Introduction
Today, we’re going to focus on habitats. If you’re creating your own creatures, you need to take habitats into consideration. What an animal or creature is equipped with will vary depending on what they need to survive. A desert animal is going to have very different features than a jungle animal, for instance. This stuff should be pretty obvious, but we’ll go over some general stuff to think about. The specifics are too varied to cover here, but once you know what kind of habitat your animal is going to live in, you can tweak your design or build it with that in mind and do the necessary research.
Considerations
Let’s chat about what you need to consider about your creature and the habitat.
To start off, the most important thing about your creature is what it eats and how it gets to its water source. If the animal lives in the desert, it doesn’t have many options for these two things most of the time, so you’ll have to plan accordingly. But if it lives in the middle of the woods, this might be considerably easier to manage.
Second, how big is your animal? The bigger they are, the more food they’re probably going to need. Muscles need fuel, and that fuel comes from food. The more muscles you have, therefore, the more you’ll need to consume. A mouse doesn’t eat the same amount as a black bear before hibernation, for example.
Next, what kinds of resources are available to your creature and what sort of creature do you have? Rodents, for example, such as mice or gerbils need things to gnaw on because their teeth never stop growing. As a result, they need an environment that provides hard foods or things to chew on. A dog, on the other hand, doesn’t have that problem. They, instead, have the issue of needing plenty of meat to sustain them, so they need an environment that has plenty of prey to catch. The kinds of resources available in your environment might limit what kind of animal you have or, as is often the case with Earth’s incredible creatures, your animals may need to have special features that allow them to live in their environment.
Finally, the other thing I think is really important to consider is whether or not your creatures share their habitat and territory with humans or humanoid beings. If they do, you’ll have to take their interactions into consideration. Do the humans or their equivalent get along well with these creatures? Or are they constantly at odds? Have the humans destroyed these animals’ habitats or have they managed to coexist without doing that?
Conclusion
I’ve only covered some of the considerations, but the ones I covered are the ones I’ve found to be the most important for thinking through your creatures. At the least, it will give you a solid launching point for your own creations.