tenth anniversary, but we'll see.

The blog's Discord server has been running for just over two years and I have seen it grow immensely. Sadly, we did have quite a few individuals who seemed to want to ruin it for others, but these have all been dealt with. Those who frequent the blog will have noticed I removed the "Kreatures - My Views" post, and this was mainly to avoid attracting any more potential drama to the blog or server, and to be quite frank I'd rather let sleeping dogs lie regarding this particular user.

With regard to content posted on the blog, I've considered possibly starting up reviews, or the "Download of the week" section again, as I quite enjoyed doing them in the past, and it would also provide a good information resource for the Creatures Community.

When The Norn Nebula/Docking Station Galaxy does turn ten (which is this May, I believe) I will most definitely be trying to do a blog post announcing it. Despite the inactivity this blog means a great deal to me - I've been through so much in the past decade and yet this blog has always remained as a sort of beacon of hope in some ways. Hopefully it will remain this way for many years to come.

A Quick Update

Although I've not got any plans to do anything for the Norn Nebula for the time being, I thought it might be a good idea to give a quick update on things regarding the site, and what to possibly expect in the future!

Note: This is a standalone post. I will likely not be following it up with anything for a while.

Firstly, I did a little housekeeping on the "Other downloads" page (what was I thinking with the image alignment?) to make it look a little bit neater. I am also likely going to be doing a check of all the downloads and links I have hosted on the blog to make sure they work properly. Yes, the Discord button doesn't work. It will be staying that way for a while.

I will be keeping The Norn Nebula's YouTube channel, even though the newer version has barely been used. Facebook, on the other hand, will likely be removed as I haven't been bothered to update it since November last year. I will still be keeping the actual page up, however, as it's been running since 2014 and is a piece of history, and it would be a shame if I were to get rid of it.

I hope those who enjoy the blog continue to do so for many years to come. If anyone wishes to get in touch please see the about page. 

Kreatures - My Views

DISCLAIMER: Please keep in mind that the following blog post consists entirely of my own views. If you disagree with me, then that's fine, but please do not post abusive comments or insults.

I also do apologise for the negative tone of this blog post, but I strongly believe it is something that certain community members need to be aware of.

As many of you will know, a fangame based around the Creatures series has been in development for a few months. Known as Kreatures, the game aims to bring the creatures games to a more modern standard. With the fact that Spil Games is not actively working on Creatures Family for the time being, this may be the closest thing we will get to a Creatures sequel.

However, the positivity ends there, I'm afraid. The developer of the project, Geat_Masta (Or Geatmaster), has proven himself to be against everything the Creatures community stands for, in regards to his personal attitude and views. From just one glance at his YouTube channel, one can see that he has subscribed to numerous far right figures, many of whom regularly spew vitriol and hatred towards minority groups. For this reason along with several others which I am not compelled to speak about, I strongly believe that it is important that community members are well aware of his own personal views before they consider endorsing his project, especially since the community itself has a very diverse range of people from many different backgrounds, religions and sexualities.

Geatmaster's Subscriptions include far-right hate preacher Tommy Robinson and bigot "Count Dankula", among others.

If anyone is looking to endorse alternative community-based projects, I highly recommend Albian Warp, which I believe I have previously spoken about on the blog in the past. It has gained a lot of momentum over the past few months and I'm really looking forward to seeing the warp return! You can find more information on Albian Warp here.

I probably won't be updating The Norn Nebula for quite some time now, but I hope people continue to enjoy it, especially since today marks its ninth anniversary! Time certainly flies doesn't it?

Update - 01/06/2018 
So I went looking on the Twitter feed for my YouTube Channel's Twitter account and came across these lovely messages that Geat_Master left me last year. I wasn't even aware of their existance until this evening:

 So yeah, this is the guy who is apparently going to be bringing us a worthy sequel to the Creatures series. Right.

Regarding Inactivity

It has been nearly a whole decade since I joined the Creatures Community, hard to believe, I know! Throughout the years I have seen a whole load of members come and go, along with many websites, some of which I have fond memories of visiting when I was a child and first discovered Creatures. Things have certainly changed within a space of ten years. However, this blog post is about to adopt a more poignant tone.

As a person, I rarely play creatures any more. I may go through phases of playing it, but these are often quite few and far between. I haven't released any content since 2013, and personally, there doesn't seem to be the spark that there used to be. I am most certainly not done with Creatures, and I think it is a modern classic, but I simply don't have the time to play like I used to.

It is with this that I am announcing The Norn Nebula will be going dormant. To put it bluntly, I will not be posting anything unless it is significantly important. I know the blog hasn't seen much activity over 2017, but I thought I would at least announce it so people are aware. However, the blog will NOT be closing permanently any time soon, and I will be keeping it available as long as possible, so there's no need to worry about it.

Now, on a related note we have the Creatures Community Discord Server, which WILL be remaining active. I must say, though, that I have seen some behaviour from certain members that I have been quite disappointed with - I have never set out to make enemies in the community and I hope that everyone understands that I am running the server with the community's best interests in mind, but I am willing to listen to feedback if people have suggestions.

As always, I hope everyone continues to enjoy the blog, and if anyone has suggestions or feedback, feel free to get in touch.

NOTE: Due to spam I have had to disable comments on this blog post. Sorry!

The Discover Albia Forum Closes

It has recently come to my attention that the Discover Albia Forum has been closed by Jessica, and is no longer open to new users or posts. Jessica's blog, Discover Albia, went on holiday last year and so it's understandable that it has been closed, but it is still sad to see the forum close.

Running a forum can be quite a lot of work - The Norn Nebula had its own forum at one point, but like the Discover Albia Forum, it closed, but it was down to a lack of activity rather than myself not having the time to maintain it. It seems that in this day and age forums may be starting to become things of the past, but they are still very useful regardless, especially Creatures Caves which has been running for, wow, over seventeen years!

I might consider archiving the Discover Albia Forum at some point, as Jessica states it may be removed at some point in the future. I hope this isn't the case, but it's always good to be prepared in case the inevitable happens.

I'll still keep a link to the forum in The Norn Nebula's link section, but will edit the title to let users know that it is closed.

Thanks for the experience Jessica, and I eagerly anticipate the return of Discover Albia.

Where Does The Time Go?/Join the Creatures Community Discord Server!

At the risk of sounding like I'm repeating myself from my last post, I just thought I'd give everyone a quick rundown on how I'm doing. It's been four months since I last posted to The Norn Nebula, and to be frank, the blog has been pretty dead lately - I've not had much motivation to post anything, and I'm not as big a Creatures player as I used to be, especially since my favourite game in the series, Creatures 2, doesn't work on Windows 10. Don't worry, however. The blog isn't going anywhere, and if it was, I would definitely announce it first.

Next January marks a whole decade since I officially joined the community. Time flies, doesn't it? I can remember back to being thirteen years old and going to the library to download  COBs and stuff as we didn't have an internet connection back at home. I've been thinking about commemorating it some way, but haven't come to any conclusion. I actually planned to release a CoB for the 20th anniversary of Creatures 1 last year, but it never came to be. Maybe I could do a Wolfling Run? As always, I'm open to suggestions, so if anyone has anything to share feel free!

I go back to my third and final year of university in September ( got to skip a year because my prior studies were equivalent to the first year) which I'm looking forward to; a bit of freedom is always nice! Slightly less exciting news comes in the form of, or lack of, Creatures Family. Spil Games have released no news since acquiring the license back in 2016, and to be blunt, I couldn't care less, and judging from Spil's previous titles, I think we'll have dodged a bullet if it is never released.

On a more positive note, the Creatures Community now has its own Discord Server! I'm sure most members of the Creatures Community will already be aware of its presence, but I'll post a link to it anyway. It's always nice meeting new people! You can connect to the server here.

Finally, I hope everyone has a lovely summer, and continues to enjoy The Norn Nebula!

Happy 20th Anniversary Creatures!

As many of you may (or may not) know, today officially marks twenty years since the release of the original Creatures game on PC. The first entry in the creatures series, it is considered by a lot of people to be the "perfect" Creatures game, and also helped introduce us to the loveable norns that we still all love to this day! The game also introduced the scaly grendels, which although seemed scary at first, were actually all not that bad with a few tweaks to the game's scripting.

I've not really been active in the community recently, but decided this would be a good opportunity to return for short while as this is quite a special occasion indeed. I did originally plan a piece of fan art to commemorate the occasion, but I've been too busy with uni work recently and never got far from doing a few initial sketches. I'm also probably not going to release anything for the CCSF this year - I did hope to finish off an Ant Norn breed for C3/DS earlier this year but unfortunately life has taken over. Regardless, I hope everyone continues to enjoy Creatures for many years to come, and if anyone has any memories to share about your creatures experience please talk about them in the comments!

Discover Albia has a Forum!

After plenty of preparation and testing, Jessica's website, Discover Albia, now has a forum! It features Creatures Challenges, discussions, guides and even a help section for getting help with the games.

Please read the rules before joining. You can also get more information from Jessica's original announcement post here!

Helen's Bibble Directory and SeeYou7.net - The End of an Era

It's always sad when a creatures website closes down for good, and it's a great shame that two fantastic websites, Helen's Bibble Directory and SeeYou7.net, have finally been lost after all these years.

SeeYou7.net was a great website, offering a directory of Norn, Grendel and Ettin breeds released for each game, along with a wide selection of COBs and other items. Helen's Bibble Directory was one of my favourite websites for gathering downloads when I first got into Creatures 2, and I loved the design and the fact it was packed full of fun features. It was definitely a far cry from a lot of creatures sites from the late 90s!

Unfortunately despite contacting Helen via her Twitter (Sparkleblue's email address is reportedly not working, so I never tried it) I have yet to hear any info on the status of Helen's Bibble Directory, and it seems that barely any of the downloads have been archived. I myself have quite a few that I downloaded within the past year, along with a couple of CD-ROMs I used to use to download things on during my highschool days (to cut a long story short, I broke the memory stick I had been using previously and so had to resort to CDs) that may contain a few more of Helen's downloads.

I will be keeping the wiki pages for Helen's downloads updated with my own links to her downloads, should I come across them. If Helen herself reads this blog post, and would like to discuss this, feel free to email me on the email I provided on the about page.

On another subject, I should hopefully get NornHub up and running again soon once I fix my installation of C3/DS on my laptop.

Regarding Creatures Online

It should come to no surprise that Creatures Online has unfortunately been postponed due to lack of funds. I for one was not surprised, as the came itself has been in development for nearly five years! Such a thing is quite tragic, and it's saddening to know that the game may never see the light of day.

Of course, there are the other people who are rejoicing in this fact. I for one completely understand why peoples' cynicism with the game due to the free-to-play approach Fishing Cactus have chosen along with the Norn and gameplay redesigns. However, I believe some of the things people have been saying has been bordering on just plain hate; wishing for the company to go bankrupt is mean-spirited and selfish, especially given the fact this company has gone and resurrected an undeniably dead franchise (bar the community) with the risk it may or may not become a success for them. I find such comments very tiresome and I am quite frankly fed up with this attitude. Until Fishing Cactus have released Creatures Online, and people have actually experienced the gameplay for themselves, these criticisms have little to stand on.

Finally I apologise for the negative tone of today's post, but I had to get it off my chest. Unfortunately my opinions on various people around the community has changed a lot these past few months, but I certainly won't let this stand in the way of my enjoyment of the games!

Blog Update and Layout Changes

It's been a very long time since I last updated this blog, nearly a year in fact! However, I haven't been exactly inactive; I've been tweaking a few parts of the blog's design and layout to my liking, and to make everything a little accesible to visitors.

One of the first things you'll notice are that I made the blog slightly wider, and made more posts appear on each page. Hopefully this will give viewers more to read than having to keep scrolling through each page! I've also added a bit more content to the sidebar, mainly popular posts so they are easier to find, along with updates from other Creatures blogs so it is easier to keep up to date with them.

At the moment I am currently revamping the download pages to seem a bit neater - recently I decided to reupload everything to my own Google Drive for the sake of convenience. So far the C2 downloads page is done, but I still need to work on the other two pages.

Will I be doing any more posts about the games? It's too soon to tell, as my interest in the games has been dwindling quite a lot and I have been preoccupied with other, more important things in my life, like trying to find a job! I have also become a lot more wary of people following the recent events this past month, and have also been accused of posting spam, which is completely wrong, as I would never consider doing something so pathetic. However, I won't let these simple things get in the way, and hopefully, with the possible release of Creatures Online in November, I should have new content up soon.

Out With the Old and in With the New

For the past few months there has been very little activity on Docking Station Galaxy. Unfortunately, my own dwindling interest in creatures is the main cause of this, and consequently I have been unable to produce anything creatures-related in 2014.

However, it is now new year, which means new beginnings! Hopefully we should see the eventual release of Creatures Online, and I also plan on releasing my Creatures Village Reorchestrated album sometime this year also. I've also put in a bit of effort into tidying up the website - the contact page is now gone, as there is little point in having one when I can be easily reached on Creatures Caves, and I have also cancelled the Norn Hub livestream mostly due to having insufficient time (and a spare computer) to stream from.

Last year also saw some superb releases for the CCSF, which although not as extensive as the previous years, still managed to get the majority of the community involved. A big thanks to KittyTikara for making such an excellent effort!

In the meantime, I have no major plans for this blog, but will continue to maintain it, and may return once Creatures Online is released. If anyone has suggestions, please let me know.

Petition: Help Bring Docking Station Back Online!

The Docking Station server has been down for quite a while now, which is a shame as the warp is a highly integral part of the game. Fishing Cactus have stated they will be releasing the original Creatures games, along with Creatures Online, when it is released. However, there as been very little news in terms of bringing the warp back, something that can be quite confusing to new players. You only have to look on the Creatures series' GOG.com forum to see the amount of people who are unable to play the game, unaware of the DS login disabler.

Luckily, our friend Eprillios from Creatures Caves has recently made a petition asking Fishing Cactus to consider restoring the DS warp to its former glory. Signing it will be greatly appreciated by the whole Creatures Community!