No CD (C1)

The original Creatures game required a CD in the drive in order to start. This article lists ways of circumventing this requirement, for convenience.

Change shortcut
The shortcut for Creatures usually points to somewhere like. You should change it to read. Alter the last part of the target only, retaining the path.

This method is often required for Windows XP and later.

Registry edit
In the registry directory, set the   key to.

This can be done by manually editing the registry entry, or by typing the following four lines into Windows Notepad, saving the file on the Desktop as  and then double left clicking on it:

REGEDIT4 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Millennium Interactive\Creatures\1.0] "IntroPath"="C:\\"

Fake CD
If running in Classic on Mac OS X, run the following in Terminal. You need the program mkisofs, which is available from fink. You may replace x with anything convenient which doesn't already exist.

$ mkdir x $ mkdir x/Intro $ touch x/Intro/ct2.smk $ mkisofs -hfs -V Creatures -o cfake.iso x $ open cfake.iso $ rm -r x # clean up

This will create and mount a disk image containing the file Creatures checks for. You need to mount (by double-clicking or as above) this image,, before running.

Hex edit
A possible hex edit of the Creatures executable was suggested by Troignipen on alt.games.creatures.