Familiar Names

Every time an adventurer puts a familiar hatchling into his or her Familiar-Gro™ Terrarium, and it becomes their very own familiar, it is given a default name. The game tells you the selected default name by displaying the following message:

You decide to name <him> <familiar name>.

The familiar's name will appear in its action messages; for example, this message could appear during a battle:

Gobert attempts to hit <him>, but misses.

In this case, the <familiar name> is Gobert.

Of course, an adventurer can rename his or her familiar to whatever name they want to by clicking Manage Familiar Names, which is located on the Manage your Familiar page.

Default Familiar Names

Most new familiar names are put together randomly with the help of the following recipe. Male familiars use one set of suffixes, female familiar another.

	B Fr G Gr H St T Tr W	a o u	male suffix or female suffix
	generic familiar name

• Male suffixes (most familiars)
  • bastian, bediah, bert, ddeus, derick, dolph, fferson, fflesby, garth, ginald, llace, lliam, nald, nathan, ncent, nderson, njamin, nklin, raham, sevelt, tchell
• Female suffixes (all the gravy fairies, Black Cat, Cheshire Bat, Coffee Pixie, Comma Chameleon, Feather Boa Constrictor, Grouper Groupie, Happy Medium, Hippo Ballerina, Jill-O-Lantern, Jitterbug, Sugar Fruit Fairy, Uniclops)
  • berta, brina, chelle, gdalena, landa, linda, ndrea, nnifer, phelia, redith, rgaret, rgarita, rlotte, ronica, sabella, sadora, semary, xanne

Special Familiar Names

A number of familiars do not use the default name generator, instead using their own name custom generators.

Adorable Space Buddy	A random string consisting of the letters C, T, H, U, L, and apostrophes.	Tuutlthc
Artistic Goth Kid	Nickname + 'Goth Name' + Compound Last Name of two gothy items	Jack "Draco" Dreadmaw.
Baby Bugged Bugbear	snɔɐʇɹɐdS.	snɔɐʇɹɐdS
BRICKO chick	Random four-digit number	1026
Clockwork Grapefruit	6655321	6655321
Fancypants Scarecrow	Format first name + either a hyphenated last name or longer last name + optional Roman numeral	Leopold Peel-Pitt XIII
Flaming Face	Pairing of a heat-related attribute and a name	Burnin' Martin
Galloping Grill	Female Name + Occupation	Hortence Clerk
Gelatinous Cubeling	Squishy-sounding name	Schluuulch
Grim Brother	German First Name + Von (sometimes) + German Last Name or German Concept	Laurenz Von Schadenfreude
Grimstone Golem	Mineral + Grim adjective or Grim adjective + Mineral	Dolorous Chrysoprase
Helix Fossil	10 characters, with repetition following specific formats	!!!!!!!kkk
Homemade Robot	"<ADJECTIVE>bot N000"	Awesomebot 1000
Mechanical Songbird	Three sound effects, separated by hyphens	Click-Chirp-Cheep
Mini-Adventurer	"Little <PlayerName>"	"Little <PlayerName>"
Mini-Hipster	Randomly Hobo first name	Martin
Nosy Nose	Adjective + Nose Synonym	Cool Beak
Reagnimated Gnome	Random First Name + "enstein"	Edenstein
Squamous Gibberer	Follows the default naming system, but always begins with Cth-	Cthwalliam
Steam-Powered Cheerleader	Has a small number of female names	Chariti
Tickle-Me Emilio	Emilio	Emilio
Twitching Space Critter	A compound "alien" word	Floopjoort

Additionally, some familiars have restrictions on what you can call them.

Blood-Faced Volleyball	Cannot be named Wilson, in order to spur creativity. Voit and Spaulding, however, are allowed as names.
Exotic Parrot	Cannot be named Polly. If you try to do so, it will be named Unoriginality instead.
Ragamuffin Imp	Cannot be named the word that is used to summon it. Instead, it will be named Spoiler.

Notes

• During Bad Moon, if an adventurer places a familiar that he or she had obtained in a previous ascension into his or her terrarium, then the following message will appear:

  As you place the <hatchling> in your Familiar-Gro™ Terrarium, you feel a brief sense of deja-vu. You decide to name this familiar <previous familiar name>.

• If you go to your Manage Your Familiar page and leave your active familiar's name field blank, then the familiar is renamed using the default naming system for that familiar.
  • This does not work from the Manage Familiar Names page; leaving a name blank there results in the default name of No Name McGee.
• Trying to name a familiar with ten or more of the same character or digit gives the following error message:

I reckon you tried too many repeating characters, mmhmm.

• Attempting to give your familiar a choice or swear word as its name will cause it to be named [profanity] instead.
• Placing brackets ([ ] or { }) in a familiar name will cause the brackets to show up everywhere (in your side frame, terrarium, character sheet, etc.), except during combat. If you are engaged in combat, the familiar's name will be displayed without the brackets (for example, [x] or {x} would show up as just x during combat). If you only place brackets in a familiar name, then the name will be displayed as a blank spot during combat.
• Some accented characters can be used in familiar names. However, familiar names must be in ISO-8859-1. Attempting to use names in other charsets (many web browsers use UTF-8) will result in the bits being interpreted as if they were in ISO-8859-1, thus leading to buggy results.
  • As a deliberate joke, the default name for the Baby Bugged Bugbear is not in ISO-8859-1, and it will be corrupted if you use the Manage Familiar Names page.

History

• Prior to the trivial update on August 1st, 2009, no message about what familiar name was chosen would appear when you used a hatchling.
• Prior to the trivial update on June 6th, 2014, leaving the name field blank would result in No Name McGee. Also prior to this update, including a < character would result in the above, and any & characters were replaced with n.
• Prior to the trivial update on August 4th, 2014, default familiar names had a simpler generator.

References

• The Clockwork Grapefruit is a reference to the book and movie A Clockwork Orange. Its default name (6655321) refers to the main character's serial number while he is in prison (in the movie, the number is shortened to 655321).
• Wilson is the name of the blood-faced volleyball in the movie Cast Away.
• The BRICKO chick follows the LEGO tradition of numbering each basic building set that is developed.