The Dog Tier List

[This is part of a series of posts about animals. To find other posts in this series, see here.]

This month’s topic is by request. A few readers have asked me to do a tier list for the dog guild, or “canids”, as they’re more properly called, so here it is.

BASIC DOG BUILD ANALYSIS

Dog guild history

Canids first became part of Outside’s meta during the Eocene expansion. Around 40 million years ago, a group of early caniform carnivorans started speccing into longer legs to boost their stamina when chasing prey, and so the first dogs were born. The first of these canids was a small, fox-like North American animal called Hesperocyon, and the sub-faction of dogs it represented were called hesperocyonines. This faction quickly started splitting apart, and led to the creation of two more dog factions during the Oligocene expansion. One group, called the borophagines, specced into bone-crushing jaws akin to hyenas, and specced for a DPS-oriented role. The other dogs specced further into longer legs to better snatch small, fast-moving targets, and became the canines. For a while, borophagines were the most dominant of the three; by the time of the Miocene expansion, they, along with cats, had become so oppressive that they forced the hesperocyonines out of the meta entirely. However, the canines started to grow larger and more powerful during the Pliocene, when they started to radiate into many of the forms that are familiar today; by the time of the most recent Ice Age event, they had grown strong enough to do to borophagines what the borophagines had done to the hesperocyonines, leaving the canines as the only branch of canids to survive into the current day. Today, canines are among the most popular of the carnivorous mammals, having a sizable player-base on every major land server except Antarctica.

Not all canines took advantage of their new adaptations to become large predators. In fact, most of them still stick pretty close to the small generalist builds that the earliest dogs started out as. Generally, those that became large predators fall under a particular subclass known as the wolf-like canids, or true dogs, while those that stuck with the original playstyle are broadly grouped together as “foxes”. Strictly speaking, “foxes” aren’t a proper subclass, as some foxes are genetically closer to the wolf-like dogs than they are to other foxes. But given the similarity foxes have in appearance and playstyle, dividing dogs into foxes and wolf-like dogs is a lot more useful for understanding how the guild operates in practice than a more biologically accurate classification would be.

Dog build stats and abilities

In general, dogs’ highest stat tends to be mobility. Again, this is partly due to their long legs, but part of it also comes from the [Nuchal Ligament] they have at the back of their neck. This is a ligament that connects the sinuous processes of their first thoracic vertebrae to the back of the second cervical bone, and can support the weight of the head without requiring any active muscle exertion. This energy-saving adaptation is standard for hooved mammals, but among predators, it’s only found in dogs and humans. This is a big part of the reason behind dogs’ legendary ability to track scent trails over long distances.

After mobility, the main thing that distinguishes dogs from other predatory mammals is their cooperative ability. Dog groups have some of the tightest social bonds among mammals; they’re among the minority of mammals where both parents cooperate to take care of young, and where players are generally permitted to retain the same social group for their entire lives. Canid family groups have been noted for sharing food and caring for their sick members, behaviours not seen in very many other wild animals. Almost all of them also hunt in teams, and their high intelligence often allows them to adapt their cooperative tactics enough to incorporate even players of other species, a topic I’ll explore in more detail when we get into the tier list.

Other than mobility and intelligence, dogs generally have pretty middling stats. Their crushing bite can do significant damage, but their raw power isn’t especially high compared to a lot of competing carnivorans, and their defence isn’t anything to write home about, either. This means that their best matchups are usually against small prey; they have to be very careful when fighting mid-weight or heavy-weight targets, and are often dominated by more DPS-oriented carnivorans, like cats, bears, and hyenas.

Dog guild overall tier rating

I think few will dispute that dogs hold an above-average rank in the current meta, but honestly, it’s not by as much as you might think. While their sheer endurance makes them formidable opponents, their relative lack of physical power often puts them at a competitive disadvantage. I’d give dogs an average rating of high B tier.

But there are some dogs that take things to another level, and may even rank among the top tier of predatory mammals. To find out which ones, let’s now go into the dog tier list; as usual, I won’t be able to go into all of the 37 dog builds in the current game, but I’ll try to cover the most interesting ones.

THE DOG TIER LIST

D Tier: Bat-eared fox

I don’t think there are any dogs that rank in bottom-tier, but in D tier we have the bat-eared fox, the only dog to have attempted to adapt to an insectivorous playstyle. Playing mainly in arid grasslands, bat-eared foxes have much smaller teeth than any other dogs, and their digastric muscles have been modified to allow them to open and close their jaws more rapidly when chewing the small, soft bodies of termites.

While I’ve said in previous posts that specialising in hunting eusocial insects can be a viable strategy, doing it effectively requires adaptations that bat-eared foxes don’t really have. Much like the numbats of the marsupial guild, bat-eared foxes don’t have the arm strength to break into termite mounds, so they’re restricted to hunting for termites that are wandering above-ground in search of food. They’re mostly reliant on hunting the harvester termite, which, as I discussed in my termite tier list, is one of the few termites that’s easily tracked when doing this. In fact, bat-eared foxes don’t really function effectively as insectivores at all in practice, despite their biology being seemingly adapted to this playstyle; they have to make up for how little XP they get from insects by eating a diet of primarily fruit for most of the year.

D Tier: Maned wolf

The other low-tier dog in the current meta is the maned wolf. Despite the name, maned wolves don’t belong to the wolf-like canid subclass, but rather to a closely related group called the South American canids. While most South American canids have basically stuck with the fox-like default canid build, maned wolves have specced into increased size and exceptionally long legs for seeing over the tall grasses of the South American savannah, becoming the largest dogs in South America and the tallest dogs in the entire world. Ordinarily, a carnivoran that spent points on a size increase like this would use it as an opportunity to start hunting larger and more valuable targets, but maned wolves never really bothered to spec into traits that would let them do this. Unlike actual wolves, maned wolves have almost no social instincts and never hunt in packs, and their solo attacks aren’t powerful enough for them to easily kill animals close to their own size or larger. While there have been a few instances of maned wolves killing medium-sized deer, the vast majority of their hunts target the same kinds of small mammals and birds that regular foxes eat. Since they’re too big to survive just off of these low-value targets, they have to make up the difference through heavy consumption of fruit. This works fine during the rainy parts of the year, but during the dry season, it becomes a lot more difficult. The result of all this is that maned wolves are massively over-reliant on a particular plant called the wolf apple, one of the few fruits that grows in the South American savannah all-year-round. When you take one of the most versatile predators you can find and turn it into something that may have to rely on a single plant for the majority of its XP requirements, it’s fair to say you’ve probably screwed up somewhere.

C Tier: Raccoon dog

In C tier, we have the raccoon dog, a build you might have heard of due to its role in initiating the COVID-19 world event in 2020. Raccoon dogs are among the most unusual dog builds in the game, and not just because they look like a mixture of a dog and a raccoon. Raccoon dogs have four special abilities that distinguish them from all other dogs. Firstly, much like actual raccoons, raccoon dogs are highly skilled climbers and spend much of their time in trees. There are a few other dog builds that have retractable claws for climbing, but with the possible exception of the grey fox, no others do it nearly as well as raccoon dogs. Second, and also like actual raccoons, raccoon dogs can eat almost anything. They can even eat poisonous toads due to their third special ability, a series of genetic enhancements that allow their digestive system to break down toxins far more easily than other carnivorans. Finally – and unlike raccoons – raccoon dogs are the only dogs that get to hibernate through cold winters like bears, allowing them to basically just skip through the hardest parts of the game.

You might think unlocking all of these abilities would make raccoon dogs a strong candidate for a high-tier rank, but the problem is that they had to take a lot of points out of base stats in order to do so. While their mobility is still decent, their shrunken carnassials have left them with an extremely weak bite, and they lack any good fighting moves on either offence or defence. Their greatest vulnerability is to wolves, which kill and eat them so often that it’s a major suppressant of their population growth, but lynxes and other larger predators can also be major problems for them.

C Tier: Coyote and jackal

Also in C tier, we have two of the most generalist canids, the coyote and jackal. I already talked about why coyotes are mid-tier in my Looney Tunes tier list a while ago, and pretty much everything I said can be applied to jackals, which are basically just a slightly shrunken-down coyote equivalent for players in Africa and Asia. Both of these builds have been able to achieve wide-ranging success due to their intelligence and adaptability, but fall short when it comes to raw power and can’t compete very well with the higher-ranking predators of their regions. Both especially struggle against wolves, to the point that they tend to be rare or absent in any biome where wolves are found. Both can hunt socially to a degree, but not to the same extent as a lot of the higher-ranking dogs.

While neither of these builds are especially powerful on their own, another thing they have in common is that their intelligence allows them to take good advantage of other predators’ abilities. I talked about this in my earlier tier list regarding the partnership that coyotes have established with the badger player-base, and jackals sometimes use similar strategies to access prey they wouldn’t be able to kill on their own. In India, jackals often follow tigers and other larger predators around, and may get a significant portion of their XP from eating the leftovers of large kills that wolves and tigers make. Unlike badgers with coyotes, these wolves and tigers don’t seem to derive any benefit in return from the jackals, but they generally allow the jackals to do it – though it’s a pretty big risk to the jackals if they don’t. Both coyotes and jackals are also famously adept at taking advantage of humans, and thrive in cities due to the protection that humans offer by keeping out larger predators. This means there’s a good chance they’ll achieve much higher ratings in future expansions as urban biomes continue to expand.

One thing players interested in jackals should know is that if you go to the dog page on the character select screen, you won’t actually find “jackal” listed as an option anywhere. This is because there are three variants of jackal in the current meta – golden, black-backed, and side-striped – and despite their similarities in appearance and playstyle, the golden variant isn’t actually closely related to the other two. To find golden jackals, you have to look for the Canis page – the same page where you find wolves, coyotes and domestic dogs listed – while the other two jackals have their own page, marked Lupulella.

B Tier: Red fox

In high B tier, we have the red fox, the largest of the true foxes. Red foxes rank ahead of most other foxes, not because they have any abilities that other foxes don’t, but just because their larger size generally allows them to dominate over other foxes in competition. They’re among the most versatile predators in the whole carnivoran faction, being known to hunt hundreds of varieties of small animals, and also being able to supplement their hunting by eating a wide variety of plants. They’re exceptionally versatile in their habitat preferences too, having not only established thriving populations in nearly every biome in the Northern Hemisphere plus parts of Africa, but also successfully invaded Australia and dominated the environment there too. In fact, red foxes have adapted to Australia so well that their predation has pushed some native marsupials completely out of the game. With the possible exception of the coyote, they’re also the best dogs for adjusting to living alongside humans, surviving just as well in city and suburb biomes as they do in the wild.

In order to maintain their dominance within the lightweight meta, red foxes have to be vicious fighters. They regularly kill other small predators, including other foxes, and have even forced Arctic foxes out of several biomes entirely. What keeps them from going even higher on the tier list is that, like all foxes, they still suffer from a very poor defence rating. While their light frame and agile body make it possible for them to evade attacks a lot of the time, they get killed often enough by larger dogs like wolves and coyotes that I can’t quite see them making it into the top tiers.

B Tier: African wild dog

Also in high B tier, we have the African wild dog. This is perhaps the most representative build of the dog guild, in that it takes everything dogs are known for and pushes it to the limit. While almost all dogs subsist primarily off of meat, African wild dogs are probably the most specialised for a predatory lifestyle; their teeth are more specialised for meat-eating than other dogs, with massively enlarged, hyena-like premolars and a blade-like cusp on the heel of the lower carnassial that enhances their flesh-shearing capacity beyond that of most of their relatives. Almost all large dogs are adapted for endurance chases, but African wild dogs are the most so, due to the loss of the first claw on their forefeet allowing them to make longer strides when running. And almost all dogs are at least somewhat social, but African wild dogs have probably the strongest social bonds out of any of them; they’re among a small minority of mammals where bonds are strong enough that not only parents, but whole packs will assist with the rearing of pups.

I’m not going to spend too much time explaining how African wild dogs play, because I already covered them pretty thoroughly in my tier list of Africa’s apex predators. To quickly recap, African wild dogs are mainly adapted for hunting midweight antelope on the African savannah, and they do it better than any other build – it’s not unheard of for a wild dog pack to succeed on as many as 90% of their hunts. However, they have nowhere near the physical power of the server’s other two major pack-hunting builds, the lion and spotted hyena, and tend to get bodied by these two in competition. Lions regularly outright kill them with ease, and while hyenas aren’t quite powerful enough to get away with doing that, they do frequently steal the wild dogs’ kills and kill their pups without much fear of pushback. These problem matchups have severely restricted the wild dogs’ ability to grow their player-base, and keep them from going above B tier on the tier list.

A Tier: Fennec fox

In low A tier, we have the fennec fox. Players might be surprised to see the smallest dog in the game ranked above so many of its larger and more powerful relatives, but there aren’t very many builds as well-adapted to such a difficult niche as the fennec fox is. Found throughout the Sahara Desert, fennecs have two key adaptations that make them among the best builds for surviving in this legendarily brutal environment. First, their huge ears, which act as a surface to dissipate heat during the hottest times of day. This is actually kind of an add-on bonus to the ears’ main purpose, which is to listen out for the movements of small animals hidden under the desert soil. The other major adaptation fennecs have is that their kidneys retain water extremely well. In fact, they retain so much moisture from the prey they eat that they can survive for an unlimited time without drinking water at all.

Like all foxes, Fennecs do still have the downside of being vulnerable to getting killed by larger predators. However, fennecs are among the most agile dogs, and are known for being incredibly difficult to capture; even specialist game-hunting dogs bred by humans almost never manage to catch them successfully. The fennec is easily one of the best builds for the Sahara Desert meta, and is only kept out of S tier by the fact that it’s unlikely to spread to other biomes outside of it.

A Tier: Wolf

And on the opposite end of the spectrum, the middle of A tier is where I’d place the largest dog in the current meta, the wolf. With their huge teeth, wolves easily outclass all other canids when it comes to raw attack power, and with legs that are long even by dog standards, only the toughest of herbivore mains can outlast them in a chase. Even a lone wolf can deal enough damage to kill nearly any herbivore in the Northern Hemisphere, but it’s when wolves hunt in packs that they become a true terror. Aside from perhaps African wild dogs, wolves are probably the most adapted to pack hunting out of all dogs. This is true both in the sense that their social instincts are the strongest, and that they’re most adapted to hunting the kind of large prey that dogs would normally need a pack for.

Wolf packs have two main approaches to hunting, depending on how many players they have. Smaller packs tend to rely mostly on midweight ungulates, with a particular focus on deer. These packs typically kill ungulates by tiring them out in an extended chase, and then one-shotting them with a bite to the throat. Larger packs are more likely to have to take on riskier targets like moose or bison, and these require a different approach, as getting too close to the horns or antlers would be more danger to the wolves than it’s worth. So instead, these wolf packs first wound their prey with a series of bites to the hindquarters, then wait until the blood loss has critically weakened them before going for the kill. This is generally easiest for wolves living in cold climates, as wolves’ paws are much better adapted at running through snow than the hooves of their prey. All that said, wolves aren’t very picky and will also eat smaller prey like rodents and rabbits if available, in which case they use essentially the same tactics as smaller dogs – leaping onto them and stunning them with their forepaws before killing them.

Although they’ve lost a fair amount of territory to competition from humans, wolves still control territory spanning a good portion of the Northern Hemisphere and a wide array of biomes. The width of their range means that they have to compete at least periodically with nearly every other apex predator in the North American and Eurasian metas, which makes it unusually easy to see how they compare in viability against similar builds. Wolves easily dominate over all other canids. Against higher-tier carnivorans like the cougar, hyena, and black bear, things are more even; these characters can usually defeat a lone wolf, but will typically lose if confronted by a pack working together. Their biggest problem matchups are against the S-tier carnivorans of their servers, the grizzly bear and tiger, both of which have basically free wins against even entire wolf packs. All of this balances out to place the wolf pretty definitively in A tier.

A Tier: Domestic dog

At the top of A tier, we have the domestic dog. I should note that I’ve done something I don’t normally do when rating this build. Ordinarily, I tend to rate builds on how well they can survive in the wild, without taking into account direct interference from humans. If I did this for domestic dogs, they’d probably rank around low C tier. The reason I do this is because for most animals, the degree to which humans help or harm them is essentially a matter of blind luck based on how humans in the area feel about them, and has little to do with their actual build design. However, domestic dogs are an exception to this rule – maintaining cooperative relationships with them has been a consistent feature of nearly every human guild throughout history. And unlike most livestock animals, who basically just function as passive recipients of aid from humans, dogs have adapted to playing a variety of active roles in human societies. This makes dogs closer to conventional symbionts than other domesticated animals, and that sort of symbiosis does factor into account when giving builds a rating.

Dogs were the very first support build that humans ever unlocked, and by a wide margin. Hunting in partnership with wolves has been a major element of human gameplay going back around 45,000 years, and the earliest wolves who became so adapted to this that they became an outright separate species probably appeared at least 23,000 years ago, if not earlier. As humans started to develop agriculture, dogs further modified themselves to make it easier for humans to feed them, speccing into a starch-digesting ability which isn’t found in any wild-living dog build. The other big change that occurred in the process of turning dogs into supports was in their brain structure. Like most domesticated animals, dogs have shrunken brains compared to their wild relatives, and are generally a lot worse at problem-solving and less wary of threats compared to wolves. However, they’ve compensated with a massive increase in their social cognition; the degree to which dogs are attuned to the behaviours and emotions of the humans surrounding them is utterly unlike anything seen in other domesticated animals, and also well exceeds the emotional intelligence of many other animals that are otherwise smarter.

Today, dogs’ partnerships with humans have made them the most popular carnivoran in the game, with over 700 million active players currently. I came very close to giving them S tier for how far they’ve spread, but the one thing that holds them back is that their breeding has left their code particularly prone to glitching out. This is mainly a problem with what humans call “purebred” dogs, due to the inbreeding involved in their creation, with all the problems that entails. The exact glitches that result vary depending on the breed, but they’re enough to keep domestic dogs just barely out of the top tier.

S Tier: Dingo

The true top-tier of the dog guild is the dingo. Including this on the list might be a bit controversial, as it’s still disputed whether dingoes are actually a distinct build. The official character select screen still lists them as a variant of the wolf, and there are other game guides that treat them as a variant of the domestic dog, but I think they’re different enough from the more common variants of both to deserve their own section. Found in Australia, dingoes are the descendants of a group of wolves that came over with early human settlers. These wolves had already been taught to hunt alongside humans, but had not yet begun to undergo selective breeding to become truly domesticated. Today, dingoes remain generally well-disposed towards humans and often live in close association with them, but are also still fully capable of surviving on their own.

In terms of playstyle, dingoes play pretty similarly to wolves, but have traded away some bulk in exchange for more flexible shoulder joints, which enable them to easily climb cliffs and rocks so as to keep better lookout for prey. Given how few large herbivores there are in Australia, a pack of dingoes the size of regular wolves probably wouldn’t be able to find enough prey to survive anyway, so this wasn’t much of a sacrifice. Kangaroos and wallabies are dingoes’ most preferred source of XP, but their smaller size compared to regular wolves means that they can also sustain themselves on rabbits, rodents and other lightweight prey in biomes where these can’t be found. Unlike domestic dogs, dingoes have also retained the enlarged brains of wolves, and their remarkable intelligence can help them with hunting difficult prey. For example, lone dingoes have been known to kill large wallabies by using ocean waves to drown them, and they’ve also been known to use the same tactic to kill echidnas without getting near their spines.

Dingoes are the largest and most powerful predators in Australia’s meta today, and among the few true apex predators left on the continent. For achieving nearly uncontested dominance across nearly an entire major server, I rate them as the S-tiers of the dog meta.
So that’s the dog tier list. I hope you enjoyed it, and if you’re interested in playing a dog, I hope you find this helpful. If you’re interested in other carnivorans, consider checking out my tier lists for the raccoons, mustelids, bears, or cats. Thanks for reading.

The Antelope Tier List

[This is part of a series of posts about animals. To find other posts in this series, see here.]

Okay, so a while ago I did a tier list ranking the bovine and caprine members of the bovid guild, but I left out the other branches of the guild, the antelope. I said at the time I’d be saving the antelope tier list for later, and I think the time has come.

Antelope basic build analysis

I’m going to keep this pretty brief, since my earlier bovine and caprine tier list already covered the basics of the bovid guild, and there’s not a whole lot else to cover here. To briefly recap: the bovid guild first appeared in the mid-Miocene, and includes a variety of horned, cud-chewing herbivores. They can be broadly divided into three categories – bovines, caprines, and antelope – but where “bovine” and “caprine” both refer to specific subclasses, “antelope” is more of a default category for any bovid that doesn’t fall into the other two.

Despite not being a proper guild, antelope do tend to share broadly similar stat spreads. While they don’t have much in the way of special abilities, the main things they have going for them are high mobility and herd behaviour. They basically function as the African equivalent to the deer builds of other servers, and have an average rating of low C tier – a tier below the deer’s rating of low B tier due to the added difficulty of playing in Africa.

Antelope do have one major improvement over deer. Instead of antlers, which have minimal damage-dealing capability and fall off at the end of mating season, antelope have horns, which are much more powerful, and can be used year-round. Still, given that both builds are more optimised for evasion than fighting anyway, this doesn’t make that much of a difference to how they play in practice.

THE ANTELOPE TIER LIST

D Tier: Impala

At the higher end of D tier, we have the impala. Impala are more or less the “vanilla” version of antelope. They can jump up to three metres high and can run very fast, but on a server as harsh as Africa, they tend to be easily outclassed by the competition. Because of their low defensive ratings, impala are seen as easy XP for nearly every large predator in Africa. Lions, leopards, hyenas, cheetahs, wild dogs, crocodiles, and pythons all regularly kill and eat them.

Impala aren’t very good at defending themselves against parasites, either. Of the herbivores of Africa, impala are among the most vulnerable to infection by parasitic ticks, and this can be dangerous. Many ticks inject small amounts of neurotoxin when they bite, which can cause paralysis and death. Tick paralysis is a rare condition, but when you get bitten by ticks as often as an impala, there’s a good chance you’ll end up with it sooner or later.

Another thing that holds impala back is their relationship with the oxpecker player-base. Oxpeckers are a kind of bird that live off of parasites they find on the backs of African herbivores; while they target zebras, hippos, giraffes, buffalo and many other herbivores, impala are among their most-favoured targets due to their high amount of ticks. For a long time, this was seen as one of the few perks of the impala class, as it was thought that oxpeckers helped keep herbivores clean and acted as an early warning system for predators thanks to their keen eyesight. However, more careful studies have revealed that what oxpeckers are attracted to isn’t ticks, it’s blood. While they do sometimes eat ticks after the ticks have filled themselves up, oxpeckers actually spend much more time pecking at open wounds and lapping up the blood that bleeds out, making their relationship with impalas more parasitic than symbiotic. So what looked like a rare W for the impalas has turned out to just be another L, and further reinforces their status as low-tiers.

C Tier: Dama gazelle

In C tier, we have two antelope builds that tried to optimise for survival in harsh environments, but couldn’t get it quite right. First up, another desert build, the Dama gazelle. This build is known for its exceptionally long legs, which help players to dissipate heat as they wander. However, compared to other desert herbivores, the Dama gazelle has relatively few adaptations for retaining water and is highly prone to dehydration. As climate change is making drought seasons worse, this gazelle’s rating is likely to only go down with time.

C Tier: Klipspringer

The other C-tier antelope is probably the most unorthodox antelope build in the current meta, the klipspringer. Like most antelope, the klipspringer is basically a mobility build, but rather than focusing on maximising speed like most antelope, klipspringer mains took an approach that’s more typical of caprines and put most of their evolution points into moving through difficult terrain. Klipspringers have a unique gait, being the only antelope that walk on the tips of their hooves, which enhances their grip on the ground and enables them to easily climb and jump over rocky surfaces. They also have a much thicker fur coat than most antelope, which functions both as insulation for when they’re climbing tall mountains and as a cushion in case they lose their balance and fall. They spend most of their time in rocky mountains, where they’re relatively safe from predators, as most predators typically don’t have the agility to balance easily there.

However, there are some major flaws in their strategy. Unlike some mountain animals, klipspringers don’t have many adaptations for finding loot in the mountains. If it becomes too hard to find food, they often have no choice but to come back down to the lowlands, where they’re highly vulnerable due to their small size. Even when they stay in the mountains, they’re only really protected against ground-dwelling predators; they still have to watch out for birds of prey. So while this is an interesting strategy, their oversights keep them from going above mid-tier.

B Tier: Lechwe

At the bottom of B tier, we have a marsh-adapted antelope, the lechwe. Lechwes have specced into long hind legs with a water-repellent coating, which allows them to run much faster through water than most other land animals. Not the flashiest ability, but the slight edge it gives them when evading predators puts them at the higher end of this list.

B Tier: Springbok and Thomson’s gazelle

At the high end of B tier, we have two antelope that went all-in on maximising mobility, the springbok and the Thomson’s gazelle. These are the two fastest antelope builds, and, after the cheetah and the pronghorn, the two fastest-running animals in the entire game. These two builds tend to have relatively favourable matchups against most predators, since no predator is fast enough to chase them down. Their biggest problem matchup is against cheetahs, the only predator that can beat their top speeds. Even this matchup is far from unwinnable, as these gazelles have much higher stamina than cheetahs and so will usually win if they can evade long enough for the cheetah to tire out.

However, they do have one exploitable weakness, in that their game plan depends on being able to clearly see danger and having a wide open space to run away through. If they’re in an area where predators can easily hide, like an area with lots of tall grasses, this can leave them highly vulnerable to an ambush attack, and all of Africa’s large predators will readily take advantage of this weakness if the opportunity presents itself. One way Thomson’s gazelles deal with this is by following larger herbivores like zebras and wildebeest; these larger herbivores tend to eat the tallest grasses as they travel, making it harder for predators to use them as cover.

While by no means overpowered, these two builds have a mostly-solid strategy that’s enabled them to succeed against some extremely tough competition, and earn an above-average rating.

B Tier: Wildebeest

At the top of B tier, we have the best antelope build in the current meta, the wildebeest. This is a build that combines the best aspects of antelope and bovines, having the high mobility typical of an antelope with bovine-like size and power. While most apex predators of the savannah do have the power to beat a full-grown wildebeest in a fight, all of them, even lions, need to be careful when taking them on. Wildebeest muscles are built to be highly resistant to fatigue, so while they aren’t as fast as some other antelope in short-distance chases, they excel when it comes to tiring predators out. The wildebeest player base also benefits from maintaining a good relationship with the zebra playerbase; their herds often graze together with zebra herds, and the two help each other keep watch for predators.

The biggest weakness that keeps the wildebeest from being top-tier is its poor resistance to disease. Wildebeest are highly susceptible to a number of pathogens, particularly anthrax, and their player base periodically falls into sharp decline whenever there’s an outbreak of one of these diseases on their server.

So that’s the antelope tier list. I hope you enjoyed it, and if you’re thinking of playing an antelope, I hope you find it helpful. Thanks for reading.

The Strange World of Starfish

[This is part of a series of posts about animals. To find other posts in this series, see here.]

A while back, I did a post where I ranked the phyla of animals which lack bilateral symmetry. Since this was a gigantic topic including about 1% of the entire animal kingdom, I didn’t even try to go into detail on specific builds, instead focusing only on ranking the high-level factions. But if I had decided to go more specific, there are plenty of fascinating builds I could have covered, and probably the highest-ranked of them would have been the starfish. Starfish are among the strangest builds in the entire game, and much more powerful than they appear at first glance. So today, I’m going to do an in-depth analysis of the starfish build, to explore how these bizarre creatures have been so successful.

STARFISH GUILD HISTORY

The history of the starfish guild is a little difficult to assess, because starfish bodies tend to decompose quickly once the player gets a Game Over. After a while, all that remains are usually some calcite fragments, but these aren’t fused together and tend to drift apart once the rest of the starfish is dissolved. But every now and then, a starfish’s entire body does get preserved for long periods; this usually involves the creation of an area called a lagerstätte, a sedimentary deposit abnormally suited to the preservation of fossils. So there are some things we can say with confidence.

Starfish are among the oldest animal guilds still in the game; the earliest surviving logs of them are from the early Ordovician expansion, around 450 million years ago. They most likely started as a modification of a now-extinct marine invertebrate called the edrioasteroid, which had similar internal structures to starfish, but was rooted to the ocean floor. Oncethese early starfish re-developed the ability to crawl, they quickly diversified into a variety of forms which would last throughout the Paleozoic. When the Great Dying patch brought the Paleozoic era of gameplay to a close, most of the old starfish classes were banned, but the one surviving class quickly recovered and diversified again, creating most of the basic starfish forms that we still see today.

Today, the starfish are a popular and highly successful guild, including over 1900 builds and being found across every major ocean server. What accounts for their success? To find out, let’s now go into their stats and abilities.

STARFISH STATS AND ABILITIES

Body structure

• General Echinoderm structural traits

So before we get into the starfish’s specific abilities, it might be worth briefly going over the traits of the echinoderm faction that they belong to. I already covered this in my earlier tier list of the non-bilateral phyla, but to recap, echinoderms have three main traits that distinguish them from all other animals. First, they have hard calcite plates called [Ossicles] underneath their skin, which provide structural rigidity and act as a deterrent to predators. Second, they have a unique form of tissue called [Catch Connective Tissue], which can alternate between being rigid or flexible in response to the stimulation of nerves. And thirdly, instead of hearts, they circulate fluid through the body using a system called the [Water Vascular System], a network of fluid-filled canals with small projections called tube feet on the ends. When they move, they contract muscles so as to force water into the tube feet, causing them to extend and push against the ground, then relax them to allow the feet to retract. The tube feet can also double as secondary gills.

• Specific starfish structural traits

Even among echinoderms, the starfish’s structure stands out as particularly weird. Structurally speaking, starfish can basically be thought of as giant disembodied heads that have evolved to move on their own. Like all echinoderms, their very early ancestors had standard bilaterally-symmetrical bodies, but their trunks and tails got lost as they adapted to sessile life, until their heads were all that was left. As starfish reverted to their earlier active-hunting lifestyle, they grew feet on their lips so that they could learn to crawl again.

A starfish’s body wall is supported by a network of collagen fibres, set at right angles to each other and arranged into a 3-D web. The web includes small openings where the aforementioned ossicles fit in, along with thin-walled protrusions called [Papulae], which some species use to breathe. This web pattern is ideal for providing maximum stability when crawling, while still allowing for a wide range of movement. As I said in my previous post, the use of catch connective tissue also allows for the starfish’s body to rapidly alternate between flexibility and stiffness, so that they seem soft when crawling on the sea floor, but become hard as stone when you try to pull them out of a crevice.

Many starfish, as well as some other echinoderms, have additional structures on the body wall called [Pedicellariae]. These are groups of ossicles compounded into wrench- or claw-shaped appendages with movable jaws. The function of the pedicellariae can vary depending on the type of starfish you opt for. While pedicellariae can have different functions for different kinds of echinoderms, their main purpose for starfish is to help get a grip on small prey.

Eating and digestion

A starfish’s insides are mostly occupied by its digestive system. Starfish have stomachs that are divided into two sections, called the [Cardiac Stomach] and the [Pyloric Stomach], and the role of each varies depending on the starfish you play. When you play more old-school starfish builds, the stomachs are used exclusively for digestion, with prey being captured by swallowing it whole. But for more advanced builds, the caloric stomach can actually be turned inside-out to engulf prey items too large to fit in their mouths, which is then passed to the internal pyloric stomach once it’s sufficiently digested.

Nervous System

• Cognition

Like all radially symmetrical animals, starfish don’t have brains or central nervous systems. However, this doesn’t mean that they don’t still have a very limited form of intelligence. A starfish’s nervous system consists of a nerve ring around the mouth and a radial nerve cord running along the regions near the pores of each arm, with information being passed between the two by neurons in the dermis. The radial nerves are divided into two nets, one in the epidermis with nerves that take in sensory information, and one in the lining of the coelom cavity with nerves to control movement. This system allows each arm to sense its environment, move, and pass food to the mouth, all without the need for a brain.

You might be wondering, if each arm independently controls its own movement, then how do starfish ensure that they all go in the same direction while walking? The answer is that, while starfish don’t have central nervous systems, they do have dominant arms at any given time (which arm is dominant can change over time). When the dominant arm moves in a particular direction, all the other arms feel the pull on them and take it as a signal to follow. Most of the time, each arm is allowed to move at its own pace, but sometimes the dominant arm will send out a signal to the other arms to coordinate a synchronised movement, which is the closest starfish can get to running.

• Perception

Since I brought up the starfish’s senses, I should probably clarify something. A lot of players think that if you don’t spec into a brain when designing your character, then you automatically lose access to all or most sensory perception abilities. Actually, starfish, like a surprising number of other brainless organisms, have access to many of the same senses that so-called “higher” animals do.

Starfish have compound eyes at the end of each arm. Many echinoderms have primitive eyespots, but usually they’re only capable of distinguishing light from dark and nothing more, whereas starfish eyes are complex enough to allow for genuine image-forming vision. That’s not to say they’re especially useful, though. For one thing, because they’re at the ends of the arms, they can only see anything when the arms are lifted. In other words, whenever starfish crawl along the ocean floor, they keep starting to see things and then going blind again when they put their arms down. For another, even at the best of times, starfish eyes produce images with no colour and extremely low resolution, so they can only really make out gigantic objects like coral reefs.

When it comes to actually navigating their environment, the two main senses starfish rely on are smell and touch. How these senses work is a bit of a mystery, but they seem to be mostly handled by the tube feet. The radial symmetry of echinoderms makes it a little easier for them to survive like this – having a body plan based on a repeating pattern ensures that starfish always have an equal number of sensory organs pointed in all directions, so they never need to turn around in order to see or smell something better.

Defensive strategies

• Passive defence

Because radially symmetrical animals can only move very slowly, starfish don’t have much ability to fight back or run away if they get attacked by predators. When it comes to defending themselves, they tend to rely more on passive strategies. In addition to the aforementioned hard-to-digest ossicles, starfish body walls also include chemicals called saponins. Saponins are among the best passive defences in the game because they work simultaneously as poisons for predators and as built-in immune boosters, effective against many forms of infections – bacterial, viral, and fungal – and even cancer. I’m actually kind of surprised we don’t see more players making use of them.

Even the best passive defence can only work for so long by itself, so many starfish players supplement their saponins with a variety of other passive defences. Common choices include rows of spines, hard armour plates, or mixing the saponins with other poisons, like tetrodotoxin. Less commonly, some starfish players, mainly those in the guild Velatida, can defend themselves against attackers by spraying them with giant balls of toxic mucus.

• Autotomy and healing

Should a predator manage to tank all of these defences, there’s one other defence that starfish can use as a last resort. When a predator grabs them, starfish can rapidly soften the catch connective tissue by restricting the flow of calcium ions, allowing the grabbed arm to easily break off. This can distract predators enough to allow the rest of the starfish time to escape.

If you’ve been following this series, you probably already know my thoughts on autotomy-based defences like this, and that, while I don’t approve of builds that rely on it as a primary defence, I recognize that they can be real life-savers in the right situation. To mitigate the obvious downsides of this strategy, it’s generally best to pair it with a good HP regeneration stat, and this is probably the area where starfish most excel. All starfish can regrow an arm if they lose it, and in many species, the arm can even regrow a new body as well.

For starfish with the more extreme forms of HP regen, a side benefit of autotomy is that it provides an alternative means of reproduction if they can’t find a mate. They just break off an arm and become two starfish. There exist populations of starfish that maintain themselves almost entirely by splitting themselves up.

Weaknesses

• Low stats

The biggest weakness of starfish is their minimaxed stat spread. They put almost all their points into attack power and HP regeneration, leaving their mobility and intelligence ratings among the lowest in the game, and their perception isn’t great either. This is something they have in common with all radially symmetrical builds, as bilateral symmetry is a prerequisite for unlocking a brain or high-speed movement options.

• Pollution

Despite all their defences against predators and parasites, starfish, like most echinoderms, are below average when it comes to defence against environmental damage. Humans often use them as a kind of living alarm system to measure how badly polluted a marine ecosystem is, because they absorb toxins from the sea so easily.

Matchup Spread

Starfish will generally eat most prey that comes their way, but due to their poor movement speed, they’re not very good for hunting active-swimming builds. Instead, their best matchups are usually ones against sessile invertebrates found on the seafloor. Their remarkable arm strength, combined with their ability to turn their stomachs inside-out, make it possible for them to easily hunt targets that would normally be too large and heavily-armoured for a build of their size – clams, oysters, and other bivalve shellfish are among their most common targets. When hunting these bivalves, starfish will grab them, pull the two valves apart slightly, then insert a small section of the caloric stomach and release enzymes to start digestion. Starfish do so well against bivalves that in some regions, they’ve become single-handedly responsible for preventing mussels from growing overpopulated enough to damage the whole ecosystem. The achievement [Keystone Species], given to builds whose player-bases become essential to keeping a biome running properly, was first added to the game in recognition of these starfish players’ achievements. Some of the larger starfish play a similarly pivotal role in controlling their echinoderm cousins, the sea urchins.

On the other hand, starfish tend to have pretty weak matchups against a lot of larger predators. Even with all their passive defences, their massive shortcomings in mobility and intelligence tend to make them easy pickings for opportunistic hunters like the seagull and sea otter.

One of the biggest threats you’ll face when playing a starfish will be from other starfish. Some types of starfish, like the morning sun star, survive almost entirely by eating other, smaller starfish builds – or even smaller individuals of their own build. They’re so voracious, that, once, a group of humans tried to keep a family of starfish in a tank to study their reactions to predators, but the experiment had to be scrapped because the bigger starfish had already eaten all their younger siblings before they had the chance to introduce any other animals.

The Crown-of-thorns Starfish

I’m not going to do a full starfish tier list, because most starfish builds are too similar for it to be interesting. However, I do want to take some time to spotlight by far the best starfish build in the game, the crown-of-thorns. One of the larger starfish, the crown-of-thorns has a largely typical starfish design, but boosts its defence with a coating of sharp, venomous spines on its upper surface.

Crown-of-thorns starfish are found in coral reefs, where they feed primarily on the coral polyps. Due to their eversible stomachs, crown-of-thorns starfish can consume coral far more efficiently than most similar builds, and a full-grown one can destroy up to thirty feet of coral per year. And when conditions are right, their populations grow terrifyingly fast, as a single crown-of-thorns female can lay up to 200 million eggs in just a single season. When their numbers get large enough, they can absolutely devastate entire reef biomes, so much so that their growing player-base has become a major factor in the ongoing decline of coral populations in the Indo-Pacific.

To be clear, crown-of-thorns don’t always cause this much damage by default, as a variety of predatory fish often keep their numbers in check. But when they’re in an environment where they have few threats – which is becoming more and more common due to overfishing of their predators by humans – their power is truly incredible.

STARFISH TIER RATING

I’d say that starfish have a good, but not great position in the current meta. They’ve got a lot of great special abilities that make them formidable predators, but their shortcomings in base stats can’t be overlooked. I’d say they average around high B tier, with the crown-of-thorns making it into low A tier.

So that’s my analysis of the starfish. I hope you enjoyed it, and if you’re thinking of playing a starfish, I hope you find it helpful. If you’re interested in checking out some other marine invertebrates first, consider checking out my analysis of the cephalopods, or my crab tier list. Thanks for reading.

The Bear Tier List

[This is part of a series of posts about animals. To find other posts in this series, see here.]

One thing I find interesting about the metagame of Outside is how rarely the [Omnivore] and [Megafauna] traits get combined within a single build. Given that the main challenge of playing as a megafauna build is finding enough XP, you might think that the ideal approach for any such players would be to take advantage of all possible forms of loot, but this isn’t how it usually works in practice. Almost all successful megafauna builds in the current meta go for either the pure carnivore or pure herbivore approach, with the one notable exception of the bear. What’s unique about them that accounts for their success? And are some kinds of bear better at it than others? Bears have some of the simplest play styles among Outside’s top tiers, but there are still some interesting variations among them that I think are worth exploring. So today, I’m going to go into the bear tier list, to determine which kinds of bear are best.

BASIC BEAR BUILD ANALYSIS

Bear Guild History

Bear-like carnivorans first became part of Outside’s meta during the Eocene expansion, around 40 million years ago, with the introduction of two carnivoran guilds called the subparictids and the amphicynodonts. While most closely related to bears, both of these builds played quite a bit differently from bears today, being much smaller and bearing more resemblance to raccoons and otters respectively. True bears first appeared in the Oligocene, with the introduction of the hemicyonines or dog-like bears – not to be confused with bear-dogs, which were an entirely separate group of primitive carnivorans – and for a while, the dog-bears largely remained small. They continued to employ the same raccoon-like playstyle as their predecessors.

This small size was, and still is, typical of omnivorous carnivorans; as the guild name suggests, the carnivoran digestive system is specialised for carnivory, so it’s very hard for them to gain enough points off of an omnivorous diet to reach megafauna status. The breakthrough that allowed the bear guild to escape this trap and develop into the terrifying behemoths they are today came in the mid-Miocene, with a bear build called the Aurorarctos. While not itself particularly large, Aurorarctos was distinguished from earlier bears by having teeth with parallel buccal and lingual ridges. This dental shift allowed it and its descendants to switch to a more efficient style of chewing, enabling them to better break down plant matter before digesting and so get more XP out of it than other carnivorans. This set the stage for later bears to quickly reach megafauna status, and these huge bears ended up outlasting all of their smaller relatives. As the Miocene gave way to the Pliocene expansion, bears saw a sudden explosion in popularity, due to climate shifts creating a much greater number of open spaces for them to inhabit; most of the current bear builds emerged during this time.

Bear Stats

Bears tend to have a pretty solid stat spread. Their physical power tends to be extremely high, thanks to their bulky, robust builds and huge, muscular forelimbs. For most bears, the only animal in their environment that can match their strength is another bear. Their other key advantage is their sense of smell, which is the highest among carnivorans and is able to detect the scent of food from several kilometres away. On the other hand, the rest of their senses aren’t quite as great. While they do have the advantage of being among the few carnivorans that aren’t colour-blind, their hearing and eyesight are still only mediocre, and they lack the touch-sensitive whiskers that most other carnivorans have.

The biggest relative weak area for bears, stat-wise, is mobility. Unlike most carnivorans, bears are too heavy to stand on their toes; they have to walk with their weight on their hind feet, which is generally a lot slower. Most bears can still run pretty fast in short bursts, but it costs them a lot more energy than it does for other large mammals, and so long-distance chases are a lot more difficult for them than for most of their competitors.

Overall Bear Tier Rating

This might come as a surprise, but I actually don’t see bears as being top-tier in general in the current meta. While they’re fairly successful wherever they go, that’s mostly just due to coasting on sheer physical strength, and they don’t have much in the way of impressive stats or abilities beyond that. Since they’re still strong enough to dominate almost all challengers in a very wide variety of environments, including some of the hardest in the game, I’d give them a low A-tier rating on average, but no higher. That said, there are some bears that have definitely earned top-tier status. Which ones? To find out, let’s now go into the bear tier list.

THE BEAR TIER LIST

F Tier: Giant panda

I don’t think it’ll be very controversial to say that by far the worst bear build in the current meta is the giant panda. I already did a pretty good roast of the panda in my first-ever tier list, where I ranked the large herbivorous mammals, and not only is everything I said there still true, but I think I actually understated how garbage this build is. So now I’m going to take an even more thorough look at everything wrong with the panda’s design.

Pandas are infamous for having thrown away all the amazing advantages available to the bear class, just so that they could more easily eat bamboo. They’ve spent almost all their points on a pseudo-thumb that helps them grasp onto bamboo stalks, combined with some poison resistance to better withstand bamboo’s cyanide content. Because they still have mostly the same carnivorous digestive system as other bears, they can only barely digest these bamboo stalks, and get less than a fifth the XP from them that other herbivores in their forests do. The resulting lack of energy in turn makes it practically impossible for them to do things like hunting down other animals or crossing difficult terrain to search for other food sources, and so forces them to stick to their ridiculously inefficient bamboo-specialist playstyle, creating a vicious cycle.

Again, most of this was already covered in my earlier tier list, but it doesn’t fully cover just how unbelievably terrible the panda’s build design is. See, when I said that pandas have the same digestive system as other bears, that wasn’t entirely true. The panda is actually the last surviving build from a bear subclass called the ailuropodines, which split off from the rest of the bear faction around 20 million years ago – before they developed the Aurorarctos build that I mentioned before. As a result, pandas don’t have the same efficient dentition as other bears, which is kind of unfortunate when their whole playstyle is based on eating tough, hard-to-chew plants. Their teeth do have some adaptations for herbivory, like large molars for crushing tough fibres, but they’re less effective than the similar adaptations of omnivorous bears, which is frankly just plain embarrassing. Also, in order to process all the bamboo they eat without being able to digest it fully, they’ve had to spec into a shortened gut to help faeces come out quicker… but that also means that their gut bacteria have less time to absorb nutrients than those of other players, so that they not only digest less of the bamboo they eat than other herbivores, but even less than other omnivores.

So, to recap, pandas took a build design meant for the role of an omnivore, tried to trade away all its main advantages so they could spend all their time digesting one very specific plant, and then ended up being worse than their omnivorous relatives even at doing that. If that’s not a bottom-tier build, I don’t know what is. I’m going to close off this section by repeating the ending of my earlier analysis: “With the recent expansion of human players leading to the destruction of more and more bamboo forest biomes, the panda’s overspecialization and high XP requirements have become a crippling hindrance and killed any chance of their becoming competitively viable. Ordinarily, I don’t judge too harshly if a class takes a hit in viability because of humans, but in the case of pandas, I have to say: you guys did this to yourselves.”

B Tier: Spectacled bear

Aside from the panda, there’s really no other bad choice for bear mains in the current meta – every other bear build has at least an above-average ranking. So we’re going to jump straight to mid-B tier, where we have the spectacled bear, which is maybe the most vanilla bear in the current meta. Spectacled bears are around average in size by bear standards, though still larger than any other land animals on their server aside from tapirs, and are similarly middling in most other regards. Their diet is around 95% plant matter, which is more than most bears, but not quite as much as the panda. They live in forests, and have some adaptations for climbing, but not to the extent of a number of other bears. While they do fairly well in the meta and don’t have a lot of threats, on the whole they can’t do much that other bears can’t do better.

Probably the most noteworthy thing about spectacled bears is their choice of biome: they’re almost exclusively found in the Andes mountains of South America, a server otherwise free of bears. This is because they’re the last surviving members of a group called the short-faced bears, which originated in Miocene North America, but invaded South America after the two became connected. During the Ice Age, short-faced bears were among the dominant predators of the Americas, with some growing larger and more powerful than any carnivoran in the Americas today. However, most of them quickly died out once humans reached the server. Spectacled bears managed to largely avoid confrontations with humans thanks to their ability to retreat into treetops, and so were the only short-faced bears that survived into the present.

B Tier: Sun bear

Also in mid-B tier, we have the sun bear, a build found in the tropical forests of Southeast Asia. While sun bears are omnivorous, and tend to get most of their XP from fruit if they can, the bulk of their evolution points have been spent on adaptations for eating eusocial insects. Sun bears have extremely sharp claws and huge, powerful teeth, which they use to crack open termite mounds, and to tear open trees in order to find bees’ nests. Once they find their way into an insect colony’s dwelling, they use their long, anteater-like tongues to lap up insects in huge numbers.

The biggest problem that holds sun bears back from ranking with the top-tier bears is their weak matchup spread within their weight class. Sun bears are the smallest bears, and among the physically weakest, and tend to lose out when competing with other large predators. Tigers regularly kill and eat them, and leopards, dholes and pythons all take them down from time to time as well. They manage to avoid these threats to an extent by staying in the treetops much of the time, but they’re still vulnerable when they come down to the ground.

B Tier: Polar bear

In high B tier, we have a build that you might have been expecting to see at the top of this list, the polar bear. This is probably the gutsiest bear build in the current game; while most bears generally stick to environments where food is abundant and easy to find, polar bears have been bold enough to venture into one of the harshest regions in the game, the Arctic. In order to survive there, polar bears have had to make some substantial changes to the usual bear playstyle. They’ve specced into large, hairy paws for friction on ice, with sharp claws for added grip, and an extra-thick fur coat for warmth. To gain points to unlock these traits, they’ve cut back a bit on their sensory stats; their eyes and ears have shrunken to minimise the risk of frostbite, and while they can still use their large noses to track down prey over long distances, their olfactory receptors have become considerably reduced. In the Arctic, the kinds of plants that other bears eat don’t really grow, so there’s no point retaining the ability to detect any food scents other than that of fresh meat. Relatedly, because playing as a large land-omnivore isn’t really a viable strategy in the Arctic, polar bears have had to switch factions to survive, and have become semi-aquatic carnivores.

Polar bears are legendarily powerful, and if this tier list were based solely on who could beat up who, they would easily rank at the top. However, success in Outside is a little more complicated than that, and polar bears fall short in a number of other areas. In a lot of ways, polar bears can actually be seen as a kind of mirror-image to pandas, even if not quite as useless. Polar bears do have some digestive adaptations for carnivory, such as having fewer copies of genes for breaking down plant starch than other bears, and more copies of genes for metabolising the kinds of fats found in animal flesh, but they’re still not quite as well-adapted to digesting a carnivorous diet as other predators that have been doing it consistently for longer. For example, polar bears’ carnassial teeth, which most carnivorans use for tearing flesh off carcasses, are just as small and under-developed as in other bears, making them much too weak to be used for shearing. In fact, polar bear teeth look less like what you’d normally find in a build optimised for hunting other mammals, and more like what you’d usually see in a specialist insectivore. Consequently, while polar bears will eat reindeer and other land herbivores if they get the chance, they don’t get the same value from them as other carnivores; without teeth that are properly adapted to tearing meat off of bones, they only end up being able to eat a small portion of the target’s flesh compared to what a lion or wolf would.

In order to get around this issue, polar bears have adapted to become specialist predators of marine mammals. By far their biggest sources of XP are seals, with a particular preference for the ringed seal, and their next-biggest sources are beluga whales. This works because seals and whales are covered with thick, nutrient-rich layers of blubber and fat, so that polar bears don’t need to reach the bony areas to get good value from eating them. But even here, there’s a pretty obvious problem. While polar bears can swim better than other bears, they’re nowhere near as adapted to moving through oceans as seals and whales are, and it’s difficult for them to score a kill while actually underwater. In order to find enough seal and whale meat to live on, they need to find a way to hunt these animals while staying mostly on land. For the fully-marine beluga whales, there’s not much they can do except search for beached carcasses. This is an important part of their strategy, and can provide enough nutrition to carry them through periods where live prey becomes most difficult to catch. But as those who follow this series will know, scavenging like this never provides enough XP to be viable as a full-time strategy for a heavyweight carnivore. So, most of the time, polar bears rely overwhelmingly on hunting seals.

Since polar bears don’t have high enough aquatic mobility to reliably chase down seals in the water, they instead have to function primarily as ambush predators. But this is complicated, because they’re gigantic. To get around this, they can use one of several methods. Commonly, a polar bear player will begin a hunt when it notices a seal coming up onto the sea ice in order to rest or give birth. The bear then starts slowly stalking behind the seal, carefully lowering its head so that its dark nose doesn’t stand out against the snow. As it gets closer, the bear crouches more and more until it’s ready to pounce, then rapidly charges at the seal, trying to catch it before it can escape into its ice hole. Polar bears’ semi-aquatic abilities sometimes come in handy here, as getting close enough to a seal sometimes requires swimming towards an ice floe where a seal is resting, and then lunging from the water to catch it. More often, polar bears will skip the process of tracking down specific seals and instead search for a breathing hole, or some other place on the ice where seals are particularly likely to emerge. When they find such a spot, they wait for up to several hours until they see a seal coming up, at which point they pull the seal out with their paws and kill it with a bite or swipe. Neither of these are exactly great strategies, though; there’s a pretty heavy amount of luck involved in finding a seal in the first place, and even once one is found, bears generally only have a pretty narrow window in which to catch them before they escape back into the safety of the ocean. This already-risky strategy has become especially a gamble in recent years thanks to climate change shrinking the sea ice available for seals to rest on, and many polar bear players are finding themselves unable to catch enough prey to meet their XP quotas.

One thing I do have to give polar bears credit for is being able to take on the premiere giant tank of the Arctic meta, the walrus. Polar bears can’t match walruses in sheer physical strength, but they can still get the edge in the matchup by making good use of their superior intelligence. The most common tactic is to target lower-level players; this is done by finding a walrus herd, provoking them into stampeding, and then searching for carcasses of walruses that got trampled, or young walruses that got separated during the chaos. More rarely, polar bears can even arm themselves to take down adult walruses, by picking up rocks or heavy chunks of ice in their paws and using them to bludgeon the walruses to death.

I’m not going to write polar bears off entirely, because I do think they have a lot of potential. They’re relative newcomers to the meta, having only split off from brown bears within the last 500 thousand years, and it’s pretty impressive that they’ve already attained uncontested status as the Arctic’s most dominant land predator. But their matchup spread remains surprisingly poor, and they really need to step up their game if they want to continue their dominance into the future. For now, I only put them in B tier.

If you want to see what a truly overpowered Arctic predator looks like, check out my whale tier list, where I take an in-depth look at the incredible abilities of the orca.

A Tier: Sloth bear

In A tier, we have the sloth bear. This build is basically an improved version of the sun bear, with a little less emphasis on climbing and more emphasis on raw power. Unlike sun bears, sloth bears don’t generally search in trees for insects, instead focusing more on hunting underground-dwelling ants and termites. When they find an ant or termite mound, they scrape at it with their long, sickle-shaped claws until they reach the combs at the bottom of the gallery, then quickly suck up as many ants and termites as they can.

Sloth bears live in more-or-less the same regions and environments as sun bears, but the two tend not to compete much due to the sun bear’s more arboreal lifestyle. However, sloth bears are generally better than sun bears at fending off other predators in their areas, due to their larger size, massive canine teeth, and legendarily ferocious temperament. They still fall prey to tigers from time to time, but at full power can hold their own against leopards, which seems to put them solidly in A tier.

S Tier: Black bear

In S tier, we have the black bear, a build found primarily in the forests of North America. Black bears are the smallest of the three bear builds found in North America, but are still bigger than any of the other bear builds in the game, and with enormous strength to match. Even the smallest of adult black bears have enough muscle power to casually flip over a boulder with a single paw. Their intelligence is also quite high, which means that even if you manage to find a successful strategy for keeping them away, it often won’t work for long. Humans in Yosemite used to try to prevent black bears from accessing their food by hanging it from a rope high up in a tree, but this stopped working when the bears learned they could use their powerful teeth to chew off either the rope or the branch supporting the bag, then open up the bag when it falls down. Some players have now taken to calling the bags “bear piñatas”. Black bear gameplay tends to be a lot more relaxed than that of other North American bears; they spend most of their time eating plants and insects, while relying on their massive size to avoid dealing with competition. They’re also among the few bears that hibernate during the winter, which helps them to skip the most difficult parts of northern gameplay.

Up until recently, I would have said that the black bear only ranked in A tier, held back from top tier by its weak matchups against other apex predators. When competing with other large predators of the Americas over kills, they tend to have an easy win against cougars, but get absolutely dominated by grizzly bears, and often lose to wolf packs as well. However, in recent times, black bears have started to move out of the forests, and have begun taking over cities. Grizzlies and wolves are generally not tolerated in cities because of the danger they pose to humans, and would be unlikely to find enough food to survive in the city even if they were allowed. Black bears, on the other hand, can survive decently well off of human players’ garbage, and their relatively docile temperaments mean that humans tend to treat them more like giant raccoons than as serious threats. No other city-dwelling build comes close to rivalling black bears’ strength, so these urban bears can basically just spend all their time scrounging easy XP with no real threats. With that, they’ve jumped up to earn an S-tier spot.

One last thing to note here is that there are actually two black bear builds: the American black bear, which is the more well-known version, and the Asiatic black bear. Most of what I’ve said applies primarily to the American black bear. The Asiatic black bear is pretty similar, but a little bit smaller and a fair bit more aggressive. If you’re going to play a black bear, I’d say that the American version is pretty clearly the better option – its superior size makes it safer in the forest, and its more docile temperament makes it more suited to living around humans in the city.

S Tier: Brown bear

At the top of this list, we have the brown bear, also known as the grizzly bear. What makes brown bears so great is a little bit difficult to analyse, because the way they work can be drastically different depending on what biome you’re playing them in, and they can be played in a lot of different biomes. And that actually gets at the main reason why I put brown bears near the top of this list: they’re incredibly versatile. Almost everything other bears can do, brown bears can do just as well, if not better.

That said, there are some general observations that can be made. Most brown bears play similarly to black bears, but with a few upgrades. Like black bears, most of their game strategy is just taking the easiest sources of food available while being so big that nobody dares to threaten them. Their diet consists mostly of plants, and when they do eat meat, it’s mostly things like insects and rodents. However, there are two key differences. First, brown bears are even bigger and pack more muscle; of all living land carnivorans, only polar bears grow larger on average. Second, their claw shape is a bit modified; instead of having thin, sharp claws for grip while climbing, brown bears have long, straight claws, more adapted for tearing out earth. They also have massive humps made of pure muscle at the tops of their shoulders, further enhancing the force of their digging. So, while black bears have a slight advantage in access to fruits, nuts and such, brown bears compensate by being better at finding underground foods like roots and tubers.

For the most part, hunting other vertebrates is not a major component of brown bear gameplay. However, some brown bears, mainly found in Russia and Alaska, have become heavily dependent on fishing for salmon. It’s rare to see bears interacting with one another, outside of mothers with cubs, but brown bears are known to gather in huge numbers around waterfalls during salmon’s spawning season, catching the fish in mid-air as they breach the water. The protein content this adds to their diets enables bears in these regions to grow even more muscular than is typical for a grizzly, and some, known as “Kodiak bears”, are even able to reach sizes on par with the polar bear.

Now, just because grizzlies don’t hunt large animals all that often, that doesn’t mean they don’t eat large animals. It’s just that when they’re searching for a large supply of meat, hunting one down for themselves is usually less efficient than stealing one from a smaller predator. Throughout almost all of North America and Europe, brown bears are the uncontested top dogs of the predator hierarchy; wolves, cougars, and black bears will all tend to quickly fold when a grizzly challenges them for a carcass. Even polar bears, despite their size advantage, will generally back down from a kill when faced with the ferocity of their grizzly cousins. The only brown bears who face any real challenges when kill-stealing are those playing in Asia, where they sometimes struggle to deal with competition from tigers. Brown bears are stronger than tigers on average, but both species have significant strength differences between the sexes, and male tigers do sometimes get strong enough to dominate or even kill female brown bears. But, again, even here, the brown bears are still the winners much more often than not – to the point that tigers may have to deal with getting over 10% of their kills stolen by the bears in areas where their ranges overlap.

While it’s not the norm, it is possible to play the brown bear as an active hunter of other large mammals too, and there are players who’ve done it with great success. Generally, they kill their targets by pinning them to the ground and eating them alive, but if that’s too difficult, they can also use their powerful forearms to kill most targets by breaking the neck or back in a single swipe. Even North America’s premiere tank, the bison, can be killed by grizzlies using these methods. The big challenge for grizzlies using this strategy has less to do with killing their targets, which they’re well-equipped to do, and more with catching them. As I mentioned in the introduction, bears aren’t really built for long-distance chases, so brown bears that try to function as active hunters need to figure out a way around this in order to function. By far the most common approach, as with a lot of predators, is to pick out the young or sick members of herds and focus on hunting them. However, another approach that’s possible for skillful players is to take advantage of difficult terrain. Grizzlies’ broad paws enable them to run over a wide variety of terrain types, including ice, snow, and mud, all of which are difficult to traverse for hooved mammals. So when the circumstances are right – such as when hunting near a river bed, or after a cold winter – grizzlies can gain enough of a mobility edge to hunt down even full-grown, healthy specimens of animals like moose and elk.

So, to recap, the grizzly bear is the near-uncontested dominant predator across three entire major servers, can one-shot even the hardiest tanks of its server, can function in almost any biome type, and is versatile enough to work as a near-herbivore, as primarily an active hunter, or anywhere in-between. It’s easily the best bear build in the game, and ranks comfortably in S tier.
And that’s the bear tier list. I hope you enjoyed it, and if you’re planning on playing a bear, I hope you find it helpful. Alternatively, if it’s gotten you interested in learning about other kinds of carnivoran, consider checking out my posts on procyonids, mustelids, cats, and some of the other, more obscure branches of the carnivoran faction. You might also be interested in my ranking of the African savannah’s top predators, most of which are carnivorans. Thanks for reading.

The Smart Choices for Bird Mains: Comparing Corvids and Parrots

[This is part of a series of posts about animals. To find other posts in this series, see here.]

Flight and high intelligence are two of the most coveted abilities you can get in Outside, both presenting massive advantages for almost any possible situation. So it should come as no surprise that guilds based around a flight+intelligence combo tend to be high-tier, and the two best examples of this are corvids and parrots. But which of these is better? Today I’m going to compare the two, go into their different stats and abilities, and evaluate where they rank on the tier list to see which has made the best use of this amazing combo.

PARROT BUILD ANALYSIS

Parrot evolution

I’ll start with the parrots. The history of the parrot guild is a little difficult to determine, as, for some reason, parrot players rarely show up in game logs. But based on source code analysis, it seems that parrots are likely among the older surviving bird guilds. They were probably first unlocked a few million years prior to the K-T extinction, and started to rapidly diversify shortly after. Judging by the logs we have of closely related prehistoric birds, the earliest proto-parrots were likely fairly generalised arboreal birds, lacking the large, crushing bills and other distinctive attributes of modern parrots. However, the earliest game logs showing definite parrot player activity come from the Eocene expansion, around 50 million years ago, and the familiar traits of the modern parrot build seem to have already been fairly well-established by this time.

Today, the parrot guild is one of the largest and most widely popular guilds in the bird faction, including nearly 400 builds on a variety of servers. What accounts for their success? To find out, let’s now take a look at their stats & abilities.

Parrot stats and abilities

• Bill

Given the theme of this post, the main focus here is going to be on the birds’ intelligence, but I will look at a few other parrot special abilities first. First, parrots’ beaks are highly specialised to exert pressure, to the point of having evolved two extra jaw muscles not found in other birds. This grants the beak an astonishing strength for its size, enough to pull objects over five times a parrot’s own weight. This beak strength has a variety of uses. The primary one, and the reason why it initially developed, is to help with cracking shelled plants; when eating the nuts and seeds that make up most of their diet, parrots shell them by placing them between the sharp frontal edge of the mandible and the maxilla grooves while rotating them with the tongue. The beak can also be used to deliver a nasty bite to an attacker, or as a gripping limb for added support while climbing.

In addition to being strong, parrot beaks are also unusually flexible and dextrous. This is due to a joint in parrot skulls called the [Cranio-Facial Hinge], which allows the upper beak to move upwards and downwards on its own, independently of the lower beak. This allows the beak to function like a combination hammer-and-anvil in one during feeding, with the upper beak hitting large or hard nuts until they crack, while the lower beak holds them fixed in place. Parrots are also among a number of birds that have the trait [Bill Tip Organ], a collection of touch-sensitive nerves near the tip of the beak. Parrots have their bill tip organs on the inside of the bill, so unlike some other birds, they can’t use them to search for things in their external environment; instead, they first find food through eyesight, then use the bill tip organ to feel its position once it’s grasped. Once they’ve caught a nut or seed in their beak, they carefully move it around with their tongue until they’ve got it in the optimal cracking position, and then strike.

• Talons

Parrots belong to an arboreal subclass of birds called the Telluraves, and one trait that they share with many members of this group is the ability to manipulate objects using their talons. Even within this group, parrots stand out as by far the most flexible with their claws, being able to not only grasp objects with them, but also bring them upwards in order to move objects into the beak.

• Eyesight

I mentioned above that, unlike many birds with bill tip organs, parrots are still mostly reliant on eyesight to navigate their environment. To accommodate this, parrots have specced into vision that works a bit differently than other birds. Since their bill tip organ’s sensitivity means they can largely get away with not being able to see anything they can grab, they haven’t put any points into seeing underneath the beak. Instead, they’ve re-allocated those points towards high, laterally positioned eyes with a broader frontal binocular field of vision and a near-comprehensive field of view surrounding the head, traits that help them to stay constantly alert for predators.

• Poison resistance

Part of the reason parrots are so successful in tropical areas is that they can eat a wide variety of poisonous plants without taking damage, and so have access to many valuable nutrition sources that are off-limits to most other vertebrates. Data-miners once thought that the reason parrots were able to do this was because they used the [Clay] item as a consumable, and it acted as a toxin-absorber in their gut. However, more recent research has shown that the toxin-resistance is actually just something they have naturally, and doesn’t require them to pick up any particular item. The real reason so many parrots eat clay is that, when living in tropical forests, its sodium is used to make up for nutrient deficits in tropical plants. 

• Intelligence

And now we come back to the parrot’s highest stat, intelligence. Parrots have much larger brains than typical for a bird of their size, with a particular enlargement in the medial spiriform nucleus, a neural circuit in bird brains which passes messages between the cortex and cerebellum. This circuit in parrots can be anywhere from twice as large to five times larger than in other similarly-sized birds, and this gives parrots a problem-solving ability which is among the best in the game. 

Language

What parrots are probably best known for is the wide variety of sounds they can learn to make. While birds don’t have the [Vocal Cords] trait like humans do, they instead have an organ called the [Syrinx] at the base of the trachea, which produces different sounds in more-or-less the same way. Parrots have particularly complex syrinxes, which allow them to learn more varied noises than any other bird. They’re best known for their mimicry of human speech, which they so excel at that Outside fans often refer to the act of mimicking a human as “parroting”.

Why parrots are so fond of mimicking humans specifically is a bit of a mystery. My personal pet theory is that they recognize humans as the most dominant predator in the game, and they copy them to get an intimidation bonus. But whatever the case, the most skilled parrot players often surprise the rest of the player-base with just how advanced their mimicry of human language is. One particularly clever parrot main, who went by the handle “Alex the African grey”, even entered the Hall of Fame for his over-100-word vocabulary, and his ability to answer simple questions about different objects with something like 75-80% accuracy. He’d sometimes go so far as to make up his own words to describe objects he wasn’t familiar with – when introduced to an apple for the first time, he described it by inventing the word “banerry”, apparently because he thought it was a cross between a banana and a cherry.

Tool use

If you’ve been following my series for a while, you probably know that when I say a build combines high intelligence with high dexterity, that’s going to lead into talking about its use of tools. While tool use doesn’t play as big a role in parrot gameplay as it does for a lot of other intelligence builds, that’s not due to lack of capability. Among the kinds of tool use parrots have been observed engaging in include: shaping splinters of wood to create rakes, which they use to gather food items they would otherwise be unable to reach; using chewed leaves or pieces of wood as wedges to keep nuts from slipping while they feed; using pebbles to grind powder from seashells, in order to make them more easily digestible; and, in at least one case, an injured parrot with half his beak missing using small stones to preen himself instead. Interestingly, some instances of parrot tool use appear to be motivated by pure curiosity as much as by survival. In New Zealand, for instance, keas have been observed carefully using sticks to set off stoat traps, but they don’t usually eat the food that this unlocks. They seem to be doing it just for the fun of it.

Social abilities

Along with creative tool use, social structure is probably the intelligence-based ability that I tend to talk about the most, and also the most potentially powerful. As with tool use, parrots don’t make as much use of this as many other intelligence builds, but they can manage alright. When tested by data-miners on cooperative problem-solving tasks, parrots have no trouble coordinating with a partner to find solutions, and they can assign different roles to different members if the task requires it. Parrots sometimes share food with each other, and have occasionally been known to forgo taking food items for themselves in order to give other parrots a chance to take them. They’re also pretty good at social learning, and there have been a few instances of parrot mains teaching other parrot players how to speak.

• Weaknesses

While parrots are generally in a pretty strong position in the meta, they do have a handful of weaknesses. While they benefit from having some of the longest game-time caps among birds, their population growth is also held back a bit by their relatively slow respawn timers. And while it’s not universally true, many parrot builds are dependent on tropical biomes to survive, and these builds’ standing in the meta is being jeopardised by deforestation. Largely because of this, parrots have a higher percentage of builds considered likely to be removed in the next patch than any other major bird guild.

Overall parrot tier rating

Despite their ongoing decline, I still think parrots hold a fairly high-tier position in the meta, with a unique combination of abilities that’s made them successful in tropical biomes around the world.  The human-dominated meta is posing some challenges for them, but their intelligence is allowing many of them to adapt much better than expected, and you can now find parrots thriving almost as well in human-built cities around the world as in their native biomes. I’d say the guild as a whole averages out to a mid-A ranking on the tier list.

CORVID BUILD ANALYSIS

Corvid evolution

The corvid guild developed from primitive songbirds that colonised the forests of what is now the Papuan archipelago during the Eocene expansion. Called corvoids, these songbirds started to become prominent parts of the Oceanian meta during the late Eocene and early Oligocene, after the northern part of the Australo-Papuan plate emerged above the surface of the ocean. This emergence created a vast array of large new uninhabited island plateaus, ripe to be colonised by any adaptable build capable of crossing the several-hundred-kilometre distance to them from the Australian mainland. To ensure the transition to life on these islands would go smoothly, corvoids specced into several adaptations for generalist feeding, as well as minimaxing intelligence in order to better adapt to new challenges. This strategy worked so well that it allowed corvoids to diversify beyond just these islands and rapidly spread around the world, and by the time of the Miocene, they were already thriving as far as Europe.

With only 135 builds, the modern corvid guild isn’t quite as diverse as the parrot guild. But it’s even more widely popular, with a huge number of players on every major land server except Antarctica. Many of the game’s most iconic bird builds are in this guild, including crows, ravens, magpies and blue jays. What accounts for their success and popularity? To find out, let’s take a look at their stats and abilities.

Corvid stats and abilities

This section’s going to be mostly focused on intelligence, as there’s not much else that separates corvids from other birds. Still, there are a few other topics I should briefly touch on first:

• Physical stats

Besides intelligence, the corvid’s stats are pretty typical for a songbird. However, they do tend to be a little larger than most, and are a little stronger as a consequence.

• Omnivory

As I alluded to above, corvids’ generalist feeding strategies are a part of why they’re so widely successful. Their ability to adapt to eating foods that humans produce has been a big contributor to their success in city biomes.

With that out of the way:

• Intelligence

Like parrots, corvids have very large brains for a bird of their size. While their overall brain enlargement isn’t as extreme as a lot of other intelligence-based builds, they make up for this with the sheer density of their brain cells; a corvid build can have as many neurons packed into its forebrain as a monkey brain four times larger. And even more than in the case of parrots, this has given the corvids an extraordinary intellect, probably the highest among birds. Their problem-solving abilities surpass those of most mammals, and are on par with those of non-human simian primates.

Tool use

More than any other bird, corvids are often seen using innovative problem-solving techniques to find food, a perk of their high intelligence. As with parrots, this often involves tool use, though corvids use tools much more frequently. Examples of tool-based strategies corvids have been found to use include: breaking shellfish two-at-a-time by picking up one shellfish from a bed and dropping it onto other shellfish from strategically-chosen heights in the air; tearing pieces off of newspapers and using them to rake in food pellets that would otherwise be out of reach; dropping stones into water-filled tubes, so as to raise the water level enough to let them get at bits of meat floating within; using trays as makeshift snowboards to slide down snow-covered roofs; and using sticks to extract insects from tree bark.

The most impressive examples of corvid tool use come from crow mains on the island of New Caledonia. New Caledonian crows have adapted to survive by feeding off of bugs that they find hiding in cracks or crevices in trees, a little bit like the corvid version of woodpeckers. Since they don’t have the ability to drill into wood with their beaks like woodpeckers do, they have to hunt using barbed or hooked tools made from sticks and leaves, which they stick into crevices to capture grubs. New Caledonian crows have so advanced their arts of tool-making that they even show an ability to refine their tools through cultural evolution, to a degree not seen in any other build except humans. Nowadays, there are three main types of barbed tool designs used by New Caledonian crows – one wide, one narrow, and one tapered by a sequence of cuts and rips. These three designs didn’t emerge independently: they all descended from one simple barbed-tool design, but as the crows spread throughout the island, different crows came up with different designs to better suit the particular regions they ended up in, and then spread them throughout their flocks. The flexibility that allows them to do this also enables them to be flexible in what they make their barbs out of, and New Caledonian crows kept in captivity have been known to spontaneously start making tools from materials that they’d never find in the wild. They can also create compound tools by combining objects that are otherwise useless on their own, and can even figure out how to use “meta-tools”, or tools selected specifically to facilitate the use of other tools, an ability otherwise only known in primates.

However, I do feel the need to clear up one particular misconception regarding corvid intelligence. Many game guides claim that corvid players in city biomes use a strategy of deliberately dropping hard nuts onto busy city streets to be cracked by cars. While there are two game logs showing things like this happening, there’s actually very little evidence that either of the corvid players involved were purposefully planning to use the automobiles as nut-crackers. The most likely explanation is that they were using the standard corvid trick of dropping hard objects onto hard ground from high places in order to crack them, and that a car happened to be driving in front of them was just a lucky coincidence.

Social abilities

Corvids are pretty good at cooperating to solve problems. Like many songbirds, corvids often form large mobs to drive off larger predators. Unlike most other songbirds, some corvids can use teamwork offensively as well as defensively; for instance, Florida scrub jays have been known to team up to hunt snakes that are too large for one to fight alone. More commonly, though, corvids will tend to team up to steal food from other large predators rather than to hunt directly. For instance, American crows have been known to form teams to steal large fish caught by river otters; one crow distracts the otter by pecking at its tail, while the other takes the fish.

Other problem-solving abilities

Beyond just tool use, corvids generally show an impressive ability to quickly learn strategies to deal with new problems. For example, while most Australian predators have struggled to deal with the spread of invasive, poisonous cane toads throughout the server, crows in Northern Australia quickly figured out a way to safely kill and eat them by flipping them onto their backs and stabbing them to death with the bill, then cutting them open to get at their internal organs without activating their poison glands. This kind of innovative strategic thinking is a big part of why corvids have done so well in adjusting to the human takeover of the meta.

• Weaknesses

Corvids have few weaknesses in the current meta. However, one thing that does hold them back is their high level of vulnerability to the [West Nile] debuff. Whenever this viral infection starts spreading in some region, corvid players tend to be among the first to suffer mass eliminations.

Overall corvid tier rating

I don’t think I’ll get much argument that corvids are in an extremely strong position in the current meta. Despite their middling physical stats, the simple combination of flight with high intelligence and a generalist diet has allowed them to thrive on every major server except Antarctica, and unlike a lot of other top-tiers, having to adjust to the human takeover has only propelled them to even greater heights of success. As arguably the best aerial generalists in the game right now, I’d give them an S-tier rating.

CONCLUSIONS

Both parrots and corvids are great builds that prove the combination of avian flight with high intelligence to be a sure-fire recipe for success in the meta. While it’s difficult to choose a clear winner between the two, if I had to, I’d say that the corvids are narrowly better. While parrots have the physical advantage, the greater adaptability of corvids has made them more successful overall.

I hope you enjoyed this analysis, and if you’re thinking of playing either a corvid or a parrot, I hope you find it helpful. Thanks for reading.

The Gods Only Have Power Because We Believe in Them, Part II

[Inspired by this post from Scott Alexander]

“Is it true,” asked the student, “that the gods only have power because we believe in them?”

“Yes,” said the sage.

“Then why not appear openly? How many more people would believe in the Thunderer if, upon first gaining enough worshipers to cast lightning at all, he struck all of the worst criminals and tyrants?”

“Because if the Thunderer were the sort of god who struck down every criminal and tyrant that he could, then we would know that he had not been all-powerful during the past days when one could commit a heinous crime and not get struck down. For any god to make us believe fully in their eternal divinity, they must confine themselves to using their power in ways so subtle that we can’t be sure they weren’t already doing it before we knew about them.”

——

“Is it true,” asked the student, “that the gods only have power because we believe in them?”

“Sort of”, said the sage, “The gods only have power because we believe in their goodness. If you believe in a god but see them as evil, they derive no power from that.”

“But… if that’s true, then why is the Thunderer called the king of gods? The myth-tellers testify that he is capricious, lascivious, arrogant, petty…”

“The Thunderer does not need myths to attest his benevolence. He is the god of the sky; his gifts to us are, literally, in the air we breathe.”

“But… if the Thunderer doesn’t need myths for us to know about him, then why are there so many myths about him?”

“Exactly because his benevolence is so evident. If all we knew him from were what we could infer from reason, the evidence of his goodness would make him powerful enough to do away with the other gods altogether. Only by providing our myth makers with a steady stream of propaganda against him can the remainder of the gods preserve any influence on Olympus at all.”

——

“Is it true,” asked the student, “that the gods only have power because we believe in them?”

“Yes,” said the sage.

“Then why not appear openly? How many more people would believe in the Thunderer if, upon first gaining enough worshipers to cast lightning at all, he struck all of the worst criminals and tyrants?”

“There is no such thing as the Thunderer.”

The student looked confused. “But I thought you said gods gain power from being believed in. Since so many people believe in the Thunderer-“

“You misunderstand. The gods gain power from being believed in, not existence. In Egypt, the Pharaoh is called a god, and so is Caesar in Rome. It was not belief that caused these men to be born, but it is the belief of others that allows them to decide who lives and who dies. Others say that God is Love, or Beauty, or Goodness. All these things continue to exist whether you believe in them or not; but they have much greater power to affect your life if you do.”

——

““Is it true,” asked the student, “that the gods only have power because we believe in them?”

“Yes,” said the sage.

“Then why not appear openly? How many more people would believe in the Thunderer if, upon first gaining enough worshipers to cast lightning at all, he struck all of the worst criminals and tyrants?”

“Once, that was the way. But man grew powerful, and soon there was nothing the gods could do openly to distinguish themselves from the works of man’s own mind. Gods used to prove their nature by levelling entire cities with a word, but now there are men who could do the same, and who calls them gods? Gods used to prove their nature by curing plagues; now man can do the same. Once man understood the secret laws of the universe, the gods who depended on performing miracles for belief had nothing left to distinguish themselves with, and their powers vanished as dust in the wind.”

“But what about the gods who still have believers today? How’d they avoid the same fate?”

“Consider: once man deciphered nature’s secrets and gained mastery over her, what was left that he could not assert control over?”

“Uhhh… himself?”

“You have said it. Man has learned the rules for how to control nature; but he still does not know the rules for how to control the passions of his own heart. If you want to see the workings of the gods, look for where you see men’s passions under control. Whenever you see men facing death with great courage, though their natural instincts tell them to preserve their own life at all costs; where you see men standing up to tell the truth, though their natural impulses tell them to go along with the consensus of the tribe; where you see men forgiving great wrongs done against them, though their passions cry out for vengeance — there you see the remaining gods revealing themselves.”

——

“Is it true,” asked the student, “that the gods only have power because we believe in them?”

“Sort of”, said the sage, “The gods only have power because we believe in their goodness. If you believe in a god but see them as evil, they derive no power from that.”

“So what would happen if the entire nation were to all pick one god, praise that god all the time, and demonise all the gods of the other nations? Would the god of that nation then become more powerful than those of all others, thus enabling that nation to rule over the other nations?”

“What you have described is the way of the Hebrews. Their praise has made their God more powerful than any other individual god — enough so to ensure their survival in the face of hostility from numerous other peoples. But, it is precisely this hostility which has weakened their God enough that other nations continue to rule over them, rather than the reverse.”

“So if someone were to announce some kind of ‘Judaism 2.0’, which called on people of *all* nations to praise the God of Abraham exclusively, instead of just the Hebrews…”

“Such a religion might become very powerful indeed.”

——

“Is it true,” asked the student, “that the gods only have power because we believe in them?”

“Yes,” said the sage.

“Then why not appear openly? How many more people would believe in the Thunderer if, upon first gaining enough worshipers to cast lightning at all, he struck all of the worst criminals and tyrants?”

“There is no such thing as the Thunderer.”

The student looked confused. “But I thought you said gods gain power from being believed in. Since so many people believe in the Thunderer, shouldn’t he have great power?”

“How else could a non-existent entity have power to affect reality, if not by the effects that its stories have on those who believe them?”

Corrections

[This is part of a series of posts about animals. To find other posts in this series, see here.]

Hey guys, I’ll be returning to regular tier lists soon, but first I wanted to issue some corrections on things I got wrong in my previous posts:

1. In my first-ever tier list, “Giant herbivorous mammals tier list”, I said that moose were among the fastest land animals. This was an exaggeration; moose have a top speed of about 56 km/h, which is impressive to be sure, but many other land animals can move faster.
2. In the same tier list, I also claimed that the reason rhinos hold the record for intraspecific combat mortality among mammals is due to their low intelligence. This explanation is highly dubious; for a more detailed look at possible reasons for the rhino’s traits, as well as a fairer evaluation of the build’s tier placement, see my later post, “Reconsidering the Rhinoceros”.
3. In my analysis of the monotremes, I said that echidnas had the slowest metabolism among mammals. While echidnas do have an extremely slow metabolism, this title actually belongs to the three-toed sloth.
4. In my Looney Tunes tier list, I described mice as an upgrade to rabbits, and one of my reasons was that the low-nutrient diet of rabbits forces them to eat their own dung just to survive. While this is true, I was wrong to describe it as a difference between the two – mice do the same thing.
5. In my whale tier list, I said this in my section on the bottlenose dolphin: “Although the bottlenose dolphin’s brain isn’t the largest among whales in absolute terms, it’s more than four times bigger than the standard for an animal of their size; apart from humans, no other known animal has a brain as relatively enlarged as that of the dolphin.” This was a bit misleading, as while it’s true that dolphins in general are second only to humans in their proportional brain enlargement, the bottlenose dolphin is not unique among dolphins in this regard. While the part about the bottlenose’s brain being more than four times bigger than usual for an animal their size is accurate, there are several other dolphin builds, including the Tucuxi dolphin and the Pacific white-sided dolphin, where the proportional brain enlargement is equal or greater.
6. I already corrected this in my shark tier list, but in my analysis of the jawless fish, I stated that the hagfish is the only fish to be an osmoconformer. Actually, sharks and some other cartilaginous fish are osmoconformers as well.
7. In my analysis of the Dimetrodon, I said that synapsids could be distinguished from sauropsids by the presence of the temporal fenestra. Actually, the distinguishing factor is not the presence or absence of temporal fenestrae, but their quantity and placement. Synapsids are defined by having two temporal fenestrae, one on each side of the skull, located beneath the postorbital and squamosal bones. Sauropsids show more variety; some have no temporal fenestrae at all, some have more than two, and others have two, but not in the same places that synapsids do.

Thanks for reading. If you find a mistake in one of my tier lists that I didn’t include here, please let me know, and I’ll keep it in mind in case I ever decide to do another post like this.

The Spider Tier List

[This is part of a series of posts about animals. To find other posts in this series, see here.]

Many builds in Outside have a reputation for being scary or creepy, but no build gives players more nightmares than the spider. Just mentioning the word strikes fear and disgust into the hearts of many. So for Halloween this year, I thought I’d go into the spider tier list, to examine whether this guild really deserves its terrifying reputation.

BASIC SPIDER BUILD ANALYSIS

Spider Guild History

Spider-like builds first entered the Outside meta during the Silurian expansion with the trigonotarbids, a group of early land arachnids that already had the same basic body plan as modern spiders, but were distinguished by the absence of the characteristic silk-spinning ability. This ability would go on to be first unlocked during the Devonian expansion, around 390 million years ago, by an offshoot branch of the trigonotarbids called the uraraneids. However, uraraneids failed to tap into the utility of silk for hunting, instead using it primarily to create protective coatings around their eggs.

True spiders first appeared in the Carboniferous, around 320 million years ago. These early spiders were distinguished from the uraraneids by the way their silk was produced; while the uraraneids released silk from simple spigots mounted on the underside of the abdomen, true spiders developed complex networks of spigots on their rear end, called [Spinnerets]. These spinnerets were significantly more manoeuvrable than the single spigots of the uraraneids, and it was because of this added mobility that spiders were able to start doing what they’re best known for: spinning webs. This was a major breakthrough, because it allowed spiders to make traps to catch prey in mid-air, a big advantage in an era where flying insect builds were exploding in popularity.

Spiders started to diversify into their current subclasses during the Triassic, around 200 million years ago, and continued to diversify throughout the Mesozoic era, with the most sophisticated web-spinning behaviours starting to appear during the Jurassic. They had already taken on most of their modern forms by the end of the Cretaceous, and haven’t changed much since then. Today, spiders remain one of the most successful invertebrate guilds, being among the most common and feared lightweight predators on every major land server except Antarctica. What accounts for their success? To find out, let’s go into their stats and abilities.

Spider Stats and Abilities

• Spinnerets

Like I said above, what spiders are best-known for is their ability to produce sticky silk. Most spiders hunt by building sophisticated webs of silk, then lying in wait for insects or other prey to get caught in them. The earliest spider webs were built with cribellate threads, which are made from dry silk that creates adhesion through van der Waals forces. Some spiders still use this technique today, but the majority have switched to webs made of flagelliform silk, with a viscous gluey coating. While cribellate silk is stronger, flagelliform silk is preferred by most spiders because it’s highly elastic, and can recover easily from deformations that result when an insect lands on it. Either way, building webs allows spiders to punch well above their weight class in terms of fighting ability; even tiny spiders can build webs strong enough to trap comparatively gigantic animals, like shrews, bats and lizards. A web also allows a single spider to easily trap multiple targets at a time, which allows spiders to rack up absurdly high K/D ratios. Collectively, spiders are estimated to score over 400 million tons’ worth of kills each year, making them possibly the most lethal predator guild in the entire game.

Building webs is the most prominent use of spider silk, but it’s far from the only one. We’ll see more when we get into the tier list, but another big one is the [Ballooning] ability. Many spiders can release fine strands of silk called [Gossamer Threads], which can form triangular parachutes. These parachutes allow the spiders to glide through the sky, travelling along air currents and electrical fields as they go. This can be risky due to the lack of control involved, but when it goes right, it allows spiders to traverse incredible distances with minimal energy cost; some are even able to balloon across entire oceans.

• Chelicerae, venom, and feeding

Like all arachnids, spiders have pincers in the front of the mouth, called [Chelicerae]. Spider chelicerae are divided into two segments, each of which ends in a hollow fang filled with venom. Although human players are often famously nervous around spiders, most spiders don’t actually have enough venom to kill animals that large; mainly, they use their venom to kill or incapacitate smaller animals that get caught in their webs. Even for spiders that have enough venom to kill humans, it’s pretty rare for them to actually use it that way; because their fangs are designed to bite into insects or other small creatures, they have difficulty penetrating thick human skin. It’s not impossible, but it’s generally much less efficient than simply biting to scare off a human, without injecting venom, a tactic known as [Dry Biting].

Another thing to understand about spiders is that their stomachs can’t break down solid foods. In order to digest large prey, spiders have to pump digestive enzymes from the midgut into it after biting it, then suck up the liquefied tissues.

• Eyes and vision

Spiders’ eyes are a little unusual among arthropods. Generally, arthropods have at least one pair of eyes called [Ocelli], which serve purely to distinguish light environments from dark ones, and can’t make out images. They then have several more [Compound Eyes], each of which are divided into thousands of light-sensitive cell clusters called [Ommatidia]. The compound eyes work via each of the ommatidia processing images in parallel, followed by each ommatidium sending its own signal to the brain, which combines them all. This system is useful for such small animals because it allows them to effectively see in many different directions at once, maximising their alertness for signs of danger. However, spiders lack both of these eye types. Instead, each of a spider’s eight eyes has a simple structure with a single lens and only sends one signal to the brain, similar to the eyes of a vertebrate. Having only one lens per eye allows them to gain a higher-resolution picture of their surroundings, letting them get a clearer image of their prey when trying to hold it down, at the cost of not being able to react to environmental signals quite as quickly as most other arthropods.

• Limb Movement

One of the stranger things that should be noted about spider gameplay is the way they move their legs. Most arthropods have muscles attached to the inside of the exoskeleton, which they use both to flex and extend their limbs. While spiders have the same flexor muscles as other arthropods, they don’t have extensor muscles, except in the hip joints. When they extend their limbs, they do it by generating immense hydraulic pressure in the cephalothorax, causing hemolymph to flow into the legs. This increases the volume of their joints, causing an extension of the leg as a whole. Strange as it may sound, this method can actually generate quite a large amount of accelerative force. However, it comes at a serious cost in terms of HP regeneration. Because of the high pressure spiders generate while moving, they tend to lose blood rapidly when injured, and can readily die from wounds that most other arthropods would recover from.

Spider Guild Overall Tier Rating

With one of the highest K/D ratios of any guild, and a major presence on every major land server except Antarctica, I’d say spiders as a guild rank solidly in A tier. But which kinds of spider are best? To find out, let’s now go into the spider tier list. As usual, I won’t be able to cover all of the more than 50,000 spider builds in the current meta, but I’ll try to cover the most interesting ones.

THE SPIDER TIER LIST

D Tier: Hawaiian happy-face spider

There’s no spider I’d place in F tier, but the weakest is probably the Hawaiian happy-face spider. This build is so named because of the patterns on its abdomen that resemble a smiling face, and because it’s only found in Hawaii; and if there’s one thing any reader of my blog should know by now, it’s that it’s best to avoid builds locked to a single small island. Hawaii in particular is a bad place for a spider to get stuck in, because the heavy rainfall there makes it very hard to keep a web stable. Instead of speccing into stronger webs to counter this, happy-face spiders’ webs have actually become smaller and flimsier, to the point that they’re very rarely effective at actually trapping anything. In fact, their webs seem to have become not only pointless, but actually a hindrance; the more points a Hawaiian happy-face spider player puts into building a web, the fewer prey items they tend to capture. Instead, they spend most of their time hiding under leaves, and capturing any prey they sense coming onto the leaf. For giving up the core ability that makes spiders so successful, and not getting any comparable special abilities in exchange, happy-face spiders rank at the bottom of the spider tier list.

D Tier: Silver argiope

Also in D tier, we have the silver argiope. Argiopes are a group of spiders that build pure white webs with zig-zag patterns to reflect UV light, reducing their stealth to near-nothing in order to prevent larger animals from accidentally destroying them. You might think this would have the cost of making it harder to successfully ambush insects, but because many insects are attracted to UV light, it actually has the opposite effect. So you might be wondering, if this mechanism is so effective, why are silver argiopes low-tier? Well, that’s due to a glitch where, every now and then, all the silver argiope players in some biome just suddenly get a Game Over. This doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the prior state of their player-base – even in areas where they’re common and thriving, they still sometimes just all die randomly for no clear reason. This is obviously a pretty serious design flaw, and I can’t see how this build can go above a D tier until it’s fixed.

C tier: Diving bell spider

At the bottom of C tier, we have the diving bell spider. While many spiders hunt partially or even mostly while underwater, diving bell spiders are the only ones that have become fully aquatic, never coming to the surface unless they need oxygen. To make the [Diving Bell] items that give them their name, diving bell spiders first use their hydrophobic abdomen and leg hairs to trap air bubbles, until they’re prepared to submerge themselves. Then, they land on underwater plants and use them as a base to spin a sheet combining silk and protein-based hydrogel, which forms the base for the bell. They then take the bell to the surface and inflate it with air, effectively spinning gills for themselves. While this strategy is certainly interesting, I don’t really see a whole lot of benefit in it. Being underwater is an inherently vulnerable position for a small build, since it opens you up to attack from every direction, and I don’t think the benefits of being able to hunt aquatic invertebrates and small fish are enough to make up for it. I rate this build in low C tier.

C Tier: Bolas Spider

Also in C tier, we have the bolas spider, a build specialised for hunting moths. Bolas spiders hunt by producing silk lines with sticky blobs, called [Bolas], on the end. These bolas are swung at moths and used to snag them, similar to fish hooks. Since bolas spiders don’t have the advantage of a hidden web for prey to get caught in, they need an alternative means of attracting moths to their hiding spots, which is achieved by mimicking the pheromone signals that female moths give off when searching for mates. While effective within their niche, this strategy is too narrow in its utility for bolas spiders to rank above an average rating on the tier list.

C tier: Net-casting spider

At the top of C tier, we have the net-casting spider. Net-casting spiders hunt under cover of night, with their webs stretched across their front legs. When they detect a target, they propel themselves forward to touch it. Once a prey item is touched, they can stretch the web up to three times its normal size in order to fully entangle it. In order to make this strategy work, net-casting spiders have had to spec into enlarged eyes for better night vision, so that they can cast accurately in the dark. Unfortunately, this has come with a pretty serious drawback: since arachnid eyes don’t have irises, the light-sensitive membranes in the net-casting spider’s eyes get destroyed by sunrise. They can heal from this in time to hunt again each night, but still, it’s a big enough hindrance to keep them from ranking above C tier.

B Tier: Dewdrop spiders

In B tier, we have the dewdrop spider. While dewdrop spiders can spin webs for themselves, they mostly survive by finding webs made by other spiders and setting up hiding spots within them, then stealing food caught by the other spider. For the most part, dewdrop spiders don’t conflict much with the spiders that they steal from, because they tend to eat small prey that the host spiders would most likely ignore anyway. However, some dewdrop spider players adopt a more confrontational strategy, biding their time until they’re strong enough to kill and eat the host spider and take the whole web for themselves. This is riskier, since if a dewdrop player attempting this miscalculates, they will likely end up being the one getting eaten by the host.

B Tier: Slingshot spider

Also in B tier, we have the slingshot spider. Slingshot spiders build webs so that, instead of the threads running directly to a central hub, they’re joined into groups of two or three before combining to meet in the middle. When waiting for prey, the spider holds a thread that runs from the centre to a nearby support, pulling the entire web into a conical shape. Once a potential prey item approaches, the spider releases the thread and gets catapulted onto the target. They can travel at over four metres per second using these slingshots.

B Tier: Social spiders

At the top of B tier, we have the social spider. This isn’t a single build, but rather a term that encompasses a variety of tropical spider builds which independently converged on the strategy of living in colonies. They’re not eusocial – their associations are generally situational rather than life-long, and they aren’t divided into fertile and sterile castes like ants or termites are. However, this is still enough to unlock a number of important benefits. By building and maintaining webs cooperatively, social spiders can capture much larger prey than any one spider would be able to on their own, and if their web gets destroyed by a larger animal or a tropical downpour, no single player has to rebuild the entire thing. Collaborating in groups also allows social spiders to benefit from the division of labour, so that different spiders can focus best on those tasks most suited to their personalities. Players with more aggressive temperaments tend to be tasked with focusing on catching prey, while those with more docile temperaments are generally tasked with caring for the offspring of the community.

Although being social has its benefits for spiders, it’s not quite as overpowered for them as it is for, say, ants or termites. Whereas ants and termites can eat just about anything they find lying around, spiders need to actively hunt other small animals to survive, so it can be harder for them to find enough food to sustain a large colony. The fact that they’re tied to their web adds an additional layer of difficulty, as they’re effectively rooted to one location for extended periods, and can’t wander to wherever food is the way that some of the more carnivorous ants do. As a result of all this, social spiders haven’t really taken off globally the way eusocial insects have; they’re mostly confined to tropical biomes, which are the only places with a high enough density of insects to make their strategy viable. Even there, it’s not always easy; in fact, it can be so difficult that social spiders sometimes have to force particular colony members to avoid reproducing, to ensure the population doesn’t explode past what the local food supply can support. While I do think social spider builds can be very powerful in the right situation, the narrow requirements of their functioning prevent them from living up to their full potential. I rate them at the high end of B tier.

A Tier: Widow spider

In A tier, we have widow spiders. This guild includes the iconic black widows, but its members can come in brown, red, and a variety of other colours as well. Regardless of colour, widow spiders tend to be fairly standard spider builds, but with a bonus to their attacks due to their extra-potent venom, called [Latrotoxin]. Latrotoxin can cause a debuff in both small and large animals, which is called [Latrodectism], and leads to pain, muscle rigidity, vomiting, and on rare occasions, even death. As with most spiders, widow spiders don’t usually kill larger animals when they bite; their usual response to a threat is to play dead or flick silk, and even when they do bite, they rarely inject enough venom to cause death or serious injury. Still, the mere possibility of such a bite is often enough to scare off humans and other large animals from bothering them. It’s an important component of why the widow spider has had such global success, being one of the dominant predators of the featherweight meta on every major land server except Antarctica.

One thing I want to clear up before going further: a lot of players get nervous about playing widow spiders because of the rumour that the females usually eat the males after mating – this is where the “widow” part of the name comes from. While this does happen from time to time, it’s mostly only as a response to being held captive by human players; in their natural gameplay, male widow spiders tend to avoid this problem by refusing to mate with females who look hungry. The one major exception is the redback spider, a subclass of widow spider commonly found throughout Southeast Asia and Oceania. Redback spider males are so unafraid of being cannibalised that when they mate, they actually do somersaults to place their abdomens directly over the female’s mouth, to make it as easy as possible for them to be eaten whenever the female wants. So if you don’t want your mate to kill you, it’s probably best to avoid playing as a redback, but most other widow spider builds should be fine.

A Tier: Darwin’s bark spider

In mid-A tier, we have the Darwin’s bark spider, which holds the record for the toughest silk of any spider. It’s more than twice as tough as the next-closest spider silk, and the toughest biological material ever measured. This toughness allows their webs to maintain stability at extraordinary sizes, spanning areas up to nearly three square metres at the largest. Making a web this large takes a lot of time and effort, but their effort is rewarded by letting them control the space directly above rivers and lakes, a coveted hunting ground that’s effectively off-limits to most other spiders.

A tier: Wandering spider

Also in mid-A tier, we have the wandering spider. Wandering spiders are so named because they don’t usually put any points into making webs, instead finding prey by wandering the forest floor. This riskier lifestyle requires them to be quite a bit more aggressive than most spiders in order to survive, and they back this up by having the most potent venom of all spiders, regularly killing prey up to the size of small frogs. As I discussed in my post on overrated builds, they have a bit of an overblown reputation for killing animals up to the size of humans, which they rarely actually back up. But just like with the widow spiders, the intimidation bonus they get from the potential threat of it remains a significant advantage nonetheless.

I should also note that there’s a subclass of wandering spider called the giant fishing spider, which is semi-aquatic and can hunt underwater. So if you’re disappointed by my low rating for the diving bell spider, but still interested in playing a spider underwater, maybe consider looking into these.

A tier: Jumping spider

In high A tier, we have the jumping spider. Jumping spiders are so named for their unusual movement patterns; while their base mobility when walking is slow, they’re very agile when jumping, and can travel nearly forty times their own body length in a single bound. Instead of building webs to catch prey, they tend to hunt by actively wandering in search of targets. When they find a potential prey item, they swivel their cephalothorax to orient themselves. Then, they move their abdomen into line, and start stalking slowly forward. When they’re close enough, they pause to attach a filament of silk called a dragline to wherever they’re standing, and then they pounce onto their target. In order to support this hunting mechanism, jumping spiders have developed quite a number of unusual traits. Most notable are their eyes. Unlike any other spider, jumping spiders have flat faces, with their anterior eyes looking forward, and they can move their retinas in vertebrate-like ways to get the best focus. This setup helps them to see their environment clearly enough to hit their targets accurately, something no other arthropod would be capable of. Jumping spiders also have the [Bimodal Breathing] trait. In general, there are two kinds of respiratory systems available to spiders: they can either breathe through openings on ventral surface of the abdomen called [Book Lungs], or through tubes called [Tracheae] (not to be confused with the kind of tracheae humans and other vertebrates have), connected to the outside world through openings in the exoskeleton called [Spiracles]. Jumping spiders are unusual in being able to use both systems simultaneously, which allows them to take in enough oxygen to make their intense jumps. 

However, what really makes jumping spiders stand out is their shockingly high intelligence rating. Jumping spiders get most of their XP from hunting other spiders, and to make this risky strategy work, they’ve had to spec into an intelligence level far beyond any other arthropod, or any other invertebrate outside of the cephalopod guild. When trying to attract another spider, jumping spiders crawl onto the other spider’s web, then make vibrations that mimic either those produced by the struggles of a trapped insect, or those made by the target species when looking for a mate. Jumping spiders that use this method all start off the game with instinctual knowledge of a few mimicry signals that they can use to attract their most common prey builds, but they’re not limited to these. When hunting a spider for which they don’t have a pre-programmed attraction signal, they try out a kaleidoscope of different vibration types until they find one that gets a response, and then keep repeating it. This kind of trial-and-error-based problem-solving is something no other spider can pull off. Depending on the situation, their hunting strategies can get even more complicated. Sometimes, jumping spiders will try to hunt spiders larger than themselves. In these cases, just imitating the target’s prey item by itself wouldn’t do them much good, since they risk ending up as an actual prey item. Instead, they carefully modulate their signals to draw the target into a vulnerable position, then use monotonous repetition of habituating signals to pacify the target while they draw in for the kill. In some cases, this drawing-in might involve an approach with carefully-planned detours, in order to reach the optimal attack angle. This complexity and flexibility in hunting strategies is something you’d usually be more likely to see in a mammal like a carnivoran than an arthropod, and is part of why the jumping spider build has been nicknamed by the fan community as “the eight-legged cat build”.

Jumping spiders are among the most successful spider guilds in the game, and are so respected that many insects mimic them in order to scare off predators. However, they do have one weakness that keeps them from being top-tier. Keeping track of all this complexity is a ton of work for a spider-sized brain, and the cost of this is that they’re very slow when processing information. This leaves them especially vulnerable to larger predators, like birds and frogs, because they often fail to identify objects of that size until it’s too late.

S Tier: Tarantula

I don’t think it will be much of a surprise to anyone that the best spider is the tarantula. Tarantulas have a reputation for being among the most terrifying opponents in the entire game, and this is for good reason. Tarantulas pack venom potent enough to easily kill a cat or dog, which is impressive, but doesn’t quite reach the power of some of the other spiders that they compete with. However, what they lack in toxicity, they more than make up for through sheer size and brute force. Tarantulas can grow larger than any other spiders, with the largest reaching up to the size of dinner plates, and the gaping puncture wounds left by their gigantic fangs provide a far more effective deterrent to attackers than venom alone could. Mobility is something of a weak point for them, so if an attacker approaches from behind, they may not be able to turn around in time to inflict a bite. Fortunately, they’ve got this covered too, thanks to their unique special ability, [Urticating Hairs]. These aren’t true hairs, but rather barbed bristles on their abdomens which they can eject to throw at attackers, causing rashes and impaired eyesight. With their well-rounded selection of abilities, tarantulas have easily the strongest offence+defence combo of any spider build in the current meta. They rank up among the most powerful solo builds in the whole arthropod faction, and are comfortably at the top of the spider tier list.

So that’s my ranking of the spiders. I hope you enjoyed it, and if you’re planning on playing a spider, I hope you find it helpful. Thanks for reading.

A Thought on Writing History

History is written by the losers. A conqueror who is admired by his victorious followers and hated by his defeated enemies will be remembered as a great villain and destroyer; only if you can get your vanquished foes to praise you for the favour you did will you go down as a hero. This is what separates a Genghis Khan, Vlad the Impaler or Attila the Hun from an Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar or Napoleon.

A Toast To Sharks: Celebrating 400 Million Years of Success | The Shark Tier List

[This is part of a series of posts about animals. To find other posts in this series, see here.]

Outside has gone through a lot of changes over its 4-billion-year history, but some things just never seem to change, and one of the great constants for the past hundreds of millions of years has been the success of the sharks. Just about every other top-tier guild from when sharks got introduced has either been banned or reduced to irrelevance, but sharks have managed to stick around, and continue to absolutely dominate seas the world over. What accounts for their success? To find out, today I’m going to go into the shark guild’s stats and abilities. I’m also going to go into the shark tier list, to find out which types of shark deserve the most credit for keeping this ancient guild’s legacy alive.

BASIC SHARK BUILD ANALYSIS

History

Shark-like cartilaginous fish first got introduced to Outside in the early Silurian expansion, around 440 million years ago. At this time, fish had only recently evolved jaws, and early sharks were among the first to really master the use of this new organ. Strictly speaking, these fish, called “spiny sharks” weren’t part of the same shark guild we know today; they were basal cartilaginous fish, and the predecessors to modern-day rays and skates as well as sharks. However, they still functioned basically like modern-day sharks, aside from the hard spines on their fins that gave them their name. Modern sharks, or “neoselachians” as they’re formally called, debuted during the Jurassic, where they quickly started to outcompete the hybodont sharks that had dominated the four expansions immediately prior. Neoselachians continued to spread and diversify throughout the Jurassic and Cretaceous, and by the time of the K-T balance patch, had already developed most of the same basic forms that they still use today. After the K-T patch banned hybodonts, modern sharks were left as the uncontested dominant predators of the fish world, a position they’ve maintained to this day.

Stats and abilities

• Senses

Sharks have so many OP abilities that it’s hard to know where to begin when analysing them. I’ll start with their senses. Sharks have arguably the best sensory perception package in the entire game, and the most important perk of this package is their incredible sense of smell. Sharks are legendary for their ability to sniff out the slightest hints of blood in the water, being able to pick out concentrations as low as one part per million. It should be noted that the way sharks use info gained from smell is a bit different from most animals. Generally, when animals follow the direction of a scent, they travel to wherever the scent is strongest. In ocean servers, this can get confusing, because small eddies in the water can cause odour concentrations to vary a lot over short distances. Sharks have unlocked a more sophisticated approach. Their brains are so good at processing scents that they can tell which nostril picks up a scent first, and this, rather than the strength, is the primary information they use to figure out where smells are coming from; in other words, they essentially smell in stereo.

Sharks combine their keen conventional senses with a rarer sixth sense: [Electroreception]. Shark skin contains thousands of mucus-filled pores called [Ampullae of Lorenzini], which detect electric fields in the water by measuring the potential difference between the voltage at the skin pore and that at the base of the electroreceptor cells. This isn’t unique to sharks, as the pores are found in many kinds of fish, but the ones in sharks are especially sensitive. Electroreception isn’t good at detecting targets long-range, because the electric fields generated by muscle contractions dissipate to near-zero levels too quickly; this is why sharks still need to rely mainly on their smell when searching for prey. But once a shark gets close to a target, electroreception makes it basically impossible to hide from them. Sharks can also detect electrical fields produced by ocean currents, which they use to more easily orient themselves when swimming.

• Replacements for Bone

Sharks’ skeletons are made of cartilage, which means they don’t have bones to guard their organs. As a substitute, they have specialised structures surrounding their skin called [Denticles], which are essentially teeth that have been modified into a scale-plate armour, for protection against both predators and parasites. Just like human teeth, shark denticles have a central pulp cavity filled with blood vessels, surrounded by a conical layer of dentine, all of which is in turn surrounded by an outer layer composed of enamel-like minerals. As an added bonus, these scales are covered by a series of rough ridges and dents; when water moves over a shark’s skin, it flattens the ridges, creating tiny vortices that reduce drag and turbulence. By reducing the energy required to swim, and damping down the noise produced by their movement against the water, this turbulence reduction boosts both the shark’s stealth and stamina.

Not having bones presents some special difficulties for a large predator, because it’s difficult to bite into things with jaws made of soft cartilage. To account for this, sharks have surrounded their jaws with a protective coating of mineralised blocks, called [Tesserae], arranged into a crystal mosaic. Smaller sharks generally have only one layer of calcium blocks, while larger sharks will usually have multiple, since they need extra stability. These blocks give shark jaws strength on par with the bony jaws of other large vertebrate predators. Similar tessellated structures are found in a number of other places on the shark’s skeleton, allowing their cartilage to perform most of the same mechanical roles that bone performs for other vertebrates.

• Breathing

One of the subtler differences between sharks and other fish is the way they breathe. Usually, fish breathe by [Buccal Pumping], which means they inhale water and let it pass through the gills. While most sharks can do this, they more commonly use [Ram Ventilation], which involves rapidly swimming forward with their mouth open and letting the water rush in naturally. This might sound inconsequential, but it’s actually very important. Ram ventilation requires significantly less energy than buccal pumping to take in the same amount of oxygen, so it’s a big help in allowing sharks to track down prey over long distances without getting tired. You have to be careful, though, because breathing by ram ventilation only works when you’re swimming. This isn’t a problem for most sharks, because most of them can switch back to the standard buccal pumping when they need to rest. But there are a few sharks that are strictly obligate ram ventilators, and if you play one of these sharks, you need to keep moving continuously, or you’ll get a Game Over.

• Swim bladder

Powerful as sharks are, they do have some minor weaknesses. The biggest is that, unlike most fish, sharks don’t have gas-filled swim bladders for controlling their buoyancy, and while their oil-filled livers do fill a similar function, it’s nowhere near as effective. To make up for the loss of passive control, sharks have to keep moving their fins constantly in order to generate enough lift to keep themselves afloat, draining their stamina. Having cartilage instead of bone reduces the cost of this significantly, since they’re not as dense as bony fish of the same size, but it still doesn’t fully eliminate the disadvantage.

Overall Shark Guild Tier Rating

There’s no question that sharks hold a top-tier position in the ocean meta. They’re among the most dominant predators in ocean servers, rivalled only by cetaceans, and have managed to hold onto their position for hundreds of millions of years while basically shrugging off multiple major balance patches. I’d say that sharks as a guild rank at the low end of S tier overall. But which sharks use their abilities best? To find out, let’s now go into the shark tier list. As usual, I won’t be able to go into all of the more than 500 shark builds in the current meta, but I’ll try to cover the most interesting ones.

THE SHARK TIER LIST

C Tier: Frilled shark

There aren’t a lot of low-tier shark builds, so we’re going to be starting in low C tier, with the frilled shark. Although many players today say this build seems more like an eel than a shark, it actually closely resembles the early shark builds from the Jurassic and Cretaceous metas, and has been tagged [Living Fossil] as a result. Frilled sharks hunt by capturing prey with their long jaws. Their bite attacks aren’t very strong, as the length of their jaws makes it difficult to get enough leverage over their prey to bite forcefully, but they make up for it with their high suction forces and extraordinary flexible jaws, which allow them to swallow prey more than half their own size whole. Although it’s impressive that frilled shark mains have been able to keep their playstyle going for as long as they have, their viability in the current meta has been severely limited by their failure to take advantage of the most updated strategies available to shark players. Due to their weak attacks and low mobility, successful hunts tend to be a rare occurrence for them – data-miners examining specimens of frilled sharks caught by fishermen have found that around 70% of them were swimming on empty stomachs, a much higher rate than standard for sharks. The lower end of C tier seems like a reasonable placement.

C Tier: Epaulette shark

Also in C tier, we have the epaulette shark. Epaulette sharks have optimised their build for hunting in shallow tidal pools, and have specced into some interesting and unique abilities in order to accommodate this playstyle. Firstly, epaulette sharks can cope with oxygen depletion in their waters by increasing blood supply to the brain and selectively shutting down non-vital neural functions. This is an important adaptation in their shallow reefs, because the oxygen content of the water can drop dramatically when the tide ebbs. Using this method, epaulette sharks can survive without oxygen for over 45 minutes without taking damage. However, what’s most striking about epaulette sharks is the way they move. Epaulette sharks can rotate their fins to turn them into small legs and walk on the seafloor, or even on land, with a gait resembling that of a salamander. This is primarily necessary for travelling between tidal pools, but epaulette sharks actually tend to prefer walking over swimming, and use it as their primary means of locomotion even when in the water. As terrifying as the idea of a walking shark might sound, I don’t think epaulette sharks are particularly viable; their attack and mobility are pretty weak, and the abilities they get in return are kind of gimmicky and only really useful in a few narrow situations. I wouldn’t go so far as to call them low-tier, but I’d say C tier is reasonable.

B tier: Sand tiger shark

In the upper tiers, things are going to get a little bit crowded. In B tier, we have the sand tiger shark, a build that has relatively weak mobility, but makes up for it with stealth. Sand tigers have a unique ability to gulp air from the surface and store it in their stomachs. This air pocket allows them to remain buoyant without moving, so they can scan for prey without making any noise.

B Tier: Thresher shark

Also in B tier, we have the thresher shark. Thresher sharks get their name for their huge, thresher-like tails, which can take up as much as half their body length. The primary function of these tails is as giant whips, allowing thresher players to stun large schools of fish with a single move. As special abilities go, this is a bit of a mixed bag.  This move has low precision, missing the target more often than not, but a strike that does connect almost always kills many fish at once, more than cancelling out the XP lost from their misses. The tails also have a secondary purpose as propellers, allowing thresher sharks to leap out of the water like dolphins. The tail does come with a significant cost, though, because it makes threshers more vulnerable to fishermen. This is a problem for pretty much all large sharks, but particularly bad for threshers, because their tails get hooked so easily.

One other thing threshers have going for them is that they’re among the few sharks capable of regional endothermy. Threshers have strips of red aerobic muscle around their flanks, which can contract for long periods. Contained within these muscle strips is a tight meshwork of tiny blood vessels called the rete mirabile that transfers metabolic heat during contractions, shifting the heat inwards and towards the body core. Using this technique, thresher sharks can elevate the temperature of their swimming muscles above the ambient temperature of the surrounding waters by several degrees, helping them to keep chasing prey when the water gets cold.

B Tier: Greenland shark

In high B tier, we have the Greenland shark, a build optimised for the Arctic meta. As cold-blooded predators in polar environments, Greenland sharks have had to adopt a lower-energy playstyle than most large sharks; proportional to size, their average swim speed is the lowest of any fish on record. They’re so slow, in fact, that you might think they wouldn’t be able to hunt at all, but it seems that they’re able to compensate with stealth, scoring kills by ambushing fish and seals while they sleep. This isn’t the most glamorous of shark playstyles, but one thing it has going for it is stability: Greenland sharks have longer lifespans than any other vertebrate, with some Greenland shark games having lasted for over 300 years. Because they live in deep water, Greenland sharks have had to evolve special adaptations to withstand the pressure. They’ve accomplished this by speccing into high concentrations of blood trimethylamine N-oxide, a stabilising chemical which counteracts the destabilising effects of the water pressure. As an added side bonus, trimethylamine N-oxide at the concentration found in their blood is poisonous, so even if another predator does manage to beat them in a fight, there’s no way to safely eat them without human-exclusive cooking abilities. The main thing that keeps Greenland sharks from ranking even higher on the tier list, aside from their aforementioned low mobility and limited range, is their vulnerability to eye parasites, which frequently lead them to go blind. Due to how strong their other senses are, they’re usually able to get around fine under these conditions, but it’s still not exactly a trait you’d want to have.

B Tier: Cookiecutter shark

At the top of B tier, we have possibly the strangest shark in the game, the cookiecutter shark. Cookiecutter sharks’ undersides are covered in light-emitting photophores, except for a dark “collar” around their throats and gill slits resembling the silhouette of a small fish. While cookiecutters can swim quickly, they mostly hunt by hovering in the water column and waiting for other predators to be drawn to the fish-shaped collar. When a predator approaches close enough, the cookiecutter shark rushes in to take a bite of it. You might notice that I say “take a bite of”, not “eat”. That’s because unlike most sharks, the cookiecutter shark doesn’t always eat its targets whole, but rather bites chunks out of them. Cookiecutter sharks have a unique tooth design, with narrow, upright upper teeth that taper to a single, smooth-edged cusp, and knife-like lower teeth with interlocking bases, together forming a cutting edge like a saw. When a cookiecutter shark gets close to a target, it first secures itself to the body surface of its prey by closing its spiracles and retracting its tongue to create a zone of low pressure in its mouth, and tightly seals itself using the powerful suction force of its lips. It then bites, using its upper teeth as anchors while its lower teeth slice into the prey. Finally, it twists and rotates its body to cut out a round chunk from the target’s skin; its name comes from the wound left behind making it look like the target has been cut with a cookiecutter. Due to the heavily calcified cartilage surrounding its cranium and lip, the cookiecutter shark has an exceptionally strong bite for its size, and can take a chunk out of almost any type of animal found in the sea, even including large whales. It should be noted that this behaviour is actually a supplement to their standard hunting strategies, rather than their primary source of XP. But considering how much XP the flesh of these huge animals can be worth to such a small predator, it’s pretty useful to be able to do it nonetheless.

A Tier: Portuguese dogfish

In low A tier, we have the Portuguese dogfish. One of the more niche shark builds, the Portuguese dogfish distinguishes itself from most sharks partly by the degree to which it relies on vision. Portuguese dogfish have developed special eyes, which are specifically optimised for detecting the glows commonly produced by deep-sea fishes and squid. This adaptation makes them very adept at hunting in deep waters, and has allowed them to penetrate further into the deep-sea meta than any other shark; it’s the only shark known to survive at depths of over 3600 metres beneath the surface.

A Tier: Spiny dogfish

Also in low A tier, we have the spiny dogfish. The spiny dogfish gets its name from the spines on its back fin, which it can use to deliver a venomous sting. This venom combines with the sharp teeth typical of sharks to make a predator that’s deadly from all directions.

A Tier: Whale Shark

In mid-A tier, we have the whale shark, the biggest fish in the current game. Whale sharks are too big to function as fast-moving predators like most sharks, so they’ve switched into the role of plankton-eating filter-feeders, similar to most actual whales. They have two main modes of feeding. The first is [Ram Filtration], which involves drifting through the water with an open mouth, taking it in along with whatever small animals are found in it. This is the simplest approach, but a little bit inefficient, so when whale shark players want to speed things up a bit, they can switch to actively sucking up water and the animals contained within. While whale sharks might not have the most exciting play-style, their sheer size allows them to basically just coast through the game with no real threats, at least once full-grown, so I’d say I have to give them a high-tier rating. The one thing that keeps them out of top-tier is their vulnerability to pollution. While sucking up water, whale sharks often accidentally ingest plastics that humans have left behind. These plastics are generally pretty harmless by themselves, but due to the sheer amount of water that whale sharks have to suck up regularly, the plastics can build up over time and become a drain on their health rating.

A Tier: Mako shark

In high A tier, we have the mako shark. Makos are the fastest sharks in the current game, and are among the only sharks to be fully endothermic, granting them a massive boost to their stamina, and they have the strongest bite force of any shark that’s been measured as well. One of their biggest advantages is their good matchup against swordfish, which are too fast for most other sharks to catch. They need to be careful, though, because if they screw up, a jab from the swordfish’s bill can seriously injure or even kill them.

A Tier: Hammerhead shark

At the top of A tier, we have the hammerhead. Hammerhead sharks are named for their unusual heads, which are flattened and laterally extended into a hammer-shaped structure called a [Cephalofoil]. This might look like just a weird gimmick, but it’s actually very useful, for several reasons. First, it grants a boost to the hammerhead’s hydrodynamics, giving them extra manoeuvrability when turning. Second, the cephalofoil’s shape ensures that the hammerhead’s eyes are on opposite sides of its head. This gives them a wider field of view than other fish, and allows them to see both above and below at all times. However, it does have a drawback, in that it makes it hard for them to gauge distances through vision. To compensate for this, the cephalofoils are filled with electroreceptors, and the shape allows these receptors to be spread across a wider area so as to sweep for prey more effectively. While hammerheads will eat almost any animal that fits in their mouths, and some even eat plants, they’re particularly adept at hunting stingrays. Reliance on electroreception is more practical than vision for this purpose, as stingrays’ flat shape makes them difficult to see against the seafloor. During these hunts, the hammer serves an additional purpose as a weapon, used to pin down and/or stun rays before eating them.

S Tier: Tiger shark

At the bottom of S tier, we have the tiger shark. This build is distinguished by its sickle-shaped teeth with outward-pointing hooked tips, forming a double-serrated blade for easily slicing through hard substances. Flesh, bone, and even turtle shells are all easy to cut through for the tiger shark. This adaptation allows tiger sharks to target a wider variety of prey than any other shark – not only fish, but crabs, seals, birds, squid, turtles, snakes, dolphins, dugongs, and other sharks are all on their menu, and on rare occasions, you can even find tiger sharks killing and eating full-grown baleen whales. Land animals that go in the water get hunted, too; cats, dogs, goats, sheep, horses and rats are all commonly found in tiger shark stomachs. Often, tiger shark players get a little carried away and try to eat inedible garbage that humans leave in the water, like tires or fur coats. However, since this doesn’t really seem to hurt them at all, I’m not going to penalise them too much for it. Tiger sharks basically dominate tropical oceans, only being threatened by humans, and the occasional orca pod. For achieving such a strong matchup spread, I have to give the tiger shark a top-tier rating.

S Tier: Bull shark

Also in low S-tier, we have the bull shark, the shark with the strongest bite attack proportional to size. This is important in murky coastal waters, as they need to get a good grip on prey before it has the chance to disappear out of view. However, what really makes bull sharks special is the [Euryhalinity] trait, which allows them to alternate between freshwater and saltwater. This trait is difficult for sharks to unlock because the internal chemical concentration of their cells changes to match that of the surrounding water, a trait I once claimed hagfish were the only fish to have (sorry), so when they enter freshwater, their cells start to lose sodium at a dangerous rate. Bull sharks’ bodies have evolved to cope with this sodium loss in several ways. When they enter freshwater, their rectal glands start excreting salt at lower rates, their kidneys produce large amounts of dilute urine, and their livers adjust production of urea, so as to keep their internal chemical balance at a healthy level. Through these adaptations, bull sharks have taken a legendary ocean terror and spread it into a whole new array of biomes around the world.

S Tier: Great white shark

I don’t think anyone will be shocked that the highest-ranked shark build in the current meta, by far, is the great white. Honestly, there’s so many reasons for this that it deserves a whole post to itself, but I’ll try and cover as much as I can in this one. The great white shark is the largest predatory fish in the current game, not counting planktivores like the whale shark. In the early game, like most sharks, great whites get XP mainly from hunting fish. But as they grow older, they get too big to sustain themselves off of fish alone, so they switch to hunting marine mammals. They’re able to hunt these targets because of their gigantic serrated teeth, which are better at tearing into large objects than those of any other shark – not even the tiger shark compares. But even with this adaptation, hunting marine mammals is still a more daunting challenge than hunting fish for several reasons, and great whites have had to spec into a variety of remarkable abilities to make it possible.

Part of the difficulty is that seals and dolphins are warm-blooded, which means they have a huge stamina advantage over fish. Great whites can partially compensate for this because their sheer size protects them against heat loss to a significant degree, but that wouldn’t be enough by itself. In order to fully gain the stamina to chase after marine mammals, great whites have had to take a page from the thresher shark’s playbook, and developed regional endothermy. Another issue with hunting mammals is that they’re usually a lot smarter than fish, and in order to combat this, great whites have had to put lots of points into intelligence abilities of their own. The great white shark is probably the smartest fish in the game, and this intelligence allows them to develop a varied repertoire of hunting strategies, each carefully designed to suit their particular environment. For example, off the coast of Seal Island in South Africa, great whites hunt Cape fur seals by ambushing them from below, ramming their mid-bodies so fast that the sharks hurl themselves out of the water with the seals in their mouths. For great whites off the coast of California, the main sources of XP are elephant seals, which are too heavy for this approach to work. So instead, they attack the seals from behind, immobilising them by taking big bites out of their tails and then waiting for them to bleed to death before eating them. Similar tactics are used when hunting sea turtles, which they immobilise by biting the carapace around a flipper before swallowing them whole.

Sometimes, a great white main will grow to sizes that are extraordinary even by the standards of the species, and the resulting loss of agility can make even hunting seals and dolphins challenging. To compensate, these sharks can fall back on an even more valuable source of XP: scavenging baleen whale carcasses. Thanks to their exceptional sense of smell, great whites are very good at sniffing out dead bodies, and while most sharks don’t have sharp enough teeth to bite into a whale-sized animal, great whites can do so easily. In rare cases, a large great white won’t wait for a dead whale and will instead hunt down and kill baleen whales while they’re still alive. Again, this is rare, and it usually requires either teaming up with other great whites or finding a whale that’s already injured. But even so, being able to pull this off at all is a rare and remarkable achievement.

All this would be enough to make the great white the #1 shark already, and I’ve barely scratched the surface of their insane abilities. For example, I haven’t even gotten into their extraordinary poison resistance; many great whites have been found with levels of blood arsenic, lead and mercury well beyond the range that would kill most vertebrates, yet showing no sign of illness or injury. There’s no question that the great white shark is one of the most overpowered builds ever seen in the game, and ranks near the top of S tier.

So that’s the shark tier list. I hope you enjoyed it, and if you’re interested in playing a shark, I hope you find this helpful. Thanks for reading.