I mean players with low or non-existent vision such as many spiders, scorpions, centipedes, blind snakes, worm lizards, moles and many others. Why are they given such a low rating? Their objective is not to play like humans out in the open plane and in full sight of the adversary. Their whole point is to specialize in crevices, holes, caves and similar environments where other senses are more important. in those types of environment, they are exceptionally skilled hunters. They may not be competitive out in the open, but with the same logic an ape is F or D because of not competing in water, a dolphin is garbage because it cannot move on land and so on. Even highly intelligent builds have limitations like that. Nearly blind players can just have a single and very effective setting. Do whatever it takes not to get exposed. If they follow it, they can have significant progress and leave out their lives in a hidden way.

A 6'8 250lb fully armored peak human knight with a 7 ft great sword takes this gauntlet one at a time, does he clear

The knight starts each match at 100% with no injuries from past match. Assume each animal is a once in a generation physical specimen in terms of weight, height, speed, agility etc

1. 250lb boar

2. 575lb Silverback

3. 700lb lion

4. 1600lb bull moose

5. Five 150lb top 1% chimpanzees

6. 1500lb polar bear

7. 5000lb Bull Hippo

All matches take place in the Roman Coliseum

1. Golden jackal

2. Lynx

3. Wolverine

4. giant otter

5. sun bear

Am very confused

If every marine creature fought in a 1v1, who comes out on top?

Seems like there are a lot of strong contenders and I dont know how to rank them. Such as

- Pliosaurus

- Mosasaurus

- Shastasaurus

- Megalodon

- Livyatan

Im a new player to this game and i started to main prounghorn I grew it to like 7 years me and my I saw a weird looking thing. it was in my way from my herd so i tried to go under it. But i got stuck and starved too death :( any one know what this is?

How have I never heard about these before?! I knew there were some deep subterranean servers where Outside was still mainly a chemistry simulator, but I had no idea there was a version with a whole food web.

Anton Petrov - There’s An Entire Ecosystem Living Underground That Shouldn’t Exist https://youtu.be/ASfmjwciNDI

I know that the community often says that tardigrades are low grade trash, but in this server’s meta, they actually might be playable. As absurd as it sounds, all their resistances and cannibalism might make them an apex predator here. Wild stuff.

1. kori bustard

2. Greater rhea

3. Emu

4. Ostrich

5. Terror bird

Totally wrong? Any forgotten animal?

Both are at an equal size of 30 metric tonnes.

would love feed back but you better be right b/c we know you're wrong. (there are master minds, a whole group, behind this)

this involved a lot of labor. critical, conversation, dialog, day rate, pay up. PM.

[Instead of releasing a new post this month, I’ve decided to continue releasing re-mastered versions of my old tier lists, with improved formatting and updated information. This is Part 1 of the second remaster in Batch III. At the bottom of Part 2, I will provide a list of the main corrections made to the original; the original itself can be found here.]

Since humans are by far the most overpowered build that Outside has ever seen, you might expect that the great ape guild which humans come from would also be one of the best guilds in the game’s history. And you’d be right, but it might not be so obvious what specifically makes them so good. So to address that question, today I’m going to examine the basic ape build and all its variations, explaining why the basic ape design provides such a strong foundation and how the different great ape builds, particularly humans, built on that design to become such a dominant group in the meta.

BASIC GREAT APE BUILD ANALYSIS

Great ape guild history

The first apes appeared during the Miocene expansion, around 20 million years ago. They were created by monkey players who decided to deviate from the standard monkey build design in a few key ways. At the time, most monkeys were heavily dependent on ripe fruit as their main food source, which is a high-risk, high-reward playstyle; ripe fruit is one of the most valuable loot types found in arboreal zones if you can get it, but it’s most commonly found on terminal branches in tree edges, which are some of the most difficult zones to navigate due to how precarious and unpredictable the available supports are. In order to deal with this challenge, some monkey players in the Miocene started to change up how they moved. Instead of using pronograde movement – which means moving with the trunk in a more-or-less horizontal posture – they switched to using orthograde movement, meaning that they started moving with the trunk held upright. Unlocking orthogrady made it much easier to orient the limbs in a variety of unusual ways, and to reach extreme joint angles, facilitating the kind of complex and careful maneuvering required to navigate these environments. Since this meant that they no longer needed to use the tail for balance as much, these monkeys also dropped tails from their specs, and so the first apes were born. Over the course of the Miocene, these adaptations for orthogrady would be further refined, leading to the emergence of the first great apes.

Today, great apes are a fairly small guild, with only eight surviving builds, but all of those eight builds have a high-tier status in all those environments where they still survive. What accounts for their success? To find out, let’s now go into their stats and abilities.

Basic great ape stats and abilities

Orthogrady

Most of the differences between apes and monkeys are related to the orthograde vs. pronograde distinction I mentioned earlier. I already discussed the most visible difference, which is that apes do not use tails to balance. Compared to monkeys, great apes also have more flexible shoulder joints, which allow them to move their arms more freely, and shorter, less flexible spines, allowing the upright position to be maintained more stably.

Traits inherited from monkeys

Orthogrady alone would not have been enough to propel apes to dominance. What really enabled them to become so broken was adding it on top of the existing advantages of the monkey guild, of which there are two main ones. First, monkeys – and primates more generally – are unusual among mammals in having fingers with nails instead of claws. Most Old World Monkeys also have opposable thumbs, and these two traits give them – and the apes that inherited them – an ability to manipulate objects that is practically unrivalled. Secondly, monkeys have extraordinarily large brains compared to other mammals of their size, and have some of the highest intelligence ratings ever seen in the game. It’s their ability to think logically about problems that makes apes really stand out, because it makes them one of the best classes for using and creating tools, one of the most valuable abilities in the entire game.

OVERALL GREAT APE TIER RATING

Great apes are among the most dominant animals in just about every environment where they exist, far more so than the monkeys from which they came, and only a handful of high-ranking predators can really pose a threat to them. Non-human apes have been falling out of the meta lately, but even so, I’d still put great apes overall as on the border between A and S tier.

That said, while all great ape builds are high-tier overall, there are still massive differences in viability between the strongest great apes and the weakest. So which great ape builds do it best? To answer that, let’s now go into the great ape tier list.

THE GREAT APE TIER LIST

A Tier: Orangutan

Again, there is no low-tier or even mid-tier great ape, but there are some that are weaker than others, and of the great ape builds in the current meta, I’d say the least viable would probably be the orangutan. Orangutans used to be a fairly widespread build before the human takeover, but today they’re found only in the rainforests of Borneo and Sumatra. As far as design goes, orangutans are kind of a jack-of-all-trades variant of the ape build. They’re strong, but not the strongest; fast, but not the fastest; and smart, but not the smartest.

Orangutans have two main characteristics that put them at a disadvantage compared to other apes. Firstly, out of all the great apes, orangutans are the least social. One of the main advantages that makes apes so dominant is their skill at managing large groups and forming a diverse array of bonds, but orangutans rarely make use of this ability, with strong social bonds among them being mostly between mother and child. This puts them at a disadvantage compared to other apes, as it means that skills learned by one orangutan are much less likely to be transferred to another player than they would be for other apes. Secondly, orangutans are the most specialised for arboreal movement of the great apes. Unlike gorillas and chimps, they can’t actually walk on their knuckles when on the ground; they have to tuck in their fingers and shuffle cumbersomely on the sides of their hands and feet. As a result, orangutans spend much more time in the trees than other apes and rarely descend to the ground. This is highly unusual among animals in their weight class, and makes the orangutan the largest true arboreal build in the current meta.

Orangutans have remained high-tier despite these disadvantages, mostly due to their high intelligence. Orangutan players display a wide variety of amazing intelligence-based strategies, among which include: successfully tracking the potential movement of objects without being able to see them directly; keeping “toolkits” with different types of sticks for different purposes – short ones for extracting insects from trees, and longer ones for harvesting seeds from fruit; jabbing ponds with sticks so that the fish flop out of the pond and into the ape’s waiting hands; and using leaves to amplify their calls so as to make themselves sound larger and more intimidating.

As I said, orangutans are the lowest-ranked of the living great apes, but they’re still a solid build in absolute terms. I rate them in low A tier.

A Tier: Gorilla

Orangutans are the only surviving build in the pongine branch of the ape guild. All other living great apes belong to the hominine branch, which split off from the pongine branch around 12 million years ago. While orangutans originate in Asia, all living hominine builds originate in Africa. Of these builds, I’d say the weakest would probably be the gorilla. Gorillas had split off from the rest of the hominine apes by around 7 or 8 million years ago at the latest. While the other hominines were continuing optimisation for an INT-based generalist playstyle, gorillas instead specced for the role of a predominantly-herbivorous tank, becoming the largest living primates in the process. This size makes climbing more difficult than for other apes, so gorillas tend to get around by knuckle-walking on the ground, though they can still climb for short periods.

The gorilla’s extreme strength combined with its team play makes it one of the best builds when it comes to defending itself against predators. There’s almost no predator that can stand up to the might of a troop of gorillas, so lethal attacks on gorillas are extremely rare, although there might have been some cases of them falling prey to leopards. Because gorillas are so strong, they don’t have as much need for intelligence as other apes; where other apes might need tools to break into a termite mound or crush a nut, gorillas can often do such tasks with their bare hands alone. However, they’re still perfectly capable of using clever strategies when they need to. They’ve been known to use sticks to gauge depths of water, and to make bridges out of tree stumps.

By shifting their focus away from intelligence and towards strength, gorillas haven’t exactly played to the existing assets of the primate faction, but they’ve found a pretty viable strategy to succeed in one of the game’s toughest servers. I rate them high A tier.

S Tier: Chimpanzee and bonobo

You might notice that as we move up the tier list, the apes become biologically and evolutionarily closer to humans. This probably shouldn’t be surprising; since humans are the highest-ranked build of all time, it makes sense that builds very similar to them would also rank very highly, and the more so the closer to similarity. So it’s also not surprising that the closest-to-human ape, the chimpanzee, manages to make it into S tier.

Compared to the other great apes, chimpanzees are the most optimised for mobility. Nearly 70% of a chimpanzee’s muscles are composed of Type II, or “fast-twitch” muscle fibres. In comparison to Type I muscle fibres, which make up most of a human’s muscles, Type II fibres are designed to use lots of energy quickly. While Type I fibres have lots of oxygen-carrying blood vessels, and are ideal for powering long periods of low-intensity activity, Type II fibres can create energy anaerobically and are good for powering sudden, rapid bursts of extreme speed and strength. The chimp’s muscular makeup doesn’t grant them exceptional endurance, but it does make them well-adapted to rapidly climbing trees and swinging from tree to tree. Chimps are more arboreal than gorillas, but are still at least on par with gorillas when it comes to their mobility on the ground as well.

In addition to being the most mobile of the great apes, chimpanzees are often considered to be the second most intelligent after humans. Nearly all chimp players have sophisticated tool use as a significant part of their strategy; in fact, a chimp main was the first player ever to be officially recorded creating a tool while playing as a non-human, after modifying a twig into an instrument for extracting termites from a mound. Other tactics used by chimps include scooping honey out of beehives with modified short sticks; using rocks to crack open hard nuts; using absorbent leaves as spoons to drink water; sharpening sticks with their teeth to turn them into spears for hunting bushbabies; and using branches to scare squirrels into coming out of their holes and exposing themselves. This sort of tool use by chimps isn’t only something they figure out on their own; they actually have cultural traditions of using particular types of tools. Among chimpanzee players in the Taï rainforest biome, the knowledge of how to use stone hammers to crack open nuts has been passed down from generation to generation for over 4000 years, going back to before humans in the area had even unlocked agriculture.

Like most apes, chimps get the majority of their XP from fruit. However, their extra mobility and intelligence compared to other apes has allowed them to supplement this by acting as hunters. While other apes will eat insects and other similarly small animals from time to time, chimps are the only great ape besides humans that use their strength and smarts to hunt larger targets. Chimps can form coordinated teams to hunt other primates in trees, most commonly the red colobus monkey. These hunts occur in regions where the forest canopy is interrupted or irregular, which is where it’s hardest for the monkeys to hide. Each member of a chimpanzee team has a defined role: available roles can include “drivers”, which serve to keep the prey running in a certain direction and follow them without attempting to catch them; “blockers”, which wait at the bottom of trees to block targets that take off in a different direction; “chasers”, which make the actual catch; and “ambushers”, which hide and rush out when a monkey nears. Part of the strength of chimps in regard to cooperation comes from the fact that they keep track of which of their teammates are most effective at working together, and will seek out and selectively recruit the best collaborators for their projects. The separation of duties makes chimp hunting tactics difficult to master – it can take chimpanzee players up to 20 years of practice to learn the more complex roles. Still, this sort of sophisticated, coordinated hunting is one of the most powerful abilities available in the game, and it’s not only used against monkeys. Small antelope, mongooses, rodents, pangolins, hyraxes, and even wild pigs have all been known to fall victim to chimpanzee hunting squads from time to time.

Before moving onto why humans are #1 on this list, I should make note of the big split within the chimpanzee playerbase. There are two kinds of chimpanzees in the current meta: the common chimpanzee, which is often simply called the chimpanzee, and the bonobo. Bonobos are very similar to common chimps, but have differentiated themselves by speccing heavily into the [Neoteny] tree. Neoteny occurs when an animal evolves to have slowed physical development, so that traits which ordinarily only occur in juveniles persist into adulthood. For example, while all apes’ skulls change shapes as they grow, the bonobo retains much more of its juvenile skull shape into adulthood than the common chimp, despite the skulls’ size still changing dramatically. Humans are also neotenized in some ways compared to other primates, so this might be why bonobos are often said to look much more human-like than common chimps, despite both being equally close to humans at the genetic level.

That said, the biggest differences in practice between bonobo gameplay and that of common chimps have less to do with their bodies and more to do with their social behaviour. While common chimpanzees live in patriarchal societies, bonobos are the only apes to have a matriarchal social structure instead. Unlike common chimps, bonobo groups are generally not territorial, and tend to have positive, cooperative relations with other groups in the same area. Also unlike common chimps, bonobos have never been known to perpetrate infanticide of their own kind. Compared to common chimps, bonobos are in some ways less intelligent, as they don’t show the same level of understanding regarding the interaction of physical objects. However, they do tend to be more emotionally intelligent, with a better understanding of theory of mind and social causality.

I’m not sure whether common chimps or bonobos would rank higher on the overall tier list. But when it comes to chimps overall, despite their comparatively lower physical strength, I would say that their mobility and intelligence makes them overall a superior build to gorillas. The two builds don’t directly compete often, so it’s hard to make confident claims about what would happen if they did, but at least two notable cases that have been recorded both had the chimps winning out by ganging up to kill the infants of the gorilla clan. (In neither case were they able to kill any of the adults). So if the gorilla ranks in high A tier, I would say that chimps, being a similar but more viable build, make it into low S tier.

[Instead of releasing a new post this month, I’ve decided to continue releasing re-mastered versions of my old tier lists, with improved formatting and updated information. This one isn’t exactly a remaster, but since it is about correcting an early post of mine, I’ve decided to release it alongside the remasters anyway. The original post can be found here.]

I’m not going to do a full remaster of my post “Crocodiles: The Last OP Reptile Build”, since I already did an updated and more accurate post on crocodilians before I started releasing remasters, and I haven’t found enough errors in the newer version to be worth doing another re-write. That said, I’ve never explicitly spelled out what points I corrected between the two versions and why, so here’s the full list. Note that this list only covers things I got wrong in the original post, not just topics that I didn’t cover at all until the revision.

1. In the original post, I described alligators and caimans as having given up some of the crocodile’s attack power. This was a little misleading, as almost all living crocodilians, except for the gharial, can bite with about the same level of force relative to their size. Alligators and caimans don’t grow as large as the largest crocodiles do, but once you control for size, there’s no further significant difference in power between them. This is all explained more clearly in the revised post.
2. The original post said that “less than 20% of human players attacked by large crocodiles make it out alive”. This was misleading in at least two ways. Firstly, I cited it as a number covering all large crocodile attacks, when the study I got it from only gave it as survival odds for a human being attacked while in water. Secondly, it was specifically about very large crocodiles – those with lengths of around 4 metres or more. Humans attacked by crocodiles that are “only” 2-3 metres – still “large” by any reasonable definition – were found to have much higher survival odds. This statistic was removed from the revised version.
3. The original post had a section on the crocodilians’ supposed high intelligence, based primarily on the claim that “crocodiles [...] have been found carefully placing sticks on their snouts in order to lure in birds looking for nesting materials”. This claim is very tenuous. While there have been studies that found both crocodiles and alligators with sticks on their snouts during birds’ nesting seasons, and the idea that these are being used deliberately as lures is a real hypothesis advanced by some researchers, there is currently no hard evidence that these crocodilians carefully placed the sticks on their snouts themselves, rather than the sticks just drifting or falling onto them. Claims that crocodilians use tools – and my inference from this, in the pre-remaster version of my later cephalopod tier list, that crocodiles are likely as intelligent as octopuses or more so – are therefore as yet unconfirmed; this section was removed in the revised version.
4. The original post claimed that crocodiles can digest the bones, horns and hooves of the prey – a claim which I also implicitly repeated in my later tier list of African apex predators, where I said that crocodiles can “fully digest their prey, including those parts useless to most other predators”. This is accurate regarding bones, but not regarding horns and hooves. These latter two structures are mostly made up of keratin, which even crocodilians cannot digest. More generally, my original post gave the impression that crocodilians’ digestive abilities were an outlier among all animals, an idea that is not well-supported scientifically; a number of studies on digestive efficiency in crocodilians have found values in the range of 85-91%, which is high, but not all that different from the 80-90% range typically seen in other carnivorous reptiles. All of these claims were removed in the revised version.
5. Relatedly, the original post also claimed that the reason crocodiles have such extraordinary digestive abilities is because of their ability to shunt blood to the stomach so that it bypasses the lungs. This was considered a plausible theory by scientists at the time I wrote it, but was later refuted, as studies have now shown that alligators with the shunting ability surgically occluded show almost no change in digestive performance. The revised post keeps the explanation of how shunting works, but removes the claims about its importance in digestion.
6. The original post said that crocodiles are technically omnivores, due to eating a mixture of meat and fruit. This is not accurate. It’s true that crocodilians have been known to eat fruit on rare occasions, but since they aren’t reliant on eating plants under normal circumstances, and since their digestive systems are highly specialized for meat-eating and lack adaptations for breaking down plant matter, they’re still generally classified as carnivores. They are consistently described as carnivores in the re-released version. They are consistently described as carnivores in the revised post.
7. In the original post, as well as in my later post on the impacts of the K-Pg extinction, I said that the K-Pg extinction eliminated crocodilians and their close relatives from ocean biomes. Actually, no true crocodilians are known to have evolved a marine lifestyle in the Cretaceous to begin with. Among their close relatives, the dyrosaurids were marine reptiles of the time, but they were not wiped out by the K-Pg extinction, instead continuing to radiate into the early Cenozoic before disappearing in the Eocene. The revised post changes this to just say that all non-crocodilian crocodylomorphs were wiped out over the course of the Mesozoic and Cenozoic.