What's Docking Station all about?

Q : What do you get when you download Docking Station?
A : You get a complete self-contained spaceship that contains all you need to raise happy and healthy Norns. There are many food sources, toys and equipment to help you teach your Norns. There's also medical scanning equipment that will help you care for your creatures should they become ill. In the Communications room, there are address books that will allow you to organise your friends. You can set up portals to your friend's worlds and let your creatures travel to and fro at will!

Q : Can I play Docking Station offline?
A : You need to be online to register a new world. This is so the Norns you make in it have their home world properly stored in their history. If you register a world online then you can save it and play it later without ever going online again. There are some third party instructions for making a new world without registering it online. This can cause confusing history for your Norns in the online database, and can crash the game, so we do not support it.

Q : What can you do with it?
A : As with all Creatures titles, your job is to raise and train Norns, cuddly virtual life creatures that live on the Capillata space ship. Because they have neural network brains, Norns can be taught right from wrong, but because they also have their own, individual personalities, they may not always do what you want (or even what you expect!). You should play with them and spend time teaching them about the world around them and when they're old enough, you can breed them. Norn babies inherit the digital DNA from their parents and this, along with some random mutations, makes them truly individual creatures.

But that's not the whole story. Creatures users around the world have been playing Creatures in a variety of ways. Its open-ended design offers multiple opportunities for fun and amusement! Many users love the cuddly little Norns in the game and spend most of their time interacting with them and breeding them. Docking Station makes this even more fun by essentially opening up the "gene pool" to lots of variation. By sending a creature through the Docking Station "warp" you are providing your Norns with lots of opportunities to breed with other Norns. You'll be able to buy new breeds from the Creatures Mall or download third party breeds.You can then choose to trade them with your friends and hopefully, between you, you can breed better-looking and more intelligent Norns.

Or try your hand at Genetic Engineering: Get the free Creature Labs Genetics Kit from the Creatures Development Network and fiddle with your creatures' digital DNA to create new behaviour or better instincts. Or maybe you'd like to create a new breed from scratch? Get the Brain-in-a-Vat kit and work on developing new brain structures for Creatures. Finally, join in the fun of the Creatures Community. This sociable bunch loves to talk Creatures! There are tons of third party websites, chat forums and newsgroups devoted to Creatures. The Gameware website also has forums where you can talk to other Docking Station users and find new friends.

Q: Are the Norns really alive?
A: Well, some say they are and some say they aren't. We've never been ones to say who's right or wrong about this issue and we're not going to start now!

We set out to create the most believable virtual creature that we could and Norns are the result of that. They have a biochemistry, brains, and digital DNA and fulfil most of the requirements for real life. We think they're the most believable and life-like virtual creatures ever created but you should find out for yourself!

Q : Why is it free?
A : One of the greatest things about Creatures has always been the people who have played and loved it over the years. They've been communicating online and making friends with other Creatures players and are always coming up with great new ways to play the game. We wanted to make an easy and fun way for Creatures fans to trade Norns online and we came up with Docking Station.

But then we thought it would possible to introduce lots of new people to Creatures and giving Docking Station away for free seemed like a great way to do this. We hope that these new players will love Creatures Docking Station so much, they'll want to buy the full Creatures 3 game.And because we ask you to fill in some survey and demographic questions, we can find out what our users - both new and old - are interested in so we can make better titles of all kinds.

Q : What do you get in Creatures 3 that's not in Docking Station?
A : If you have Creatures 3, you can do even more! Creatures 3 is a giant spaceship with 4 separate terrarium environments. You'll get 3 huge habitats - Forest, Jungle and Desert - each with their own environments and 2 Operations areas: Engineering and The Bridge.

The Shee spaceship didn't leave Albia without a few stowaways and you'll find two completely new species of creature and three more Norn breeds as well, including the popular Bengal Norns. Creatures 3 contains all new equipment including a Genetic Splicer, a Replicator, a Recycler and a Chemical Injection machine. There's also new food, plants, animals and toys and connecting gadgets - connect individual machines together to produce larger and better gadgets! There are a huge number of useful machines that you can connect together to help you take care of your Norns.