Just an original species, there isn’t too much lore or anything on them, I tend to call them ‘dwellers’.
Long post explaining why they were made
They were originally a mod for Dwarf Fortress;
The game used to be really easy to mod due to it’s object format, that hasn’t changed,
but since the graphics update you now also need to be able to draw 32x32 pixel-art.
Some time around December 2024, I decided to make a mod for a troglodyte civilization,
something like the morlocks from Wells “The Time Machine” (Good book btw, would recommend)m
threw that together with a modified human sprite from the game, which looked bad.
I shelved the idea, a month later made a Naga civ (Malicious eel men, based of the fantasy trope),
which at least proved I could make one a mod that looks okay.
A few months later, I took another stab at the troglodyte civ,
but decided to make them less human so they were easier to sprite for.
Drawing the head of the sprite at a single pixel level wasn’t working,
so I decided to make some reference, and made the first head drawing of the creature.
They were designed pale and without eyes because darkness+parasites due to living underground,
having large ears, nostrils, and whiskers to compensate, they almost certainly can echolocate.
Their face had some previous basis on a different troglomorphic design I’ve done,
the raptor model that can (barely) be seen in my old 2023 halloween profile (Which is currently visible on my user card background),
it is not very quality work because that is my first fully rigged model.
I used that to finish the tiny sprite (which was then complete), but was a little unhappy with how the big drawing looked.
I did end up finishing that mod, the species was named ‘Terranean’ there in an attempt to make it sound more like
a race of people and not just some moniker. They only build a handful of sites inside the mountains, plus player forts,
unlike the dwarves they won’t build around the foothills, but they still play extraordinarily similar for obvious reasons.
That’s pretty much the end of the story for the mod.
So 2 days after the first image, I decided to do a full body drawing of the dweller, I ended up drawing 3,
most of the actual body is drawn basically entirely human.
A few days later I came back to image and decided to do more, so added 2 more characters, and a background;
sort of trying to make it look like those old photographs of miners lined up.
Surprise, humans are fun to draw when your brain isn’t trying to protect you from the men we stabbed to extinction long ago.
That drawing is the banner on my profile, which I snuck in there when I changed my pfp to the spelunker.
I later made another for a better view of the face,
but waited until I had the spelunker pfp for month so it wouldn’t be too short lived;
so it is now my current pfp, because it has an alien-ish design so I figure it would fit well here.
Even if I have no intent of making an alien planet, so they’re just from Earth I guess.
I’ve been a bit obsessed with troglomorphism as a trait for a creature for some time, I don’t know where that started.
TL;DR: ONC accidentally makes himself look like a furry.