The uncivilized reaches of the Frontier teem with Creature great and small from wind-swept steppe to miasmatic bog to roiling dark seas! What hold these wilds for the enterprising Adventurer, the industrious Bureaucrat of the Royal Charter Antipodean Seas Trading Company?

Why yes, we’re stumbling back into consciousness from the holidays and need to fill a post with pictures of stuff so we don’t need to think too hard about being terribly clever. Bear (heh) with me here.

Birds, perched and elsewise

Ah, those devious eyes – scheming, always scheming – those beating wings. I speak of BIRDS, terror of the open skies. Singing of songs of torment at unutterably early hours of the day. BIRDS.

Butterflies

These are pretty simple, really, because they don’t need to do much but flit around awaiting sampling as Prestigious Specimens by inquisitive Naturalists seeking to enhance their collections and the glory of the Queen.

(You can also see how Joseph is getting as much mileage out of his grass chunks as possible in these Potemkin Renders. They’re actually a problem in-game due in part to some immature rendering settings with regard to texture alpha as well as mipmapping hurting the detail of very small textures. Tweaking the range at which mipmaps are used helps, but those tiny little gaps between grass blades still get destroyed when viewed at a distance we we’re going to have to revise the texture by scaling upward and taking a more stylized painterly approach.)

The Fishes of The Seas

Fish: the soggy, slimy bread-basket of the seas just waiting to be caught up and dried with a liberal application of lye so your people will have something unidentifiable to eat sometime next year.

(Mr. Triolo has been busy creating delightful animations for these — it was a pretty simple set, all told, as fish don’t actually do much other than flop about in one way or another.)

Woolying The Aurochs

What good is a cold Aurochs? Not much, but this is not your common woodland Aurochs of the Home Counties, docile and pleasantly-tempered as any rustic beast of The Farm. Nay, this behorned, robust ogre of a Bovidae is a surlier and hardier beast.

Capybara? Oh, there’s one around here somewhere. It’s a shy little guy so maybe for the next post for a slow week we can show off some more of the varied peoples of The Kingdoms Of Beasts And Fishes.