Finding out what is what in Creatures 1 & 2

One of the most frustrating aspects of trying to understand C1 or C2 cobs might just be the first step you need to take.

Say you are looking at an object, and wonder "What is this object's classifier so I can look up it's scripts ?"
Or the other way round ? What if you find an interesting script and wonder which object it governs?

I've found no easy way so far to answer those questions, and got tired pretty quick of trying to manually look up my targets each time.
 
Cross referencing the various online lists of classifiers didn't cut it either: many of them are at best incomplete when not downright wrong.And they are limited to the standard game items, with obviously no way to reference every single COB ever made.

Things don't have to be this way.
Read through this very quick article with me, and grab a tool that makes the job as simple as hovering the hand over an object to get the needed information.

A smart(-ish) C1 scriptorium browser.

One of the hard aspects of trying to understand the C1 internals is trying to figure out which scripts exist for a given object.

C2 and C3, both have "Scriptorium browsers" available, that make it easy to visually browse ALL existing scripts for given classifiers.

Surprisingly, C1 seems to lack such a tool, and leaves us with no easy way to be sure we found all scripts governing a given object or behaviour.

Why is that so ? On what mechanisms do those scriptorium browsers operate ? And what can we do about it ?

Follow me for some technical exploration of the mysterious Shees CAOS library, and if you bear with me to the end of the article, a proper, exhaustive C1 scriptorium extractor will be the takeaway :)