Ok, here's an attempt at combining what we have so far:
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they worship the stars that power there station and keep
gender is a social construct, and any two slimes can actually share genetic material, and slimes can reproduce asexually but it's regarded in a similar light to incest and for similar reasons. About 6/10 of slimes appear female, 1/10 male, 2/10 androgynous humanoid, and 1/10 have various bizarre non humanoid shapes. The reason slimes are usually humanoid is that the station was built by somehting human like, so everything is designed to be operated by such and there might also be an aspect of worshipping them. Slimes are most biologically related to slime mold, and are actually a bit more rigid then their name would imply; think jellyfish. however, they can completely morph their shape with a few hours of concentration and are unaffected by structural damage the way you'd expect from a slime.
Slime culture doesn't really have an explict sex act as such. Slimes usually talk to each other by physical contact, which usually results in some material being shared, and in the end slimes usually have the genetic material from just about everyone they know available all the time. Romance and courtship are much more verbal and open, and to a human might aper very innocent or even platonic, based of convincing someone to use their genetic material which is an explicit and concious choice. They tend to be emotionally much more stable and less competitive then humans.
They can tell individuals apart based on smell
This tends to mean their culture is subdivided on several levels, with numerous levels of "one of us." Slimes can have tribes, clans, families, guilds, kingdoms, and so forth. Groups have a tendency to specialize somewhat to differentiate from other groups, but this seldom exceeds common sense- overspecialization or specializing for something they're bad at is very rare. In many cases their "specialization" is more a symbolic profession or animal than any kind of practical description of their talents or tendencies.
How well they get along with other groups is almost entirely dependent on how well they're doing on space, power, food, and so forth. Under ideal conditions, slimes are very curious about each other. Under dire circumstances, entire tribes can be ripped apart by civil war over a few degrees' color difference. Since slimes don't have any qualms about cannibalism, battles tend to be very decisive- losing sides retreat as far as they need to or get eaten.
This tends to result in rather unpleasant cycles in slime culture. Things go well, slimes multiply, explore, build, and interbreed with others. Eventually, they exceed their carrying capacity, and things slowly degenerate into genocidal war. Eventually, this peters out, the living slimes can't eat all the dead, nature reclaims the biomatter, and things start up again. Much of slime civilization is aimed at preventing the worse parts of this, usually through advances in food production and attempted limits on breeding. Neither is usually successful for terribly long, but at least they're trying.
The abandoned remains of the once proud ship orbital Crescent for the home world of the slimes. Designed to be fully self sufficient, an artificial planet
photosynthetical slime was created on the space station, getting all the energy it needed from solar rays.
It wasn't all that dissimilar from Earth's social ameboids (feel free to look them up, really weird and interesting creatures) , ((Aka, slime molds))
Abandoning the slow creep of psuedopods, they developed bipedial locomotion, spurred by the ever increasing energy demands of their increased complexity. Civilization grew slowly, with uplifted slimes mostly surviving by tending to and absorbing their non-sentient predecessors. However, slimes that specialize in certain tasks continue to become more prevalent.
They were designed as work drones by the extinct human empire and the space station is full of rogue biotech and robots and A.I.s and such
The station orbits a gas giant and was originally a giant habitation thing.
Gender: 30/60/10 Mix. ((3/10 look male, 6/10 look female, 1/10 look androgynous. Presumably nonhumanoid slimes not counted for some reason, maybe because of being to small a minority to bother including?))
I'd like to see the Slimes as a relatively innocent heart of nature civilizations, with most wars not fought to eradication, but to a serious detriment of biomass. As a slime loses biomass, it has to become simpler and less complex. However, slimes don't get much larger than a human because of the inherent decreased efficiency (See: Square Cube law).
As slime population continues to grow, the area of the ship that they are on has grown crowded. It's separated from the rest of the ship by some physical barrier (areas without sufficient light), but brave slimes are pushing back the frontier.
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All of these sound compatible! Thats a fairly good amount of culture data.
I also suggest:
* Humans are extinct long ago, to avoid the problem of them suddenly encountering their gods and creators tey were designed to serve.
* They have complex, varied goals and inner conflict, just like most human societies, rather than somehting banal and specific like "see the stars" or "build a space station this big."
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Topic: Civilization builder! Starting. (Read 7681 times)