Who wins? 🐿️ or 🍕?

Don't get me wrong. I hold no personal grudge against those builds or the players who use them. Some of them involve truly unique and distinctive builds(including Kakapos, one of my personal favorites).

However, the fact that invasive builds are thriving on servers where they were never meant to spawn in the first place is a entirely different issue. Most of native builds cannot compete with them, because they were made to survive in a world literally devoid of highly competitive invasive builds. They also spread new diseases that can kill native species lacking immunity.

This issue is particularly pronounced among avian builds. Invasive builds prey on their eggs and juvenile, destroy their preferred habitats and nests, and multiply far more rapidly. Almost half of all island-endemic avian builds are currently either extinct or threatened with extinction. Islands are the epicenters of global bird extinctions, accounting for the vast majority of all known bird extinctions since the Holocene season.

Ironically, these builds are receiving assistance from human players who introduced invasive builds to the server, and some builds are currently in a situation where it is extremely difficult to play the game without the active help of human players.

Best of luck to the island-build players.

P.S. So why a GIF from the Angry Birds movie? Aside from the fact that it’s currently popular as a meme, I felt the film’s main plot effectively illustrates how defenseless native species are destroyed when unable to counter an invasive species—especially considering that the natives are naive, flightless birds and the invaders are Feral pigs(Sus scrofa).

Arena: an open convention center.

Both parties are bloodlusted and lack self preservation instincts.

The sparrows goal is to kill and eat the elephant down to the bone. The sparrows can and will enter the elephants orfices.

The elephants goal is to kill all the house sparrows.

who comes out on top!

Next year during the month of May, a population of 100,000 fully functioning adult Lowland gorillas are spread out amongst local servers on the North America platform in the regions of: Georgia, Florida, and Alabama.

The gorillas Will be evenly spread out consisting of one silverback with 3-10 females in his troop.

Their coding update has now made them omnivores, similar to bears. During the spring and summer months they will largely stick to vegetation, but will happily eat road kill/young or injured animals/bird eggs if they come across them.

Fall and Winter time is when the gorillas switch to wanting mostly animals protein, and will gladly hunt livestock and medium size animals.

Their hunting strategy will largely consist of females chasing an animal, say a whitetail deer or a wild boar, to the direction of the silverback who is waiting in ambush. The silverback will then perform the killing bite to the throat.

And yes, if they get desperate enough, they WILL see humans as prey.

can gorillas survive long term on this new server with their coding update?

the only time humans had a video analysing them was in the ape tierlist, where they werent that deeply analysed, simce it was a tierlist and other apes had to be talked about to. i think a dedicated video breaking down just how op humans are would help, especially since the meta has changed alot, mainly beacuse humans keep changing stuff like climates, as well as region and biome sizes, eithout the devs. they literally can partially control the meta and am surprised why they dont have their own video. would also help noobs learn their strengths and (few) weaknesses if they wont main him

Otodus Obliquus vs Deinosuchus Hatcheri

Description:

• Otodus Obliquus - The least massive Species of Otodus Genus in history.

• Deinosuchus Hatcheri - The most massive Species of Deinosuchus Genus in history.

Imo a Better build than monitor lizards at the same size..

Also TierZoo underestimated its true damage, a female can bite up to 313 newtons acording to a study, imagine a male that is almost twice the size and with larger jowls.

Killer Whale(Orcinus Orca) vs Otodus Obliquus

Description:

• Killer Whale - The most massive Species of Orcinus Genus, and of Oceanic Dolphins(Delphinidae) Family in history.

• Otodus Obliquus - The least massive Species of Otodus Genus in history.

I mean Jesus people How is this fun for anyone? I main human too but least I work for it! You can just through money and all your problems go away… food, housing, even social connection… which for balancing purposes richness should decrease that like with other animals… can all be maxed just by enough pieces of paper! Can someone please explain to me how this is even allowed? It affects other people’s play to a drastic extent… I got a buddy who mains lion… dude can’t even play without spawning in a Zoo ran by these guys! I don’t get it!

round 1. both are standard sized males who just happened upon each other

round 2. Both are large males, the tiger is hungry and the moose is defending its offspring

I've got a couple of questions about the stalk-to-kill ratios of predator builds in this game.

First, is a predator build's stalk-to-kill ratio a major factor in determining where it ranks in the overall tier list as a whole, or is it not that big of a factor?

Second, I keep hearing pretty consistently that builds in the cat faction have absolutely brilliant stalk-to-kill ratios. Is this the general rule of thumb for all cats as a whole, or do certain cat builds have better ratios than others?

[As promised last month, instead of releasing a new post this month, I’m doing a batch of re-mastered versions of my old tier lists, with improved formatting and updated information. This is the fifth and final re-master in Batch II. I may or may not be continuing with the re-masters next month, or I may try going back to doing regular tier lists for a while; we’ll see how I feel then. At the bottom of Part 2 of this, I will provide a list of the main corrections made to the original; the original itself can be found here.]

Browse the Outside forums for any length of time, and you’re sure to come across at least a few posts from players whining that their preferred build isn’t nearly as overpowered in the current meta as it was in past expansions. By far the most common complaints are from bird mains complaining that they can no longer play as giant theropods, but you can see variants of it from tons of other factions too – insect and millipede mains will complain about not being able to reach the sizes they did during the Carboniferous, shark mains will complain about the banning of the Megalodon, cat mains will whine about not being able to unlock saber teeth, and so forth. To be honest, I have very little sympathy for most of these complaints; almost all of these “nerfed” builds are still among the highest-ranked builds in the current meta, and I have no interest in hearing players complain about how their build is “only” one of the top builds rather than the absolute undisputed top. And in many of these cases, notably with the aforementioned insects and cats, these builds have been buffed so many times since the expansions these players reminisce about that they’re probably stronger now than they were then. However, there’s one group of players that even I have to admit have every right to complain about getting screwed over by nerfs, and those are the sloth mains. Up until roughly the release of the Holocene patch, sloths were absolutely legendary among mammalian tanks, only to get nerfed so hard that they’re now quite possibly the single worst build choice in the entire game. So what made the sloths of old so powerful, and why did they ultimately get nerfed so hard? To find out, today I’m going to go into the ground sloth tier list, to examine the rise and fall of these builds.

BASIC GROUND SLOTH BUILD ANALYSIS

Sloth guild history

Before I go into the history of how ground sloths emerged, I should probably explain why the title of this section is “sloth guild history” instead of “ground sloth guild history”. That’s because, technically speaking, the ground sloths weren’t actually a distinct guild from modern-day tree sloths. Rather, the ground sloth was the original version of the sloth build, and modern-day tree sloths just happen to be their only surviving descendants. In fact, modern tree sloths aren’t even a distinct faction within the ground sloths – they’re actually the descendants of two unrelated factions that independently specced into a similar arboreal playstyle. So, with that out of the way, let’s now go into the history of the sloth guild.

As I’ve discussed in the past, sloths are part of a strange group of mammals called xenarthrans, which today also includes the anteater and armadillo. The details of how sloths in particular emerged are a little hazy, but the first sloth builds probably debuted in the Eocene. Ironically for a famously slow animal, sloths started to rapidly diversify almost immediately after their introduction, and within about 10 million years, the guild had already divided into at least eight major sub-guilds. This initial burst of diversity didn’t last very long, as the sloths’ diversity underwent a lot of fluctuations during the Miocene, and, after reaching a peak of diversity during the Late Miocene, they underwent a major drop from which they never fully recovered. Their diversity would continue to slowly but steadily decline throughout the subsequent Pliocene and Pleistocene eras, so that, by the time of their extinction, they were already quite a long ways off from the diversity they’d had at their apex. Nevertheless, up until the human invasion, ground sloths remained a widely successful faction of herbivores, dominating biomes ranging all the way from Patagonia to Alaska. What was it that made them so successful? To find out, let’s now go into their stats and abilities.

Ground sloth stats and abilities

Attack power

Probably the biggest advantage ground sloths had over contemporary sloths was in their vastly superior attack power. As I discussed in my xenarthran tier list, modern sloths have some of the weakest attacks of all mammals, because they don’t have enough extensor muscles to easily apply force with straight or extended limbs. By contrast, ground sloths typically had more muscular forelimbs, in line with other mammals of comparable sizes, and had large, well-developed claws on the ends of their hands; these features probably originated as adaptations for digging, much like similar adaptations seen in their living xenarthran cousins, the armadillo and anteater. Also like armadillos and anteaters, but unlike present-day sloths, ground sloths could stand upright on their hind legs for short periods, probably using their tails for balance. In addition to helping them get better leverage when digging, this also allowed them to use their claws for several other purposes, like pulling down tall branches to get at the vegetation thereon – but, more relevantly for combat purposes, there’s some evidence that they might also have been useful for stabbing attacking predators. This part is still debated, but, whether or not they were adapted for stabbing specifically, the sheer strength of their forearms would have made a blow from one devastating regardless.

Feeding and metabolism

When discussing why ground sloths ranked so much higher in the meta than tree sloths do today, one factor has to do with how they fed. As I’ve talked about in the past, part of the reason why living sloths are such garbage-tier builds – particularly the three-toed sloth – is because of their reliance on leaves. While high-tier leaf-eating builds do still exist in the current meta, they tend to be builds that can digest huge amounts of food relatively rapidly, which modern sloths can’t. Ground sloths were mostly herbivores, too, but since they weren’t restricted to feeding in treetops, the variety of plant matter they were able to make use of was a bit broader.

Diet-wise, ground sloths could use a variety of strategies, with some being primarily browsers, while others were mostly grazers, and still others fell somewhere in-between. These differences were reflected in the varied shapes of their muzzles and lips. Grazing ground sloths, like the Glossotherium, had wide muzzles, with square upper lips and mobile tongues used to pull grass and herbs out of the ground, similar to those of the present-day white rhinoceros. Like most large grazers, the plants they ate were often low in nutrients, but they made up for it through bulk-feeding. On the other hand, browsing or mixed-feeding sloths, like the iconic Megatherium, had prehensile upper lips that were more cone-shaped, and used them to selectively grasp onto the most valuable parts of plants, similar to the modern-day black rhinoceros.

It should be noted that, compared to most large herbivorous mammals, ground sloths’ feeding mechanisms still had some pretty significant limitations. Like their living descendants, ground sloths typically had only eighteen teeth in total – five upper teeth on each side of the jaw, and four lower – where most large mammals have anywhere from 20 to 40. Also like living sloths, ground sloths lacked tooth enamel. They instead had teeth primarily composed of orthodentine and vasodentine, both of which – especially vasodentine – are significantly softer. Because of this relative softness, ground sloths’ teeth were not as adapted to applying crushing force as those of most other large herbivores, and they weren’t able to feed on the toughest plants. Shearing and grinding low-to-moderately-tough plants still worked fine, but the motion wore their teeth down faster than it would have for other large mammals. This wasn’t as big a weakness as it might sound, though, because it was basically compensated by their hypselodonty. As in living sloths, ground sloths had continuously-growing teeth, which meant that whatever material they lost to wear could be made up pretty quickly.

Size

The last big difference between ground sloths and living sloths was their size. While modern sloths tend to be fairly small by mammal standards, ground sloths showed a much wider variety in this regard, with most skewing towards the larger side. Even some of the smaller mainland ground sloths could weigh up to 250 kg, putting them around the size of a modern-day elk or a large male tiger, while the largest of them could reach sizes on par with some modern-day elephants. Combined with their powerful arms, this gave them a pretty solid defence against most predators, more than compensating for their lack of raw speed. As you probably know if you’ve followed my series, the usual downside of large size is that it requires a huge amount of food to sustain, but the extent to which this applied to ground sloths is currently unclear. Some analyses suggest that ground sloths shared the slow metabolisms characteristic of living xenarthrans, in which case, they likely wouldn’t have needed to eat as much as most other mammals of similar sizes. However, other analyses have suggested that the opposite is true, and that ground sloths had metabolisms more similar to those of other non-xenarthran large mammals. For now, the question remains unsettled.

Mobility

Mobility was the biggest weak area for ground sloths. While they were relatively fast and agile compared to today’s sloths, their mobility in absolute terms was still pretty weak. For much of their history, this didn’t really matter, as they didn’t really need good mobility for anything. However, once humans entered the server, the situation changed dramatically. Being large and slow-moving made ground sloths some of the easiest and most convenient targets for attacks from human hunting parties, and, even at the time, the humans’ crafted weapons were already OP enough that the sloths’ natural defences offered little protection. Every time humans reached a new region of the Americas, the ground sloths in that region went extinct shortly after, and, by around 4,200 years ago, there were none left at all.

One other notable thing about how ground sloths moved is that their method of walking was radically different from that of any other known mammal, living or extinct. Most ground sloth builds exhibited a form of walking called [Pedolateral Locomotion]. This was marked by an inward rotation of the hind foot, which placed nearly all of the weight on the calcaneum and fifth metatarsal, with the rest of the digits playing little or no role in supporting the animal’s massive body. This feature emerged numerous times amongst sloths, but has never appeared even once in any other known group of animals. Nobody’s entirely sure what purpose this served, so it’s impossible to say how it affected their viability, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

OVERALL GROUND SLOTH TIER RATING

Overall, ground sloths were solid, reliable tank builds in the pre-human meta. While most of their stats and abilities were nothing special, their sheer power was so overwhelming that they didn’t really need anything else. I would say they averaged in high A tier.

But, as I’ve said, there were quite a variety of different ground sloth builds, and not all of them were equally viable. So, which ones did it best? In Part 2, I'll go into the ground sloth tier list. As usual, I won’t be able to cover all of the dozens of known ground sloth variants, but I’ll try and cover the most interesting ones.