Citizens of Rat Nation

Some of our well-known and respected citizens.

Grady and Hardscape

Two ant sisters who are architects. Best known for developing the Skydam, an elaborate hydroelectric grid built into the rainwater drainage system throughout the city state. Not only does it route the rainwater into the aquifer (thereby stabilizing the bedrock upon which the city is built), but it also generates up to 22% of the city’s power needs annually. Thanks for your help, ladies!

Hardscape is the blue one, Grady is the black one. They’re clone sets, save the recolors. @Eilrach gave me the idea of using the Nuhvok shield as a head, glad he mentioned it. It was a fun little build.

Burdock the Bat

Here’s the original design by @TotalMaddness, as dictated by me in questionaire format via the Bat Creation Service:

And I took a stab at realizing him in MoC form:

Burdock is a tinkerer. He was injured as a young boy in the war, but in his time in the infirmary, he discovered a fascination with prosthetics and, eventually, robotics. Most of his mechanical components are his own design at this point. He is a fairly well-recognized inventor, having worked on the Emotionoid Program: he is credited with condensing the artificial digestive, circulatory and nervous systems into a single streamlined mechanism, as well as developing pseudo-organic bioluminescent technology for their high-speed fiberoptic nervous system.

The torso was a ton of fun to mess with, and although I believe there’s room for advancement, I’m pretty proud of it. The rubber band counter-tension arrangement allows for waist articulation and flexibility, while maintaining his perfect posture.



Close up of his ball peen hammer:


Still trying to find some Ken doll jeans for him, hence the bare legs. Surprisingly difficult to do.

And I’m gonna include Victor the Skeleton too.

Unremarkable build, I know, but there’s a reason. I had an idea for a carnivorous plant MoC, one that was vampiric and sucked out the nutrition from a victim. I built this guy as the withered corpse, just a display of the plant’s function. But guess what? I never built the plant, and the victim has been floating around my living room ever since. I named him Victor and gave him citizenship in Rat Nation. That’s right Zorks folks: Skeletons are canonically present in Rat Nation.

Group Shot!

Pistol, Grady, Burdock, Victor, Dynamite, Hardscape, and LODOM the Emotionoid. Big happy family.

I’m gonna take a page from @Senit’s book and post any additional characters from this whole thing in this topic. Unflooded boards are less prone to structural damage.

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The Ants look nice, the centaur style legs are a pretty cool idea.
Burdock is nice too, while the legs look strange, due to the jeans currently not being there, he is a pretty creative design. I also like the small hammer you gave him.
While quite simple, Victor is a nice inclusion too.

Ah nice

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look great!

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I love this! Especially the hammer. It’s such a simple, yet stylish design. It truly looks like a hammer any tinkerer or inventor would have in their supply.

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Bonus photo of a prototype ant that was too 2001 Rahi for the application:

Yeah I really wanted to have jeans by now but man it’s near impossible to find em. Now that I’ve said that someone else will find em instantly

I will tell him you said that

Thank you! That was actually the first part I built, and I spent almost as much time on that as I did on the torso

Thanks folks!

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Ooh these look nice. The ants have a neat build and the bat guy looks cool. also victor is great. Overall a good bunch of mocs.

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I’m sorry, but the sentence “citizens of rat nation” brings me unhealthy amounts of serotonin.

The bugs here are great tho.

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these look super neat! love the ants design

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Thanks guys!

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Meet Titus.

Titus is Victor’s father. He’s short, barrel-chested, has a Hulk Hogan handlebar mustache and is constantly talking about motor oil. He does not approve of the fact that his son makes a living from political ad revenue on his YouTube account but is nevertheless impressed that Victor actually manages to pull it off. He has a gutted '85 Ford Mustang GT in his garage, but he drives a '93 Ford Bronco XLT with a corroded license plate. He has a small cat that he loves very much, and has not named. He works at a steel mill and smells like burnt iron. For some reason, the idea of oat milk irritates him.

Father and son.

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Titus is Sidorak if he was cool.

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Meet the talids, specifically a talid priest

The talids were native to this land long before Rat Nation was founded. Click for lore

Summary

The Talids are the species native to the region Rat Nation was founded in. They are a reptilian people who believe all things are connected to each other, natural or unnatural.

A long while ago, when the first rat settlers arrived, the talids were nowhere to be seen. The rats spent decades expanding their settlement, utilizing their already advanced robotics to expedite the process. As far as they knew, nobody else occupied the area.

The talids are a hibernating species. The colony sleeps together deep underground for decades before awakening and climbing to the surface. There, they rear their young and collect food, refurbish their temples and pray to the earth. This cycle had continued uninterrupted for thousands of years, until one season they awoke to find a small city built above them.

The first rats to see them panicked. As the talids wandered the streets, confused and frightened by what they saw, rumors of invaders spread quickly through the rat population. The nation’s leaders at the time were brash and impulsive, ordering a weaponized response against them. The talids, of course, defended themselves.

The conflict lasted months. The rats engineered machines, the Warfarers, that could fight their battles for them, but the talid priests were seasoned warriors, and knew the land better than the rats. It was a losing battle on both sides.

With both sides convinced the other was an invading force, the battle raged on. It’s unclear how the truce came to be, and many different stories are handed down on both sides, but the result is always the same. Some communication between the two allowed for the misunderstanding to end between the species, and the wounds began to heal almost immediately.

Unfortunately, the Warfarers programmed to hunt and kill talids were still active, and the rats were not a mighty enough people to outfight their own creation. Some of the leading engineers developed a larger machine, aptly nicknamed the Peacefarer, to hunt and kill anything that would bring harm to a talid, even a rat. This Peacefarer brought a swift end to the Warfarers, and in accordance with the peace treaty, the rats forbade themselves to ever build a war machine again.

Many talid seasons have come and gone since then, and some rat generations are born and gone before ever seeing them. They always return, though, and a months-long festival is held in remembrance of that war. Every time that social relationship is reborn, it is marked with a time of peace and celebration shared between the two peoples.

The resounding opposition to the purpose of the Warfarers has greatly affected rat culture moving forward, and all synthezoids and androids have since been crafted as creatures of peace and healing. As these beings advanced, and became people in their own right, they would become known as “Emotionoids”, and would be welcomed into society as equal civilians.

The Peacefarer still walks the streets of Rat Nation, a pan-generational reminder of the consequences of fearful thinking. It becomes increasingly alert and active just before the arrival of the talids, and protects them from any threat that arises against them. The rats, talids and emotionoids all view this entity with solemn respect, each for their own reasons.

A new talid season is arriving soon, and Rat Nation is preparing for their arrival. The temple parks, set aside as sacred land for the talid people, have been scoured for any refuse and have been cleaned and prepared in advance. Rat Nation has recently undergone a social restructuring, and introduced an era of peace, success, and equality previously unknown to this nation. We hope the talids can thrive all the moreso in this modern utopia.


I had all this done up months ago and I just wanted to lay these plot points before I forgot em

He’s a somewhat fragile guy, true to my design habits, but I enjoy the way he turned out visually.

Fun fact! Apparently, ‘Talid’ is a Muslim name, but I got it by putting the words ‘tail’ and ‘lizard’ next to each other and just hacking out most of the letters. I figured a cyclops lizard neededed a special name.

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Ooh looks really cool! I quite like that head build and color scheme.

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