TamTroll

Kinda seems a bit excessive. the game is about wild animals in a pretty scientific (if fictional) world, the whole thing is based around genetics don't forget. I feel like an afterlife, ghosts, and magic and such really fits very well with the theme of the game. If this were something more fantasy-orientated like minecraft, lord of the rings, or heck even The Sims i could see it, but with Niche it just doesn't really feel like it would fit very well.

Eeeeyup. Haven't been in the game since before the latest patch (worried my old tribe will have troubles idk yet) so it might be lower, but i was definitely able to sustain a tribe of 200 on the archipelago islands, on a half-jungle half-plains island right now and i think it's somewhere between 150 and 200 ish.

Just do what i did in this situation: Start breeding in low-fertility, and adapt your personal play-style to accommodate it. step 1; Low fertility in the mutation menu: Creatures will begin being born with low fertility, meaning less chance of successful pregnancy when breeding. Pregnancy is still possible, but it will take more tries. Every action you spend trying to breed is another resource burned, if you need too, you can have both nichelings spend all their actions attempting to mate for a pseudo-guaranteed child, but they won't be able to do much else on that turn, forcing you to slow down and consider how many tries is too many. Step 2; Try to maintain a "Every other turn" policy. If babies were born on Turn 1. Make sure that no pregnant females are on nests during turn 2. They can sit on nests on turn 3 however. This will effectively cut your reproduction rate in half. Step 3; Wait for death. Keep an eye on your total population, I've been keeping mine hovering at around 200 by making sure that new babies are only ever born when older adults finally pass on. And step 4: Accept expend-ability. When you have so many nichelings you don't know what to do with them, they start to become more expendable and unnecessary. Use this to your advantage, send a group of unimpressive nichelings to tackle apes or explore the oceans, experiment with locking a small group away from the rest and introducing some new genes to allow speciation to take effect. take some risks you normally wouldn't take. When you have two hundred creatures, loosing ten or so isn't going to be the end of the world. If you're really brave, you could start intentionally breeding creatures with double-up immunities. Half the lifespan means faster deaths, meaning less time waiting for the next generation.

I can dig it. Seen plenty of playthroughs where a tribe is starving and encounter a rogue male, but can't eat the rogue male so they just keep starving.

i like this idea, could inadvertently get the whole "There's another tribe sharing this island with you" feel from it. And you could even intentionally leave behind rouge-born children for the rouge females to pick up and take care of!

My only issue is the whole breeding with it thing, why do we need more hybrid creatures? We can breed with the bearyena because they were the first non-nicheling creature to be introduced to the game, and it's not too out there to assume that the two share a relatively recent common ancestor, hence the interbreeding. breeding with bearowls, tigles, or orcolfs though just seems strange and a bit too complicated. There is such a thing as having too many options after all. Personally i'd rather keep things simple and leave the hybrid species to just the bearyena. MAAAYBE one other? but something that could still be reasonably assumed to be relatively close to the Nichelinges genetically. (Can't exactly see a real life wolf getting it on with a Komodo Dragon any time soon after all.) long story short, like the creature, not so much being able to breed with it though.

there are Apple trees? I've found Ape trees that give nuts, but no apples

I could dig it. since males already have manes in the game, i'm assuming they would be the only ones to display a majority of the mains? other then the ear-bits for females?

webbed paw could do with some collecting or fishing ability somehow, as right now having a double-webbed paw nicheling is kind of worthless, you can swim really fast, but you sure can't do anything with it. i could see webbed paw with either fishing 1, and / or feeding from the bottom ability like Platypus beak, it could be liked the underwater version of digger's paw.

that'd be cool too yeah, would still like to have functional genes segregated however, have hunting males and gathering females, or fast aquatic females and slow strong males for example.

Ahh, Knew about the tails, didn't know this one would only be good for males. A good first step then! Would still be neat to be able to assign existing genes to a sex, but one step at a time

So in real life, there are all sorts of traits that exist in one sex but not the other. Bulls have horns while cows don't, male lions have manes, peacocks have bright feathers while the females have plain ones, etc. i think it'd be awesome if we could do the same thing here, perhaps as an unlockable feature if your creatures survive to a high enough generation. I imagine it would sort of be like an extra circle in the nicheling's gene tab that would appear blank, maybe even have two of them, one with the male symbol, and one with the female symbol. You can select these genes and you'll be pulled into the mutation menu, where you can assign any gene to be passed on to the next generation as you normally would. but in this situation if you apply "Ram Horns" to the male circle, and "Black fur" to the female circle, then only the creature's male children will be born with Ram Horns and the like. For the offspring of these creatures, i'd imagine that these gene tabs would be already filled in based on what the parents had. if the creature's mother had Ram horns in the male slot, and it's father had Claw in the male slot, then this creature would likely have a 50-50 chance on wich male gene it acquired and could pass on to it's offsprig. Regardless of the gender of the offspring, the offspring would still carry the gene for the opposite sec (So our male nicheling would still carry the female "Black fur" gene, but just not express it, possibly even having bright white fur itself.) this would allow these genes to be passed on to future generations still. With this in effect, you could set up new social structures and adaptations. You could make sure that your females always come equipped with a nimble-fingers paw to assist in food gathering, and you can have your males always have Ram Horns both for cosmetics and help them fight in the wild while out hunting or the like. New creatures invited into the tribe would likely have blank sex-gene slots that you could fill in after inviting them, or possibly randomly filled in slots that you need to adapt too or breed out when introduced to your own bloodline. Rogue males would likely also have randomly filled slots with negative genes. just thought this would help keep things interesting throughout the game, and it could help with some situations where it's difficult to tell the males from the females (Such as those with Bearyena head) AND allow you to still have multiple different gene types without your nichelings having wildly different genes. (I.e. you could have big-nose females who still posses double poison-fang genes to pass on to their male offspring, thus you don't need to worry about loosing poison fangs because of the big nose, etc.) i write too much. sorry.

By human definition at least, Tool use tends to be a good indicator of intelligence, if a creature is able to comprehend that an inanimate object outside of itself can be used to perform tasks it can not perform alone, then it's generally thought to achieved some level of understanding most animals don't. It was our use in tools that let humans as a species evolve to the intelligence we have after all.

i wouldn't say taming is a huge red flag, especially if you don't consider it taming. Nichelings are a sort-of hybrid between canines and felines, both of which have been known to occasionally adopt members of other species in the past. One cyote worked together with a badger to hunt gophers, Cheetahs in zoos are sometimes given Dogs to help calm them down, and heck, cats innitially approached humans as a cooperative source of food. as well as other animal addoptions such as: A tortoise adopting a baby hippo Koko the Gorilla with her kitten A pod of Sperm whaled adopting a deformed dolphin A Macaque (a kind of monkey) adopting a stray kitten A dalmatian adopting a spotted lamb Monkey and a wild boar becoming best freinds a housecat adopting a bunny a Lioness adopting an Antelope calf as her own Dog adopting an owl and a cat adopting a squirrel. you can find similar instances of animals adopting other animals all over. PLUS, given that you can only "tame" a Bearyena as a baby, it makes sense that the nichelings would adopt it, it's a child in need of help. AND, since Nichelings and Bearyenas are able to interbreed, it stands to reason that they are in some way related, distant cousins grown to hunt one another, so even while one becomes big and ferocious, there is still enough similarity between the two of them for one to mistake the other as a member of it's own kind. so yeah, i wouldn't take taming / adopting as a huge sign of sentience really. and even gathering food for the group to eat could still be explained away as a game mechanic rather then what they really do. *shrugs*

so with my only other idea being the ability to separate genes by the sex of the creatutre i suppose i shouldmake another one now before this thing closes in a couple of days. So i watch a few youtubers play this game, and i have some pretty awesome creatures myself that i think would be neat to potentually see in their videos. Soo... What if, when you banish a creature from your tribe, there was a chance that it would leave your game altogether and travel to someone else's? Maybe something like when the creature leaves your line of sight the first time, it has a 10% chance of being copied, deleted from your game, and saved into some kind of central cloud (or even a folder on your own PC). Then whenever a wandering random creature is about to show up in someone else's game (Maybe you need to provide them with a code that they can store in a game file, or maybe it transfers via internet, idk) there's a small maybe 1% chance that it could be your creature. this could also allow partial transfer of genes between save files. say i have a breed of saber-fanged creatures in one save, but i'm just starting out in another. if i banish some creatures from my first game, and maybe put a code into the file of my next game, there could be a chance that i encounter my own creature, allowing me to bring those genes into this new world. i just think the ability to trade or exchange creatures somehow would be neat. Back in the days of "Creatures 3" and docking station, you could send creatures off through a wormhole and they'd show up in someone else's game. some small thoughts in relation to this: Creatures from another player could have a unique gem colour to show they are from a player. Home-player's steam name could be listed somewhere maybe. It's probably too much work / effort; But getting a notification somewhere that your creature was found in someone else's world would be neat. If your creature dies without having been invited into the other player's tribe, it goes back online to search for a new player. Just don't pull a Pokemon and make it so we can't re-name creatures from other players. Dat's bad >: P