u/funwiththoughts

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[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 I; another batch of five re-masters will be released next month, after which I will briefly resume posting normal tier lists before continuing further. At the bottom, I’ve provided a list of the main corrections made to the original; the original itself can be found here.]

Every Outside player knows that the game’s meta is prone to rapid shifts. I’ve made a number of posts in the past telling the stories of how builds that were once among the most overpowered in the game ended up being reduced to total non-viability by changes in the overworld conditions. However, one thing that hasn’t changed all that much for a long time is the type of strategies that enable players to rise to dominance. If a player from the present were to look at the meta from the Mesozoic era, they’d see most of the dominant builds in the meta putting their points primarily into things like large size, thick skin, powerful bites, sharp claws, and other abilities that are all still very much a part of the meta today. There have only been a handful of cases in Outside’s history where an entire combat strategy has gone from being considered top-tier to completely fading from the meta, and probably the most notable of these is the strategy of hunting using sabre-teeth. Sabre-toothed carnivores once dominated a wide variety of land servers, yet not a single one managed to remain viable into the present day. Why were sabre-toothed predators once so successful, and why are they no longer part of the meta? To answer that question, today I’m going to look at the development of the various sabre-toothed builds throughout the game’s history, and examine their rises and falls.

Part 1, The Beginning: Gorgonopsians

While the sabre-toothed build type is today primarily associated with carnivorous mammals, the earliest examples of the archetype actually pre-date the introduction of mammals to the game altogether. The gorgonopsians were a group of therapsids – the predecessors to mammals – that first appeared in the Early to Middle Permian, somewhere from 270 to 280 million years ago. Early gorgonopsians were fairly small, but they would go on to become some of the largest predators of the Permian, with some reaching proportions similar to modern-day bears.

Before going further, I should take the time to once again remind you that Outside’s processes for keeping track of past player activity are notoriously unreliable, and so any analysis of what players were doing in past expansions is necessarily going to be largely speculative. With that out of the way, let’s take a look at what the best available evidence suggests about the rise and fall of the gorgonopsians.

Gorgonopsians became the dominant land predators around 260 mya, following the extinction of another group of large therapsids called the dinocephalians. Their ability to do this was partly thanks to having several mobility bonuses which, while commonplace now, were unusual at the time. Unlike most early therapsid builds, gorgonopsians walked with their soles partly on the ground and with most of the weight on the outer digits, an ability combo called [Semi-Plantigrady+Ectaxony]. This allowed them to walk with a speed and agility that, while it wouldn’t be anything special today, was great by the standards of the Permian land meta.

However, what really made gorgonopsians stand out in the Permian meta was their teeth. For one thing, they had serrated incisors. While there were other synapsids with tooth serrations, the serrations along the incisors of gorgonopsians were composed of a unique arrangement of dentine, enamel and interenamel folds, which formed a cutting blade more specialised than any other synapsid could match. The kind of complex flesh-cutting adaptations that gorgonopsians had would not be seen again until the evolution of theropod dinosaurs in the Mesozoic era. But more relevantly for the purposes of this post, the gorgonopsians were the first faction in the history of the game to unlock sabre teeth. As they were the first to use this tactic, the way they used it was somewhat primitive compared to what would come later. While sabre-teeth in later expansions were generally used by players who wanted to attack prey larger than themselves, most gorgonopsians could not open their mouths wide enough to pull this off and were generally specialised for hunting smaller prey. Also, while later sabre-toothed predators would carefully target the weak points of their prey for critical hits, the gorgonopsians’ reptile-like jaws were too imprecise to allow for this. Instead, they used a “puncture-and-pull” feeding strategy, where they would first startle their prey with a powerful bite and then drag their teeth back through the flesh and bone of the victim; they used their sabres in order to inflict more severe wounds while doing this.

Although gorgonopsians developed larger builds following the demise of the dinocephalians, the smaller variants did not go away. Instead, the smaller and larger gorgonopsians were able to coexist, thanks to a strategy called niche partitioning. This strategy is when two similar builds in the same environment avoid competing with each other by speccing into different roles. In this case, the smaller gorgonopsians specialised for hunting smaller prey that could be swallowed whole, functioning somewhat like the Permian equivalent of present-day foxes and coyotes, while the larger gorgonopsians targeted the medium-sized herbivores of the period.

For the most part, gorgonopsians never quite used their sabre-teeth to their fullest potential. As noted above, their methods of prey capture remained largely analogous to those of theropod dinosaurs and other non-sabre-toothed predatory reptiles. However, towards the end of the Permian, some gorgonopsian builds were beginning to experiment with using its sabres in a more careful and delicate manner. A build called the Smilesaurus ferox, which appeared around 259 million years ago, had the proportionally largest sabres of any gorgonopsian. Unlike most gorgonopsians, Smilesaurus did not have any dorsal thickening of the skull, and wouldn’t have been able to withstand biting down on hard bones as well as other gorgonopsians could have. This suggests that unlike them, the Smilesaurus actually was using its sabres as slashing weapons to selectively attack weak areas. Another Late Permian gorgonopsian, called Inostrancevia, also had similar adaptations, and some have argued that these were technically the only two true sabre-toothed predators of the Permian era, with the other gorgonopsians’ “sabre” teeth really just being large canines.

If the Smilesaurus and Inostrancevia had been allowed to persist a little longer, it might well have led to further innovations in the sabre-tooth meta. But it was not to be. Around 252 million years ago, the devs released the Permian-Triassic balance patch, the harshest balance patch that the game has seen since the introduction of complex animal life. More than 80% of available builds got banned, including the entire gorgonopsian faction. This put an end to any attempts at sabre-toothed builds for the next hundred million years or so.

Part 2: The thylacosmilids

In order to spec into sabre-teeth, you first need to spec into canine teeth, which are a trait exclusive to mammals and other synapsids. Consequently, the sabre-tooth trait is off-limits to reptiles, and so was largely absent from the meta during the reptile-dominated Mesozoic era. The only known sabre-toothed build of the Mesozoic period was a small mammal from the Late Cretaceous called Lotheridium, but this creature is known only from a single game log that doesn’t show anything except the skull, so it would be almost impossible to say anything with confidence about how it operated. The next group of sabre-toothed builds to achieve any notable success would not appear until the Cenozoic, with the emergence of the thylacosmilids.

Thylacosmilids were a subclass of a now-banned group of mammals called the sparassodonts, which were related to marsupials and are often confused with them. Sparassodonts were a group of carnivorous mammals that emerged in South America during the Paleocene and, along with the terror birds, quickly became the top predators of the continent. The sabre-toothed sparassodonts known as thylacosmilids branched off from the other sparassodonts around 21 million years ago, during the early Miocene expansion.

Thylacosmilids lasted a while and are known to have diversified into a number of subclasses, of which the largest and most famous was a jaguar-sized build called Thylacosmilus. Much like the placental sabre-tooths that would evolve later, Thylacosmilus specced into an exceptionally wide gape and robust, powerful forelimbs along with their elongated canines. However, this is about where the similarities end. Unlike most sabre-toothed predators, Thylacosmilus’s sabre-canines were triangular in shape, which meant they looked and functioned more like claws than the flat blades used by other sabre-tooths. This made them weaker and not well-suited for stabbing prey, but good for pulling flesh back to open carcasses. They also lacked several other traits typically seen in sabre-toothed predators; unlike cats, they did not have long legs, flexible backs, or retractable claws, which meant that they couldn’t easily pounce onto or hold onto large prey animals. Their incisors were also shrunken to the point of functional nonexistence, making it difficult for them to get meat off of bones. Dataminers still haven’t figured out why exactly the Thylacosmilus specced into such an unorthodox set of traits, but they seem to suggest a body plan specialised for opening carcasses and eating the soft internal organs, avoiding the hard bits. Some data miners have even suggested that it might have been an obligate scavenger and not a hunter at all, although this is unlikely, as soaring flight is generally thought to be a requirement for any large obligate-scavenger build to be successful.

In any event, thylacosmilids disappeared from the meta during the Late Pliocene, around 3 million years ago. It used to be widely believed that this was due to competition from sabre-toothed cats, but this has been disproven, as cats didn’t actually enter the South America server until much later. The real reasons for the disappearance of the thylacosmilids, like so many other things about them, remain a mystery.

Part 3: The sabre-toothed cats

By far the most iconic instances of sabre-teeth have occurred among the placental mammals. While the earliest attempts at sabre-toothed placental mammal builds came from the now-banned oxyaenid faction, with the Machaeroides build of the Eocene, the majority of placental sabre-tooths have come from the feliform branch of the carnivoran faction.

There have been at least two separate instances of feliform carnivorans speccing into sabre-teeth. The first were the nimravids, which appeared in the middle of the Eocene about 40 million years ago, and became major predators in the Oligocene. They disappeared in the Miocene, around 9 million years ago. The other, and more famous of the two, were the sabre-toothed cats. For the sake of brevity, I’m going to avoid going into detail about the nimravids here, and focus only on the cats. Although both guilds developed their sabre-teeth independently, they were very nearly copies of each other in terms of appearance and playstyle, so most of what I say about the cats will apply to the nimravids anyway.

Sabre-toothed cats first appeared in Africa in the early Miocene. By this point, cats as a group had been around for around 10 million years, but they had so far remained relatively small and had yet to develop into the dominant forms that they take on today. In fan art, sabre-toothed cats tend to be shown taking down gigantic prey, far larger than what modern cats are capable of, and it’s particularly common to show them hunting the legendary woolly mammoths. However, their actual playstyle was quite a bit different. In reality, sabre-teeth are actually pretty bad tools for biting into anything thicker than about 10 cm in radius, so taking on gigantic prey targets was largely off the table for the sabre-toothed cats. Instead, the primary benefit of sabre-teeth was that they allowed for more efficient killing of medium-sized targets, as they could penetrate deeper into prey than regular teeth could and more easily reach major blood vessels. You might think that sabre-toothed cats would have had particularly strong bites, but they were actually relatively weak in this regard compared to other large carnivorans. This meant they had to be a lot more careful with their technique than modern-day cats; their jaws were too weak to withstand biting into a struggling large herbivore the way lions and tigers do regularly, so they had to make sure their prey went down on the first hit. In order to facilitate this, they had to switch up their style of attacks a little from the way cats had previously done it. Most cats, and most carnivorans in general, use the jaw adductor muscles to bite into their prey. Sabre-toothed cats started off doing this, but as they evolved over time, they shifted away from this method and instead started using their large, powerful neck muscles as their primary means of generating force. Big cats today do this to an extent as well, but it was much more developed in the sabre-tooths. After knocking down a prey animal with a pounce, they would drive their sabres deep into it with a forceful downward thrust of the head, killing them rapidly.

Sabre-toothed cats faced a lot of competition, and their playstyle was pretty risky. Again, they weren’t set up to bite into struggling prey, so their games could get seriously messed up if they took on a target they couldn’t easily restrain – game logs show they broke their teeth about three times more often than living cats. Unlike the gorgonopsians, sabre-toothed cats had no way of regenerating broken teeth, so this was basically a death sentence for them. But the risks were more than outweighed by the rewards. Sabre-toothed cats were the first cat builds to successfully attain the status of apex predators. They quickly spread around the map, and were among the most dominant predators in the game for nearly 16 million years.

Sabre-toothed cats diversified into a number of varieties over the course of their nearly 16-million-year reign, but the one that made them legendary was actually the last one they came out with: the sabre-toothed tiger, or Smilodon. Despite the name, this build wasn’t particularly closely related to the tiger, or at least no more so than it was to any other living cat. It probably didn’t bear much physical resemblance to a tiger either – there’s some dispute as to just what it looked like, but the prevailing theories are that it either had spots like a leopard or a plain coat like a lion. However, it was similar in size to the tiger, and sometimes grew even larger. Sabre-toothed tigers first appeared in North America around 2.5 million years ago, where they quickly became one of the dominant predators, replacing the previously dominant sabre-toothed cat, Megantereon, in the process. Their main competition for the title of North America’s top predator was the other iconic carnivore of the period, the dire wolf. To minimise competition with the wolves, sabre-toothed tigers generally focused on hunting forest-dwelling prey such as deer and tapirs, leaving dire wolves to hunt down the large herbivores of the American grasslands. Around 700,000 years ago, sabre-toothed tigers crossed into the South America server, where they became just as dominant as they had been in North America. They would continue to be an A-tier predator in the Americas – only held back from S tier by the aforementioned fragility of their main weapons – until around 10,000 years ago. That was when humans invaded and hunted many of the large mammals that the sabre-toothed tigers fed upon into extinction, causing the sabre-toothed tigers to die out as well.

The sabre-toothed tiger was the last of the sabre-toothed predators; no other build has specced into this trait since it went extinct. However, there’s a modern-day cat called the clouded leopard which has proportionally much longer canines than typical of cats, and some have suggested that these might one day develop into sabre-teeth. So if you’re interested in finding a way to bring sabre-toothed builds back into the meta, keep a close watch on these cats. But if I’m being honest, I don’t think this is a particularly good strategy to pursue. Again, while sabre-teeth can be very efficient when they work, they’re risky tools to use because they’re so prone to breakage. Sabre-toothed cats may have been the first to show that cat builds could be apex predators, but in my view, the more durable weaponry of present-day big cats makes them more overpowered than the sabre-tooths ever were. So in the end, I guess the biggest lesson to take away from the rises and falls of sabre-toothed predators is that just because a strategy has worked in the past doesn’t mean it’s perfect, and it’s important to always be on the lookout for ways to improve.

So that’s my analysis of the sabre-toothed carnivores. I hope you enjoyed it, and, if you’re interested in creating builds similar to the sabre-tooths in the present-day meta, I hope you find it helpful. Thanks for reading.

—---

List of main corrections made to the original:

1. In the original post, I said that gorgonopsians first appeared in the Middle Permian, around 265 million years ago. This is now outdated, as a gorgonopsian fossil was discovered in 2024 that is estimated to be somewhere between 270 and 280 million years old; the line has been updated to reflect this.
2. The original post said that semi-plantigrade animals walk with their feet flat on the ground, and that ectaxonic animals walk with most of the weight on the last digit. Both of these definitions are slightly off – walking with feet flat on the ground is actually the definition of full plantigrady, while semiplantigrade animals still walk with the heel partially or permanently elevated. As for the latter, what ectaxony actually means is that most of the weight is placed on the outer digits; it does not require most of the weight to be placed on the last digit specifically. Both definitions have been corrected.
3. The original post said that gorgonopsians were not warm-blooded. This is most likely false; more recent analyses of game logs from the Permian have found strong evidence that warm-bloodedness was probably already present in gorgonopsians, and may have been common among Permian synapsids generally. This claim has been removed.
4. The original post said that Lotheridium was known from the Early Cretaceous, rather than the Late Cretaceous; this has been corrected.
5. The original post misspelled the name of the earliest known sabre-toothed placental mammal as Machairoides. This has been changed here to the correct spelling, Machaeroides.
6. The original post listed nimravids, barbourofelids, and sabre-toothed cats as three separate taxa that evolved similar body plans independently. This is now outdated, as most scientists now consider barbourofelids to be a subfamily of nimravids. As such, I have updated the list to only include two distinct taxa, the nimravids and the sabre-toothed cats.

[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 third re-master in Batch I. At the bottom, I’ve provided a list of the main corrections made to the original; the original itself can be found here.]

In all of my previous posts about Outside, I’ve mostly focused on vertebrate and arthropod builds. This is pretty typical of guides like this, and it’s not hard to see why. These two groups emerged at the top of the meta almost immediately after they were introduced in the Cambrian, and they’ve remained the two most dominant factions ever since. Not only that, they’re also generally the most interesting groups; whereas most of the major factions in Outside have a very simple playstyle that all the members stick to pretty closely, vertebrates and arthropods each have a huge variety of builds that differ radically in build design, stat spread, ability kit and overall gameplay. However, when it comes to the ocean meta, there’s one guild in the mollusc faction that has been able to compete on a nearly even footing with the best of these top two factions for millions of years, and has single-handedly elevated molluscs from a complete joke to the third highest-ranked faction in the game. I’m referring of course to the cephalopods, the guild that includes the squid, octopus and nautilus, among others. This guild has some of the most bizarre, yet highly effective build designs out of all Outside’s high-tier characters. Seeing as this guild has recently started to attract a huge influx of new players, I thought it would be a good idea to make a guide explaining their unorthodox gameplay so that newcomers to the guild have an idea of what to expect. What stats and abilities have elevated cephalopods so far above the rest of the mollusc faction? And where do they rank on the tier list?

BASIC CEPHALOPOD BUILD ANALYSIS

Cephalopod guild history

Cephalopods are one of the game’s oldest guilds. They first appeared in the Cambrian expansion, when some mollusc players decided to drop feet from their build and spec into tentacles instead. These players also specced into buoyant shells, which meant they could actually swim instead of just crawling on the sea floor like their snail and slug cousins. The meta of Outside was in something of a state of anarchy at this point, and players were trying all kinds of bizarre new strategies to try and take control of the chaos. Most of the weirder strategies faded out of the meta sooner or later, but cephalopods proved effective enough to stick around for quite a while.

Unlike certain other ancient guilds I’ve covered, cephalopods have updated their strategies significantly since their introduction in order to remain relevant. Early cephalopods relied on shells for defence, and for a few expansions, cephalopod players spent most of their evolution points on improving their shells. This started to become a problem during the Triassic expansion, when a number of the top marine predators started investing in shell-crushing attacks. To counter this, some cephalopods during the Jurassic expansion decided to drop the shell from their specs entirely. Counter-intuitively, this actually made them better at defending themselves against predators, because they could swim away more quickly when attacked without their shells weighing them down. It was around this time that cephalopods would develop their current forms and playstyles, becoming the first octopuses and squid, which have remained among the highest-ranked ocean predators ever since. Still, octopuses and squid didn’t become the primary cephalopods immediately; shelled cephalopods would continue to co-exist with the new builds until the K-Pg balance patch. While most famous for nerfing the giant reptiles that dominated the Cretaceous meta, this patch also banned nearly all shelled cephalopods, leaving the shell-less variants as basically the only viable options for players who wanted to keep the cephalopod guild alive. What is it that’s allowed these groups to remain successful so long after the rest of the guild has disappeared? To find out, let’s now take a look at their stats and abilities.

Basic cephalopod stats and abilities

RNA editing

Before we can understand the cephalopods, it’s important first to understand the unique way that they execute their design specs.

As you probably know, the source code for all builds in Outside is stored in .DNA files. However, in order to run the source code for any build, the .DNA files must be converted into .RNA files; executing these .RNA files loads the proteins that carry out all the required functions. This process is not always completely reliable, though -- every now and then, the .RNA file is altered after conversion and the proteins end up not being what the source code instructed. This alteration is created by programs called ADARs. Why the devs included this feature in the game is unclear, but in a normal build, ADARs operate fairly rarely and don’t have much of an effect on gameplay. In humans, for example, only about 3% of the build design ever gets lost or altered in this process, and it’s mostly restricted to commenting out unnecessary code. But in most cephalopods, RNA editing is one of the primary means of adapting to environmental changes. Where a typical mammal has no more than a few hundred sites in their coding files at which ADARs are allowed to edit, a typical cephalopod has over eighty thousand such sites, mostly in files that code for the nervous system.

This technique was a carefully guarded guild secret among cephalopod mains for a long time and was only publicly exposed fairly recently, so we don’t really know why they did this or what effects it has. But it appears to play a role in helping them adapt to temperature changes, and is likely an important part of the reason for their success across such a wide range of oceanic biomes.

Intelligence

As far as stats go, cephalopods are probably best known for their intelligence. For the most part, investment into high intelligence is a strategy almost exclusively used by vertebrate players; even when an invertebrate build gets credited for its high intelligence, it usually has to come with the caveat that this is only relative to others in their guild, like in my post on cockroaches. Cephalopods are the one exception to this rule. Where most invertebrates have a small and simple nervous system consisting of no more than a million neurons or so at most, a typical cephalopod has over five hundred million neurons, on par with small mammals such as the rabbit and hyrax. Octopuses in particular are known for their excellent problem-solving abilities, as well as having some ability to use tools. In particular, they have been found carrying discarded coconut shells around with them as a kind of armour. Human players who’ve worked with octopuses in aquariums have even noted that the octopuses often seem aware of the difference between the aquarium and their natural environment in a way that fish and other marine invertebrates aren’t. Under-stimulated captive octopuses frequently manage to escape from captivity, and some anecdotal reports suggest that they may even carefully time their escape attempts so as to avoid being seen by their captors. This puts cephalopod intelligence at by far the highest among invertebrates, and ahead of most vertebrates as well.

Decentralized nervous system

It’s worth noting here that cephalopods have specced into the [Decentralized Nervous System] ability. This means that, unlike in mammals and other vertebrate builds, a cephalopod’s neurons are not entirely controlled by a single brain. Instead, most of them are in their arms, to the point that each arm can think and move on its own for a period of the time when severed from the body. This might seem like a pointless and counterproductive ability, since a severed arm can’t eat or mate on its own and so won’t live for long anyway. It also means that their awareness of their own movements is limited compared to that of so that they often struggle with tasks that require them to consistently keep track of where their own arms are (although recent research has shown that these limitations are not as strict as was long believed). However, it may have some benefit as a deterrent for predators, serving a function similar to the [Poisonous Skin] ability seen in some other animals. If you eat a cephalopod’s arms after severing them from the head, the arms might still fight back to avoid being swallowed, and if you’re not careful, they can get lodged in your throat and suffocate you from the inside.

Limitations

Now I don’t want to get too caught up in the hype here. Cephalopods still have a ways to go before they truly master intelligence-based gameplay. While being able to use tools is impressive, cephalopods only use a few fairly simple tool types and don’t display the same ability to innovate with a variety of tools in the same way as some high-intelligence amniote builds like the chimpanzee, crow or honey badger. Most cephalopods also do not have access to one of the best intelligence-based abilities in the game: social structure. So while their intelligence is the best among invertebrates, I don’t think they’re quite as impressive as even relatively modest vertebrate intelligence builds like the rat, let alone the really exceptional ones like the elephant and dolphin. I think the main reason why they get so much attention is because, with the obvious exception of cetacean mains, there aren’t very many players in the open ocean meta that invest into intelligence to any significant degree. The oceanic meta is dominated by fish and invertebrates, two groups that tend to use intelligence as dump stats. If cephalopods had to compete in a land biome dominated by mammals and birds, they would probably seem a lot less impressive. To be fair, though, some octopus mains have been investing more into sociality lately, creating sites where octopuses can gather to interact with one another in relatively complex ways. If octopuses continue more down this path, I could definitely see their stature rising in the meta to the point of being really overpowered.

Stealth

Chromatophores

Cephalopods’ stealth stats are the best of any guild in the history of the game. Part of this is because they’ve grouped their chromatophores -- the cells that create skin colour -- into a complex system of muscles and organs. By contracting and relaxing these muscles, they can change the colour of their skin at will, as well as its opacity and reflectivity. Besides letting them disguise themselves in nearly any environment, this has the side benefit of allowing cephalopods to unlock a unique combat move called [Passing Cloud]. Cephalopod players use this move to confuse and startle other players by creating waves of dark colouration across their bodies, which can be highly effective against low-intelligence builds like the crab.

Papillae

What makes cephalopods truly exceptional at disguising themselves is that they can not only change the colour of their skin, but also the shape and texture. They have small regions in their skin called [Papillae], where muscle fibers run in a pattern of concentric circles resembling a spider’s web. When these fibers contract, they pull the soft tissue of the papillae towards the centre, and because the tissue doesn’t compress easily, it ends up going upwards. By arranging the muscle fibers in different patterns, a cephalopod can turn its skin into all manner of three-dimensional shapes. This gives them an unparalleled ability to seamlessly blend into just about any environment, and, in some cases, to mimic the appearance of other animals for the purposes of luring in prey or scaring off predators.

Ink jet

In a combat situation, most cephalopods can buff their stealth even further by using the move [Ink Jet]. Cephalopods have a gland that produces black ink, which they store in a sac underneath the digestive gland. When confronted by a predator, cephalopods can squirt out a jet of this ink. This temporarily blocks their opponent’s vision and olfaction, allowing them to get away unseen. This is particularly impressive because it’s one of the few moves in the game that prevents detection via smell as well as sight.

Attacks

In addition to their remarkable intelligence and stealth, cephalopods also have fairly high ratings in attack and mobility. All cephalopod builds are predators, and since they often prey on crabs and other high-defence builds, they’ve had to invest a fair amount into attack power. While prehistoric cephalopods were once held back by their difficulty dealing with shell-crushing attacks, today cephalopods have gained enough points to spec into shell-crushing attacks of their own. First off, each of a cephalopod’s eight arms is covered in extremely strong suckers, allowing them to get a nearly unbreakable grip on their targets, and these are used to pull snails and other players out of their shells. If that fails, they can resort to their second line of attack. All cephalopods have sharp, hard beaks, which usually contain toothed tongues called radulas, and can often produce venomous saliva. If they can’t pull an animal out of its shell, they can puncture it with the beak, or use the radula like a drill to poke holes in the shell. Once they’ve got a large enough exposed area, they use their venomous bite to paralyze or kill the target.

Mobility

Jet propulsion

To optimize mobility, cephalopods have specced into a rare movement ability called [Jet Propulsion]. This ability allows them to push themselves in any direction by sucking water into their mantle and then ejecting it through a funnel in the direction opposite where they want to go. They can swim with their fins like other sea creatures too, but jet propulsion is faster.

Flexibility

However, where cephalopods really stand out is in their flexibility -- the highest in the entire game. Because cephalopods have limbs composed almost entirely of muscle, with no bones or other rigid tissues, they have an extraordinarily wide range of movement. Each of a cephalopod’s eight arms can bend, twist, elongate and shorten at any point along its length and in any direction, allowing for a staggeringly wide variety of arm deformations overall. Cephalopods are so flexible that even the largest octopuses can still compress themselves enough to fit through tiny holes, effectively limited only by the size of their beaks.

Weaknesses

Defence and HP

So by now you might be thinking all these abilities make octopuses and squid OP. However, they do have some important weaknesses that should be taken into account as well. First off, their high ratings in the four aforementioned areas are mitigated by their abysmal ratings in the two remaining base stats, defence and HP. Outside of their beaks, cephalopods tend not to have a lot of hard tissue, so their resistance to attacks is some of the worst in the entire game. If they somehow get caught by a larger predator, it’s generally game over. They are particularly vulnerable to ambush attacks, since basically the only way they can survive an attack from a larger predator without taking serious damage is if they see the attacker coming in time to hide or flee.

While most squid have basically no good defensive options if they get grabbed by a predator, many octopuses do have one: the special ability [Autotomy], which allows the player to sever one of their own arms in order to escape a predator’s grab. While this is better than nothing, relying on it as your primary line of defence has some pretty obvious drawbacks. For one thing, it’s only useful if your attacker grabs you by the arm, so you’re still screwed if you get grabbed by the head instead. Also, I probably shouldn’t have to point this out, but losing your arm is just generally not a good thing. Now to be fair, cephalopods have specced heavily into HP regeneration, so if they survive the attack, they’ll get a new arm that’s just as good as the old one within a few weeks. However, this takes time, and losing an appendage that helps you to swim while you’re under attack and need to swim away quickly is a pretty risky play.

Dolphins

There are many predators in the ocean servers that prey on octopuses and squid, exploiting their low defences, but possibly the most challenging for them to deal with is the dolphin. Not only do dolphins have even higher intelligence than cephalopods, and high enough HP that a live cephalopod’s attacks are unlikely to seriously damage them, but they also rely primarily on echolocation to find targets, which is one of the few detection methods that cephalopods have no defence against. Also, because dolphins have such high intelligence, they usually come prepared for the choking hazard posed by cephalopod arms and will make sure to neutralize a cephalopod before eating it so its arms don’t fight back.

Lifespan

Besides their low defensive stats, cephalopods have another, less obvious weakness: they’re held back by their inefficient life cycle.

When their game loads, many cephalopods have to spend the first part of their tutorial as plankton. Note here that, contrary to popular belief, “plankton” is not actually a specific build or build type. Rather, plankton is a general term for any build that moves around by drifting along ocean currents. Although the plankton playstyle is a very common strategy among small marine builds, almost all of these builds are extremely weak garbage-tiers that basically act as free XP for all manner of predators, and baby cephalopods are no exception. The plankton stage in these cephalopod builds usually lasts for a few weeks or so, and the vast majority of players get a Game Over while still in this stage, never getting to the point where they can use all their broken abilities. To compensate for this, some cephalopods may need to lay up to 500,000 eggs at a time to remain competitive. However, even if everything goes right and a cephalopod player survives long enough to reach full power, they still have the [Semelparity] weakness, which means they die within a short time after reproducing. As a result, cephalopods have pretty short lifespans, with their game times tending to last only around two or three years at most. While most fast-respawning invertebrates have similarly short lifespans, it’s particularly limiting for cephalopods because it means their high intelligence isn’t nearly as useful as it could be. Ordinarily, the members of a class that spec the most into intelligence will tend to also invest more than usual into a long lifespan, so that they can learn as many tactics as possible and then teach them to the next generation. If cephalopods specced into longer lifespans, at least long enough to protect their vulnerable offspring during the tutorial, I think they could become a truly oppressive force in the meta.

CEPHALOPOD TIER RANKINGS

D Tier: Nautilus

Now I’ve been lumping all cephalopods together for most of this post, and they are all fairly similar for the most part, but there are some important differences I should also acknowledge. In addition to the squid and octopus, there are also a number of other, lesser-known cephalopod builds in the current meta, of which the most unorthodox is the nautilus.

The nautilus is basically a throwback build, a Mesozoic shelled cephalopod that for some reason was exempted from the end-Cretaceous ban on such designs and has remained playable up to the current expansion. For the hundreds of millions of years they’ve been around, nautilus mains have refused to change their playstyle to take advantage of all the powerful abilities available to cephalopods. While they do still have sharp beaks, they have no suckers on their arms, no camouflage, no ink, no venom, and no advanced problem-solving abilities. Instead, they’ve continued to sink almost all their evolution points into defensive shells, making them essentially swimming snails. Just like snails, they basically have no options for dealing with any predators powerful enough or persistent enough to break through their shell, and this overspecialization makes them the only low-tier cephalopod in the current meta. I rate them D tier.

A Tier: Octopuses and squid

The two more well-known cephalopod guilds, the octopuses and squid, are mostly pretty similar, and almost everything I said about cephalopods above applies to both. However, there are some important distinctions. Firstly, while both have eight arms, squid have also specced into two extra tentacles for assistance with gripping prey. Second, squid tend to get around by swimming and do almost all of their hunting in the open ocean. Octopuses, while capable swimmers, prefer to stick to crawling where possible and hunt mostly prey on the sea floor. Octopuses can crawl on land, too, although this is risky since they can’t survive out of the water for long. Also, many squid can glow in the dark, while only a very small minority of octopuses can. I think octopuses rank slightly higher on the tier list due to their superior movement versatility, and since they’re not quite as bad at escaping grabs, but both are great builds. I would rate both octopuses and squid near the top of A tier.

Specific build recommendations

Best octopuses

Before I finish off, I’d like to take a look briefly at the variety of the over 800 cephalopod builds in the current meta. While I’m not going to do a full tier list for them, I would like to briefly recommend a few that I think stand out. For octopus players, I’ll start with the blue-ringed octopus, which is the octopus that has put the most points into venom. Most octopuses only have enough venom to paralyze or kill lightweight prey, but the blue-ringed octopus has a neurotoxin powerful enough to one-shot animals up to the size of full-grown humans. The other octopus that I want to recommend is the mimic octopus, the build that has elevated the octopus’s skill for confusing other players to an art form. While many players will try to scare off predators by mimicking another, more dangerous build, mimic octopuses are unique in that they can learn to imitate a wide variety of other builds. While they most commonly mimic flatfish, they can also mimic everything from lionfish and sea snakes to sponges and jellyfish, and they can carefully select which animal they mimic based on what other animal they’re trying to bait or scare off.

Best squid

For squid players, my top recommendations would be the giant, colossal and flying squid. The giant and colossal squid are the two largest invertebrates in the entire game, with the largest individuals of the latter possibly reaching sizes of over half a ton. Ordinarily, I’d say that becoming huge is a bad idea when playing a stealth build, but colossal and giant squid play in the pitch-black deep sea, so this doesn’t really matter. Because of their size, giant and colossal squid are avoided by almost all predators when full-grown, except for the sperm whale. As an added bonus, they have the largest eyes in the entire game, for maximum ability to see in darkness. The colossal squid is the larger of the two builds, but it’s only available on the Antarctica server, while the giant squid can be accessed in almost any deep-sea biome. Be aware that despite their apparent similarities, these two builds have fairly different playstyles; giant squid actively hunt for kills, where colossal squid basically just float around and grab onto any fish that comes within their reach. The other squid build that I would recommend is the flying squid, which has the ability to jump out of the water and glide through air, similar to a flying fish. This is a risky move, since it leaves you open to attack by birds with no possible means of evasion, but it is faster and more energy-efficient than swimming over long distances. The biggest and best flying squid build is the Humboldt squid, which is also the only cephalopod that hunts in packs. I’d consider the Humboldt squid the best cephalopod build in the current game, and it’s no surprise that more and more players across the North America server have been abandoning their previous mains to play as one.

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

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List of main corrections made to the original:

1. In the original version of this post, I said that mammals typically have only a few hundred “.RNA files” which can be edited by ADARs, while cephalopods commonly have over 80,000. This was misleading on two counts. Firstly, the numbers I cited were actually counting the sites that ADARs edit; this is not the same as the total number of transcripts they can edit, as there can be more than one editing site on the same transcript. Secondly, these numbers are specifically based on the number of editing sites in coding regions of the genome, while there are vastly more editing sites in noncoding regions. This has been rewritten in the remastered version to make things clearer.
2. The original post said that having about 500 million neurons puts an octopus’s neuron count “on par with a small dog”. Actually, this is only on par with the amount of neurons in a dog’s cerebral cortex – a dog’s entire nervous system contains over 2 billion neurons, far more than that of an octopus. In the remaster, this has been changed to “on par with small mammals such as the rabbit and hyrax”.
3. The original post mentioned crocodiles as an example of a vertebrate that I thought was likely more intelligent than an octopus. In hindsight, I don’t think I stand by this claim; my original assessment of the intelligence of crocodilians was based on some research that has since been shown to be pretty shaky in its conclusions. I’ve removed them from the list in the remastered version.
4. The original post said that cephalopods had no inherent awareness of the positions of their own limbs, and that they needed to be constantly looking at their arms in order to perform complex tasks. This claim of absolute inability has been disproven by recent research, which has shown that octopuses can learn at least some tasks requiring complex arm movements even without visual information on their arms’ positions. I’ve revised the language in this section to clarify that their awareness of their arms’ positions is limited compared to vertebrates, but not absent entirely.
5. The original post said that octopuses had been found to be capable of more than sixteen-and-a-half thousand types of arm deformation. This was a mistake; I had garbled the results of a study which observed over sixteen-and-a-half thousand examples of octopuses deforming their arms, not sixteen-and-a-half thousand distinct types. In the remaster, I’ve changed this to just say that the variety of arm deformations they’re capable of is “staggeringly wide”, without giving a precise number.
6. The original post said that cephalopods other than the nautilus have no hard tissue outside of their beaks. This was an exaggeration, as squid and cuttlefish do have tough internal supporting structures called the gladius and cuttlebone respectively. This has been amended to say that cephalopods tend “not to have a lot of” hard tissue.
7. The original post said that cephalopods in the earliest stages of life are planktonic and drift along ocean currents. This is not universally true; there are some cephalopod species where hatchlings are benthic, meaning they live close to the sea floor. This line has been changed to say that “many cephalopods” are planktonic in the early stages.
8. In the original post, I described octopuses, squid, and nautilus as being the three main types of cephalopod. This ignored the cuttlefish and vampire squid, the latter of which is not a squid despite its name. Adding a proper explanation of what these are would probably have required more of a straight-up new post than just a remaster, but I’ve at least added a brief comment acknowledging that other types of cephalopod do exist.
9. The original post said that giant and colossal squids both weigh over half a ton. This is plausibly true for the largest colossal squids, but it is not true for giant squids; the largest credibly-documented giant squid specimens weighed around 318 kg at most, with more typical specimens ranging from around 200 to 280 kg. This has been corrected.

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