FUCK ZONE

in the top middle are your common urban gnomes, the kind who'll live quietly under your floorboards and in your walls. the gnomes i've been drawing (and applecore) are common urban gnomes. they've adapted to living with bigger species to the point of requiring them, and would not do well if you dropped them in the woods. whether you consider them pests or guests depends on the kind of person you are, but they're generally preferred to rats, as they're much cleaner and don't shit everywhere.

on the top left we have fancy gnomes. the breeding of gnomes for certain traits is dubiously ethical, given their sapience, but it's been practiced for so long that it's a bit too late to do anything about it, and fancy gnomes are too babybrained to live in the wild. fancy gnomes have had the males' aggression largely bred out. it's not unheard of for fancy females to escape, become queens, and establish colonies with urban gnomes, so urban gnomes with surprising patterns may have fancy gnome ancestry (kind of like when you see pigeons with fancy speckling)

top right we have common wild gnomes, who live in woodlands, prairies, meadows, etc in burrows in the ground. they're completely capable of living without larger species, though it's normal to find them near farms. farmers generally leave them be for similar reasons to above. they're better than rats, and will in fact kill and eat other pests like insects. wild gnome queens are actually not so much larger than the regular females, but they're all larger than males. unlike urban gnomes, whose males rarely leave the queens boudoir, male woodland gnomes participate in scavenging and colony activities outside of mating.

bottom left are desert gnomes, inspired by jerboas and kangaroo rats. the male's ruff is noticeably downsized due to the heat of their environment. male desert gnomes are like urban gnomes, in that their mating runs involve aggressively infiltrating nests and getting past the rest of the colony, but unlike urban gnomes, they don't stay afterward. they get the fuck back out to go try it again somewhere else.

in bottom center, we have snow gnomes (snomes). due to the cold, females grow ruffs as well, and all of them have winter/summer coloring. aggressive male mating behavior is not worth the energy expenditure and doesn't help with survival, so rather than make desperate runs and kill each other, males will move from colony to colony to mate with queens, and then peacefully move on. keeps the gene pool varied. they're very cute to see waddling in lines through the snow.