Super Animal World Is Here: A cozy new place to kill your friends

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It’s finally here: Super Animal World, the massive free expansion to Super Animal Royale that turns the time between matches into a living world!

This has been the largest and most ambitious project our small team has taken on since SAR first launched in Early Access. After more than two years of work building an entirely new foundation for the game, we couldn’t be more excited to get it into your paws!

So what does Super Animal World include, and what comes next for SAR as a whole? Let’s start with what Super Animal World actually is.

What is Super Animal World?

Super Animal World is a reimagining of Super Animal Royale that turns the island into a relaxing space to make friends and enjoy cozy activities, all while you're queuing up to fight your new friends to the death.

We call this new loop the Circle of Super Life. You explore the new Social Hub, chat with characters, accept quests, and then matchmake straight into Super Animal Royale or our other competitive modes. When you die (or do the winner dance), you respawn back in the Hub to regroup, claim rewards, and head out again for your next battle.

The Social Hub was inspired by how wholesome and friendly this community has been over the years, and we wanted to create a larger space to support that. We’ve designed Super Animal World to make life between matches feel just as engaging as the battles themselves, with activities like fishing, bug catching, hamsterball racing, and more. In the sections below, we’ll walk through those new activities as well as BananOS, the new quest system, and everything else packed into the expansion.

Super Hamsters, Chinchillas, Emus

To celebrate the launch of Super Animal World, a whole trio of new Super Animal species has arrived in the Research Lab: Super Hamsters, Super Emus, and Super Chinchillas, each with their own set of breeds to unlock.

Super Hamsters can finally claim their hamsterballs, Super Emus get to join the royale as full combatants instead of just noble steeds, and Super Chinchillas are here by popular demand, ready for their chance to scurry to the top of the food chain.

Super Hamster Breeds (Available at Level 20)

• Super Hamster
• Super Blonde Hamster
• Super White Hamster
• Super Red Hamster

Super Emu Breeds (Available at Level 30)

• Super Emu
• Super Chonk Emu
• Super Speedy Emu
• Super Battle Emu

Super Chinchilla Breeds (Available at Level 50)

• Super Chinchilla
• Super White Chinchilla
• Super Black Chinchilla

Grand Opening Pass

To celebrate Super Animal World’s release, Ms. Macawsome’s got a new Animal Pass for you: The Grand Opening Pass! This one’s all about the newest activities on the island, so there’s bound to be something for everyone (as long as you like fishing, bug catching, or racing hamsterballs).

We’re also really excited to debut the new Mini Emu pet in this pass! It may be too short to ride, but it makes emus the first species to exist as a complete set of Giant Animal, Super Animal, and Mini Animal.

• During this season, the Grand Opening Pass is available for a discounted price of 550 SAW Tickets.
• As always, Animal Passes never expire, so you can continue working on passes you own from previous seasons on your second track, or purchase previous ones from The Archive for 750 SAW Tickets.

Grand Opening Starter Pack

Feeling daring? The Grand Opening Starter Pack features a star-studded set of flashy daredevil cosmetics and the Super Stuntman Hamster! It’s the perfect look to rock while outspeeding the competition out on the raceways, just watch out for flights of stairs. Or don’t.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4115440/Super_Animal_World_Grand_Opening_Starter_Pack/

The Grand Opening Starter Pack includes:

• Stuntman Aviators
• Stuntman Outfit
• Super Stuntman Hamster
• 600 SAW Tickets (enough to pick up the new Animal Pass or put toward items in the SAW Shop!)

Buying this Starter Pack will also unlock the base Super Hamster early, as a small bonus. This is the first time we’ve offered a non-starter Super Animal in a Starter Pack and we’d love to hear what you think!

SAW is Finally Here? It’s a CRISPRmas Miracle!

CRISPRmas is here! Candy canes have once again been scattered across the island to collect, and the first week’s challenges and rewards are ready to be unwrapped.

Be sure to head on over to the SAW Welcome Center in the Social Hub and have a chat with Santa Claws himself, in the fur! He’ll be around throughout the entire event, to meet all the nice (or naughty) Super Animals on the island.

Keep an eye out for candy canes during your matches. Eating them grants a small heal and helps you progress some of your weekly challenges. Smashing snowmen (snow animals?) around Thomas’s Tundra will score you even more candy canes, and you’ll also earn them just for completing matches!

5 challenge rewards to earn

• Red Elf Hat | Collect Candy Canes (1000)
• 1500 XP | Smash Snowmen (5)
• Red Elf Outfit | Land on Ice
• 750 Carl Coins | Chop Snow Grass (125)
• Gingerbread Sword | Get Kills (12)

New Super Animal breed

• Super Sock Monkey (Available at Level 20)

Week 2 and 3 CRISPRmas challenges and Super Animal breeds arrive on Tuesday, December 16th and Tuesday, December 23rd.

Social Hub Activities

Looking for an itinerary of things to do in Super Animal World? Here are some of the new activities you’ll unlock in the Social Hub as you progress along the Main Quest.

Fishing

Believe it or not, there are fish out there that don’t stand on two legs! Once you get a fishing rod, you can catch some of these so-called “water fish” in just about any body of, well, water. You can catch different fish depending on where you cast your line, so to complete the Museum of Super Natural History collection you’ll need to angle all around the island.

Bug Catching

Whether they’re skittering or buzzing or fluttering about, dozens of bug varieties call the island home, too! With a bug net, you can catch them to add to the museum’s collection (and never snack on, as tempting as it might be for some Super Animals). Just like fish, different bugs can be caught in different locales, so be sure to search every nook and cranny on the island.

Hamsterball Racing

Dash, drift, and dodge your way through the island’s six hamsterball racing tracks! BananOS augmented reality turns stretches of the island’s existing landscape into exhilarating raceways to challenge your friends on, complete with dash pads, items to give yourself an edge, and all the spherical mayhem you could want.

The Island’s Inhabitants

The island’s never felt more alive, thanks to the massive new Quest System that’s been added, with tons of characters to chat with including familiar faces from our SAR Tonight animated series and plenty of debuting critters too! Every corner of the island has friendly (or not-so-friendly) faces to meet, many of whom will give you quests and rewards every day you return. Be sure to say hello to any and all Super Animals you meet out there while exploring. You never know who might need your help, or what you might get in return if you lend a hand. Or… paw. Or wing, or fin!

All in all, there are 350+ quests to complete and over 100 characters to chat with (200+ when including ambient NPCs, who all have unique dialogue). There’s a full novel’s worth of story here, with over 140,000 words of dialogue in total. For context, that’s roughly 1.5x longer than The Hobbit and about 4.7x longer than Animal Farm. It was a huge undertaking to add this many questlines to the game, and it’ll be an undertaking in its own right if you want to experience them all, so expect it to take multiple days if you’re dedicated enough to complete every quest.

Please be respectful of spoilers for everyone! There’s a lot of story reveals and new lore tidbits in this novel-length addition to the game, so if you’d like to discuss these things with others, we encourage you to check out our #lore-discussion channel in our Discord server.

We’re super excited to see everyone’s reactions to these additions! Super Animal World is a vibrant place with all sorts of colorful and often chaotic critters, and we hope getting to talk with them and help them out will be a fun way to enjoy the Social Hub and challenge yourselves.

BananOS

Seven years after its original Early Access release, Super Animal Royale has received a nearly top-to-bottom UI overhaul. At the heart of that overhaul is BananOS, a new augmented reality operating system that every Super Animal now runs as a brain-to-eye interface (...whether they opted into the install or not).

The big question we asked ourselves that led to BananOS and the new Social Hub was: what if instead of returning to a menu between matches, you can access everything you need while staying in-world the whole time?

BananOS overlays an AR interface onto every Super Animal’s vision so they can access apps, notifications, and matchmaking from anywhere in the Social Hub. Other systems that used to live in menus have also been brought in-world to physical locations, like MTN Stations where you can access customization and the Research Lab, and Photo Booths for snapping commemorative pics while you explore the island.

You can also use BananOS to queue up for any game mode straight from the Social Hub, and keep fishing, questing, or socializing while you wait for matchmaking.

Alongside Super Animal Royale, S.A.W. vs Rebellion and The Bwoking Dead are now permanently available to queue for instead of rotating weekly. Now that waiting for your next match is a whole game itself, we felt it was time to make these additional modes permanent, and we plan to keep evolving them and adding new competitive modes you can access right from the Hub.

For the first time, BananOS also introduces an in-game cross-platform friends list. You can add players you meet while you play, no matter what system they’re on, and that list lives alongside your Steam or console friends while staying shared across all platforms. Grouping up from BananOS’s Social tab is simple too, especially now that console players can use text chat in-game.

This is just the first version of BananOS and we already have new features planned, so we’d love to hear your feedback as you use it and see where you’d like it to go next. The best way to learn BananOS is to get your paws on it, so give it a try while you’re exploring the island.

And Everything Else!

We’ve also implemented tons of other changes that aren’t directly tied to the Social Hub itself. There’s more than two years worth of additions and quality of life improvements in this expansion, too many to list entirely here, but here are a few highlights:

Respawn Tanks

By popular request, Duos and Squads modes in Super Animal Royale now feature Respawn Tanks where you can revive fallen teammates, as long as you pick up their respawn vials first. You can finally bring a dead teammate back into the fight, or at least a new clone of them. Rejoice!

Intense Weather

The island’s weather patterns have gotten a bit superer! Stormy weather can occur at random, with new visual and audio effects to match. Be careful heading to the Tundra during these storms, since it also means there’s a blizzard in the snowy northern sections of the map.

Other Additions and Changes

There’s a lot more packed into this expansion so we can’t cover every single detail, but here are some final highlights from the changelist before this post itself becomes novel-length:

Competitive Modes

• Emus can peck ammo, juice, tape, and throwables to loot them for their rider, making looting on the go much smoother.
• Carl Coins rewarded per minute survived in Super Animal Royale have been increased from 5 to 7.2.
• Explosive barrels have a new knock down animation for both competitive modes and Social Hub. In competitive modes this acts as a stun, even if the player has only lost part of their health.
• The first Skunk Gas circle now takes longer to close, giving you more time for early-game looting and reducing the chance of being rushed or caught by the first circle.
• Skunk Gas visuals have been adjusted so it’s easier to see the environment while you’re inside the gas.
• A confirmation sound now plays when armor taping finishes successfully.
• Fixed several spots where throwables would bounce incorrectly or through walls (such as around the Giant Emu pen and small research lab buildings).
• Existing NPCs in the royale are now client-side, so each player can complete related milestones if they find them in a match.
• Zombie Joe bots and The Bwoking Dead have seen several improvements: bot melee range and attack speed have been slightly reduced, bot melee now breaks crates and other objects, the last survivor in Bwoking Dead now sees kill notifications correctly, and a rare issue where the on-screen kill notification would show 0 kills has been fixed.
• Reworked the SvR “Top Players” showcase to consider multiple stats for players (while still only picking someone once), fixing cases where someone qualified for a stat but wouldn’t get featured.
• Private match hosts have a suite of new tools, including commands to teleport (/tele), toggle the kill feed (/killfeed), spawn Lucky Cat Mines (/mine), spawn Skunk Bombs (/skunk), and enable or disable Respawn Tanks (/tanks).
• Added keybind for private match admin leaderboard.

World & Social Hub

• New Points of Interest: Hamsterball Stadium, Victory Island, and new details around the island including waterways and waterfalls. (Note: Victory Island is only accessible when exploring the Social Hub, and getting there will be up to you!)
• Be sure to check out the exclusive shops at Victory Island and Mini Ranch for special items only found there!
• SMoMA’s art collection has been updated with new works from the latest fanart contest.
• New cinematics to see and photos to collect through the main questlines.
• Tons of new music, including ambient location-sensitive tracks and new music when joining a lobby for a Super Animal Royale match.
• New trails and boost visual effects for hamsterballs to make races feel even more satisfying.
• Rebel Caches can now also be found around the Social Hub, awarding Carl Coins and with a rare chance to drop a cosmetic from the level-up item pool. An old bug in BR where they could not be opened after eating a mushroom or coconut has also been fixed.
• Blue mushrooms have new run animation while you’re boosted. Their speed cap has been adjusted to +24s and they can be found and used in both competitive modes and Social Hub.
• Giant Giant Clams can be opened in the Social Hub for a chance at pearls of different colors/rarities, which can be sold for Carl Coins and used in certain quests.
• Carl Coins have a small chance to drop when cutting grass or breaking crates in the Social Hub.
• Earporium has been renovated to become the new flagship SAW Shop location and MTN Station at the Welcome Center. Other areas around the island have also been renovated to make way for MTN Stations.
• Added a squishable fly to the SAW side starting screen in SvR.

Systems & Quality of Life

• You can now undo DNA Magnet choices at the MTN Station Research Lab if you change your mind about which Super Animal to target.
• The game's HUD and notifications have been updated, including a larger minimap, improved text styling, and notifications moving to the right side of the screen.
• Chat now supports Direct Messages. You can send DMs to a friend from their profile and use “/r” in the chat window to quickly reply to the last direct message you received.
• All consoles now support text chat (via the Select button).
• New emote wheel and quick chat design.
• New dialogue/chat font for improved legibility and character support.
• A Master Volume setting has been added to control all game audio at once, and more music (like SMoMA and Aquarium ambience) now respects the Music Volume slider.
• Thanks to the new modular settings menu design, new settings have been added, including VFX quality and the ability to hide your armor locally. Existing options like “Toggle Recoil Indicators” and the old “/hidenames” chat command have also been moved into the settings menu. We plan to add more highly requested settings in the future so let us know what you want to see!
• Various load-time optimizations have been made, including preloading more animations and speeding up map loading when joining servers.
• Fixed a bug where ping-based hamsterball extrapolation of other players was not working correctly, improving how accurate the position of other players’ hamsterballs will look on your screen.
• Social hubs restart daily at 10am Pacific Time, with matchmaking reopening shortly after. Server downtime will be 1-2min or less.
• Weekly Challenges now refresh on Tuesdays at 10 am Pacific instead of Mondays to sync everything up to the same time.

Twitch Drops

A new Twitch Drops campaign is live from now until Friday, January 2nd! To start earning rewards, link your Super Animal and Twitch accounts on the SAR Drops website, and watch Drops-enabled SAR streamers on Twitch.

Here’s what you can earn by participating:

• RGB Dress
• RGB Oversized Hoodie

What's Next

Super Animal World is meant to give Super Animal Royale a whole new foundation to build on for years to come, and now that the pieces are in place, we can't wait to get back to regular Major Updates that continue building on it.

So what happens after launch? Here are a few of the things we’ll be focusing on that you can expect to hear more about in the new year:

• We’ll be returning to seasonal Major Updates, released roughly every quarter, with smaller event updates in between. Those larger updates will keep adding new content, building on the seeds we’ve planted with this expansion, smoothing out rough edges and fixing bugs.
• For upcoming Major Updates, we’re already looking at quality of life improvements like Inventory Search for the Customize screen, and upgrades to the new BananOS cross-platform friends list.
• You’ll probably also notice a museum currently being built by the hard-working Super Construction Beavers on the northeast side of Murre Woods. Your hard work for the Museum of Super Natural History directly supports filling its halls with an impressive collection when it opens its doors.
• Beyond the Social Hub, we plan to continue updating the game’s core modes (like The Bwoking Dead) and will return to exploring new modes to add in 2026.
• There is a lot more planned than we can list here, so if we haven't mentioned your most desired feature yet, please keep letting us know what you would like to see next in Discord, on our socials below, or here on Steam.

Before all this, the team will be taking a very hard-earned break to relax and recover over the holidays. We've put a ton of effort and love into Super Animal World and it has been a big undertaking, but we cannot wait to see how you enjoy this new way of playing and what feedback you'll share to help us make it even better.

As always, if you want to know what’s next for Super Animal World and the game as a whole, please subscribe to our ​​newsletter and follow us on:

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Once again, thank you so much for playing and supporting Super Animal Royale and our small indie team. We hope you enjoy Super Animal World, exploring everything this expansion adds and everything you bring to it when you step into the Social Hub. See you on the island, Super Animals!