Day 2

Today marks the second day of the CCSF 2017! I would also like to take a moment of our day to endorse Discord as another platform that will be very useful for our community as a whole. While chatrooms were not nearly as widespread as websites in the history of our community, Discord makes it incredibly easy to set up your own chatroom as well as being completely free! You could make a server for followers of your blog, members of your forum or perhaps your development team? There are numerous possibilities of how you can design your chatroom, as well as who you invite into it, will your server be a private chatroom for you and your development team to discuss in, or a public server where you can communicate to other members of the community? Or perhaps both?

It is also worth noting that Discord doesn't just let you make one server for free, but you can make multiple! You can even assign your own emotes to your server and set up what channels it has and which ones are available to users or not. I personally believe that Discord is a very underrated platform that our community should be using more, especially given how easy it is to set up Discord servers I am surprised to have not seen new servers springing up left and right! There's also no need to have "The One Server to rule them all" when Discord servers as a whole are very easily and quickly created.

Anyways, now that we're properly acquainted with another option for community expression, Arnout has brought us not one, but two new machines for our creatures!

Caretaking Machines

"Are you sick of eggs laying all over the place? Have you had enough of feeding your baby Creatures every minute? Fret no more, as now there are two new machines that can fulfill these tasks for you! First of the two machines is the Egg Collector; a unique, experimental device that'll seek out all eggs in your world and piles them up right under its monitor. Secondly, there's the Baby Nursing Machine: A gadget that is capable of dispensing huge amounts of food, but only if there are enough baby Creatures nearby."

Speaking of Discord servers, Pilla has recently set up her own Discord server which is known as the Caos Coding Cave! (Click for server invite). 

"This is a server for all Creatures fans who would like to mess around with CAOS!

If you have any projects you are currently working on and you want to create a discord channel to host these projects, feel free to ask for a dedicated channel on the server."

Today we also have another set of sprites sent in by Mea of the Icy Button!

"Is it an elevator button? Is it a toy?  Maybe it's a teleporter of some type?  Is it a button of doom?  Maybe it does something unknown?   I don't know either."

All submissions can be downloaded on their respective pages. Click on either the picture or the name of the submission to visit its page.

Day 1

Welcome to this years annual Creatures Community Spirit Festival! The theme for this festival, as you are all certainly aware by now, is Community Collaboration. I've had a good time building this blog for the festival so you can all enjoy yourselves, as well as being a demonstration of a well-decorated blog.

Most importantly, you too can make a blog like this! Blogger serves as a free and easy platform for making your own blog, and even lets you keep track of the posts of other people in the community. I'd say having your own blog or website is a must-have for anyone in the community who wants to be active, even if just a little bit, as it is a great way to give yourself a place to call your own without requiring too much technical expertise and money for web hosting. You can even create a pseudo-webring with your fellow community members to reach your blogs easily, or check up on recent activity!

This has numerous advantages of course, such as allowing you to sort all of your Creatures content into one place associated with you, as well as giving you a place where you can speak your mind without having to worry about character restrictions. Finally, it serves as a return to our roots, back in the days of the community where your average user would most likely have a small website to call their own. It's no secret that our community has seen much better days, as general activity dwindles down and users become much less expressive. I believe that with this we can do miracles for our community as a whole.

Speaking of community, from the combined efforts of Linda and Zzzzoot brings us the Gren-Dell computer!

"The favourite computer of the Banshee! Older norns use it to browse the Creatures Internet. Younger norns learn to speak from it. Images by Linda. Coding by Zzzzoot."

As well as that, we also have the Orchid Norns from CeruleanSilver :

"The orchid norns are a genetic breed utilizing the sprites of Wood Norns, Fallow Norns, Siamese Norns, and Butterfly Norns. The genome is Arnout's CFF 2017 based on Evo's CFF genomes with a few tweaks. I was inspired by the Thistleferns and the Chloroplast organ to make them more plant like. After asking Dragoler and Arnout for ideas, I've come up with a new organ which converts heat into vitamin C. Like any good Orchid, these norns depend on heat to stay healthy. They use Vitamin C to boost their immune system and it's also the only way they can fight infection. If they are near someplace fairly warm, like the heat pan in the meso, they are hardier then your average norn. Take them away, and they become very fragile.

Crossbreeding should be done with caution. The extra organ should transfer over, but hybrids will probably have a mix of antigen + glucose reactions with the Orchid antigen + vitamin c. As a challenge, if you can get a norn with the extra organ and only antigen + glucose reactions you will get a super norn!"

And finally we have some sprites by Mea of the Deep Jellyfish:

 "Just a pretty jellyfish that swims around.  No offspring have ever been found(or created), although an egg was found."

All submissions can be downloaded on their respective pages. Click on either the picture or the name of the submission to visit its page.

Website!

Heya everyone, welcome to the CCSF 2017 website! Nothing here is confirmed to be final, so there may be some changes over the time between now to the start of the festival.

The mobile layout will not extend the background correctly, so I strongly recommend visiting the site on a proper computer. All graphics (with the exception of the favicon) were made by yours truly.

If you have a tutorial, piece of artwork, piece of fiction, add-on (agents/cobs/metarooms) or generally any downloadable Creatures-related object such as sprites and scripts or really just anything in general that you'd like to contribute to the festival, e-mail me with it at CCSF2017Submissions{at}protonmail{dot}{com}.

The festival will begin on Monday 20th November and will run until Monday 27th November.