Okay, so...how do I contact those tutorial dudes from the letter? I think one of them was something with Nana...I forgot about the other one.
I checked for any convenient message signs, but there were none. So..."Tutorial?" I said out loud, but nothing happened. I'm not usually the type who uses internet guides or, well, tutorials, so I really wasn't used to finding those things.
I willed Nana-whatever and the other tutorial NPC to appear, but I got the feeling that that was too vague a demand for the AI to understand. At least that was what my 'power' told me and where else except from the AI would this come from?
Being all powerful, apparently, didn't mean being all knowing. My brain was too tiny for that. Being all powerful I could try changing that, but judging by my stellar success so far...I'd better wait until after I got a grip on this stuff.
Since there was no tutorial button, no messages and I had no idea where to go to find tutorial dudes Nana-something and Number Two I went for the most familiar way of getting things done.
"Help!" I screamed, loud enough to be heard everywhere.
Lo and behold, it worked! Barely a second after I started screaming a guy with wings in a nightshirt showed up. Kind of hippie looking, with a beard and long blonde hair. So the design sucked a little, if the hacker dude asked for my opinion on this game I'd tell him to change those guys against something cooler.
Then the nightshirt guy kneeled before me. He kneeled...the hell? He didn't say anything, he just kneeled. What is this, a temple where a priest waits for their god to notice them?
...looking at the situation like that...I was supposed to be a creator. And angels were god's servants. Maybe Hacker dude wasn't quite as stupid as I thought. If he took the beard off this guy, that was. I mean, honestly, long hair and a beard? I wouldn't date this guy.
"Start tutorial." I said, trying to be clear enough for the AI to get what I wanted.
The nightshirt guy tilted his head in confusion. "High one?" He asked in a voice that sounded like ringing bells. Weird voice. And totally unhelpful if the AI didn't even get what a tutorial was. Hacker genius couldn't have forgotten something that basic, could he?
"How do I make loads of plants without designing each one separately?" She started very simple. She could probably use that method on animals and such, too. Later. First was plants and some small animals. But I was not going to spend a million years on making a bunch of boring plants!
The useless help guide fidgeted and then, finally, answered with some useful Info: "Creating basic versions of the lifeforms, setting a degree and direction of mutations and waiting until they develop is the First creator's preferred method."
"Thaaaank you." I rolled my eyes. "Was that really so hard to answer?"
I didn't wait for an answer this time but made a few basic things.
A menu for the settings as far as development went.
In it I had the following options:
Growth Rate
Rate of Mutation
Fertility Rate
Poison
Healing properties
Sentience
Cross breeding potential
Height
Width
Life expectancy
I then decided to make a really basic thing. One of those one cell plant things similar to those I'd used to get an atmosphere the first time I tried this. Then I used the settings on it:
Growth Rate: 10
Rate of Mutation: 10
Fertility Rate: 10
Poison: 1
Healing properties: 1
Sentience: 0
Cross breeding potential: 10
Height: 0,1
Width: 0,05
Life expectancy: 1
A thing that would change and develop quickly, stay small and...wait, what if the Mutations could change settings?
I kind of did want something like Ents, only prettier. Just not everywhere...
After some thought I added a new heading and took out the sentience thing. After the correction it looked like this:
Species: Plant
Type: A
Growth Rate: 10
Rate of Mutation: 10
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Fertility Rate: 10
Cross breeding potential: 10
Height: 0,1 m
Width: 0,05 m
Life expectancy: 1 year
No sentience possible and actual measurements. No Healing and Poison either, just a small basic plant. Good for covering the world.
I made a kind of book and saved the plant in there. Any variations would show up in the book, too, as soon as they appeared.
Thinking it over I then made Type B,C and D, which could be a bit bigger than the Type A but had healing 1-5. poison 1-5 and both healing and poison 1-10. Which could mean pure healing 10 or pure poison 10 or anything in between. On second thought...I'd better lower the mutation, fertility and Growth rates later on, when I make people. Or maybe not...I'd probably forget about it. Maybe make them longer lived...
So, sigh, I changed stuff them for all 4 types, the Type A looked like this:
Species: Plant
Type: A
Growth Rate: 5
Rate of Mutation: 3
Fertility Rate: 7
Cross breeding potential: 6
Height: 0,01 m - 1m
Width: 0,05 m - 3m
Life expectancy: 1 year - 10 years
Still no sentience though. First were bigger plants.
Type E, F, G and H had much lower settings than the others for everything except Height, Width and Life expectancy. But I won't bore you with details. At the moment they were all the same seedling, only they'd grow to be very different plants - and then naturally develop into all kinds of stuff. For some spice I threw in a type I which would change its settings at random with every new mutation - and had all the possibilites, except sentience. That and a much lower fertility, which was locked at 2.
I'm not going to bore anyone by repeating stuff, just notice that I did something similar to mushrooms and then animals. Animals, by the way, were split into three groups. One was herbivore, one omnivore and one carnivore. Those had subgroups and so on, but all had sentience locked at something between 1 and 3. And by animals I also mean insects and frogs and whatever. Don't be picky.
By the way, in case you're wondering, nightshirt dude just stood there like an idiot and watched.
Since I had kind of lost all feeling for whether or not this was going to be balanced I made a new window like I'd seen them in my classes, with lines to show me how much population of which type I had and some more graphs for different Species and then Types and the members of those types. I added filters and all that, too, so I could find out some info in case some future citizen asked for perfect healing plants or something. Or some type went extinct, in which case I might have made a few more mistakes.
Now if anything got closer to zero I could help that type out a bit.
As I was about to plant my lovely new seeds and spread the animal stuff around on land and sea...my eyes fell on the south pole I'd made.
Whincing I realized I almost forgot to add which climates my stuff would need.
I admit I went a bit wild after that. Suffice to say that there's going to be a looot of variation from the very beginning.
Having spent what felt like a year making seedlings with different settings (the lists grew rather long for some subtypes) I finally placed all of them on my planet and then set time to fast forward.
I watched the planet as green and purple (What? I like purple!) spread all over and occasionally erased some of those things that I didn't like. Like the giant pink mushrooms.
After a looong while and a quick fast forward my world was covered in jungles and a few million plants and...honestly, it was growing over my heat. What I needed was some kind of assistance in maintaining thie plants and animals of this world. Or maybe a few...this stuff was hard! And I still remembered the time of daisies plus three more plants and I really really hated that.
Speaking of...I spread daisies all over the world. It was an ugly world without daisies. I'd have to put someone in charge of making sure the daisies were safe, too.