We discuss some interesting physical features stemming from our previous analytical study of a simple model of a fluid with dipolar-like interactions of very short range in addition to the usual isotropic Baxter potential for adhesive spheres. While the isotropic part is found to rule the global structural and thermodynamical equilibrium properties of the fluid, the weaker anisotropic part gives rise to an interesting short-range local ordering of nearly spherical condensation clusters, containing short portions of chains having nose-to-tail parallel alignment which runs antiparallel to adjacent similar chains. 4 have shown that, contrary to an intuitive expectation, gelation of particles with short-range attractions is intimately connected with its equilibrium phase diagram.It is widely believed that the addition of a long-range repulsion to a short-range attraction inhibits phase separation, by promoting the formation of an equilibrium gel. The same mechanism can be achieved by reducing the probability of forming a bulk liquid using the concept of limited-valency and/or patchy particles 2 . This idea has been recently explored by a number of authors, who have used the so-called Kern and Frenkel model with circular adhesive patches (of non-vanishing area), or that with short-ranged attractive point-sites on the surface of hard spheres 5,6,7,8,9,10,11 . In spite of their usefulness, the above models share a common shortcoming on the discontinuous dependence of the potential on the particle orientations, which makes them very difficult to investigate from a theoretical point of view. This drawback is not present in molecular interactions where this dependence is continuous, as for instance in dipolar interactions 12 , a case which is particularly interesting for various reasons. First, because of their widespread appearance in colloidal suspensions, such as ferrofluids, which have important practical applications. In addition, recent studies 13,14,15 have shown the existence of a significant influence, in the equilibrium properties of the fluid, of chain-like aggregation characteristic of the dipolar interaction, which strongly competes with a stable fluid-fluid phase separation.Motivated by this features, in this paper we then take an extreme alternative of considering a tail with dipolarlike anisotropy combined with a very short-range attraction. The latter is patterned after the well-known Baxter's sticky hard sphere (SHS) potential, where attraction occurs only at contact 16 . Building upon our previous, almost fully analytical, study on this model within the Percus-Yevick closure with orientational linearization (PY-OL) 17 , we discuss here some additional interesting features on the local ordering properties, which were not accounted for in our previous work.In the same spirit of Baxter's isotropic counterpart 16 , the model is defined by the following Mayer functionwhere f HS (r) = Θ (r − σ) − 1 is its hard sphere (HS) contribution, Θ the Heaviside step function ( Θ(x < 0) = 0, Θ(x > 0) = 1 ), and the Dira...