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Bloodflies
Parasitic wasps native to Serkonos. Bloodflies kill other creatures and lay eggs in their corpses, which leads to more bloodflies, which kill more creatures, and so on, leading to an epidemic. Several buildings in Karnanca have been closed off to the public because of the large bloodfly nests they contain.
- Evil Is Not a Toy: Several nests found around Karanaca were inadvertently started by people who wanted to study the bloodflies, or keep them as curiosities, or harvest their blood amber. By the time the player gets there, they've usually broken loose and taken over the building.
- Kill It with Fire: The only way to get rid of bloodflies is to burn their nests.
- Money Spider: Justified. Smashing bloodfly hives sometimes yields "blood amber", a honeycomb-like material worth 25 gold.
- Puppeteer Parasite: Some poor souls who survive attacks contract "bloodfly fever", which alters their brains to be receptive to bloodfly pheromones, compelling them to protect the hives and attack anyone who gets near. They usually end up with bloodflies nesting inside of them, which emerge from their bodies to attack threats.
- The Swarm: An especially dangerous parasitic one.
Hagfish
Predatory fish that infest the Empire's waterways.
- Border Patrol: Levels set at waterfront locales will spawn in schools of hagfish to prevent the player from swimming too far from the shore. Since the player can't fight while swimming, a group of hagfish can easily tear them apart.
- Disposing of a Body: Like rats, hagfish will devour any corpses they can reach, enabling the player to dispose of bodies by tossing them into the Wrenhaven.
- Fiendish Fish: Aggressive predators that resemble pikes or barracudas with the broad, needle-toothed jaws of anglerfish.
- Perplexing Pearl Production: Death of the Outsider introduces hag pearls, which are black pearls produced when a hagfish eats something it can't digest properly. They're not as desirable as river krust pearls, allegedly, but Billie can load them into her voltaic gun as a harmless, soundless projectile for breaking bottles or hitting distant buttons.
Hounds
Wolfhounds are a domesticated breed of the Tyvian hound, often used as attack and guard animals.
- Action Bomb: Mentioned, but never seen; the Abbey wanted to use wolfhounds as these but their hound trainer refused to go along with it.
- Attack Animal: A common use for wolfhounds. The Overseers in particular often work alongside trained wolfhounds.
- Call a Smeerp a "Rabbit": Aside from the fact that they look like a cross between a dog and a crocodile, the word "dog" is also conspicuously never used to refer to them.
- Mix-and-Match Critters: The developer who designed them said that he started with a wolf "...mixed it a bit with a crocodile, [and] a little bit of a giraffe in order to make [it] unique..."
- Savage Wolves: Wild hounds are one of the reasons why Tyvian prison camps don't bother having walls. If the cold doesn't kill any escaped prisoner, the hounds will.
- Was Once a Man: Tyvian folklore claims that the hounds that stalk the wilderness are what becomes of those who vanish into the woods, never to be seen again. They view killing these hounds as a Mercy Kill that frees their souls.
Rats
Rats can be found everywhere in Dunwall, and the sheer size of the rat population reflects the state of the decaying city. Specifically rats are believed to be the cause of the Weeper plague ravishing the city's lower class. In gameplay they will attack Corvo but do not do enough damage individually, and one of Corvo's powers is to summon a swarm of them.
- Eaten Alive: In a swarm, they're bold enough to bring down humans and messily consume them until nothing is left.
- Empathic Environment: Rat swarms are more common on a High Chaos playthrough, as the glut of corpses Corvo leaves behind attracts them.
- Everything Fades: In a gruesome way. In Dishonored, small packs of rats are spawned in to eat up excess corpses.
- Non-Malicious Monster: They're animals, they don't mean to be one of Dunwall's biggest problems. The rats Billie can talk to in Death of the Outsider claim the Rat Plague was a dark time for rats, as the disease instilled a rabies-like hyperaggression in them.
- Outside-Context Problem: The rats infesting Dunwall are an invasive species from Pandyssia, breeding out of control in the absence of whatever natural predators they might have had, and bringing with them a foreign disease that became the Rat Plague.
- Reduced to Ratburgers: Skewered rats can be found an eaten for health. The Abbey of the Everyman discourages this behaviour, in the belief that rats are connected to the Outsider. With the Gutter Feast bonecharm, meanwhile, you can eat white rats raw to restore mana.
- Swarm of Rats: How they can be a threat to the player, and how Corvo can use them to be a threat to other people. Killing enough individual rats disperses the swarm, rendering the survivors harmless.
River Krusts
Clamshell-like creatures that grow along the waterways of Dunwall. River krusts are immobile, but if anything enters their line of vision, they'll open their shells and spit globs of deadly acid.
- Acid Attack: Their primary defence is to spit globs of searing acid at anything that enters their line of vision. The Dead Eels gang in The Knife of Dunwall uses bottled krust acid as a ranged weapon.
- Attack Its Weak Point: Krust shells are unbreakable, but they need to open up to spit acid, allowing the player to dispatch them with a well placed crossbow bolt or bullet.
- Money Spider: Justified. Being clam-like creatures, river krusts contain valuable pearls worth anywhere from 25 to 50 gold.
Whales
A species of large marine mammals who are harvested for their blubber and oil in order to make the fuel that powers the industrial revolution of the Isles.
- Animalistic Abomination: Despite the name, there is something seriously off about the whales of the world of Dishonored; they have scaly growths on some parts of their bodies, multiple sets of fins, and their fat and oil can be used as Applied Phlebotinum for powering everything from cars and trains to firearms and electrical defensive barriers. Then there's the obvious mystical aspects to them; their bones can be used to make magical charms that can grant powers of the Void, and on the whole these creatures seem to be magical in just about every sense of the word.
- Applied Phlebotinum: The oil that is refined from their fat and secretions has been used to power the industrial revolution of the Isles, and true to the trope no one really has any clue about how it works. The man who made the process for refining it doesn't even quite grasp it, since he was only inspired by seeing how much a fire roared up when a few dock children poured a bit on an open flame. Given the innate connection that the whales have to the Void, any research into how it works would probably bring the Abbey of the Everyman down on the researcher's head, to say nothing of the ramifications it may have if the Abbey ever decided to ban the stuff based on its magical properties.
- Brown Note: It is implied that listening to their songs can drive people insane. A butcher's journal found at the beginning of the The Knife of Dunwall DLC describes a worker slowly losing himself and going insane listening to the beasts sing as he carves away at them, stating how their songs cause him to tremble and have begun coming to him in his sleep.
- Call a Smeerp a "Rabbit": The "Whales" of the Dishonored-verse very clearly are not the same kind of whales one would find in the real world.
- Central Theme: The treatment of the whales serves as a thematic counterpoint for the state of the Empire in general; abusing, desecrating, and dishonoring something good, beautiful, or benign in the name of power and greed. As the Outsider notes in one of "the hollows" you inspect in Death of the Outsider:
The Outsider: There is death in their dark eyes. These creatures, burned alive to light the world.
- End of an Era: By the time of the sequel, the whales are becoming rarer and rarer due to overfishing, and as such the Isles are veering dangerously close to Post-Peak Oil territory. Some places like Serkonos are getting around this with alternate energy solutions like wind power, but the age of the Whale Oil powered industrial revolution is going to be coming to a close soon.
- Liminal Being: Developer commentary states that the whales exist simultaneously in the Void and the real world. Billie's visit to the Ritual Hold allows her to glimpse several living whales floating and swimming through the void.
- Space Whale: Not literally since the Isles are still only at early-20th century levels of technology, but the whales have an innate connection to the Void and the Outsider that makes them fit this trope in spirit. A few can even be seen floating through the Void during a conversation with the Outsider in the sequel. According to the developers, whales exist simultaneously in the Void and the real world.
