#Cool sophonts

[spritebloom]

Made a friend! :D

They're probably a partially melanistic individual with some lighter markings, and maybe works as an artist.

Guess what I maaade ;D

Sea Crawler Meiker is out!! Been working on this on and off for a few weeks and it's finally finished! Tried out a chibi style for the lines and I thought it turned out pretty cute :^

There's a bunch of colours, markings and accessories to choose from! (And different backgrounds too). Currently only for ocean-dwellers, but I might add a shore-dweller option someday. If you'd like a reference for the different OD ethnicities, here they are below on a pink base.

From left to right: Zunphua, Daihrut, Cevrunax, I'saimon, Xeld, Izvoi, Hvr and Zev'r.

Enjoy!

[crabussy]

god I love being an artist I can draw whatever I want forever and that includes redrawing a 1912 la vie parisienne illustration with my speculative biology alien characters

[thylacoleocarn]

heres to a new year of new things!

process pics below cut. a fun first attempt at polymer clay. learned a few things and honestly i really enjoyed the whole process! hopefully ill figure out how to take better photos. and paint! needs another coat at least.

[funeralprocessor]

Art from Mundus Carnis, a geiger-esque biopunk worldbuilding project by Screeble on DA.

I'm a huge huge fan of their art and writing and worldbuilding, have been for years. They did some fantastic work in a collaborative spec evo forum game I lurked.

Which have lived in my head ever since.

[spritebloom]

Hey!!!!

helloo

[iguanodont]

The Monoculi (informally dubbed ‘peebs’) are not exactly a new species from me, but they’ve gone through a pretty drastic redesign since I last posted anything about them. These are a spacefaring species from the same universe as birgworld! Details under the cut.

The Monoculi are so-called for the large compound eye that comprises the “head”. The densely packed ommatidia allow for crisp image resolution, and a variation in the depth of the lenses give the eye a range of acuity from only a few feet along the lower half to hundreds of meters along the top. Monoculi are nocturnal creatures which evolved to navigate complex cave systems by day and tangled branches by night; they have good depth perception and low-light vision but are nearly blind in regular daylight, and cannot perceive color.

The Mono homeworld is peculiar for the presence of a ring, the remnants of two moons which collided early in the planet’s history and bombarded the surface with chunks of space rock long after the planet’s crust had cooled. The result is an unusual abundance of heavy metals in the environment. Iridium, a prohibitively rare mineral on earth, comprises orange-yellow compound which carries oxygen through a Monoculus’s veins. The ring itself also has drastic effects on seasonal surface temperatures, though as on birgworld, life there has adapted accordingly.

Monoculi molt to grow like earth arthropods, but they only do so one segment at a time. A newborn larvae, one of 2 - 5 siblings, will remain soft and aquatic for about 8 months, until it loses its gills and hardens for the first time. They do not begin growing the first proper body segment until the thorax is as large as an adult’s. Molting and mating are both intimately tied to mineral pools found deep in their ancestral cave system. Without them, a molt will invariably fail and lead to severe health complications. Monoculi are hermaphrodites, and mate by pressing the gonopores (small openings under the first pair of arms) against the soft carapace of a first - third instar body segment, fresh after molting. The spawn will bore directly into the segment and trigger its transformation into a reproductive segment, which falls off after young are produced.

These sophonts are relatively large and long lived, with 200+ year old individuals sporting nearly 20 body segments not unheard of. They are also well into their space age, with a once-thriving space tourism industry buckled by a massive recession in recent decades. Rumour has it that several of the abandoned exoplanetary retreats still harbor stranded staff… but the company that built them dissolved and nobody has scraped up to funds for a rescue mission. They avoid contact with other sophonts, with the exception of the swimslugs, with whom they maintain a friendly cultural and technological exchange.

————

Btw, I do still post almost weekly sketches and worldbuilding notes on my patreon

[jayrockin]

Not trying to be invasive or anything but have you ever thought of making OC bases for your sophonts? I just thought it would be a cool idea, especially for the ones I love like the avians and ferrets.

With all the love in my heart to people who enjoy making OCs of my alien species: I can't even be assed to make official references of characters, locations, sophonts, and etc for my own use unless I'm forced to by comic pages. You're on your own.

[starly-amazing]

Well hello there, Stardust! I feel like I'm in a bit of a predicament and something tells me it's your fault｡:✧˚*:･｡

-Releases another dragon(adjacent) Loop into the wild-

I commissioned the lovely @nycroshears to draw Loop as a Rukemi; one of my OC species that I'm shoving in an AU I've been working on! An AU that started out as a scene that popped in my head when I was falling asleep of a rukemi grabbing Siffrin by the scruff and making them confess to their family...which turned into a massive AU I've been outlining for weeks now.

Rukemis as a species idea are nearing 20 years old at this point! I think it's past time I debut them in more than a few commissions thrown into the uncaring void of tumblr every few years. I'm not going to talk too much about them now; that'll be revealed in the AU itself!

Some more info about Rukemis + closeups below. (ISAT SPOILERS)

Fun facts about rukemis!

They're from a parallel Earth where the meteor that killed the dinosaurs glided past harmlessly.

They're descended from troodonts about 67-68mya who had a whack mutation that caused their front limbs to duplicate. They were very useless at first but others of the species found them SO ATTRACTIVE they ended up thriving and the wings over time evolved to be functional. So they are theropod dinosaurs, like t-rexes, velociraptors, and modern birds.

They evolved sapience not long before humans did after a smaller extinction event wiped out biodiversity in habitats adjacent to their native range.

Before they were relatively unassuming small tree-dwelling creatures similar to primates but with the bonus ability to fly. But with the new free real estate some of them branched out and rapidly evolved much larger sizes and intelligence comparable to our own. Now, they're roughly the size of small horses and stand about as tall as us when they're standing on all fours.

Now, parallel to our Earths, they exist a few hundred years more technologically "advanced" than us.

Their societal development was similar to ours at the start, including the destruction of their Earth's ecosystem, wars, oppression, and other fun things. But after ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ and ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ they mana▮ed to ▮▮▮▮ from the ▮▮▮s and bu▮▮d a ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮.

It was after they got their collective ▮▮▮▮ together that they gained the power to ▮▮▮▮▮▮ to other ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ ▮▮▮▮▮, ma▮▮▮▮▮▮▮e ▮▮▮▮▮nts, h▮▮▮ ▮▮▮▮ds, and ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ their ▮▮▮▮▮ into ▮▮▮▮▮ sop▮▮▮▮s upon ▮▮▮▮▮.

Now, many rukemis spend their lives trying to ▮▮▮▮ other ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ not ▮▮▮▮ ▮▮▮▮▮ ▮▮▮▮ up like ▮▮▮▮ ▮▮▮.

Their designs were based on ▮▮▮▮ from ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ ▮▮▮▮ and originally looked like your standard middle-schooler's white wolf rainbow wings + horns OC that you can see (here), but after 20ish years of workshopping they're now their own dragon dinosaur species (and are much, much gayer). This design is the most accurate and all others in the link are older versions.

They have three main sexes that are impossible to tell apart at a glance and have a much looser and queerer relationship to "gender" and family.

They generally live in family units of 3-8 adults + their children (now, often including humans and other sophonts) and have a much more relaxed & shifting hierarchy than humans generally do.

They are nice, and soft and warm.

Enter Loop, just a normal rukemi who just wanted to live a normal life as an astronomer working to discover extraterrestrial life on other planets (because finding life on parallel Earths just wasn't cool enough for them). After an ▮▮▮▮▮▮ by a ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ ▮▮▮▮▮▮, they were thrown into the world of SASASAAP and eventually runs into Loop Siffrin struggling through their time loops all alone.

Originally, I created a random rukemi to aid ISAT Siffrin through the loops and join the family after they broke free of them. But after developing it for a while I realized I had no idea what to do with Loop so I just fused the two into one and tossed them into the Start Again world to help OG Siffrin instead.

(Sorry y'all, this Loop doesn't sparkle as they are made up of flesh and blood and not pure craft energy. They did get some cool "tattoos" some time before coming to SASASA:AP world looking like a celestial being, though! They look like the 2nd image to Siffrin. If they had more time they might found some glitter to make a more theatrical entrance.)

-Adds another "dragon" Loop to the pile-

[entelodante]

Finally finished my Whorl redesign. They were cute before but idk, I wasn't digging their eyes. I gave them a frisbee head and they are much better for it now! More in depth info to be found below!

Whorls are a sophont from the slime ball planet Backera, the planets crust is entirely covered in miles thick microbial mat so the floor is always very much alive. The main form of "animal" life on the planet are the pentapods, analogous to Earth tetrapods in terms of niches and all that. Pentapods are distinguished by their five limbs, five jaws, partial exoskeleton, and an internal boney limb girdle. Whorls are from a clade of predatory pentapods who branched into frugivory a while back, eventually leading to tighter knit communities built around maintaining their farm mats. Whorls live in towns with populations between a few dozen to a few thousand, their settlements are also how they get their name. Their buildings are spiral shaped, expanded by spiraling them outward! I'm getting around to drawing that, its v cool. They eat mostly 'plant' matter, fruiting bodies from sessile organisms and maybe some choice floor scrapings. Meat is also greatly enjoyed, but is typically reserved for older Whorls or very small children. Children who by the by, go through a little aquatic stage before committing to wet land. Babies are traditionally left to grow in slow moving rivers, but modern times find communal pools to be a lot more popular.

Whorl families consist of one 'bearing' parent and anywhere from 1-5 'seeding' parents. Whorls do not have sexes, but they do have a few genders! Mostly they have to do with who is stabbing/getting stabbed and gender will change throughout a Whorls life. An important note here though is that most pentapods, including Whorls, fertilize via traumatic insemination stab. This is understandably rough on the stabbee so generally only older, larger individuals will be the ones going through pregnancy. That's the basic gist, will get more into it as I get around to it. But just wanted to reboot them a little!

[potatosapien5]

the sillies!

This is one of the guys(sophont aliens) I’ve been cooking up, for now calling them the fluffbugs(a better name will be made)

This is a portrait of a fluffbug, just showing their head and arms, but they’ve got more cool stuff going on that I didn’t draw here. Gonna try to make a good ref for them sooner rather than later wish me luck 🫡

Some info below: 

I can’t say too much rn(I’ll go into detail about them more when I actually make the ref) but for now I’ll say they’re semi-arboreal sophonts, who have a tech level(before human contact) around that of the pre-Industrial Revolution. They’ve got colorful flaps on the pedipalps just behind their head that they use to communicate emotion, along with a complex system of movements. Most fluffbug languages are divided between spoken words and hand signs. They can use a vocal organ(akin to the mammalian larynx) in their forwardmost pair of spiracles to talk, but they can’t articulate much, and their mandibles can make clacking noises and stridulations if moved right, but that’s about it. Individuals that wish to hold conversations(not just answer simple questions) with humans either have to use a modified human sign language(they only have four fingers so it’s slightly difficult but not impossible), or use a speech generating device(which is the main way one of my characters speaks). 

[dahlia-verdantus-first-floret]

Do you and your Affini ever play games together? Anything from Fields and Florets to Fetch to Riptides! I know other florets & wards relationships to their Affini are different from mine and I wanna learn more about everyone!

o-oh recently me and mommy have been getting into a cool card game but the cards that come in the affini exclusive packs are op, i hear the sophont that created it is putting themself up as the prize for whoever wins a tournament they set up for it

[styllwaters]

Baby Knight??

I'll do you one better - baby knights!

[ntls-24722]

Homo Mousike updated species refs + redesigns!

The Debu didn't get a redesign, more like an updated reference picture but nonetheless, the current Debu lore:

Debu are the most technologically behind out of all 3 sophonts in the homo mousike planet, they are in their stone age and still live in caves. They have recently begun to be sedentary to practice agriculture, and while they don't have metals, they have invented cement, where they will dig/carve out molds to pour it in and create whatever structure they need. They are an immensely successful species that have been sapient for significantly longer than the two Zebrapeople, yet have not moved meaningfully past their stone age, but this technological lag isn't due to a intellectual damper, but a lack of need.

Debu are enourmous, strong, but because their skin is bare and sensitive, if they they can't beat the daylights out of their attackers, they can just scale cliffsides as dubiously as a mountain goat and create massive caves for themselves for shelter. They are HEINOUSLY well adapted and the only reason they got sapient was because tool use got Debu insane amounts of hoes.

Debu used to be solitary, and they would call to one another like birds and at some point down the line, 1 proto-Debu was getting insane play because he was knocking on shit rhythmically while singing. This led to 2 species-wide realizations: Girls like cool sounds, so if you can make cooler sounds (by making instruments) you get more girls, and If MULTIPLE guys play together in a little band, they collectively get way more girls. These 2 combined brought the species to be communal through "concerts" and sapience through the tool use.

Zebrapeople are the most technologically advanced, in terms of humans, they're kind of at their ancient Sumerian point in history - meaning technically their world history just started but that's still miles ahead of the Debu.

Zebraelves came from something that kind of filled the niche of monkeys, crawling along land-coral branches like chameleons but became semi-hexapodal when their ancestor adopted their eusocial nature, in order to carry food across the branches to the rest of their colony. Speaking of, they have a eusocial social structure where most of the population are nonreproductive worker females, nomadic drones that group into a fraternity and migrate circularly around subcolonies to lay pipe to the reproductive female Queens that are thrice their size (around the size of humans)

Their biggest strength, as you might expect, lies in their eusocial nature - much like Argentine ants, the entire species is a part of one massive supercolony, meaning the entire species, fascinatingly, does not have wars with one another. Subcolonies do have tensions and general beef, of course, they're not a hivemind, but they're just extremely passive aggressive about things. Their tool use was actually what facilitated this - the Zebraelves were smart before this, and were not just workers in a colony, having much time to play. Any neighboring colonies would fight tooth and nail against eachother, the only truces being over liquor and their dances, where two colonies would temporarily relieve tensions to play and mess around. The intraspecies violence was actually insane to the point that inventing instruments to make larger dances and merge colonies actually became essential to their survival.

Wars with other species is on the table, as hypocritical as that is. Interestingly, they like to siege war on their "cousins" the most.

The Zebramen evolved from Zebraelves on an island close to the mainland, their eusociality and treedwelling status fading away as they got bigger and bigger. Eventually, like us, they became fully hexapodal to run across flat ground rather than across land coral branches. Interestingly, their civilization didn't start when they stopped being nomads, their civilization started when they got up and began to keep moving across the savannah. Inventing instruments for music helped them communicate as they herded the cattle that their entire livelihoods relied on, without wasting so much precious breath.

Interestingly, even though they're their closest extant relative, zebraelves are kind of hardwired to hate zebramen the most - to most zebraelves, zebramen are recognized as a seperate supercolony and there is some instinctual tension. But peace and union between the two species is not rare nor unheard of, cultural exchange is abundant and the two species are so closely related that hybridization occurs, creating the variably fertile, back problem-prone and human-sized zebragnomes.

Zebramen have 2 main ethnicities at this time, the black-and-white mainland zebramen, and the hot-pink insular zebramen, located exactly as their names suggest. They are big fans of the razzle dazzle, as when they were without queens and fraternity nomads, their evolution began to skew towards sexual selection, leading to an enjoyment of overly detailed, fancy decor and the bright-pink stripes on the insular Zebramen to this day.

[t34-mt]

important question

How do you create creechuress?? Like, do you mix a bunch if animals and such? I think its so cool and I wanna do the same

Don't think I'm the person you should ask this to because idk what I'm doing. My sophonts weren't even a spec bio thing until fairly recently (2022), and even then their designs still changed drastically

I just try to have overall shape appealing to me and just have whatever traits I like in them, that's it. Well aware that what I do is just birds / dinosaur the sequel but I stopped caring about that

[twocupsofsugar]

The Dram

A slight redesign of one of an older design, in color this time. These are the Dram, a mammal-like sophonts from an very earth like planet. On the left is a female and the right a male. They're the closets your going to get to a "humanoid" alien in the known galaxy.

Some bits on Biology

I call them mammal like but their not like placental mammals, they're really more akin to marsupials and monotremes in that young are hatched very underdeveloped and are nurtured in a pouch. While not depicted accurately here male dram are considerably larger than their female counterparts, and are around 2x times their size on average. They're feathers are display features which are used to express mood, and in mate selection. Oh and they're also venomous, they've got two fangs in their mandibles which in ancient times they'd use on their prey. They're aren't exactly immune to their own venom, but they are resistant to it.

The average global temperature on the dram home-world is considerably cooler than earth is while they are capable of regulating their own body temperature they do terribly in temps greater than 80 degrees fahrenheit, and often find room temp uncomfortable. When working in environments of other sophonts they tend to wear refrigerated chill suits.

Some bits on Culture

Dram family structures are similar to lions, so polygamy is the norm and their societies tend to be matriarchal. Their home-world is currently in its glacial maximum stage of their ice age so the northern hemisphere is largely covered in permanent ice sheets. Due to over industrialization by nations in the south their planet is unfortunately dealing with gradual global warming. The effects of which were much more intense and immediate due to their planets larger axial tilt than that of earth, so as you can imagine they're dealing with a lot of issues as a result. They were contacted by aliens , ~20 years ago and interacting with the wider galaxy has only added to their list of political and socio-economic problems.

In terms of tech, they're a little more advanced in some aspects and behind in others but they've got a comparable tech level to 21th century humans. (so us right now!) And they've already made crewed missions to other neighboring planets in their star system.

I really like the idea of the sort of role reversal, where instead of humans getting contacted by aliens its the other way around. Like I can imagine the dram equivalent of SETI discovering human ship or message and all the shenanigans that would cause. Would be a cool story i think.

[thecruxarm-personal-blog]

A NEW SOPHONT ALIEN SPECIES!!!!!!

Finally!!!!! I made one!!!!! Am I cool now?! :D

*ahem*, anyway, this guy is called a "Camptoscelid" (which roughly translates to "flexible limb" due to how well they can articulate their hips), but can also be called "scelids" for short, as I will do.

They are a radially-symmetrical species with 6 legs, 6 eyes and 12 nostrils (with two on the side of each eye), and are a type of plantimal, meaning they're an animal-like organism which descended from plant ancestors millions of years ago. They have about the same level of intelligence as a human, but are much weaker physically and have no sense of hearing, but they also did eventually form a long-lasting civilisation. Oh also they're sequential hermaphrodites, so they have no use for gendered stuff.

ALSO scelid eyes are able to extend on long stalks, as can be seen in the ref sheet, and each one has two "display sails" which they can extend and retract either at once or individually. Camptoscelids extend and retract their eye stalks and display sails in different combinations and at different lengths to emote, much like human eyebrows, though with more variety...it would be cool to make a chart of their different emotes.

In their pre-history, scelids evolved to scuttle along forest floors, picking and eating fruits, fungi and plantimal equivalents to insects on the ground and the bases of trees. Because of this, their legs (which double as arms) are quite flexible, and this also means they have a great sense of balance when using multiple limbs at once to manpiluate objects. The one pictured above has a dark striped pattern, which serves the purpose of throwing off predators or camoflauging against the forest floor, with the majority of scelid predators living up high in the canopies of the forest. However, some species of scelids can have lighter stripes, or use more spotted or blotchy patterns depending on the local flora (I'll have to get around to making a chatt displaying their different pattern variations).

Here's a version of the reference sheet excluding stripes. I'm mainly including this version for anybody who wants to draw them so they can better see the finer features of their anatomy without all the patterns getting in the way. While it is possible for scelids to have no stripes, it is incredibly rare and considered a genetic deformity.

I don't wanna clutter up this post too much, so if anybody wants to learn more about this species, feel more than free to ask questions in my inbox!!!!! :DDD

I hope others love these little guys as much as I do