So, the Idea is to have the ability to create some form of weapon in the creature editor, and I’m not just talking about your old fashioned melee weapons, I’m talking about long range weapons, spike shot, acid spit, and catapults, I want to see designs for biological weaponry that your creature can use to hunt or defend itself. Please submit your ideas and designs below.
As a creature with a catapult (human arms are, forgive the irony, inhumanly good at throwing things, and aiming), those and spit weapons (archerfish) just need to be set to interact with outside resources, but for creatures that shoot acid or projectiles that they grow would be different. For acid or venom shooting weapons (spitting cobra, bombadear beetle), just set a normal spit weapon as the place a gland dispenses into. For biological projectiles, that would prolly need dedicated development work. But, given that tarantulas and quokkas exist have a detachable modifier on body parts should prolly be added, especially one that can be activated at the same time as fast-twitch muscles. This would also come in handy for porcupines or other things.
Edit: I don’t really do design but I really like the idea of a sea creature whose symbionts’ larva are basically torpedos and embed themselves in rivals or predators for initial damage, before growing inside the wound as a parasite. They only behave as symbionts’ when they are eaten, and so want to weaken their host by being a mean parasite.
I actually already worked out the spike shot, (or, several versions of it) if you have any ideas on how to improve the design, let me know.
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Well, owls cough up balls of waste and bones and such, if an organism evolved a mechanism to throw a projectile, there is certainly a way to produce it
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Wow a 1440th of a shot per minute. Lol.
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cant this be just like spores spit ability
i meant i dosent have to be the the same you could shot small darts that ar fill whit posent or like spiting cobra fangs
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Maybe something like a harpoon? A spike that is thrown at fast speeds enough to pierce through skin and can be used to drag whatever is/was pierced.
If you mean something Microscopic, a nematocyst could fit for such role. For Macroscopic things, I am rather sure that chameleon/frog tongues is the closest thing we know of, so perhaps they could evolve into bio-harpoons for whatever reason.
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To add to that, there’s no reason why carnivorous Earth life didn’t just make hard tongue scales and plates to protect the inside of the mouth from said scales instead of teeth, aside from tongues maybe not existing at the time, and having two scales at the tip of your tongue that converge into a sharp line would let any animals that hunt by shooting their tongues at things, so that would lead to mouth harpoons since those let you hunt much bigger animals, and if they’re durable enough, and the tongue is long enough and has a high enough tensile strength, and is resistant enough to cutting, they could also be used as grappling hooks! With a mouth like that, having two heads would be more advantageous than detrimental, no matter how much room for getting one cut off or getting cut in half it left, since doubling the heads doubles the prey that gets caught! A more likely mutation to get passed on to do the same though would be moving the harpoons to store their tongues in the cheeks while separating the cheeks from the rest of the mouth, possibly with another set of mutations later down the line to have the harpoon pockets separate from the rest of the head except at a joint to let them be aimed independent of the head and thus eachother.
That means, since it is beneficial to always have your prey where you can clearly see it, the best earth animals to take on this niche would be arthropods that hunt similar to how frogs do! A way they could do that is to move an eye down to the ends of each of their harpoondibles, then wrap it around the opening at the best angle from it to see whatever they’re aimed at!
It’d be like those lizards that shoot blood out of their eyes, but harpoons and insects!
It could also be at the tail, like a scorpion or raised body of devils coach beetle. It could also be used as to encourage pack hunting if durable enough that multiple individuals can use it on larger creatures to bring them down?
Maybe they won’t need much space in their mouth if they can produce and secrete enzymes that can digest prey like hammerhead worms(flatworm genus of Bipalium) and certain species of nemotodes?
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