Split installation
The Albian Years, Creatures Exodus, and Creatures Village, which were designed to work on more recent operating systems, split the game files between the Documents folder and the C drive (the default hard disk drive) due to security limitations in modern OSes not allowing programs to create files like exported creatures, or genomes of newborns directly to a hard disk drive. The Steam edition of Creatures Exodus does not suffer from the split installation problem, although the Steam edition of The Albian Years still does, and appears to be unfixable as the game's installation directory cannot be changed.
"Documents" files are located in Documents > Creatures > Creatures 1, Creatures 2, Creatures 3, Docking Station or Creatures Village.
"C drive" files are located in either:
- C drive > GOG Games > Creatures 1, Creatures 2, Creatures 3, Docking Station or Creatures Village. (for GOG.com-released games)
- C drive > Program Files (x86) > Docking Station (for the free release of Docking Station)
- C drive > Program Files (x86) > Gameware Development > Creatures Exodus > Creatures 3 or Docking Station
Contents
Errors[edit]
Catalogue files are by default placed in the "Documents" part of split installations, but they need to be manually placed into the "C drive" part. Some agents that rely on catalogues such as the Garden Box, X-Ray and Protective Tub will crash the world unless this is done.
Resolution[edit]
Mad_Doodles, in the Creatures 3 & Docking Station Community Recommended Fixes and Addons, recommends changing the installation path of the games to This PC > Local Disk (C:) > Users > [User] > Documents > Creatures (or wherever your default documents folder is if you have changed it).
See also[edit]
- VirtualStore, a third location where the game sometimes stores files, and a common source of errors.
- Machine.cfg, a set of Windows Registry settings which need to be changed in a custom installation.
- Bootstrap, a set of code files that are launched with the start of each new world.
