A Web Shrine to Creatures
About Creatures
Creatures is an artificial life video games series where you raise fluffy alien creatures called Norns, nerdy creatures called Ettins, and scaly creatures called Grendels. The original Creatures was created by Steve Grand in the mid-1990s.
Raising creatures involves teaching them words, how to eat and breed, helping them to explore and survive through their life stages. You can teach them words by telling them the word while they are looking at an object, with object words being set as if in a category in the world such as ‘food’, ’toy’ or ‘fruit’.
Creatures Community
For such an old game, you may be surprised to know that there is still an active community!
Each year there is a Creatures Community Spirit Festival (CCSF) where the community will release mods and there will usually be games and video streams. In 2024 the CCSF will be streamed by Freyla of Freylaverse and co-hosted by Eem Foo of Eem Foo’s Archive.
Creatures Discord links:
- Freyla’s Creatures Discord
- Eem Foo’s Archive
- The Norn Nebula
- CAOS Coding Cave (for modders)
Mods and Resources
For Creatures mods made by others, a good place to look is Eem Foo’s Archive.
What follows on this page are mods and resources I personally have made.
Nornish Soundboard
I made a Nornish Soundboard while in the process of making a Nornish to Handish translator. The page linked below contains both the soundboard and an externally-hosted translator, though I hope one day to make one hosted here.
Custom Speech Bubbles
I have made some Custom Speech Bubbles and a guide to make your own.
Albian Dressup
Because I’m a visual person, I wanted to make a doll dressup for trying different norn/grendel/ettin breed combinations, in order to imagine Creatures characters. So, over one break from work when I was recovering from my second mastectomy, I made the Albian Dressup!
I released the dressup as a Picrew as well as a Photoshop file for others to make their own parts, or to act as a base for people that would like more customisayion than a dollmaker game can provide.
thesheeark then made Albian Dressup +Plus, with additional content and on Meiker.io now.
Download:
- Dressup Photoshop file (1.54MB, .ZIP)
Albian Creatures Font
A hand-crafted vector .otf font conversion of the CHARSET.DTA C1/C2 fonts, and the BlackOnWhiteChars.s16 font from C3/DS! The zip contains .otf. .woff and .woff2.
The fonts are in the same family so should show up as ‘C1 C2’ and ‘C3 DS’ in the same options you’d change between something like Bold and Italic. Let me know if any characters/glyphs aren’t showing up like you’d expect and I’ll update!
When I saw Jessica’s Original Creatures Font conversion of the C1 font into C3/DS, I knew I wanted to make it into a font for me to use on designs too! Thankyou to Jessica for converting the C1/C2 font originally, because I had no how to open the CHARSET.DTA file from C1/C2 so I used her conversion as a base for this.
Download:
- Albian Creatures font (158KB, .ZIP)
Breeds
Hircine Norn Pack
These were inspired by the Creatures 2 Goat Norns by Angela Allan. They aren’t an exact conversion, but I have taken from the original Goat Norns in spirit particularly the male colour and curved horns, and then inspired by the Frog Norns I have added goat-like horizontal pupils for pano-vision.
The Hircine Norns were made in Geneforge with custom shaped hoof-paws, horns, resized ears, and custom textures. The curved horns were supplied very kindly by SpaceSR.
They use Grendel Slot E, include TWB (True Warm Blood), CFE (Creatures Full of Edits) and Stock ChiChi (ex47) genetics, and have complete sprites for growing horns and sexual dimorphism.
Version 1 was released for CCSF 2023.
Version 2 (this one) includes: refined textures, additional genomes, fixed tail, reslotted from Grendel T to Grendel E.
Download:
- Hircine Norn Pack (11.7MB, .ZIP)
Sounds
Genshin Impact Norn Sounds
On a whim I made a sound replacement for all norn voices to become the Hu Tao TikTok meme at various stages. It’s awful, so I recommend trying it out and then changing it back lol.
This was directly inspired by (and made possible via me being able to reverse engineer…) the TF2 Voice Pack by Freyla, and the Scorn Voice Addons by Leporidae that were submitted to CCSF 2021.
Download:
- Genshin Impact Norn Sounds (284KB, .ZIP)
Art
Eem Foo variant
I drew an interpretation of Eem Foo for Eem Foo’s Archive.
CCSF 2021 Entry
I drew a piece of Creatures 1 fanart to celebrate the 25th year since Creatures 1 for the Creatures Community Spirit Festival (CCSf) 2021.