Saltasaurus - The Living Fridge

[Dracken]

Species: Saltasaurus macronarius
Time: Late Cretaceous
Diet: Herbivore
Temperament: Docile... Too Docile

Wild
The Saltasaurus can be identified from most other sauropods by their unusual dermal protrusions on the back of the animal. Upon closer inspection, these protrusions appear to be made out of a similar substance to preserving salt. These animals have no quarrels with wild predators as they don't have reason to eat a living salt rock, especially in a desert where keeping hydrated is so difficult. However, what is difficult for most is easy for Saltasaurus and the animal has adapted the environment's salt into armor instead of allowing it to dehydrate the animal. That being said, without natural predators they have no reason to expect attack and do not really know how to defend themselves well.

Domesticated
Saltasaurs absolutely love salt licks, so it is unsurprising to learn that salt is their preferred food choice in taming. Upon being tamed the Saltasaurus is typically used as food storage by human tribes which are first developing and can even rival the refrigerator in terms of keeping consumables from spoiling so quick. They also act as a decent "safe mount" to explore the wastelands without worry of being attacked by predators. Even in tribe-mounted attacks Saltasaurus can come in handy. If it were to be attacked by an enemy tribe's carnivore, they would suffer the effects of dehydration. Another usual use for Saltasaurus discovered by a tribe of scientists is that the armor can be used as a sort of smelling salt when broken. Go figure.

Description
Saltasaurus appears like the image given below with the armor being made of salt, the mouth being more of a beak, and the neck having a more upward tilt to it (no base-game sauropods have that posture, so I figured why not). Of course as the title states the preservation in its inventory would work to preserve food, essentially just short of the preservation time of a fridge. It's very small for a sauropod with decent health, but not on the level of Bronto, so it has a small damage reduction also. It has a neck swing and a tail attack, but they deal relatively low damage and the animal doesn't use these attacks in the wild. Wild carnivores simply do not aggro to Saltasaurus even when attacked, but will either ignore it or retreat if attacked by Saltasaurus. If Saltasaurus is attacked by a carnivore, that carnivore will get a "dehydrated" debuff where it cannot regen stamina temporarily making it dangerous for a carnivore to continue attacking and gaining torpor when out of stamina. Vice-versa, upon being attacked (By an enemy, cannot be activated by your own tribe. Wild herbivores could be utilized to activate this effect) Saltasaurus has a buff applied to it where it acts as a living smelling salt and instantly wakes up any allied creatures near it that have gone to sleep thanks to torpor. 

Of course all of this is subject to change, the developers can put their own spin on the salt theme I would just be happy to have this guy in game.

 

 

 

[Dracken]

Other potential ideas for Salta:
1.) Dehydration debuff stacks, so the more times a carnivore hits it the longer it lasts. (Dehydration debuff only applies to creatures that use a bite attack).
2.) Can be force-fed salt to grow the armor and increase the damage reduction up to 10x and increase damage up to 3x and since the armor can't grow where a saddle is, lessen the max when saddled to like 5x damage reduction and 2x damage (the saddle applies more armor anyway).
3.) Make the smelling salt effect work on cryo sickened creatures. (Ik this could break the game, but hey nothing else can do it).
4.) Lessen the salt theme with Salta a bit, just make it a food preserver.

5.) Add a saddle function as a preservation bin/mortar and pestle to allow for crafting sparkpowder and make the preservation longer (when sparkpowder is in inventory, that's when the function of preservation time just short of a fridge works)

[Dracken]

So basically salty capybara sauropod minus the love for water

Sorry, the original art was made by AI (bing image creator) and I decided to try my hand at tracing over it myself with some minor edits to make it more more like what I wanted