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Classification system

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Every agent in the Creatures series is classified within a hierarchy of types, which tells the engine what kind of object it is. The hierarchy includes three levels, family genus and species. For example, the spinning top is classified in the simple object family, in the toy genus, and it is the first species in that genus.

Creatures only recognize broad categories, which correspond to the genus level, and cannot distinguish between objects beyond that level. This can be useful in terms of vocabulary and behaviour learning, as Creatures can learn one word and behaviour for a particular 'toy', and it will extend to all others (so that if it's nice to activate the ball, it's also nice to do it to the spinning top). Steve Grand initially saw this as 'cheating' when he made the first Creatures game, preferring a model in which Creatures learnt to generalise more naturally, but limitations of programming power and time have meant that this system has been used throughout the series.

The class number is the family, genus and species written together: for example 2 13 1 is the class number for the spinning top, and 2 6 65 is the class number for the Breaded Hatchling Norn. Agents with exactly the same class number generally behave identically due to sharing scripts.

In all Creatures games, family and genus range from 1 to 255. In C1, species has a maximum of 255, and in C2 and CEE-based games, species has a maximum of 65535. Numbers over the maximum wrap around (so species 268 in C1 is equivalent to 12). 0 in any part of the classifier acts as a wildcard (see ENUM, for instance).

Lists of known C1 class numbers and C3/DS class numbers are maintained in addition to the overview below.

Creatures 1 genus numbers

Creatures 2 genus numbers

Creatures 3/Docking Station genus numbers

Other classes can be used, but by default they have no help name, and creatures cannot see them; you can change this, but it involves editing game files, and is therefore quite tricky to do multiple times without knowledge of how the game works - so is not good for players.

Item ID numbers

Creature genes (e.g. instincts) use a different set of numbers than the list above to identify objects.

    1. Self
    2. Hand
    3. Door
    4. Seed
    5. Plant
    6. Weed
    7. Leaf
    8. Flower
    9. Fruit
    10. Manky
    11. Detritus
    12. Food
    13. Button
    14. Bug
    15. Pest
    16. Critter
    17. Beast
    18. Nest
    19. Animal egg
    20. Weather
    21. Bad
    22. Toy
    23. Incubator
    24. Dispenser
    25. Tool
    26. Potion
    27. Elevator
    28. Teleporter
    29. Machinery
    30. Creature egg
    31. Norn home
    32. Grendel home
    33. Ettin home
    34. Gadget
    35. Portal
    36. Vehicle
    37. Norn
    38. Grendel
    39. Ettin
    40. Something (Geat)

External links