Web Video / TierZoo

TierZoo is a YouTube channel about biology (specifically zoology) wrapped up in the guise of gaming culture. Specifically, treating nature like an MMO known as Outside. Biology vocabulary is swapped for gaming lingo such as "new players" for "juveniles" and "playerbase" for the total number of individual creatures. Most videos take the format of ranking animals in Character Tiers, comparing the different "builds" of animals (typically a "genus" or closely related group of genera within a family) within a guild (roughly "family") or class (sometimes corresponding to taxonomic "class" but sometimes to "order" or less commonly to "phylum") to each other. Other videos focus on a specific build, expansion (eon/epoch), server (habitat/ecoregion/continent), strategy, or characteristic.

Check them out here. Keep notice that they do include a lot of footage of animals killing each other, but rarely in a graphic fashion and for educational purposes. Also check out the Reddit community here.

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TierZoo provides examples of:

Tropes A - C

• Achilles' Heel:
  • In the Ice Age Tier List, the Mammoth was placed in A-Tier but not S-Tier because it was extremely powerful and had great matchups against everything… except early humans which it had an abysmal matchup against, even moreso than other animals due to the humans' ranged weaponry, faster speed, and the fact that its huge size and thus experience points in the form of meat made it a prime target for humans.
  • Ankylosaurs were considered A-Tier dinosaurs but not S-tier because of this. They had insane amounts of defence thanks to their armor and also had respectable attack thanks to their tail club. However, they had a glaring weakness to being flipped over, which exposed their vulnerable neck and underside while making them unable to fight back. They would be considered S-Tier if they were reintroduced in the modern day, mainly because most modern-day predators would not be strong enough to flip them over.
  • The crocodilians' main weakness is their reliance on water and need for focus to score kills with their Death Roll, meaning that players who know how to avoid deep water or travel in a cooperative herd can avoid or interrupt their deadly attacks.
  • The dragonfly is a Lightning Bruiser in the air, with especially great air speed, mobility and 360-degree vision. Their weaknesses that prevent them from being S-tier are that they often accidentally fly into traps like spiderwebs and other players, and they cannot walk, meaning that they have to use their energy-expensive flight to reposition themselves.
  • While both termites and hymenopterans have the powerful Eusocial ability allowing them to beat out even the Master of All beetles in the S-rank spot, the former were ranked lower because their abdomens were unprotected unlike the latter, who did have rear-facing weaponry in the form of stingers.
  • Mantis Shrimp have a very powerful forelimb attack which puts them at the highest-tier spot for crustaceans, but their small fins and legs give them poor mobility and their pleons/tails provide such a glaring weakspot from the back that they fall short of S-tier.
• Acrofatic: Hippopotamuses have a fat, bulky physique but also have enough muscle to move fast. Thanks to their density, they sink underwater and this allows them to run on the riverbed at fast speed.
• all lowercase letters: The "in-game chat" between animals is generally portrayed as RuneScape-style yellow text that's entirely in lowercase.
• Animal Is the New Man:
  • Discussed in the "What if humans were nerfed?" video. It's speculated that should humans lose their viability in the meta, parrots and elephants would be the most likely non-simian candidates to unlock a society playstyle. This is due to their long lifespans, high intelligence, ability to grasp objects, and having diets that would benefit from adopting agriculture. The reasoning for parrots was re-iterated in "The Bird Tier List", where it was placed as S-Rank partially for these reasons.
  • In "Pigs used to be Overpowered", TierZoo also mentions that pigs would dominate many servers thanks to their high intelligence, fat armor, and their ability to find underground food easily.
  • In "The Dinosaur Tier List," the A-tier Troodon was speculated to have specced into enough intelligence to become a human-like top tier had it not been banned in the K-T balance patch.
• Animal Religion: In a crossover episode with the YouTuber Genetically Modified Skeptic, TierZoo states some builds other than humans might have unlocked the faith skill tree - the example he uses is elephant players gathering around their dead faction members, which might be ceremonial mourning.
• Anti-Metagame Character: Invoked by Anteaters in the context of the "game". Like their name suggests, they have a superb matchup against the S-ranked insect builds of ants and termites. However, Giant Anteaters are still high-ranked at A-tier, while Tamanduas are B-Tier and Pygmy Anteaters all the way down at D-tier.
• Anti-Structure: The Rodent Tier List mentions that rodents have a bite attack that is especially effective at wearing down structures.
• Antlion Monster: "The Ultimate Camping Build" features the actual antlion larva, which uses a pit trap to easily catch prey. However, this is only the larvae, the adult is a lot wimpier.
• April Fools' Day:
  • The creator released an entire video about Cryptid tier listing as an April Fool's joke. Mind you, this one was actually very well thought out and with detailed reasonings for the tiering of cryptids.
  • For the following April Fools, the creator did a goat (and other Caprines) tier list that was again, surprisingly well-thought out for an April Fool's joke. Turns out that goats are pretty badass.
• Armor-Piercing Attack:
  • The Jaguar's bite is stated to pierce armor, allowing it to kill prey by biting them on the back of the head.
  • The Pufferfish's teeth are stated to be able to easily crush shells on snails, crabs and clams, allowing them to have a great matchup against said animals while giving the pufferfish more food options.
  • The Mantis Shrimp is outright stated to be a "tank buster" build thanks to its extremely powerful punches capable of cracking shells.
• Art Evolution: Starting from the Deep Sea Meta, TierZoo has commissioned new animations in the analysis segments of the animals.
• The Artifact: The general tier list still shown routinely in the videos has several aspects which later videos or Word of God have retconned, including swans and starfish being listed as low-tier, and whales being listed as mid-tier.
• Awesome, but Impractical: VERY frequently points out that some animals' seemingly cool abilities can actually be situational at best and detrimental at worst, to the point where it gets its own page.
• Badass Decay: Invoked and Discussed on several occasions.
  • The Opabinia build, a B-tier Cambrian build in Outside's beta game, received this treatment as the meta continued to progress in complexity. While equipped with 360-degree compound vision, a trunk for tether grabs, and fins enabling advanced propulsion, they were quite lacking in the defense department; Opabinia mains gradually exchanged these traits for very advanced, if completely unnecessary defensive abilities, becoming the F-tier tardigrade build.
  • Sloth builds - back during the Ice Age, sloths had powerful builds like the S-tier Giant Sloth, which had monstrous stats and were virtually unassailable by predators due to their incredible strength, defense, HP, and natural weapons. However, early Humans, being even more overpowered, destroyed the high-tier Ground Sloth builds, leaving only the pathetic F-tier Tree Sloths.
  • Downplayed by bears - while modern bears remain incredibly badass, the Ice Age saw the appearance of the Cave Bear, a colossal S-tier monster that outmatched any modern bear in raw stats. Unlike Mammoths and Ground Sloths, whose demise is easily explained by the rising dominance of Humans in the meta, the decline of the giant Cave Bear in favor of the smaller modern bears is not currently explained and is not believed to be a result of direct Human actions. (The best theory we have is that changes in the overworld made it harder for them to find suitable vacant caves to serve as their home bases. Humans are implicated in this theory, as they were competing with the bears for the same caves, but PVP with Humans did not directly cause the demise of cave bears as a build.)
  • Pigs play with this. The Entelodonts, aka "Hell Pigs" were boar-like Miocene omnivores that were S-ranked beasts that could easily kill prey thanks to having higher mobility and attack power than normal pigs, and were subsequently nerfed by the devs. However, Entelodonts were actually more closely related to the hippopotamus than actual pigs. Domesticated pigs that are used as livestock are actually the same species as wild boars, and pigs that do escape can revert to a feral self similar to a wild boar.
  • The Antlion and Lacewing play this straight during their life cycle. As larvae, they are absolute killing machines that can easily take down prey, set up a hard-to-detect pit trap in the former, and use the bodies of its prey as armor in the latter. As adults, they have some of the lowest stats of any insect, are weak and flimsy, and cannot even fly proficiently.
  • Scorpions were considered very deadly builds in the past, but are much weaker in the modern day to the point of being considered D-Tier thanks to having terrible matchups against several animal species. Many intelligent, agile, armored, or simply far larger animals like birds, lizards and mongooses exist, with the last being a Hopeless Boss Fight thanks to their venom immunity, and a scorpion's claws+venom stinger combo is far easier to disrupt or avoid by most modern animals.
• Badass on Paper: Centipedes predate the dinosaurs, are one of the first players to have taken the Air Breathing perk, are venomous, and have high stats all around, with only their Intelligence kept low as a Dump Stat. This sounds like this would make them high tier. However, their poor senses and Intelligence make them easy to elude despite their speediness, their long hitbox makes them vulnerable despite their durable exoskeleton, and their slow attacks make them easy to dodge. These weaknesses all combine to make centipedes an F-tier class.
• Bears Are Bad News: Played straight or subverted depending on the type of bear.
  • Played very straight by powerful generalist bears like Brown Bears, Kodiaks, and Black Bears.
  • Exaggerated by the Ice Age Cave Bear, which was even bigger and stronger than modern bears - while Black Bears make S-tier on versatility and intelligence, the Cave Bear made S-tier on overwhelming power, defense, and hitpoints - and datamining suggests that unlike other large Ice Age builds, their decline was not a result of Humans arriving on the scene.
  • Subverted by most specialized bears, with only the very strong Polar Bear making it outside of the very low tiers, and even it is hampered by lacking the useful Hibernate ability and having to contend with the unforgiving Arctic server, including months-long Arctic nights. In the worst place is the Panda Bear, which has specialized extremely heavily into eating bamboo even though it provides them almost no energy or XP.
• Begin with a Finisher: A falcon's first attack is its most powerful, as it relies on the momentum from a high-speed dive to deal lethal damage. Should this miss or the prey survive, all subsequent attacks are far weaker thanks to the falcon's relatively small size, making it also a Death or Glory Attack.
• Beware My Stinger Tail: The thagomizers and tail clubs of armored dinosaurs like Stegosaurus and Ankylosaurus would be invokedGame-Breaker weapons in a modern day context, as most mammalian predators rely on attacking from behind which would put a tail weapon right in their faces. This along with their armor placed these dinosaurs at a hypothetical S-tier in the "Should Dinosaurs Be Unbanned?" video.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: Comes up when discussing the Carboniferous period. According to the video, the devs had the possible idea of buffing vertebrate builds, and hence decided to add high amounts of vegetation. This had an unintended "glitch"/side-effect—due to the increased vegetation, there was increased oxygen. Thanks to their Hemolyph ability that allows them to take in oxygen through breathing holes, the increased oxygen allowed arthropods to grow to huge sizes and dominate the Carboniferous meta.
• Bigger Is Better:
  • While tarantulas have venom, it's weak compared to most other spiders. Instead, they use their sheer size (for a spider) brute force, and longer fangs to take down animals that most other spiders can't.
  • The larger an animal is, the higher its HP stat, and the animals with the highest HP stat are Baleen whales which include the largest animal ever in the Blue Whale.
  • Sauropods were considered the only S-Tier dinosaur for their time periods, as their massive size gave them the highest HP of all land animals, give them a Tail Slap with massive range, allowed them to use the most powerful attack in the game via their stomp thanks to their sheer weight, and finally their height made them great at detecting and avoiding stealth attacks.
  • Elephants. Their huge size gives them incredible health, defense, attack, and intimidation factor.
  • Giraffes have legs so long that most predators cannot get a good hit on their bodies or necks. This gives them surprisingly good matchups against most African wildlife and puts them at a solid A-tier spot.
  • Coconut Crabs are Hermit Crab builds that grow so big they forgo the need to wear a shell, due to their huge size and power dissuading most crab-eating predators like birds, even potentially turning the tables against them.
  • Averted by Ostriches and many other ratites, which are considered F-Tier because they have rather low stats for their size, and their inability to fly means that they have to lay eggs on the ground, which are hard to protect.
• Bilingual Bonus: "Tier" is German for "animal", which makes Tier Zoo a Multiple Reference Pun.
• Bioluminescence Is Cool: Only if used as defensive, mate attraction or luring measures in the Abyssal server. Otherwise, you're just painting yourself as a highly visible target.
• Blessed with Suck:
  • The Chupacabra and the Jackalope are considered to be low-tier cryptids because they're animals whose condition is brought about by a life-threatening disease. For the former, it's mange that makes them appear intimidating, but also causes them to go insane. For the latter, it's the Shope Papilloma Virus that essentially causes tumours on their face and therefore cutting their lifespan by a lot.
  • Tail Autotomy among lizards. Being able to sacrifice the tail as an Escape Battle Technique may seem like a lifesaver, but It Only Works Once unless the tail can be regenerated, gives a Maximum HP Reduction, and permanently disables the ability to Tail Slap. Tellingly, the two S-ranked lizards in the Monitor and Komodo Dragon had a high rank partly because they lacked tail autotomy.
• Bloodsucking Bats: Vampire bats are discussed as part of the "Are Bats OP?" episode. In general, their hematophagous capabilities are considered Awesome, but Impractical, due to lacking the Required Secondary Powers of a high enough stealth stat to avoid being detected by a conscious victim. It was theorized that vampire bats were more efficient during the Ice Age, where several giant mammals had a harder time detecting them due to the size difference.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • The Cane Toad. Instead of putting too many points into poison and aesthetics, it foregoes aesthetics and puts points into more practical capabilities—just enough toxins to kill a cat, larger size, gobbling, hunting, thick skin for far better defence, and fast maturity. This allows it to be S-ranked while most other amphibians are F-ranked, and contributes to its invasiveness all over the Australia server.
  • Likewise, the bullfrog is a frog build with higher power and bulk that eschews special abilities, which makes them very viable as frogs thanks to increased survivability.
  • In Lizard Moveset Guide, the highest ranked lizard was the Monitor Lizard, eschewing special abilities (i.e. color change, eye blood squirt, walking on water, walking on walls and ceilings) for having high stats. The end result was something more efficient in power, speed, and durability than the other lizards. Subverted with the Komodo Dragon discussed in the video on dinosaurs—while it has even greater power, speed and durability, it also comes with special abilities too like a deadly bite, anti-bacterial blood, and pack hunting.
  • Builds like the Great White Shark, Kodiak Bear, Gorilla, Orca, and Black Mamba which get into S tier by just taking their base class, and raising the stats as high as they can go without incurring some form of penalty, ignoring almost all unique skills in favor of just being generally better at being their specific class.
  • The Baleen whale build, which can be summed up as replace teeth with Baleen only good for farming krill, then put every point you can into health. Effective, safe, and has a crazy KDA, but very boring to play.
  • Sponges have the simplest game plan of any animal, having no brain, no ability to move on their own, no camouflage, and no attacks of any kind. However, they are still fairly effective B-tier builds because any player who tries to eat them would get injured by their spicules and, in some cases, by their poisons.
  • The Bass compared to most fish builds. It doesn't have wings, poisonous spines or any other special features. Instead, it has a lot of bulk, big jaws and a generalist diet which allows it to deplete freshwater habitats and even eat Alligator hatchlings.
  • One of the traits that make the humans such a game breaker is their Marathon Pro ability, which allows them to regenerate stamina even while they run. It's not anywhere as flashy as pure speed would be, but it does mean they can overtake faster players through pure attrition. A human will never outrun an antelope, but it will catch up once the latter exhausts all its stamina reserves.
  • The Ruminant ability allows an animal to gain exp from eating grass. TierZoo states that it sounds like a boring ability, but is extremely useful since grass is almost everywhere, which means the ruminant player doesn't need to search or forage for food. This in turn means the player doesn't have to invest in abilities to forage, and simply reinvest those points into other stats — and in the case of bovines, allows them to have high attack and health stats.
• Broke the Rating Scale: The Abyssal server is so weird that Tier Zoo can't even make a traditional tier list for it. This is because much of it is unexplored and as such, nobody really has good information of what it's like down there.
  "But nothing comes close to how different the Abyssal server is. It's so different that I actually can't even make a traditional tier list for us. Why? Well, because nobody knows what the Meta really looks like down there."
• Bullet Time: Flies have such ridiculous reaction time that they're essentially playing the entire game in slow motion, which makes them a surprisingly effective build, with the robber fly in particular being S-tier.
• Cats Are Mean: The Cats vs. Dogs episode explains that cats are actually more an assassin and not exactly a support class (the support ability comes from Toxoplasma), and outside cat builds in particular have an absurdly high kill rate as well as being known to grief smaller classes such as birds and mice—up to 3.7 billion birds and 20 billion mice a year, in fact.
• Character Tiers: invoked The central premise of the channel is placing animals in tier lists.
• Chest Monster: Snapping turtles, specifically the alligator snapping turtle, has the rare Lure ability that allows it to act like this. By wiggling the worm-like appendage on its tongue to look like loot, it can trick other players into swimming into its waiting jaws where it will snap them up and eat them.
• Child Eater:
  • Despite the Dimetrodon's use of parental care in its playstyle, the strategy was not nuanced enough for the hatched young to avoid aggroing their own contemporaries, who team kill them as a result.
  • Despite its delayed starvation and dehydration rate, the D-tier Coelophysis build was forced to team kill the weaker players once sources of XP became scarce.
• Clever Crows: Corvids were considered S-tier animals in the city meta and out of all birds in general, thanks to having the high intelligence to get various loots and interactions while also sporting high mobility. A later video explained how they use their intelligence, aside from using the environment to their advantage, they can also manipulate other players by pecking them to attract their attention or even get them riled up enough to attack another opponent.
• Cockroaches Will Rule the Earth: Subverted in the video discussing what would happen if humans were nerfed. Cockroaches would be quickly forced to retreat to the tropics, as they would no longer have access to the heated houses they depend on to survive the winter in temperate and colder latitudes. Likewise, rats would also experience a sharp decline without access to human food stores or the ability to retreat into houses to avoid predators.
• Comedic Sociopathy: Acidifying the Ocean is described as being a "classic prank".
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: invoked
  • Neanderthals fell into a complacent strategy of relying on their superior stats to engage in melee combat with large creatures using their spears and other crafted items, while the Sapiens branch of humanity wasn't able to do so and instead further advanced the meta by inventing better tools like the atl-atl spear thrower and working in larger groups, which meant that when they met each other again, Sapiens wiped the floor with Neanderthals despite being completely outmatched on paper.
  • In theory, there's a truly staggering variety of builds in this game. But as the insect tier list states, in practice, 25% of these are variations of the beetle, due to said class being a Lightning Bruiser bordering on Master of All.
• Composite Character: The "cave bear" described in "The Ice Age Tier List" was actually given traits of both its real-life counterpart and another giant bear species, the short-faced bear, combining the former's herbivory with the latter's scavenging and fighting prowess.
• Continuity Snarl: He has a tendency to change up the mechanics of the fictional game of Outside to make whatever organism or clade he's currently discussing easier to talk about in that fictional context. For example, in early videos he operates on the idea that plants are a property of server environmental mechanics, but suddenly they become player builds in their own right in the The Tree Tier List video.
• Counter-Attack:
  • Poison tends to act this way, as the user needs to take a sufficiently powerful hit/bite in order for it to take effect. Since many poisonous animals tend to be flimsy, this becomes Awesome, but Impractical.
  • The Porcupine's Quills ability causes those who use melee attacks on it to get spikes lodged in them.
• Crazy-Prepared: Deconstructed by the tardigrade video. it specced so many evolution points into protection against things it should never expect to face (such as meteors and ionizing radiation) that it didn't have any left for defenses against dangers that everyone faces on a regular basis, like, you know, predators .
  • Humans, of course. Human top-end gear breaks every scale in the game and even covers their bad match-ups like eusocial insects.
• Crippling Overspecialization: Has its own page here.
• Critical Hit Class: Dromaeosaurs had a sickle claw that allowed them to deal massive slash and pierce damage, potentially one-shotting prey via Slashed Throat. If they were reintroduced in the modern day they would hold a similar niche to foxes and coyotes, but unlike canines that would wear prey down via flanking, dromaeosaurs would kill much more quickly thanks to their huge critical damage.
• Crutch Character: Most Neuropterans, including Antlions and lacewings, have a very powerful larval stage but their adult stage is weak and flimsy, serving only to complete the quest of reproduction. Mantidflies however avert this, having a powerful adult stage as well.
• Cryptid Episode: On 2018's April Fools' Day, a Cryptid Tier List video was released. It was actually pretty well done for an April Fool's joke, explaining reasons as to why certain cryptid builds were unviable due to being diseased animals (Chupacabra and Jackalope) and others being high-ranked due to essentially being living prehistoric reptiles (Loch Ness Monster and Mokèlé-mbèmbé)

Tropes D - F

• Damage Over Time:
  • Attacks that cause bleeding deal damage over time via a "Bleeding" status, which will wear a victim down fast.
  • Most forms of poison and venom cause a status effect that deals heavy damage over time.
  • The Bombardier Beetle's "Spray" deals damage over time as the hot, caustic fluid it fires gets onto its opponent and burns them.
  • Porcupines have the Quills ability which causes animals that attack them to get the "Quilled" status effect, this not only deals damage over time but also increases in intensity should the attacker unwisely continue their assault.
• Dark Horse Victory:
  • The secretary bird was outright stated to be a 'dark horse' when it was placed as S-tier in the Raptor Tier List, not because of sheer power but because its ability to hard-counter some high-tier builds like cobras, as well as the fact that it hasn't given up its flight ability and can avoid competition more easily, allows it to survive the brutally competitive environment of the African savanna metagame.
  • Besides the domestic dog, the other S-tier in the Dog Tier List was the African Painted Hound, not the Wolf which was considered an A-Rank Skill Gate Character. Like the Secretary Bird, it was capable of surviving the African Savannah thanks to higher stealth, attack and speed than wolves, while also having a better hunting strategy based around propping the weaker members than giving the best loot to the best members.
  • The Shark Tier List placed the great white in S-tier, for obvious reasons, but also listed the hammerhead build in the same tier, not because they match the great white in terms of power, but their head shape and eye positioning gives them Super-Senses in the form of panoramic and binocular vision and unparalleled electro-reception, giving them incredible prey-scouting abilities and almost unavoidable strike accuracy. It certainly doesn't hurt, though, that the great hammerhead is around the same size as the great white with a Power stat to match.
  • The "Are Honey Badgers OP?" episode was essentially a Mustelid Tier List, and the S-ranked mustelid was neither the Honey Badger nor the Wolverine, but the Otter. Thanks to their high intelligence, tool use and group hunting, they were able to take on challenges they couldn't do alone while being able to use rocks to break open clams for an alternate food source.
  • The Ice Age Tier List had two S-tiers. One was the giant ground sloth which many people expected, the other of which was the less-expected cave bear, due to its extremely high stats across the board, varied diet, excellent PVP capabilities, and being one of the few builds humans did not pose a serious threat to.
  • In "Top 3 Underrated animals", the Robber Fly was considered this as compared to other aerial insect predators. It was stated to be outright "overshadowed by other more charismatic builds despite being able to beat any of them one-on-one", and was deemed S-rank for being able to take down similar-sized adversaries in mid-air with extreme accuracy and precision, due to its long grab range and insanely good air control.
  • In the Dinosaur Tier list, the only S-ranked dinosaur class was neither the more famous carnivores like Tyrannosaurus Rex and Dromeosaurs nor the herbivores with Natural Weapons like Stegosaurus, Triceratops and Ankylosaurs, but the 'weapon'-less Sauropods. Thanks to their massive size and weight being a great weapon and lookout tool and their herd tactics allowing much greater survival, Sauropods were deemed as kings of the meta over any of those.
  • In the Cat Tier List, the S-ranked cat was neither the Lion nor the Tiger, but the smaller and comparatively weaker Jaguar. This was due to its being the only cat able to One-Hit Kill any other animal on its server (lions and tigers are both hard-countered by elephants and some other large herbivores), and being able to dominate on land, in water, and in the trees, while other cats can only hunt in at most two of the three.
  • Pufferfish in the SpongeBob SquarePants tier list, with excellent defenses and armor piercing capabilities despite being an unassuming species and a relatively low-key character in the show being used to pick species.
  • In the Bird Tier List, the falcon took the second highest spot of B-rank, with the strongest B-tier being songbirds of all things. Thanks to their surprising agility and gregariousness, they were actually considered an effective B-Tier build for their size.
    "This might seem like an odd inclusion to cap off B-Tier, but songbirds are a highly efficient build for their size and do deserve recognition on this tier list."
  • Likewise, out of A-Rank, the hawks and eagles were only the second highest spot, and the top A-ranked bird was the rather unexpected Pelican.
  • In the Insect Tier List, Mantises, a fearsome and charismatic predator with one of the highest physical power stats in the Insect faction, were placed at the bottom of A-Tier. Right above them are True Flies, a build generally regarded as weak by the common playerbase, thanks to their impressive aerial mobility allowing them to be very effective scavengers due to their massive evasive skills, or a powerful predator, much like the dragonfly.
• David vs. Goliath: The Ice Age split of humanity into the Sapiens and Neanderthals "guilds" set this up as Neanderthals were bigger and stronger than Sapiens while being as smart or close to it, but lost out to the smaller and weaker Sapiens. Much like in the biblical story, the smaller Sapiens, the David, had specialized into ranged weapons like the atlatl to compensate for their weakness in close combat and were able to defeat Neanderthals from further than either Sapiens or Neanderthals could throw spears with their unaided arms. On the other hand, the tougher Neanderthals, the Goliath, didn't bother inventing atlatls, because while they had the mental capability to invent such tools, their superior strength and durability meant they didn't really need to and engaging in melee combat with other animals worked out just fine for them. This advantage in ranged combat, combined with Sapiens's tendence to form larger groups, meant that they were able to beat Neanderthals in combat, eat Neanderthals' prey and turn their larger, more loot-hungry bodies against them, or force them to join the Sapiens, eventually wiping out the Neanderthal guild and establishing the Sapiens guild of humanity as the dominant force in Outside.
• Deadly Euphemism: Dying is often referred to as a Game Over. Species going extinct is often referred to as them being nerfed into non-viability, or in the case of dinosaurs, banned. Similarly, the Permian Extinction is described as a mass Rage Quit over balance changes. In the same vein, cannibalism is referred to as team killing. The Corona Virus was referred to as "The huge nerfs humans had to deal with in 2020" in the Are Bats OP? episode.
• Death or Glory Attack: The Falcon's dive is stated to be this, being capable of dealing massive damage thanks to the incredible speed and high momentum. However, it has to build up speed first to perform this opening attack, and if this first attack doesn't connect it will struggle to win fights. It's still a highly efficient method of killing prey, which is why the Falcon is B-Tier.
• Difficult, but Awesome:
  • The human build, for most of the game, were massive Fragile Speedsters compared to other builds, only really having a maxed Intelligence, and the Sweat ability, in a sea of disadvantages. As the meta expanded, and humans used their high Intelligence to invent greater and greater things, they eventually became the end all be all top tier of Outside.
  • Raccoons in the city meta are noted to have a low skill floor but a high skill ceiling, despite being an A-tier city build having all the tools it has to survive. This is shown by their average lifespan of 2 years despite having a maximum of 20.
  • The crocodilians' Death Roll attack is one of the most powerful moves in the whole game. Its downside is that it requires unbroken concentration on a single target, meaning that it's easily interrupted and countered by any other nearby party member. But if they DO manage to pull it off, it can inflict enough damage to One-Hit Kill even the tankiest player on the server.
• Draw Aggro: Crows are noted to have a weak-damage peck that they use to not deal damage, but to goad other targets into either attacking them (and thus getting distracted from an objective like food), or even manipulate a target into attacking another.
• The Dreaded: Most builds avoid confrontations with the human build, for good reasons. But the kind of build that's utterly indifferent to their reputation is also exactly the one the Humans have the worst matchup with and thus the Dreaded for them: flight-capable stinging eusocial insects.
• Dumb Dinos: Zig-Zagged. Most dinosaurs had average animal intelligence with some like dromaeosaurs and Troodon having intelligence on the higher end, but certain dinosaurs such as Stegosaurus and Triceratops were noted to have low intelligence.
• Dumb Muscle:
  • Bovines have huge amounts of health and high attack, but have low enough intelligence to be easily intimidated, distracted, or tricked into a trap, although it's just enough to allow herding behavior.
  • Rhinoceroses have Lightning Bruiser physical stats, but their low intelligence and poor eyesight cause major setbacks for them, especially when these shortcomings make them easy to kite/lure and often causes them to accidentally attack their own teammates.
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • When Earth was in beta points out the ways in which the Cambrian metagame was vastly different from subsequent updates: mobility, intelligence and stealth were hardly important, all gameplay took place in the oceans, vertebrates barely existed and strategies were relatively simple. The "early access" alpha version was even weirder, being closer to a chemistry simulator than the open world survival game it quickly turned into starting with the Cambrian explosion.
  • Concerning the channel itself, the early videos use two different styles for the stat meters. The first one is intentionally poor-looking, while the second resembles the first more, but has smaller icons and represents a few stats with different images, like a stealth plane for Stealth.
  • Graphic depictions of animal inuries were more commonplace in earlier videos. Such injures present in wildlife footage are now blurred out or cut entirely and instead shown in a director's cut version of the video on a different platform. An example of the latter is the shrike being cut from the normal "Bird Tier List" video due to how it hunts prey.
• Edutainment Show: A lot of very legitimate information about animals is given under the pretense of discussing the traits of characters in a massive online game called Outside.
• Elemental Powers: The "Elemental Type Moves" video showcases three animals that use elemental attacks: fire for the bombardier beetle's spray, water for the archerfish's water gun, and lightning for the electric eel's shock.
• Elephant in the Living Room: Every time humans are mentioned, their nature as a invokedGame-Breaker is also brought up, but he doesn't talk about how humans need to be nerfed that much— whereas someone analyzing an actual game in this manner would be pestering the devs to no end to do such a thing— likely due to the real life implications such a thing would have.
• Emote Command: In "Lizard Moveset Guide", TierZoo refers to the chameleon's color change ability as an emote, since they change colors based on their mood rather than for camouflage (and bemoans this as a waste of what could have been one of the most powerful stealth abilities in the game).
• Equipment-Based Progression: Playing as a Hermit Crab amounts to this, as most hermit crabs have pitiful stats around the board. However, they can obtain much better Defence and Stealth by finding a shell, and even gain a decent-to-good Attack stat if they find a sea anemone to place on top of it.
• Fire, Ice, Lightning: Well, Fire, Water, and Lightning. These three elemental attacks are shown in the "Elemental Type Moves" video—the "Fire Blast" used by the Bombardier Beetle, the "Water Gun" used by the Archerfish, and "Discharge" used by the Electric Eel.
• Fish out of Temporal Water: In "Should Dinosaurs Be Unbanned?", TierZoo rated dinosaurs on how well they would perform in the hypothetical scenario where they were brought back from extinction into the modern day. While some dinosaurs such as sauropods, ceratopsians and Tyrannosaurus Rex would be unable to cope as well with the change in meta, others such as ankylosaurs, stegosaurs and dromaeosaurs would fare even better.
• Flight: A trait discussed in the "Are Flying Builds OP?" episode. Flight was concluded to be a invokedGame-Breaker as it gave several advantages in offense, defense, and utility, with a few disadvantages.
• Flipping Helpless: The weakness of the Ankylosaurs. Despite having very high defensive stats and a club tail for crippling attackers, Ankylosaurs were completely helpless if they were flipped over, and this Achilles' Heel was a glaring counterplay that prevented it from being S-Tier.
• Follow the Leader: An In-Universe example. The glyptodont build was a B-tier Ice Age build mimicking the Ankylosaurus, although nowhere near as powerful or effective at area denial; they do have the similar moves Skull Bash and Club Smash going for them. Likewise, the chalicothere was seen as a lower-tier imitation of the giant ground sloth, although in reality the latter appeared later than the former. In general, any instance of convergent evolution can be taken as an example of this trope.
• Formula-Breaking Episode:
  • Tier Zoo did a tree tier list, which is the first time the tier list doesn't involve animals directly.
  • The raptor vs sabertooth video talks about the animals directly, without the video game framing and terminology.
• Fragile Speedster:
  • Cheetahs are considered this. They're one of the fastest land animals but they lack strength, endurance, and stamina. This meant that they have bad matchups against a lot of the other animals in the server, and the low stamina is also a big problem for a build based on speed.
  • The jumping spider sacrifices attack and defense for extremely high mobility and accuracy, making it Difficult, but Awesome.
  • Horses. They are very fast with great amounts of stamina, making them near-perfect mounts for humans. However, while their Defence stat is average, their HP stat is surprisingly low because it is very hard for them to heal from a broken leg, and it's mentioned that it's pretty much Game Over if that happens. A later video also explained that horses have surprisingly high attacking power, making them a Glass Cannon too.
  • The A-tier Haikouichthys build from the Cambrian beta game. A highly mobile fish build (and the first fish build released in the game) it lacked in many other stats, including health, but it was swift enough to dodge attacks from other builds like the top-tier Anomalocaris. In addition, it had the first "lens"-type eyes, which made detecting other players more effective than with their arthropod competitors' compound eyes.
  • Pigeons in the city Meta were considered this thanks to high mobility but their small size and hence low durability made them easily bodied by several city builds. As such, they were only D-tier.
  • Bats. They are surprisingly fast (with one species having the fastest speed in level flight) but have very low attack, defence, and HP stats, making them easily killed if they're attacked by a larger animal.
  • Falcons. Their main damage comes from the momentum of a dive, allowing them to deal incredible damage. However, if the opponent survives, all subsequent attacks are much weaker thanks to the falcon's rather small size.
  • Pronghorns are fast but fragile and have much better stamina unlike Cheetahs. Their speed allows them to outrun just about every predator in their habitat. However, they're highly vulnerable to obstacles like barbed-wire fences or less open terrain like woodlands.
• Full-Boar Action: Discussed in "Pigs Used to be Overpowered" - boars and warthogs are powerful and versatile tanks with remarkable strength and intelligence, making them a solid A-tier. However, it is subverted by the highest-ranking "hog", the pre-Ice Age "hell pig", which was not actually a true pig, but rather, a relative of the hippo.

Tropes G - J

• invokedGame-Breaker: In the game of Outside that TierZoo discusses, there are quite a few examples.
• Genius Bruiser:
  • Pigs have a rather balanced stat spread that borders on Lightning Bruiser and are surprisingly durable. Their highest stat, however, is their Intelligence.
  • Elephants are bulky, very powerful, and have high intelligence with the long lifespan and high dexterity via their trunks to make good use of said intelligence.
  • What separates Corvid builds from other similarly-built birds of prey are their high intelligence allowing them to, among other benefits, create large networks with other corvids to scout out larger areas for points of interest.
  • The overall second best build, the Orcas, not only have high physical stats all around, but also have one of the highest intelligence stat in the game, which allows them to form effective social structures or to abuse the physics engine for their own gain, and it gives them enough foresight to not provoke the number one build, the Humans.
• Genre-Busting: Outside appears to combine elements from many video game genres. It's alternatingly described as an MMORPG, Action RPG, Survival Sandbox, and Fighting Game, and elements of a few other genres may occasionally be found.
• Gentle Giant Sauropod: Played with. While sauropods were usually ignored by most smaller carnivores thanks to their massive size, it was mentioned that they were also downright deadly in a fight thanks to having an insanely large attack range with their tail, as well as a One-Hit Kill with their stomp.
• Giant Foot of Stomping: Sauropods were noted to have the most powerful attack in the entire game via their stomp thanks to their massive size and weight, knocking the target down and was explicitly mentioned to deal lethal damage.
• Glass Cannon:
  • Pit vipers and Sydney funnel-web spiders have very low defence, but one of the strongest venom-type attacks in the game.
  • Dromaeosaurs. Their health is low thanks to their small size but they can output very powerful burst damage from Critical Hit via Slashed Throat, and they also hunt in packs. They were considered an A-tier dinosaur precisely for this — while they could take down prey in groups with their high DPS, one hit was all it took to body them.
  • Again, humans—pathetic defense, below average hit points, but even with primitive technology have amazing match-ups against many animals despite that. By persistence hunting, which basically means using their superior stamina to chase an animal until it's too exhausted to escape, then killing it, humans can prolong an engagement until their prey just drops, then spear it to death.
  • Squid have high attack power owing to their piercing beak, but at the cost of low defence and HP, meaning that if a predator manages to land a hit on them, it's almost always Game Over.
  • Equines are a cross between this and Fragile Speedster, having high speed but also a fast and surprisingly powerful kick attack. Their health however is low, as a broken leg pretty much spells doom for them.
• Goal-Oriented Evolution: Animals are commonly described as having "used their evolution points toward" or "opted for" various traits, which reinforces the misconception that evolution is goal based. Justified as, in the context of the videos, evolution is the process of creating builds for the game.
• Gone Horribly Wrong:
  • The devs attempted to buff vertebrates in the Carboniferous period by increasing vegetation, so that they would have more food to eat and reproduce. This also increased oxygen levels, causing arthropods to grow to large sizes and dominate the meta instead.
  • The same can be said of the attempt to nerf the archosaur faction (consisting of dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and crocodilians) at the end of the Triassic period, with levels of volcanism that were not as intense as The Great Dying patch to avoid losing the majority of the playerbase. Rather than making the meta more diverse, though, it only gave the archosaurs a stronger hold on the high-tier positions, which they maintained until the end of Patch 1.2.3 (the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction).
• Good Bad Bugs: An invoked example, where few builds have figured out how to use certain skills and abilities in unintended ways that can provide enhanced mobility or even break the "game engine" to their benefit. For example, the cuttlefish can cycle its camouflage to overload other players' sensors and cause them to crash, while the pistol shrimp has put so many points in claw attack that a single strike, while underwater, generates an overpowered, ranged sonic shock burst.
• Good Thing You Can Heal: Ogre spiders have a passive regeneration ability, which is good because their lack of irises means their eyes get burned out everyday in the sunlight, rendering them blind during that time.
• Green Aesop:
  • "Earth's Next Balance Patch" talks about climate change and how it affects various species. Of course, this is Tierzoo, so it's presented in the style of a Super Smash Bros. announcement video.
  • "The Tree Tier List" seeks to raise awareness of how important trees are in the metagame while raising funds for #TeamTrees, a charity that aims to plant over 20 million trees.
  • "Are Hermit Crabs OP?" ends on the note that human pollution is greatly harming the hermit crab build, and is a fundraiser for #TeamSeas, a charity which seeks to remove garbage from the ocean.
• Griefer: Several classes are capable of griefing and trolling other classes with greater ease.
  • Bull Sharks are capable of moving to freshwater areas, allowing them to easily grief the freshwater fish players that aren't adapted against sharks.
  • House Cats, due to easy camping options with little to no competition, get away with far more kills on defenseless small characters than they need to, as noted under Cats Are Mean.
  • The episode on the Watering Hole "map" puts both crocodiles and hippos there, being able to camp, tank, and kill/intimidate other classes easily.
  • Squirrels have a uniquely strong matchup against humans thanks to being capable of chewing wires to cut them, as well as entering power plants with ease via burrowing. Put two and two together and you get a build that is capable of griefing even man.
• Groin Attack:
  • While the narrator talks about the hyena's powerful bite force in "Top 3 Underrated Animals," we're treated to a shot of a hyena biting at a water buffalo's testicles. Ouch.
  • In "Are Rhinos OP?", it's repeatedly pointed out that the rhino's perineum (the area between the anus and genitals) is its weak spot, and several video clips show it being attacked right there.
• Halloween Episode: For Halloween, TierZoo has sometimes released episodes dealing with notoriously scary animals: spiders in 2017 (including a unique intro clip with different music), and snakes in 2021.
• Herd-Hitting Attack: Billfish (Swordfish, Marlin, Sailfish) are stated to have slashing and piercing attacks that can hit multiple targets, allowing them to decimate shoals of fish with ease.
• Heroic Sacrifice: In "The Most Underrated Dinosaur", TierZoo shows a replay of a Deinocheirus playthrough. The climax involves a Tarbosaurus trying to attack a group of Deinocheirus players early in their playthrough just before they've leveled up enough to become self-sufficient, with TierZoo as the adult Deinocheirus assisting them. TierZoo's character fights off the Tarbosaurus, but is mortally wounded in the fight and dies just after the other Deinocheirus players gain the necessary XP to level up from watching the fight. In the "game" itself, the lower level teammates are his character's offspring.
• History Repeats:
  • Due to its success in the marine server, TierZoo expects the marine iguana to follow the path of the ancestors of the OP Mosasaurus.
  • The Giraffe is noted to follow in the footsteps of tall treetop grazing animals, a successful build over several time periods — such as the giant long-necked rhinoceros in the oligocene, and sauropods in the mesozoic.
• Hitbox Dissonance:
  • The "Spacing" builds take advantage of this to do damage with horns and/or an Epic Flail of a tail while the player remains (relatively) safe. Grappler builds get around this by actually grabbing onto the head or tail, preventing them from moving said heavy parts around effectively.
  • Giraffes have long legs and a long neck which keeps their body and head away from the reach of most African Savannah predators, giving them surprisingly good matchups.
• Horn Attack: The episode "Are Horns OP" talks about horns and antlers. Horns are more useful in combat than antlers, which primarily serve as temporary weapons for competition in the mating season. While horns are somewhat effective against frontal attacks, they're inaccurate and leave the user's head open on a miss, and also falter if the user is swarmed from multiple sides. In general, horns are Awesome, but Impractical and usually only useful for a last-resort attack, with most horned builds speccing primarily into speed to escape predators, only using horns if the predator catches up to them — and even then, kicking with feet tends to be just as effective.
• Humanity Is Superior: Humans are by far the most powerful build in the game, thanks to their superior intelligence allowing them to build inventions to bypass any shortcomings, while having one of the best social structures(second only to eusocial insects)—and even without said intelligence or inventions, they'd still be considered a invokedGame-Breaker thanks to having one of the best stamina regeneration of animals, the best throwing ability in the animal kingdom, and the ability to obtain more exp from various food thanks to the right gut flora. That said, their weakness is their low defence and hence vulnerability to flying eusocial stinging insects, but their inventiveness and capability of teaching does remedy that.
• Idle Game:
  • Playing as a sponge is effectively this, as sponges lack any mobility, stealth, attack, or intelligence, all they do is automatically filter-feed and grow. Despite this, they have a spot in B-tier due to being worth negative experience, and as such are Not Worth Killing.
  • TierZoo explicitly likens barnacles to idle games, due to sticking on a surface and filter-feeding. They're stuck in F-tier due to being entirely luck-based depending on what they manage to stick onto, since they can't move away from their surface once they latch onto one, and despite their extremely high defense they are vulnerable to the multitude of armor-piercing builds.
• Improvised Armor: Lacewing larvae have the ability to stick the dead bodies of their prey onto their back as makeshift armor, turning their otherwise low defense into an armor capable of repelling even ant swarms.
• Inescapable Net: In the Spider Tier List, the Ogre Spider is described as using its webbing in a unique way compared to other spiders: instead of camping and hoping prey walks into its web, it lurks in high places and throws its web like a net onto a target.
• Insistent Terminology: He tends to replace biological terms with video game terms. For example:
  • Being born is respawning.
  • Nutrition is XP.
  • Habitats are servers.
  • Species are builds.
  • Age is level.
  • Food is loot.
  • An individual's death is a game over.
  • Extinction events due to natural disasters are balance patches.
  • Extinction events due to animals being out-competed or preyed upon are players mass-quitting.
  • Cannibalism is team-killing.
  • A non-biological example would be referring to scientists as data miners.
• "Instant Death" Radius: Herbivorous dinosaurs with a tail-based defence often had one, due to their mid-ranged Beware My Stinger Tail Slap attack being capable of inflicting lethal wounds. Sauropods in particular had a massive range with their very long and heavy tails, which, while less damaging than ankylosaur or stegosaur tails was enough to cause knockdown, and getting even closer to their front was an even bigger death sentence as they could use their Giant Foot of Stomping for a One-Hit Kill.
• Instant-Win Condition: The "Pick Two Animal Groups. They will defend you. The rest are coming to kill you." scenario has two examples. For the enemy side, they win if they manage to kill the VIP. This is a problem if the human with the rifle is not picked as he only needs to shoot the VIP and not the defending animals, and if the VIP doesn't pick the rats they will be overrun. For the player's side, picking the rats ensures a Foregone Victory against almost all the other animals with the exception of the human shooting the VIP—but even that is covered by the other top choice in the eagles.
• Introduced Species Calamity: Invasive species builds tend to be very high on the tier list, precisely due to their build's survival capabilities allowing them to dominate and proliferate in the environment they were introduced into.
• Irony: The Cookie-cutter shark build is stated to be the least orthodox shark build, in other words, it's the least cookie-cutter build of sharks.
• Item Caddy: Some builds have unlocked the Tool Use ability, which lets them pick up items to unlock special abilities or boost their stats.
  • Humans have become a invoked Game-Breaker in part because their Tool Use, combined with Item Crafting, can potentially turn them into a Master of All.
  • Hermit crabs have pathetically low stats by default... however, they have the special ability to equip shells dropped by defeated mollusk players, massively boosting their defense and stealth. They can also equip special accessories onto that shell to gain even more abilities (for example, attaching anemones to get a poison-based Counter-Attack). Unfortunately, the current balance patch means that the highest-ranked snail shells drop at a much lower rate due to pollution making snails unviable in the metagame, while Joke Item plastic shells created by human players dilute the pool of available items.
• Item Crafting: An ability of a handful of high intelligence builds, most prominently humans. Even at low levels, it is considered extremely powerful, and at the advanced levels humans have in it, it's a complete invoked Game-Breaker.
• Jack of All Stats:
  • Pigs are noted to be quite balanced statwise (bordering Lightning Bruiser) for a tank build, with Intelligence as their highest stat, and their durability comes from an ability in their thickened skin and layer of fat. This along with other abilities give the two prominent ones (Boars and Warthogs) a solid high A-tier in the meta.
  • Rats are described as "the ultimate jack-of-all trades for the lightweight meta".
  • Orangutans are this in comparison to the other apes. They're fast, but not as fast as chimpanzees. They're strong, but not as strong as gorillas. And they're highly intelligent, but nowhere near as intelligent as humans. According to TierZoo, this makes them a great beginner class.
  • Iguanas. All of their stats are higher than a typical lizard, but still only mid-range overall. Despite this, their abilities are adequate enough to help their survival, thus earning them a spot in B-tier. In "The Lizard Tier List", it was even described to be "arguably the best representative of the lizard build as a whole, as it essentially has all the main weaknesses and strengths of its class".
  • Owls are considered this among bird builds. While their ability to fly silently makes them primarily excel in stealth, it's noted that all of its other stats are solid, with its only major weakness being that its lack of waterproof feathers can result in hindered flight when wet. Despite this, its stats are enough to place it firmly in A-tier.
  • The largest of the "Felinae" cat builds, the Cougar, is placed in C-tier. All their stats are solid but not high enough to reliable hunt other players in or above their own weight class. The "Panthera" cat builds can do this and are thus all placed in higher tiers.
• Joke Character:
  • Surprisingly, the supposedly Nigh-Invulnerable Water Bear is considered among the worst builds in the game. It's stated that it sacrificed all its stats for speccing huge amounts of points in heat, cold, vacuum, radiation and pressure resistances… without taking the extremophile trait, meaning that it has to go into "hibernation mode" if in extreme conditions. All this, and the fact that it doesn't have resistance to physical damage which most players use makes it considered a bottom-tier character.
  • Modern-day Sloths are considered the worst build in the game. Any hostile encounter is practically a death sentence since they are extremely slow and have almost no attacking power. Their stealth ability is poor and only works when they're stationary in tree foliage. They need to descend to the ground in order to defecate, which makes them vulnerable to predators. Finally, they specced into gut bacteria to allow them a nutrient-poor diet of leaves, and said bacteria die if temperatures drop low, causing the sloth to starve to death. Harpy eagles even intentionally leave sloths alive so that their fledglings can use them as target practice. However, being a Joke Character did give them an advantage against humans as compared to the huge prehistoric sloths—since humans took no interest to smaller arboreal animals, they didn't bother to hunt these low-tier sloths while the huge prehistoric sloths were hunted to extinction.
  • Domestic sheep. Their intelligence stat is abysmal to the point where they can be defeated by bramble bushes.
    "If you're a herbivore player and you get beat by your prey, you should probably choose a new main."
  • Fainting goats, a goat class that traded the usual goat defensive moves for the ability to faint when in danger. As you can imagine, this isn't very effective.
  • Underwater squirrels in his SpongeBob SquarePants species review. Specializing in razor sharp ever growing teeth and spending most of your time with a glass dome between your face and the world around you are not a useful combination.

Tropes K - M

• Kevlard:
  • Almost literally with pigs, who have a layer of skin and a layer of fat that are thick enough to provide protection from snake fangs, giving them a good matchup against snakes. This is the same fat humans use to make lard.
  • Subverted by Hippopotamuses. They are fat, but their durability comes from having a 2 inch layer of skin that protects them from most biting and slashing attacks. This makes attacks from things like lions and crocodiles hilariously ineffective.
• Killer Rabbit:
  • Several of the species in the S-tier qualify, such as house cats, bees, dogs, etc., though in many cases this is less because of sheer power in comparison with other S-listers like humans, but more akin to adaptability and the ability to remain viable in comparison to other player builds native to the servers they inhabit.
  • The Robber fly was considered an underrated S-tier insect thanks to being able to catch its prey mid-flight with superior accuracy and precision and long grab range.
  • Humans, the invokedGame-Breaker can take on many animals, but the animal type they have the worst matchup with is flight-capable stinging eusocial insects thanks to the human's extremely low defense due to not having any fur, and the insects' superior mobility and tendency to Zerg Rush.
• Last Note Nightmare: At the end of the Cat Tier List video, the narrator thinks he forgot a type of cat. A picture of a house cat with a tag saying "Hello, I am a: SUPPORT" appears. the image quickly flashes to the negative, with the cat getting blank white eyes, and their tag now saying "Hello, I am a: SERIAL KILLER". The Narrator says he'll talk about that in a later video.^note Specifically, in the "Cat Vs. Dog—Best Support Class" video, he explains that cats aren't a support class at all, but an assassin class that exploited an infectious disease they carried, Toxoplasmosis, to get humans to provide them with home security, which lets them slaughter millions of defenseless rodent and bird players annually with impunity.
• Leaked Experience: The African Painted Hound is known to give experience points (food) to the weaker members of the pack first instead of the strongest, allowing them to overcome Can't Catch Up and Unstable Equilibrium. This is one of the reasons why they are S-Tier.
• Lethal Harmless Powers: Most flies use their modified vestigal wings called halteres to give themselves balance, positioning and precise control in the air, allowing them to easily escape attacks or land on hard-to-reach places. The Robber Fly instead uses this offensively allowing it to catch and take down prey in mid-air with high accuracy and precision. This landed it a spot in S-tier as one of the best, if not the best, solo insect class.
• Lethal Joke Character:
  • Snail builds are by and large considered F-tier thanks to their pathetic mobility stat and laughable defense that can't even fend off a predator from a larger weight class. Among them, the cone snail is no different... save for the fact that it has the ability to fire off venomous harpoons. These do an amazing amount of damage, enough to One-Hit Kill many other players in the reef servers and even penetrate human diver suits. This one skill is enough to propel the cone snail to A-tier.
  • Sponges have some of the worst stats in the game — zero mobility, attack, intelligence and stealth, with meager HP and average defence. One might think that they're easy pickings for predators, but their spicules cause negative exp gain to most predators that attempt to eat them, and some sponges have a Area of Effect toxic debuff around them. This makes sponges Not Worth Killing, and combined with their incredible ease of gameplay allows them to succeed in the reef meta at a solid upper B-tier.
  • While most flightless birds sit at the bottom of the Bird Tier List, penguins manage to sneak into the top of C-tier since their flippers and cold resistance make their lack of flight trivial in favor of aquatic mobility that gives them a major advantage against fish. However, it's stated that the lack of a consistent land predator in the Antarctic server is also a major reason of this advantage, and they are still easy pickings for larger aquatic predators in the region.
  • Shrimp as a whole are considered F-tier animals, due to having weak legs, small claws, and no eyestalks, which prevents them from digging into the sand, all as a tradeoff for better water mobility... which is about as good as a seahorse's. The Pistol Shrimp averts this thanks to its powerful cavitation bubble ability and is mentioned to merit higher placement.
• Let's You and Him Fight: Thanks to their high intelligence, Crows know how to peck targets to provoke and manipulate them into attacking other threats. This even allows them to turn the tables against some normally-poor matchups like cats, making the cats fight each other.
• Lightning Bruiser:
  • The Allosaurus build was a C-tier dinosaur that was relatively balanced stat-wise, with its bite attack dealing damage comparable to a modern lion. In spite of this, Allosaurus proved to be a dangerous opponent due to its high mobility, devastating head swipe attack, and tendency to hunt in packs.
  • Bears. Lots of bulk and power, surprisingly high mobility, and a very deadly weapon in the form of claws. Unless you can fly or are/are aided by a tool-using human, pray one never sees you as prey. The Cave Bear from the Ice Age takes it up to eleven — powerful, durable, and fast enough to take on even the most powerful builds, to the point that early humans did not pose a threat to it.
  • Hippos. They are extremely tanky due to high HP and thick skin, have very high attacking power with their bites, and also have surprisingly high mobility in and out of the water. Tier Zoo considered them S-Tier thanks to this and their abilities.
  • Billfish such as Swordfish, Marlin, and Sailfish. These are the fastest animals in the ocean and have powerful piercing and slashing attacks that can deal serious damage to shoals of smaller fish. Their defense and HP aren't too shabby either.
  • Black Mambas can move very quickly, have a fast-acting and very potent venom, and sport high HP and Defense for a venomous snake build, which are otherwise quite fragile. This is coupled with an extremely aggressive and fast-paced playstyle, which allows Black Mambas to dominate easily and are thus considered the top S-Ranked snakes.
  • Beetles. The hard shells on their wings makes them incredibly durable, they are often armed with powerful mandibles that make them fearsome opponents in a close-range fight, some are even armed with medium-ranged chemical spray attacks, they are gifted with the fastest land speed of all terrestrial insects even though they look like they should be lumbering and slow, and they can fly.
  • Rhinoceroses are very strong, have thick hide for durability, and can move quickly while charging. However, they're also Dumb Muscle with poor eyesight, which causes them to accidentally attack their allies when they can't distinguish friend from foe.
• Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards: Humans are a prime example of the "wizard" class—they have a good lifespan combined with the best intelligence of all animals, allowing them to overcome their stat shortcomings and make them better than even the other S-tier animals via the inventions they build.
• Living Dinosaurs: In the Cryptid Episode, the Loch Ness Monster and Mokèlé-mbèmbé are speculated to be these, the former being a Plesiosaur, and the latter being a sauropod with dwarfism (which allowed it to survive the dinosaur extinction). Both were considered high-tier Cryptids due to being able to survive in their environment thanks to their size and easy access to food.^noteOf course, it's generally accepted that evidence of non-avian dinosaurs would have been far more common if they really did exist. Incidentally, the largest of the only living dinosaurs today, ratite birds like ostriches and emus, were bought up as options in the earlier video "Is It Possible To Play As A Dinosaur?"… and promptly brushed off due to completely lacking the requisite standard theropod weaponry (teeth and grasping clawed arms).
• Long-Lived: Termite Queens are considered this compared to every other insect in the game. While most insects live for less than a year to a few years, a termite queen has a lifespan comparable to that of a human's or elephant's. This allows her to build up some of the most powerful armies and structures in the game.
• Long-Range Fighter: Not many animals in the "game" have ranged attacks, with the exception of the Electric Eel, Archerfish, Bombardier Beetle, Spitting Cobra, Spitting Spider, Velvet Worm, and primates, most notably Humans.
• Low-Tier Letdown: In-Universe:
  • Tardigrades are often touted to have resistances to several deadly sources like vacuum, ionizing radiation, and a few others. However, this requires them to go into a hibernation state, and more importantly they lack the most crucial damage resistance of all — physical damage, which almost everything and everyone uses. This huge weakness makes Tardigrades a bottom-tier pick.
  • New players get hyped when they see the cheetah's high top speed and synergistic abilities, but quickly realize that they're only good for chasing things down (they're not even good at taking down a target nor defending their prize) and have dreadful matchups against most competent builds in Africa.
  • Black widow and brown recluse spiders are infamous for their deadly bites that potentially inflict necrosis, giving them massive clout among spider builds. However, this is caused by bacterial infection instead of the bite itself (which isn't lethal to most heavier builds), leaving players with nothing but an decent-at-best spider build that's generally outclassed.
• Magikarp Power: Sauropods benefited greatly from having the highest base-stat total of any land build once they reached later levels, but they were also extraordinarily outclassed in the early-to-mid game. Their low mobility, lack of adequate defense, and extremely vulnerable neck meant they had almost no favorable match-ups to start off with. As such, very few were able to actually reach their class's full potential; but their eventual size made them practically unstoppable once they did.
• Mama Bear: Protective parenting is a team strategy that greatly helps survival. Players are vulnerable at the start of the game, and having a very protective mother can greatly enhance the survival of new players. Dimetrodon was considered a top-tier Permian build because of its protective mothers, since much of the meta involved raiding nests. Mammals became a dominant species because of having protective mothers, a behaviour passed down from the Synapsid builds like Dimetrodon. It's also noted that mammals get a "rage" powerup when defending their young, and that challenging an enraged mother is a very bad idea.
• Master of All:
  • Humans. Sure, they may lack strength, durability, speed or stealth compared to other animals, but thanks to having the best intelligence in the "game" bar none, they can invent and build things that give them far greater stats in those areas (with the exception of health).
  • While they don't compare to humans, bears tend to be this due to their high base stats in everything, being omnivores, and possessing solid abilities.
  • Hippopotamuses have high stats across the board with their lowest stats being average intelligence and stealth (which in the latter case is very high for such a large build), have very powerful abilities with little to no drawbacks. Tier Zoo considers them S-Rank.
  • Orcas are another example, possessing extremely high power, intelligence, defence and HP while also having solid mobility and stealth. They are considered the second best build in the game because of this, surpassed only by humans.
  • Most of the big cats qualify. Tigers, despite not having any unique special abilities, rank in high A-tier due to being this, having very high stats across the board. Lions are even more so, possessing similar stats to the tiger plus being able to hunt in packs. The best of all is the Jaguar, which not only has very high stats across the board, but also has great eyesight allowing it to see through almost all forms of camouflage, and is just as capable of hunting in the trees or the water as on the ground.
  • Gorillas, the second highest-ranked primate after humans, have very high stats across the board (aside from stealth) along with a strong social structure, making them basically untouchable so long as they stay with the group.
  • Beetles are speedy on land, capable of flight, have a tough outer shell in their wings on top of their natural exoskeleton that makes them more durable than other insects, are incredibly strong, good in a fight, and can possess devastating chemical attacks. They are outright described as "an amalgamation of what makes the insect faction so powerful."
• Master of None:
  • No seal or sea lion build ranks above B-tier, as splitting their evolution points between aquatic and land-based survival abilities has prevented them from mastering either environment. They are completely dominated by sharks and orcas in water, and are cripplingly vulnerable when on land. The only pinniped build to overcome this and rise to top tier is the walrus, due to being so massive that no land predator can pose a serious threat while actually having a strong weapon in their tusks.
  • The Spinosaurus, a D-tier dinosaur build, faces a similar problem as its investment into aquatic abilities like swimming and electroreception cost it the necessary stats to hold its own on land, resulting in it getting bodied against other land carnivore builds in the area, and outran by most herbivores.
  • Seahorses. They're the slowest fish in the sea, lack any offensive capabilities, and while they have above-average defense for their size, their small size and slow speed means they'll still be pushed around often.
  • The D-tier Tiger Keelback is one of the very few animals that is both venomous and poisonous, but their venom and poison aren't all that potent and they still have the weaknesses of most colubrid snakes.
• Maximum HP Reduction: The Tail Autotomy ability of the lizard family to give a permanent reduction in max HP unless a new tail can be fully regrown. Because of this and other factors, it was considered it a detrimental ability, with the two S-Tier lizards in the Monitor and Komodo Dragon being ranked high partly because they lack it.
• Mechanically Unusual Class: Humans don't have claws, fur, and other things that other builds spec into. That said, they're a class that's heavily based around the Tool Use skill, and they make up for any shortcomings with inventions created because of their maxed Intelligence.
• The Medic: Cleaner wrasse specialize in cleaning parasites off other fish, removing their debuffs. This allows them to even gain the hospitality of larger predator builds like sharks.
• Messy Pig: Pigs use their nose to dig up mud and wallow in it in order to gain a heat resistance buff, making them less susceptible to overheating in the sun.
• Mighty Glacier: Most animals of this classes are solid A-tier. However, they are vulnerable against Intelligence-based builds and herd tactics.
  • Naturally, turtles are this, with tough shells and strong bites. Those who fail in these criteria are low-tier.
  • Constrictor snakes can win a 1-on-1 fight with pretty much anything, but at the cost of severely reduced mobility.
  • Walruses are exemplary examples of this, being sluggish, but so durable they can tank Polar Bears, and their tusks can ward off the same. They're less sluggish in water, but that still doesn't help them in matchups against the invokedGame-Breaker Orcas.
  • Tyrannosaurus rex was considered this. It was noted to be not particularly fast outside short bursts of speed. If it was re-introduced in the current-day meta, it would have extremely high attack damage, but its large size made it slower than several modern-day animals. As such, the only animals it could reliably kill would be elephants.
  • Most snails are placed in F-Tier thanks to only having good defence (for their size), the worst speed in the meta, and nothing else. The Cone Snail however has an extremely high attack stat to go with it thanks to a very lethal venom harpoon that can even pierce human protection, and is a solid A-Tier because of it.
  • Elephants have high stats in almost everything, including attack, defense, health, and intelligence, but have a relatively low speed and stealth stat.
  • Downplayed by Komodo Dragons. They have powerful tail slaps, claw slashes, and a deadly and powerful venomous bite, but their speed is described to be "while solid, isn't broken by any means". This however isn't too big of an issue, as the Komodo Dragon is also a Scarily Competent Tracker.
  • Giant anteaters are a very bizarre example. While they lack any sort of meaningful armor or defensive abilities, they simply boast an absurdly high HP stat. This is backed up by massive claws and powerful forearms that give it a surprisingly strong attack, though these cumbersome claws alongside a low metabolism cut into its agility significantly. Despite this, the fact that it can defend itself from a jaguar ambush is nothing to laugh at.
  • Mantis Shrimps play with this. The speed of their punches is extremely fast, but their short legs and fins give them slow mobility. This usually means they're forced to hunt mostly stationary builds like shelled molluscs.
• Mighty Roar: An ability that's used by big cats and other larger species for Victory Through Intimidation and thus doing a huge number on enemy resolve.
• Mokele-Mbembe: Mokeles are covered in an April Fools' Day video on cryptids. The narrator considers them an S-tier animal, and speculates that they're dinosaur players who managed to avoid the sweeping bans (that is, the meteor that killed the dinosaurs) at the end of the Cretaceous period.
• Moveset Clone: In "The Rodent Tier List", a number of the rodents have an Echo Fighter counterpart, such as the mouse to the rat.

Tropes N - R

• Necessary Drawback: Sails. These helped reptiles appear larger and hence more intimidating, prevented the owner from being grabbed from the back, and also collected heat faster in the day which was vital for their stamina thanks to their cold-blooded nature. However, it did come with the price of a huge stealth decrease as well as giving them a larger hitbox, which is why sails weren't seen as often in the Mesozoic era.
• Never Smile at a Crocodile: Crocodilians are S-tier for a number of reasons. One, they have high stats across the board, with their lowest one (Defense) coming out as average. Two, they have the strongest bite in the game, which is capable of one-shotting most low-to-mid HP targets as well as crushing the armor of more tanky builds like turtles and armadillos. Three, their conical teeth make them superb grapplers, which allows them to take down even more durable players via the Death Roll, one of the most powerful attacks in the game. And four, crocodilians have been able to survive through millions of years and multiple balance patches with minimal changes applied to their general build and strategy, proving just how effective they are in the meta.
• Noble Bird of Prey: Almost every single bird of prey is at least B-tier, with the Eagles, Hawks and Falcons all in A. Surprisingly, the secretary bird was listed as an S-rank for being able to counter high-tier builds like cobras and generally perform excellently in the difficult server that is the African Savannah. The "Best Support Class" video also highlighted birds of prey as the best battle summon, with the sport of falconry being specifically tailored to taking down fast and evasive bird players. Combining this with an ally dog player's acute smell ability only adds to the potential of the team as a whole, flushing out prey so the raptor can better intercept it.
• No Export for You: invokedThe Abyssal server is region-locked, which is why no outsiders can play in it. TierZoo himself can't set up a proper tier list for the deep sea meta because even he doesn't know enough about it to make a proper call on what builds work best.
• The Nose Knows:
  • Pigs have an excellent sense of smell which helps them detect underground food. This is paired up with a shovel-like nose that helps them dig said food up easily.
  • Komodo Dragon have a powerful sense of smell to the point where the only way to really flee from being tracked down by one is to leave the island server entirely.
• Not the Intended Use: The episode "Abusing the Game's Physics Engine" is all about this—usage of skills in a creative way that the developers didn't intend certain builds to, causing ways to "exploit the physics engine":
  • The Trap Jaw ant's bite is a powerful weapon, but it doesn't have much in terms of mobility as it lacks powerful legs or wings (for most of the time). However, by using its trap jaw bite on the ground, it's capable of propelling itself a great distance.
  • Many beetles have a headbutt ability, but the Click Beetle's headbutt ability can be used without a target, the force of which can propel it into the air.
  • The Cuttlefish's color changing ability can not only be used for its primary purpose in camouflage, but it can also be used as hypnosis via undulating its color rapidly, causing other players to "crash" via "messing with their graphics engine".
  • Most Crustacean builds have a powerful pincer grab, but their abysmal intelligence means that most of them would be unable to develop ranged combat. Unless it's the Pistol Shrimp, who specced so much into grab speed that it can create a shockwave by targeting the water in front of it.
• Not Worth Killing: Sponges are mentioned to be not worth the effort for a predator to feed on despite being immobile sitting ducks and thus easy prey. Their spicules cause negative experience gain by acting like glass shards, and some sponges have a toxic area debuff to harm predators. While some builds like turtles are resistant to these two effects, they are much better off eating higher-value targets like jellyfish, snails, and seaweed.
• One-Hit Kill:
  • The Crocodile's Death Roll ability is aptly described as an instant kill. It's further expanded on in a later video — it's practically a death sentence when successfully pulled off, but requires unbroken concentration and can thus be interrupted by an ally of the victim.
  • The Brazilian Wandering Spider's venom was mentioned to be potent enough to one-shot nearly anything, from mid-tiers like lizards to top-tiers like apes. The fact that they inject more venom in one bite than any other spider also helps.
  • The Sauropod build's Giant Foot of Stomping was mentioned to deal lethal damage and described as "literally the most devastating move in the game".
  • The Poison Dart Frog's poison is stated to be able to drop any player's HP to zero relatively quickly after biting the frog. The main trouble is that it requires the frog to be attacked in order for it to work — and the frog is even more fragile than other frogs thanks to its tiny size.
  • The big cats go for the throat of their prey to slowly choke them to death. Except the Jaguar, which has the most powerful bite of all the cats relative to their size and can utilise this to crush the neck or skull of their prey, instantly paralysing them or outright causing a Game Over.
• One Stat to Rule Them All: Intelligence, which allows for both group tactics and wisdom accumulation. This is doubly true in the city meta, where intelligence is mentioned to be far more important than stats like power and HP. Humans in particular abuse their maxed-out intelligence to simply craft items that give them extremely high stats in everything except Health. The Dinosaur Tier list puts the intelligence-based Troodon in A-Rank among several other very effective builds. In "The Bird Tier List", two of the S-ranked birds were the intelligence-based builds in the Parrots and Corvids.
• Open Secret: Everyone knows that Outside is just Real Life, but everyone from the uploader to the comments section will always talk about it as if it's a real video game because it's more fun that way.
• Out of the Frying Pan: Flying Fish were considered D-Tier because their ability to jump out of the water and "fly" allowed them to escape water-borne predators... and become easy meals for airborne ones. Furthermore, even if they avoided the air predators, they would then land back into the water and get caught by the aquatic ones. Either way, their leaping ability only served to make them even more vulnerable.
• Outside-Context Problem:
  • One of the advantages of the Australia server is the matchup inexperience that non-native server players will have. While most players in other servers would be able to roughly distinguish the designs of predators and "harmless" animals, Australia contains many weird and Confusion Fu creatures like the platypus that would be a headache for outside-server players to understand.
    "The relative abundance of jank makes Australia a really unforgiving place for newbies."
  • The Deep Sea Meta is also considered as one for any outsider trying to join it. Most build types tend to be marginally similar among different servers, with the exception of the deep sea where everything is… weird, and more importantly, unexplored/not well-analyzed. It's so different that TierZoo cannot make a conventional Tier List for it!
• Overshadowed by Awesome: This is the reason why the African Cape Buffalo is only A-Tier despite being one of the most dangerous animals in the Savannah. While it is powerful, it's overshadowed by the Wildebeest (an antelope build) which may not be as bulky but is much faster, allowing it to avoid the deadly attacks and ambushes much more often compared to the Cape Buffalo.
• Painful Pointy Pufferfish: One reason why Puffer Fish were deemed to be S-tier inhabitants of the Coral Reef meta is due to being able to inflate and hurt attackers with spines, plus their round size when inflated makes it hard to get a bite on them.
• Panthera Awesome: All big cats, which are also called "panthers", are B-tier or higher, with the jaguar being S-tier. Averted by the cougar, lynx, and cheetah, however, all of whom are mid-to-low tier and are technically small cats despite their size, and thus not panthers. Played straight with the A-tier sabertooth in "The Ice Age Tier List," which had a high power stat that was surprisingly more due to its muscular forelimbs than its brittle fangs.
• Paper Tiger: The brown recluse and black widow are two of the most feared spiders in the game due to their venomous bites, the former of which is often reported to cause necrosis. However, TierZoo argues that neither of their bites are anywhere near as potent as rumored, and their small webs make their camping strategy weak compared to other spider players. This combined with their unimpressive stats rank black widows and brown recluses as F-tier spiders who get by entirely on their overstated reputations.
• Personal Space Invader: Dromaeosaurs had a sickle claw which not only functioned as a Critical Hit weapon, but also allowed them to hook onto bigger dinosaurs by using their pounce attack.
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: Beetles are mentioned to be some of the strongest animals proportionate to body size, packing enough muscle to move objects far above their weight class.
• Playing with Fire:
  • The bombardier beetle's chemical spray is called "Fire Blast" in the "Elemental Type Moves" video, since it actually heats up to near the boiling point of water when its constituent chemicals are mixed and ejected.
  • At the end of the Raptor Tier List video, TierZoo notes that some Australian raptor players have actually adopted the strategy of dropping firebrands into scrubland, starting fires that can burn cover and flush out prey.
• Point Build System: Various abilities animals may have like cling pads or venom are described as being acquired based on the spending of "evolution points" and lower-tier animals will be criticized for inefficient expenditure of their evolution points leaving them with capabilities ill-suited to their environment or spending too much energy continuing to specialize further in an ability long past the point of diminishing returns.
• Poisonous Person: Both venom and poison are two different categories of toxins used against attackers or prey. In general, venom is far more useful than poison, since poison requires that the animal has to take a sufficiently strong hit in order for it to affect while venom is injected upon attack. The Tiger Keelback snake is noted to be both venomous and poisonous, but neither its venom nor poison are very potent.
• Power Creep:
  • During the 1.2 patch era (the Mesozoic Era), more and more powerful dinosaurs kept being added until it got completely out of hand, forcing the devs to issue a heavy-handed patch that banned nearly all terrestrial megafauna and all but a few dinosaurs, and gave mammals a chance in the meta.
  • In general, over the course of the game, and especially the 1.3 patch era (the Cenozoic), higher and higher intelligence builds have become possible, allowing for more and more sophisticated group strategies, tool use, and Item Crafting, leading to extremely powerful builds like Orcas, Wolves, Black Bears, Otters, Parrots, Octopi, Crows, Pigs, Elephants, Chimps, and Humans, which have managed to hit levels of dominance exceeding even dinosaurs at their peak.
  • This trope is part of the reason cited for why scorpions are a D-tier animal. They had great matchups when they were first introduced, but animals added in later updates are better able to counter their build.
• Punny Name: An accidental one at that — "Tier" means "Animal" in German. Meaning that this could be seen as Animal Zoo in German.
• Quantity Versus Quality: In general, quantity tends to win out, as real life averts the Conservation of Ninjutsu:
  • Pack hunting and eusocialism are traits that tend to make several animals higher tiers.
  • In "The Optimal Team Composition", the biggest threat/most useful ally is the Swarm of Rats. 10000 of them, which is enough to overrun all the other animals on the list. The 50 eagles are the other most useful pick as their numbers help them at playing support.
• Rascally Raccoon: In "The City Animal Tier List", Raccoons are noted to have a reputation for making some of the best thieving builds in the game, thanks to being able to detect, reach and open several food-containing containers.
• Redemption Demotion: In "The Optimal Team Composition", the human counts as this. When they're an ally, they're actually rather weak as their objective is to neutralize all the animals attacking the VIP. While their rifle is capable of one-shotting an animal, their ammunition is limited, their attack has a reload time, and thus the number of enemy animals will easily overrun them. When they're an enemy, they're the second-most dangerous threat after the rats since their objective is to kill the VIP, which they can easily do by sniping the VIP from afar while ignoring the animals protecting the VIP, making limited ammunition a non-issue. As such, if the human is not chosen, it is imperative that the VIP have an ally who can spot him quickly and hinder his shooting capability which the Eagles would be capable of doing.
• Reincarnation: Implied. He refers to being born as respawning.
• The Remake:
  • The Frog Tier List is a remake of TierZoo's earliest video, giving a more in-depth reason for frogs being weak and also placing various frogs into different tiers.
  • Likewise, The Lizard Tier List is a remake of The Lizard Moveset Guide, giving more in-depth reasons for the tierings of lizards. It also mixes in the Komodo Dragon's mini-analysis from Is it possible to play as a Dinosaur?.
• Required Secondary Powers:
  • High Intelligence is greatly undermined if the animal doesn't have high dexterity to actually move objects around properly, since dexterity and precision is needed to craft tools. Likewise, potential is wasted if an animal has high Intelligence but a short lifespan, since they would not be able to accumulate enough wisdom to learn skills effectively before they die of old age.
  • Conversely, a long lifespan without intelligence isn't very useful either, as it hampers the ability to gather and pass on wisdom during said lifespan, thus resulting, for example, in young and old crabs alike continuing to fall for the same tricks and traps.
  • A hematophagous build requires a high Stealth stat to avoid being detected by the victim. This is the main reason why TierZoo considers the female mosquito and the tick to be more effective than the Vampire Bat when it comes to sucking blood, as the bat can be easily detected by a conscious victim.
  • Despite having the offensive tools to break open ant/termite nests and consume swarms of the residents within, anteaters don't have the defensive abilities to avoid taking damage from the ants' acid, bites and stings. This normally isn't an issue as anteaters have surprisingly high health, but it does mean that they cannot feed for extended durations.
• Rhino Rampage: As noted in Awesome, but Impractical, this is subverted with modern-day rhinos, which are listed in D-tier because of their poor intelligence and vision despite otherwise high stats, but was played much straighter by the extinct woolly rhino, which was big and strong enough to play as a serviceable tank in spite of these flaws.
• Rocket-Tag Gameplay: Australia is described to have this, since there are several venomous species that can kill in a single strike and not many herbivorous tanks due to lack of abundant vegetation.
• Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies: The extinction of the dinosaurs itself is not this trope, which is when the game master decides to kill everyone, but several videos referencing it state that in the context of the Outside meta, that's exactly what happened. Specifically, the Serial Escalation of the dinosaurs' overall invokedGame-Breaker status reached its peak during the Late Cretaceous, and the developers realized that there was only one way to restore balance to the metagame: implementing a balance patch that would render the top-tier dinosaur builds unviable.
• RPG Mechanics 'Verse: Applies this to Real Life.
• Running Gag: The text "I've made a terrible mistake", "Mike I swear to god", "Swiggity swooty", and "Yeet" pop up as a joke repeatedly.

Tropes S

• Sacred Hospitality: Cleaner wrasse rely on their reputation as The Medic to protect themselves, and even larger fish will not attack them for their parasite-removal services... most of the time. TierZoo notes that betrayals during cleansing sessions are rare, but the risk still exists.
• Sapient Cetaceans: Discussed and averted. Firstly, dolphins lack grasping digits to manipulate and craft objects, and even if they did they would be unable to create fire that is necessary for advancement due to living in an aquatic environment.
• Scarily Competent Tracker: The Komodo Dragon is described as such. While their speed is solid but not broken, their incredible sense of smell means that the distance an animal needs to flee to avoid being tracked down is to leave the island server entirely.
• Scary Scorpions: Subverted. Scorpions are considered a D-tier build thanks to having terrible matchups against several modern-day animals, compared to the past where they had few bad matchups. While their claws can catch prey and hold them in place for a venom stinger, it's ineffective against most larger animals, and many animals like mongooses and birds are agile and fast enough to go for their tail and damage it, instantly neutralizing any threat they pose.
• Scary Stinging Swarm:
  • The weakness of the otherwise invokedGame-Breaker humans is flight-capable eusocial stinging insects such as bees, wasps, and hornets. Thanks to having no fur, humans have terrible defense if not wearing the proper equipment, and the bees' mobility and fast speed via flight plus Zerg Rush tactics allows them to give several painful stings to the human which will destroy the human's resolve causing them to flee—or even worse, cause anaphylactic shock that can kill the human.
  • Yellow jackets in particular are mentioned in the video "Are Insects Getting Banned?" as one of the best generalists for its weight class, with powerful stats relative to its size, making it effective against other builds alone or in swarms. In addition, yellow jackets would benefit from the increasing level of trash in the overworld due to their ability to make bases pretty much anywhere.
• Sea Monster: Discussed with the Mosasaurus, a top-tier marine build in the Cretaceous meta. One of the few varieties of lizard players, which were mostly unfavored in the archosaur matchup, to achieve top-tier status, they were a part of the monitor lizard guild, already S-tier in the modern metagame due to their high base stats. To avoid predators, these monitor players took to waters too shallow for other builds like sharks or other fish to access, and quickly developed increased mobility in the water and the ability to give birth to live young, the latter nullifying other reptiles' vulnerability to spawn-killing. Their success in the marine server allowed them to perfect their aquatic mobility and live birth perks, as well as to spec points into gigantism and their bite attack, enough to shatter even an ammonite's armor. Their size also allowed them to become expert surface hunters that can tackle even the strongest dinosaur builds and punish any pterosaur careless enough to roost near the water's surface, exploiting the vast amount of advantages to hunting builds above the surface, including a stealth bonus from the water's reflection. Then they were banned along with the dinosaurs in the K-T balance patch.
• Sequel Hook: At the end of the cat tier list video, Tier Zoo mentions having forgotten something, then a domestic cat appears on screen, and Tier Zoo states that they're getting their own video; sure enough, the cat vs dog video came out shortly afterwards, explaining how cats take advantage of Toxoplasma gondii to secure a top tier spot.
• Shout-Out: TierZoo frequently makes references to competitive video games such as Pokémon, Super Smash Bros., Street Fighter, and Overwatch.
  • "Are Dolphins OP? The Whale Tier List" opens with an orca emerging from nowhere and giving a Badass Boast in the form of "Omae wa mou shinderu".
  • The "Elemental Type Moves" episode has several references to Pokémon, including the names of the elemental moves (Discharge, Water Gun, and Fire Blast).
  • The scream VFX from Hollow Knight is used in a few videos, namely the one on antlions.
  • Footage from Super Smash Bros. Melee, and the Battlefield theme from Super Smash Bros. Brawl and the music used on the Kirby stage from Super Smash Bros. 64 are used whenever PvP is being discussed. There's also references to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate in "Echo Fighters" such as the mouse to the rat.
  • One clip involving tigers fighting wolves uses footage from The Jungle Book (2016).
  • "Are Insects Getting Banned?" opens with Thanos snapping his fingers, and various insects being turned to dust.
  • The lifebars and damage numbers during PVP are from Runescape. In-game chat is also displayed Runescape-style, and much of the more generic background music is from its soundtrack.
  • The "rat mains" shown in the "Rodent Tier List" video are actually the main characters of Ratatouille and Stuart Little.
  • The Shark Tier List opens with "My Shiny Teeth and Me".
  • The series is partly inspired by Animal Planet's The Most Extreme, and sometimes uses its green static transition effect. The theme from Eyewitness is also used.
  • The UI from Don't Starve can be momentarily seen in the "Are Insects Getting Banned?" episode.
  • The cleaner wrasse in "The Fish Tier List" gets a task list resembling the Among Us task list.
  • The intro to "The Primate Tier List" parodies the intro of Avatar: The Last Airbender.
  • "The Crustacean Tier List":
    • A copepod is seen saying, "Holographic meatloaf again? My favorite!"
    • One video shows a human trying to hit a crab with the stick, with the crab saying, "You killed my father. Prepare to die!"
• Skill Gate Characters:
  • Both birds of prey and wolves are explicitly mentioned as gatekeepers to the higher tiers, and most are solidly placed in A-tier for the most part. They're easy to play as and can perform very well, but there are holes in their build and/or strategy that can be exploited by top-tier builds. Wolves for example need to intimidate a target into fleeing, and if the target consistently stands its ground or counterattacks instead the pack typically has to abort the attack. Being able to counter them reliably will often put a build in a high to top tier.
  TierZoo: Even though wolves have a pretty solid offensive strategy, players with good fundamentals and matchup experience will be able to thwart their plans most of the time, and wolves, much like birds of prey, function as the gatekeepers to the higher tiers and are placed solidly in A-tier.
  • Crustaceans are mentioned to be beginner-friendly thanks to having strong exoskeletal defense and a Healing Factor that can allow them to replace lost limbs. This allows them to make mistakes and still progress through their playthrough relatively unhindered. However, due to having a rather middling stat spread, they struggle against high-tier builds. Most of them are thus stuck at C/D tier, with only Hermit Crabs (including Coconut Crabs), Copepods, and Mantis Shrimp escaping to B and A tier.
• Slippery as an Eel: Moray eels stand out for their amazing spread of stats and abilities. They can swim surprisingly fast despite their lack of pectoral fins. Their skill at navigating through narrow crevices few other fish can venture into combined with their bright coloration make them fantastic ambush predators. The mucus membrane covering their skin protects them from predator attacks and other hazards on the reef, making them more durable than they look, and when coupled with their powerful bite, it allows them to ignore the poisonous spines of the lionfish and eat them with impunity, something no other fish can do. Finally, eels have enough intelligence to form basic hunting teams with groupers of all things, making them slippery in the metaphorical sense as well. All these traits combine to make moray eels one of the highest ranking fish builds in the game.
• Small Taxonomy Pools: Zig-zagged. While many featured animals are already common/iconic, some more obscure species like the tiger keelback (a D-tier, Master of None snake build) are discussed as well.
• Smarter Than You Look: Despite having a rather messy nature of digging up dirt and wallowing in the mud, pigs are a lot more intelligent than they appear, with Intelligence as their highest stat in an otherwise Jack of All Stats build.
• So Last Season:
  • In "Should Dinosaurs be Unbanned?", TierZoo discusses how well dinosaurs would fare in the current meta. Many of them would suffer this trope and be considered C-F tier thanks to the difference in animals between the Mesozoic and modern day doing no favours for them.
    • Hadrosaurs were considered bottom tier since their main ability was to signal other dinosaurs of incoming danger, as most Mesozoic predators were big and lacked stealth. Several animals in the current day use stealth capability to hunt meaning that the hadrosaurs would not get a chance to signal for help.
    • During the Cretaceous, Triceratops and other herbivores with front-facing defences were useful at defending against predators that mainly tried to take them head-on. This would not be effective in the modern-day since several predators use pack-hunting and flanking tactics to bypass this.
    • Sauropods have an extremely powerful late-game stage that many animals would not even dare to bother attacking. However, their early-game stage was especially vulnerable to getting killed, and in the current meta there are several animals that would be able to take a young sauropod down. TierZoo ranks them at either S—or F—tier depending on whether any could survive to the late-game.
    • Dinosaurs with a tail-based defence such as Stegosaurus and Ankylosaurus subvert this. They're considered S-rank for the current day meta as a tail defence was a very powerful and effective mid-range deterrent against flanking predators. Furthermore, the armor on their backs would protect against assassin builds trying to get an attack via the top. In fact, Ankylosaurs are an inversion, as they were only considered A-Rank in the Cretaceous due their weakness to being flipped over, which most modern-day predators cannot pull off.
    • Tyrannosaurus rex was only considered a C-tier because of this. In the Cretaceous, its high attack build was necessary at taking down other dinosaurs. In the modern day, it would only be useful against elephants since most other modern-day animals were fast enough to outspeed it.
    • Dromaeosaurs subvert this and because of that were considered S-rank predator choices. They wouldn't need to adjust their playstyle much as several of their prey types still exist (such as small mammals). Dromaeosaurs would fill a similar pack hunter niche to foxes and coyotes, but fare better since most canines have to grind down an opponent they hold onto while raptors could deal a fast, deadly Critical Hit to the prey's neck. They're another inversion that would be even more effective than their A-tier placement in the Cretaceous, due to more smaller animals they could quickly kill and fewer larger animals that could kill them.
  • Rhinos. The woolly rhino was B-tier during the Ice Age patch when the meta was centered around combat stats due to their massive, powerful horns and great defence. However, with the shifts in the meta that have been caused by the spread of humans leading to a meta centered more around intelligence- and mobility-based builds, the rhinos have dropped to D-tier due to their low intelligence and poor eyesight leading them to frequently pick completely unnecessary fights and put themselves in danger in the process.
  • Scorpions were considered very effective builds in the past, where their armor, along with their grab attack and venom stinger combo was extremely effective against most animals back then thanks to a lack of agile, powerful, heavily armored, or venom-resistant builds. However, in the present, things really fell apart. Their stinger is Powerful, but Inaccurate, requiring the scorpion to get a grab on the target which is generally ineffective against larger targets, and is not a disjointed hitbox meaning that several builds can grab them by the tail. While Scorpions are effective against similar-sized animals like insects and spiders, most larger modern animals destroy them^note Mongooses are fast and nigh-immune to their toxins, beetles have armor that claws can't penetrate, lizards can deal hefty damage past their armor, birds are agile enough to avoid stingers and attack it, and ants simply swarm them to death. All these weaknesses meant that scorpions sit at D-tier, a far cry from their early days.
  • Myriapods, like scorpions, were considered effective builds in the past due to the then-unique niche of air breathing and their fast speed in the Silurian period. However, as they've mostly stayed the same throughout the millennia, the ever-changing meta has not been kind to either. Both of them lack good eyesight unlike most arthropods, and their long bodies allow several builds with disjointed hitboxes to easily catch and kill them. Centipedes have it very rough, with their telegraphed and predictable attacks allowing prey to easily see them coming and escape. It's for these reasons that centipedes are considered at F-tier, even lower than scorpions, and millipedes are considered D-tier.
• Spiders Are Scary: The reason why spiders were considered a poor choice for a human support class. Arachnophobia is a very real thing, and having a spider as a companion would cause a charisma debuff towards other humans.
• The Spiny:
  • Porcupines. Their Quill ability deals damage to players who make contact with them. The quills also embed into the attacker, causing them to deal higher and higher damage as the opponent keeps attacking the quills.
  • Lionfish have venomous spines with their spread-out fins, making them very unappetizing to eat and contributes to their invasive nature. One of the very few predators that can bypass this is the moray eel.
  • To a lesser extent, the Hallucigenia build from the game's early beta stage. A C-tier Cambrian build, it foregoes opting for a tough exoskeleton in favor of defensive spikes. Unfortunately, the Hallucigenia is not nearly mobile or large enough to be considered a serious threat by other players.
• Squishy Wizard: Humans are considered these thanks to having high intelligence, tool use, teaching, learning and inventive skills, but they sacrifice their defence by not having thick fur and as such have one of the lowest defenses among all animals.
• Stealth Expert: Several animals with a high Stealth stat are capable of being these. The animal with the highest Stealth ability is appropriately enough the cuttlefish as it's capable of changing its color to blend in very well.
• Stealthy Cephalopod: "Optimizing Stealth Builds" explains various strategies used by stealth players. Cephalopods are noted to have the highest stealth stat in the game thanks to their ability to change not only their color, but also their shape and texture to match any environment in the ocean.
• Stone Wall:
  • Geese have a build like this, having abysmal offensive capability but surprisingly good health and mobility which makes them annoying to take down. They pair this with an intimidation build to troll their opponents. This however makes them rather poor in a city meta, where they are only D-tier because their only threat is in their intimidation, and most builds who can resist it will easily beat them.
  • Porcupines. Their build has an abysmally low attack stat, low HP, poor stealth and slow mobility. However, their defense stat is sky-high thanks to their Quills ability that hurts melee attackers and causes damage over time.
  • Surprisingly, the video on turtles shows them as zig-zagging this. While there are a few turtles that play into the stereotype of being tough but slow, such as the tortoise, several of the turtles shown either have great aquatic mobility or can deliver sizeable damage with their bite.
  • Baleen whales have the highest HP stat in the game thanks to their massive size, but their main weapon in their baleen is only good at killing krill and is ineffective against anything larger. That said, they do have a decent attack stat, since a Tail Slap from a whale is still very painful.
• Super-Scream: Parrots are noted to have the "Syrinx Shriek" ability, an extremely loud cry that is used in intimidation. It's particularly useful in breaking an enemy's resolve to achieve a Victory Through Intimidation — especially when more than one parrot joins in. ^note Truth in Television: Parrot owners may attest that a bird screaming at the top of its lungs can actually be physically painful to listen to.
• Support Party Member: In "The Optimal Team Composition" ^note "Pick Two. They will defend you. The rest are coming to kill you." where the choices are 10 crocodiles, 3 bears, 7 bulls, 1 human with a rifle, 5 gorillas, 4 lions, 15 wolves, 50 eagles and 10000 rats, the 50 eagles are noted to be this and are a top choice for picking. They may not have high attacking power compared to the other animals, but they have great eyesight and mobility for seeking out the threats such as the rifle-armed human, and can use their talons to blind the other animals so they can't effectively attack the VIP while making them easy pickings for the Swarm of Rats.
• Swans A-Swimming: Near the end of the "Are Geese OP" video, Tier Zoo outright states that swans are essentially geese but with everything that makes geese scary turned up to eleven, with similar territorial aggressiveness, intimidation factor and a strong attack stat alongside good defence and speed. They also have one of the best aesthetics values of all animals.
• Swarm of Rats: In "The Optimal Team Composition", which discusses this meme◊, one of the choices is 10000 rats. They're pretty much the top choice to pick, since the VIP will be overrun if they aren't picked, while the entire Zerg Rush is very capable of taking down all the other animals on the list via Death of a Thousand Cuts with the possible exception of the flying eagles—not that it matters since the eagles are the other top choice. Of note, picking the rats and eagles means that you have 200+ rats against every other animal—which is considered overkill, even against a bear or crocodile.

Tropes T - W

• Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors: In "The 4 Animal Combat Styles", TierZoo discusses which styles beat each other.
  • Grappler builds beat Spacing (zoner) builds because the Mighty Glacier Spacer builds rely on using their horns or tail to attack for heavy damage, and once they're caught in a grab, it becomes hard to move those heavy parts around.
  • Spacing builds beat Rushdown builds as many Rushdown builds tend to be Glass Cannon or Fragile Speedster types, which means one powerful hit from a Mighty Glacier Spacing build will usually spell the end of a Rushdown build.
  • Rushdown builds beat Projectile builds as they can often get in close quickly and attack the Long-Range Fighter Projectile build before the projectile can take good effect.
  • Projectile builds beat Grappler builds as the Grappler build needs to get close and find the right opportunity to perform their Grapple Move—and a ranged attack can hit the Grappler as they're attempting to do so.
• Tail Slap:
  • Sauropods are noted to have a very long-range tail slap attack due to naturally long tails. This among other factors made them hard to attack, contributing to their S-tier status.
  • The iguana's Tail Whip attack has fast startup and a chance to inflict a stun on its target, but it also suffers from low damage and slow recovery, leaving the user open to a counter-attack if it misses. Despite these weaknesses, it's considered one of the iguana's best attacks, and part of the reason why TierZoo suggests avoiding using the Autotomy ability as much as possible, since it results in Tail Whip permanently becoming unusable.
• Take That!:
  • In the Spider Tier List, the toxicity levels chart places competitive Hanzo mains as being in between a black widow and rattlesnake in terms of toxicity, while League of Legends players are just below Clostridium botulinum, making them the second most toxic thing on the list.
  • In the Primate Tier List:
    • EA and Ajit Pai are considered lower intellect compared to crabs.
    • Within the same video, humans' social structure is said to be second to that of eusocial insects.
  • In "Are Elephants OP?", TierZoo considers anti-vaxxers to have far lower intelligence than even crustaceans.
• Takes One to Kill One:
  • One of the biggest dangers to the hippopotamus is another hippopotamus, as their sharp teeth deal stabbing damage which bypasses their thick skin.
  • The only Cambrian build that can defeat Anomalocaris in a direct fight is another Anomalocaris, because they're too big for anything else to take on and their attacks are strong enough to pierce each other's armor.
• Tall Poppy Syndrome: Comes up when discussing why the extremely powerful Giant Ground Sloth build went extinct whereas the modern-day sloths (which are the lowest-tier animal) did not. Giant Ground Sloths were hunted to extinction by humans thanks to their huge size, low stealth and vulnerability to projectiles, whereas humans didn't bother to hunt the arboreal sloths since these sloths didn't give much exp and humans were not adept in arboreal zones.
  "Sometimes it pays to be low-tier, since being a powerhouse kind of puts a target on your head."
• That One Level: In-Universe, there a a few examples:
  • The African Savannah is consistently referred to as one of the most brutally competitive and dangerous servers—to the point that both the Secretary Bird and the African Wild Dog are S-Tier mainly because they excel at thriving in it.
  • The Arctic Server, which constantly deals cold damage to everyone in it, and has the Polar Night world event that removes sunlight for photosynthesis and solar heating entirely for months at a time.
  • The Deep Sea Meta on the Abyssal Server is stated to have "by far, the most unorthodox, unintuitive, and unforgiving meta in the entire game".
  • Downplayed by Australia. It's got a reputation as one of the most difficult servers due to the abundance of deadly reptiles and highly venomous creatures, as well as the many builds that have no equivalent anywhere else, but this is softened by the lack of tanks and powerful mammals.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Some frogs have a poison-based Counter-Attack powerful enough to inflict a One-Hit Kill to almost any other build. While this can scare other players out of trying to attack them, a weaker toxin that merely makes them sick would be almost as effective in that regard while costing much fewer Evolution Points to unlock, which would allow them to have a more balanced stat pool (as the Boring, but Practical cane toad build shows).
• Took a Level in Badass:
  • The F-tier Irish elk is one of the few builds that actually got buffed after the Ice Age ended, due to their much smaller antlers enabling them to more easily hide in dense forests, decreasing the energy cost for running, and reducing the risk of serious injury if one of the antlers breaks off during a fight.
  • Domestic pigs are mentioned to be able to revert back to a feral state similar to a wild boar if they manage to escape into the wild.
• Troll:
  • Cougars. They can't roar, but they try. This sounds like a screaming human female, which is good if a cougar player wants to mess with humans. It's not limited to cougars as the trolls and humans as the victims, either.
  • Geese. Their build has poor attack damage, but they resist intimidation from larger creatures while also having strong intimidation ability to chase others away. By having both HP and mobility as their best stat—should their trolling intimidation attempt fail, they can easily take a hit and fly away.
  • Are Dolphins OP? frames the dynamic between humans and orcas this way. As the two most overpowered builds in the entire game, they know better than to try to directly fight each other, but they still mess with each other every now and then.
    "Orcas will divert the course of ships, humans will acidify the ocean, you know, classic pranks."
  • Earlier videos had a Running Gag where a player named Mike would go out of their way to screw over a fellow player for no apparent reason other than for the hell of it. The victim said the line "mike i swear to god", then would sometimes let out a Big "NO!".
• Unstable Equilibrium: Averting this trope is one of the reasons why the African Painted Hound is in S-Tier. Unlike A-Tier wolves who play it straight and give the strongest members the best share of loot, African Painted Hounds prop up the weaker members of the pack first.
• Unusual Euphemism: Archaeology and paleontology are "datamining".
• Use Your Head: Caprines are noted to have the "Cranial Cushion" ability which greatly reduces blunt force trauma to the head, making it a very useful ability in a literal head-on fight.
• Victory Through Intimidation: Intimidation is portrayed as a useful way to defeat enemies while minimizing the risk of damage. A strong Intimidation skill can even allow weaker animals to defeat stronger ones. Geese are given as a specific example of a build that relies heavily on intimidation. Visually, Intimidation is represented by a visual effect from Darkest Dungeon.
• Walk, Don't Swim: Not normally possible due to the physics engine, but hippos are capable of pulling it off by exploiting a glitch in the game's water physics. By putting on so much muscle and bulk, they sink to the bottom of the rivers they inhabit, which allows them to move swiftly by walking on the earth beneath the water. This makes hippos one of the best aquatic builds even though they don't invest in any swimming traits or abilities.
• Weak, but Skilled:
  • Black Bears are this in comparison to Brown Bears. Most of their stats are slightly scaled back versions of the brown bear's, which has more power. However, their smaller size and thus higher mobility allow them to climb trees easily and therefore have access to more food options. As such, Brown Bears are mainly A-tier, while Black Bears are S-tier.
  • Humans, the biggest invokedGame-Breaker, have mediocre stats for their weight class aside from Intelligence. Average power, terrible defense, below average HP, terrible stealth, and only slightly above-average mobility. Intelligence however is the One Stat to Rule Them All and humans have the highest in the entire game, allowing them to invent things that can easily offset their shortcomings aside from their low HP. Even without the intelligence, they'd still be considered this thanks to lack of fur allowing sweating and high stamina, while gut flora allows them to eat various foods without risk for more exp options.
  • When it came to early humans, Homo sapiens were considered this compared to Neanderthals. While Neanderthals were stronger, tougher and faster, Homo sapiens had bigger party sizes when it came to cooperation, and also developed ranged weaponry which could take out prey from afar in contrast to the Neanderthals' close-range strategy. This allowed H. sapiens to out-compete the Neanderthals for food, and ultimately become the dominant species.
  • Early birds were considered this compared to Pterosaurs. While these birds were "sorely lacking in size and power", they were far more optimized in their niche in forest biomes, eventually dominating the small flying insectivore niche. During the Cretaceous Ban, the birds' smaller size, diet on insects instead of carrion or larger prey, and feather covering all helped them survive, while the Pterosaurs died out due to a lack of food and no cold resistance.
  • Hymenopterans and Termites are individually weaker than most insects on their own. However, their Eusocialism allows the entire nest to cooperate together, building impressive structures and empires, Zerg Rushing enemies several times their size with battle tactics, and control territory. This puts them at a higher S-tier spot than the otherwise-Master of All beetles, which excel at strength, offense, defense, speed and can fly, but lack eusociality.
  • Between the two S-ranked avian intelligence builds, Crows are considered these compared to Parrots. They lack the parrot's syrinx shriek, deal lower damage with their beaks, and are less dexterous with their beaks compared to parrots. However, Crows have the ability to use the city's terrain and features to their own advantage, and most importantly know how to manipulate or goad other players to their advantage, sometimes even gaining them as an ally to use their strengths to cover for the crows' own shortcomings.
• Weapon for Intimidation: The Earwig's cerci at their rear end was made out to be this. While they can grab soft-bodied bugs with it, it's not great for combat and really more of an intimidation tool that resembles large mandibles.
• Weapon of X-Slaying: The anteater build is specialized at breaking open ant/termite nests and eating the residents within.
• Zerg Rush: Several animals that are capable of doing this tend to be high tier, especially if they have offense-based ability.
  • Eusocial insects in general use this as their combat strategy. Bees, Wasps and Hornets in particular are even stated to be effective against the invokedGame-Breaker humans.
  • In "The Optimal Team Composition", Tier Zoo discusses the popular question on Reddit. "Pick Two Animal Groups. They will defend you. The rest are coming to kill you." where the choices are 1 human with a rifle, 3 bears, 4 lions, 5 gorillas, 7 bulls, 10 crocodiles, 15 wolves, 50 eagles… and 10000 rats. Naturally Tier Zoo outright states that if you don't pick the rats, they'll overrun you, and if you do pick them their sheer numbers mean that you've pretty much won (with the exception of the human sniping you, but that's when the eagles come into play).

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