Playable Octolings

In Splatoon, there exists a third gender that was meant to be playable called Octolings. Octolings are enemies that can be found in the hero mode of the game, and they function as AIs that can shoot similarly to the player. Their unique characteristic is their large tentacle hair.

Originally, the Octoling gender was intended to be playable in the game. However, because of the tentacle hair presumably causing issues with fitting with already existing player models such as headgear, they were never fully implemented and scrapped early in development.

Octoling Plaza Crash Incident

In older versions of the game, it was possible to edit the player's save in order to change the gender value to 2, which is the gender for Octolings. This allowed you to play online with the Octoling gender and other players would be able to see you wear it.

Splatoon has a mechanic where players you previously play with appear in the plaza with the avatar worn in the match. Unfortunately, because of it not having certain anims and other data implemented, players who played with Octolings would crash their game every time they reboot it or the next time they would go into the Plaza.

Previously, the only way to fix this was to continue playing matches with other players until the Octoling data would be erased from your Plaza NPC data. However, this issue was addressed in 2.8.0, and anyone who attempted to play Splatoon with the Octoling gender would have their chosen gender immediately reset, and attempting to play online with it would result in a probable ban because of telemetry data.

Octoling Kraken (Octokraken)

One of the few pieces of models that we have related to Octolings that prove that they were originally intended to be playable is their special Kraken variant. Because this variant is not ever used in hero mode or other parts of the game, it is assumed that it was added when they were initially planning to make them playable in the game.

Unimplemented Data

The following data has not been implemented for Octolings:

• Eyes (use Inkling eyes as place holder)
• Certain anims