Before Fast Ticks
Gen: 23
Eggs: 26
After Fast Ticks
Gen: 34
Eggs: 20
New Exports
19
(gen 20-32)
As you can see, today's picture is of a bunch of babies, specifically several of the extras that hatched when I came back. Eggonicer doesn't seem to like coming back off of fast ticks, and has had to refreeze all the eggs each morning I've come back to it thus far, resulting in a few hatching before it manages that.
This was the best representative picture I could get of the population, because all the norns has thoroughly scattered to the four winds. I couldn't find a single grouping of more than two or three norns, though there were a lot of pairs about. With OLSA not working, I had reduced the minimum population to 30; perhaps it was time to increase it back to 40.
For all that they were newly hatched, these babies give you a good overall idea of the population as it stands. The overwhelming majority of norns have butterfly arms, gargoyle head, bengal or zebra body and bengal legs and tail. Clearly, this was a gene pool in need of a serious new infusion of genetics, and I intend to do just that. When I add new 1st gen norns, I have been restricting breeds to those entered by the community at some point; with the addition of Aliena's two norns yesterday, Civet, Fallow and Astro were all added to the pool of allowable sprites. None of them managed to take hold, so would be a good choice to add back in. Hardman, too, had once again failed to take hold; I believe this is because, as a breed, Hardman norns seem to be generally pretty incompetent, as all of them struggle to complete the IQ portion of the run, with some failing entirely. Perhaps in a situation with more grendels they might fare better, but as it stands they are doing very poorly in the game of natural selection.
With that in mind, as well as the overall shortage of zebra and butterfly genes, and the way the populations has so thoroughly homogenised in terms of appearance, I intend to add:
- 2 Zebra norns (male, female)
- 2 Fallow norns (male, female)
- 2 Butterfly norns (male, female)
- 2 Astro norns (male, female)
- 2 Civet norns (male, female)
In addition to hopefully diversifying the gene pool significantly, this will also handily add in the population boost that I intend.
Lastly, with regards to exports. The sheer number is likely to do with the fact that I turned exports up to 1 in 5, rather than 1 in 10, as they seemed a little thin on the ground yesterday. Since we have a good pool now, I will turn this back down.
In addition, I also tweaked the export threshold; I turned it up to eight for males, and tried to turn it to four for females (as it happens, that part did not set correctly, and was still six - this is not the first time that population control options have not changed correctly). I made this change because the last batch I got was one female and six males, and the in-world population was 8 males to 22 females. Clearly, I'm getting a bit of a gender imbalance here, and can't hold the two to the same standards. I will leave these where they are for the time being, as they seem to be doing quite well; the overnight batch was pretty evenly divided, and the population seems to have held steady.
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