raingametm

[raingametm]

stupid dumbass creatures that make no sense my beloved

[raingametm]

rainworld slugs! :V I put way too much thought into this

other notes under cut cause I thought about it a lot

their skeleton isn’t normal bone, it’s actually a mix of normal and prismatic cartilage! this keeps their bones light and flexible while still giving them the ability to tightly grasp and bite things. they all have prismatic cartilage for their jaws except for spearmaster, which discourages them to eat using their mouth since it’s extremely time consuming and uncomfortable given that their diet otherwise isn’t intended to be small plant particles and plankton.

spearmasters spines/spears from its tail are also full of digestive enzymes. this won’t kill prey by itself, but once downed spearmaster can just chillax as the enzymes do their thing inside the body and the visceral mush is returned to spearmasters digestive system for processing.

all of them have some sort of internal shell in their mantle except for saint. Rivulets is vestigal and very thin to allow for more complex movement but they do still have it. In the evolutionary timeline of scug—>furred scug, at some point it became more efficient to develop thick, dense fur that could deal with the cold while simultaneously protecting them. saints pneumatostome is also almost entirely gone and is more just an unusually soft spot on their back.

I interpret artificer, gourmand, and watcher to be apart of a “future” generation of scugs far beyond survivor, hunter, and monk—though obviously not as far into the future as saint is. they developed cerata to mimic lizards, since a lot of organisms will think twice before messing with a lizard rather than a slugcat, which is (typically) much less deadly.

hunter, artificer, and spearmaster are all malnourished, which isn’t super noticeable in the way I drew them but I’d just like to point it out cause it’s important 2 me lol.

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Let's away

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The rapture

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List of things that sparked joy in my little Ancient culture enthusiast heart:

The moths in the Ancient Urban are essentially pigeons, including the fact some of them are tagged.

Finally a proper and canon confirmation that Ancients really did have pets, positive relationships with animals and weren't Only stuck in glass cubes on display like Moon implies once. It can also mean that they did research into animal behaviour, such as tracking migrating and such. From how biologists are in real life, we can assume they were even genuinely passionate & happy about these type of things.

All the pottery and plates in that workshop room,

A confirmation that they did have paper and used scrolls for writing stuff down,

alongside with the pearls that they, too, could perhaps freely read or one of those things on the shelf there might be a pearl reader, if it is more technologically based (CDs type information keeping)

I also wonder if those things there are books- with stone tablet pages or paper ones? digital things hidden in hardcovers?- or something else entirely. Do they maybe hold orders for earthenware?

The masks on the wall, they feel so real compared to the murals.

Are they of the same person or is it of the workers there or maybe a family? Some of them look similar to those in the murals.

While at the concept of family, they had creches, but it doesn't sound like it was an outright job in the sense that they seem to have been community-raised (I fuckin' knew it I can put down my tin hat now).

They had hard beds, similar to what used to be used in old china iirc, along with that pillow/headrest

This kinda thing. They were made out of porcelain to keep the head cool in the night, but I think some where out of wood too.

The bustling of the city.

The normalcy of people going about their day, talking, the vehicles zipping by (they had some kind of motor vehicles!!!!).

The architecture, in both the Ancient Urban and the Outer Rim (those roofs made the right side worth it to me, that's how much I love these bastards)

I find it very funny that what looks to me like a REALLY poor ass cable management seems like the height of decorative prowess to them. Also some insight into how the void ,,bath" actually looked like.

The toys... just the toys.

Alongside these dialogues

And the one about him remembering the halls he ran through- oh when I say that I adore the fact that this Echo is a kid stuck here, lonely and vulnerable with polite speech not plaguing it.

The original Echoes combined with the Iterators' distaste for the species as whole painted the Ancients as these heartless things lazer focused only on the Ascension, religion and rituals. There wasn't much space for thinking about them in a more human manner and I feel like most of the fandom did depict the Ancients only as the impression was given. Bunch of posh full of themselves suckups, uncaring much for one another or anything around them.

I get kinda annoyed when there's an insistance that some kind of sapient species has done only bad. With humans, too, I just about had it with the demonization, negativity and staggering blindness to the beauty and good we can and do create- in both fiction and reality. Same goes for these dumbasses.

Disko kid here begs to challenge that impression. He's lost and alone and kind of scared, stuck here not knowing how to move forward. He mourns the regularity and simplicity of his room, the nostalgia of shelves and toys, the golden sunrays sneaking in through the windows. He brings a certain humanity into the consideration of Ancients.

That maybe, only maybe.. they deserve to be mourned.

[raingametm]

[thinks about moons dialogue for the drainage system pearl again] [rams my head into a metal wall]

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i cannot be allowed near a rain world stream for one (1) reason

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“so peeping” as a slugcat descriptor enthralled me…

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I have a little theory and I want to see if it has any merit :>

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Speculative evolution of lizards evolving from neon signs

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Rivulet fandesign quirk I just kinda find funny

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^ iterator projection tutorial!! ^

this post follows on from this one made by @prismsoup, intended to cover my slightly more extended process (including post-processing)

step -1 : pre-requisites

this tutorial is designed around clip studio paint for PC because its what i work with. its probable that whatever other program / platform you're using has these features but under different names

i use a rainworld typography font for text. find it here (or do it yourself)

i use scanline textures as a part of this. find them here

step 0 : select a base image

maps, blueprints and diagrams are favourable due to lots of detail without it derailing into noise. get experimental though, my favourite one came out from a picture of a nebula, and another from a friends factorio screenshot

step 1 : binarise & flip

this command can be found under edit > tonal correction (D) > binarization. this forces every pixel in the image to be either black or white. adjust its sensitivity to your liking

step 2 : remove background

add in a black layer below (not just paper layer, as will become important later). wand select the background colour and delete it. if the remaining colour is black, CTRL+I to invert it to white

step 3 : add details

replace any text with rainworld font or simply remove it. add in blueprints or other complex decals (drawingdatabase is a decent source). during importing remember to binarise (after resizing). for "lower layer" elements such as contour lines create outlines for higher layers to retain clarity

step 4 : add multiply layer(s)

if you want to have multiple colours, put everything in the "higher" layer into a folder and set the top multiply to clipping above it

step 6 : post processing setup

copy all existing layers, create a new folder on top, and paste into that folder. right click the folder and "merge selected layers" set the resultant layer to add(glow). copy+paste and hide duplicate for now. from filters > blur apply a guassian blur with a strength of 130-170 (this creates the base bloom layer). set opacity to ~50%

step 7 : chromatic abberation

unhide not-blurred layer. guassian blur with a strength of 2. duplicate again. select top layer and move 1px up and 1px left (with arrow keys). CTRL+U then change the hue by 30. select bottom layer and move 1px down and 1px right, CTRL+U then change hue by -30.

stronger chromatic abberation can come from stronger gaussian blur and more change in hue

step 8 : scanlines

add the scan lines on top, invert so that they're white and set to add(glow). copy a multiply layer over it and make sure clipping is on. decrease layer opacity to ~10%. if it does not cover the whole image initially, paste more in and merge them together into one layer

tada! you now have one iterator projection. if you want to give it an extra affect, re-import the final PNG and filter > distort > convert to panorama. set distortion to 10 and scale to 101 (note that this drastically blurs the image)

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So, we know iterators not only have moving parts, we know that memory conflux is modular, being assembled and reassembled by backroom robot arms

On that note, have you noticed how pieces of the conflux cells are mounted over poles, as if the poles are a grid-rail of sorts?

Well, that's because they most likely are exactly that

Notice how the first step in the closing of a karma gate is a rapid deployment of poles to act as rails for the segments of the first barrier layer

Even puppet chambers aren't just segmented by projection tiles, but also by a grid made out of these rails (most likely for the arm to slide through)

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Slightly older art I have of one of Pebs.

Some headcanons I have for him, too.

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here’s something to consider. if you want a computer person thought on iterator spec bio, there is a lot of potential in them using a base 4 (quaternary) number system for storing data, instead of base 2 (binary). DNA has 4 key units, and having a form of memory that can be translated neatly to a genetic sequence could be very useful.

Someone out there (can't recall who, if you have the original post bless your soul and please send it) theorized that the data pearls are similar to a cell nucleus, with the data being encoded like DNA. I've stood by this since, and I think base 4 can very easily apply here.

I think this is a really good example of both computer science and biology intersecting. I'm not sure if it would be used for iterators very often, considering I believe them to be much more complex than a pearl and a terrible combination of multiple aspects like this

[raingametm]

You know what? *grants my iterators the ability to walk in the strangest way possible* (it's for au)

[raingametm]

finally at last they are here!! A slugcat design of mine that doesn’t drive me mad!! This is separate from my old lizard spec post “what if they were bugs”, meaning there’s a chance in the future I’ll make another one of these for lizards (how I commonly draw them!)