Dont Look In The Closet

Theyre in love, your honor

imo aethers, dusthides, gaolers, sandsurges, and veilspun aren’t wacky enough to be ancient breeds. we’ve got bug with horns, smooth boi fat tail, big shaggy moose tundra, not quite ridgebacks, and bug (?) with hair. they all fit the head neck torso arms legs wings tail layout modern breeds do, it’s literally just the line breaking genes that are the issue and the customization from apparel feels better than what the terts offer anyway imho

abberations, auraboas, banescales, and undertides i understand a little more, but…

abberations literally just have two heads and two tails. you can make head and tail apparel just go on both. some people might not want that but there’s a lot of things on the site some people don’t want already so that’s kinda a moot point

auraboas, okay. they don’t have legs or anything analogous to legs. i get why they don’t wanna have a dressable dragon with no legs. i’ll accept that

banescales don’t have arms, but i feel like that’s more manageable since the wings are in the place the arms should be. i think it’s workable putting arm apparel on wings though

undertides i can understand the most. they don’t have arms or legs and the best they have in their place is tiny fins. i can live with them not being dressable

“but the terts are so cool! it would take too long to draw all the apparel for all the breeds! you’re breaking the rules!”

i don’t think the line breaking ancient genes are cool enough to justify it. i’d rather wait longer for them to draw all the apparel stuff than get something kinda mid quicker. people make fake clothing accents for ancients all the time so it’s definitely doable. hell just get creative with how the clothes lay around the line breaking terts. put the terts on a different layer so they can overlap when needed. idk

don’t get me wrong, i’m really appreciative of the art team and everyone else on staff, i just don’t think this is working as well as intended or paying off enough to justify continuing. make the terts crazier (if you can even do that within the square they’re stuck in) or just make them modern breeds <:/

edit: i don’t expect them to change existing ancients if they change anything at all. that would be an enormous backlog and frankly unreasonable. i just think going forward they should be more lenient on what is a modern breed that deserves time put into drawing apparel for them and what should be dug deeper into to make truly weird and crazy enough to justify not being able to customize them with the thousands of different apparel pieces on site when that’s like half the game

also if they’re gonna add parallel genes anyway why can’t you breed them with other ancients or moderns. if it’d result in a gene the other breed doesn’t have just make it default to basic or something

i've had this stitchy gijinka wip sitting in my folders since last year and this dragon sitting in my sorting tab for way too long, so i'm just gonna throw this out at a reduced price.

I shall admit I was more than a little disappointed that the new breed doesn’t have lore, and it stifled my anticipation for them. But then, the new breed arrived and I realized, horribly, dreadfully, happily realized, that I can make my own headcanons. So my headcanon for the new breed is:

DUSTHIDES ARE ENEMIES/RIVALS/COMPETITION TO SNAPPERS.

When Earthshaker made Snappers he gave them powerful jaws which have a “crushing force of their beak is enough to shatter the scales and armored plating of most species”. Now then, which breeds have armored plating? Guardians yes and maybe other Snappers, Gaolers can have Scorpion and Undertides have Plating, but that is pretty much it. As to beast enemies? Forgotten Cave’s Corpse Cleaners and Reef/Dragon Snails come to mind, but most of the others are squishy (though the Burrow Bears can be a bit…prickly).

So then we have the Dusthides and they are just covered in plating. They are a competitive breed, an aggressive scrap loving breed. They are territorial, preferring to stay in their tunnel networks.  Snappers “do not seek confrontation”, they travel the majority of their lives and have difficulty with living in closed spaces. Snappers live above the Earth, Dusthides below. Yet there must have been conflict.

Snapper battle tactics are “trampling smaller foes beneath their bulk or using their powerful jaws to snap them out of the air”. Dusthides are smaller than Snappers, they “roll up until only their armored plates are exposed”, and use their wings to make short explosive jumps of movement. Perfect targets for those snapping jaws and stomping claws. However, Snappers have a weakness. “When confronted with overwhelming odds, Snappers will lower themselves to the ground, protecting their underbellies.” A soft underbelly is a perfect target for a burrowing dragon, or worse yet, the Dusthide’s like to modify the terrain with “pitfalls to surprise opponents”. These battle tactics suggest a competitive evolution between the two.

Snappers have an encyclopedic memory in order to remember which Dusthide territories to avoid. They rarely stop moving because Dusthide tunnels may lie below. I headcanon that Snappers have the ability to “listen” with their drum like feet (like elephants) and can speak long distances to their brethren with low-frequency sounds. But what if they are listening for other sounds? Like the sounds of digging beneath their toes?

New Breed Strike Hype!