Centaurians are an open species owned by Wolvenhyde, and are a completely optional part of the website. They're not canonically part of the world, but if you own one and wish to have it interact with your kijis and tallies, that's perfectly accetpable, and could be allowed for canon lore since regular centaurs are a part of Gaia's World.
To acquire centaurian genos, you can trade with other players, purchase a custom slot for Credits from the Credits Shop, or by adopting from the Adoption Center. Unlike with kijis and tallies, you may adopt a centaurian geno twice a month. The max is 2 per month, or one per each half of the month. If you don't adopt in the first half of the month (1-14) but adopt on the second half (15-30/31), then you only get one that month. So, roughly every 14-15 days, you may adopt one. However, if you adopted on say, the 14th of the month, and wished to adopt another on the 15th, that would be allowed, since those are treated as two different time windows.
When it comes to designing your Centaurian, there are a few things to note:
- You may draw your import yourself, or commission someone to draw it for you. You are not obligated to use the premade bases; the premades are solely there for convenience.
- Adding clothing, tack, or other accessories to a Centaurian is optional. Adding an import background is also optional. You do not need items to do these things.
- You do need to use the appropriate color swatches when designing your Centaurian. And yes, we do check.
- The marking rules are extremely loose, but the general rule is that they must resemble the original horse markings. So Splash should really only cover the underside, Paint should be splotchy, and so on. The markings also have no layering, and can be layered over and under eachother in any order. However, they ought to be consistent. Don't layer Dapples over Paint in one area and then swap the order in another region.
- You are not allowed to shade the import, unless it's extremely subtle, or colorpicking is still easy to do accurately. The Varnish marking is a shine, and you are not allowed to use it as an excuse to add darker shading.
- You may have different colors on the character than the geno specifies, such as nail polish, hair dye, body paint, tattoos, and even eye contacts, but you must specify in the Design Submission comments that you're doing these things or your submission could be rejected.
- You may also add nuance coloring, but it should be very subtle.
- Free marks include minimal white and minimal black, and should follow real-life horse examples. They can be accents in small patches, but shouldn't be large enough to replicate existing markings, such as Boots or Paint.
- Lineart can be colored, but the lines need to be darker than the surrounding colors. They also can't be a noticeable hue shift away from the fur or body colors. That said, dark brown lines when the character has no brown coloration is fine.
- You may add a halo effect to the centaurian's body to make it stand out from any chosen background, or from the site's background.
That's it for designing.
Next, we'll talk about what you can do with your Centaurian character(s).
Firstly, Centaurians can breed, and there are no requirements to make them eligible to breed. However, they must be of the appropriate physical sexes to breed; we're sorry, but there's no way to breed a male to a male or a female to a female. (One workaround to this is to perhaps consider using another character as a surrogate or donor parent.) On that note, you may have seen the word "Hermaphrodite" used to describe some Centaurian characters' sex. This is intentional, as it's biologically possible (in this fantasy species) to be fully both sexes, as opposed to being intersex that us real-world humans are more accustomed to.
Moving on, while there are regular recessive and dominant markings, added markings can pop up randomly in breedings, and cannot pass during breedings. They're considered "aesthetic" only, and are read as /aa/ in the geno as opposed to the usual /Aa/AA/.
Lastly, Centaurians may participate in activities on the site, so long as they're paired with a spirit character, or, they're by themselves and submitted to the General Art (Centaurians) gallery. Centaurians cannot earn EXP or items, but can earn PT for you from doing General Art. As you may have gleaned from the gallery mention, they do have their own General Art prompt you may submit to.
As for items or other equippable things, nothing can be attached to Centaurians. They can't have their own familiars either, and they don't even get stats like regular characters. Think of them as an extra, semi-isolated side addition to the site.