All of the animals in TWS that are non-sentient are either based on bugs, fish, reptiles or amphibians! This is because the world is young, and evolution hasn’t had much time to change things.

In Chapter 1, we see a bit of what Anna refers to as a ‘cow’, but on this world they were designed to look like giant aphids! Cows don’t provide milk – they provide honeydew! Chickens are lizards, although they didn’t get screentime.

^it’s the cutest cow ever!!! Here’s concept sketches of the horses too:

In an early draft of Chapter 1, Anna also had a cat, but he was removed because a whole lot is introduced in chapter 1 and I didn’t want to overload the reader. The cat is based off of a praying mantis.

All of these critters are designed by Ella Kurki / @dodostad!!!

This is also somewhat relevant to another question I get often:

This won’t be very obvious in Mind, but will come up fairly often in Spirit and Vessel, but: it’s not fair to equate the history in TWS to any equivalent in our world!

Imagine the world in TWS (its name is actually Minerva) is a game of Civilization gone unusually wrong so that, for example, you’re going to outer space before you’ve invented paper money.

Humanity was literally created by Minerva in TWS. They did not evolve 2 million years ago. Their civilization was built on knowledge that was already being utilized by elves and other species. Humanity got a head start by being born knowing how to speak language, use tools, make fire, keep animals and raise crops.

TWS may appear to have an equivalent in human history, but it doesn’t. Try not to lose sense of the story asking about timeline stuff.

Feel free to send me questions for next week via tumblr/twitter/whatevs!