lirok ideas (mk1)

LILITH
Lilith is a hot, stormy world home to an incredibly hostile biosphere which favours toxins, prodigous breeding rates, and an ever-increasing evolutionary arms race between offence and defence.

Amid this environment emerged a sapient species, the lirok. Agile insectoids packed full of biological weaponry, the lirok evolved to take advantage of lateral DNA transfer through parasitoid reproductive habits, building close-knit hives and systematically defending their territory from encroaching threats such as pests, predators, or other parasites.

Lirok hives are each a single family. A core of reproductive adults produce a large number of nonreproductive offspring; periodically offspring mature and are cast out in order to find other hives and help create a new clutch of offspring.

Additionally, lirok are parasitoid in their reproductive method; young are implanted into living hosts and absorb genetic material through lateral gene transfer, eventually devouring the host in order to emerge.

Reproductive individuals take a place of seniority in a hive, often learning specialized skills (as they are more vulnerable and thus both less suited to general labour and more important to keep away from external threats). Additionally, since the reproductive core of a hive is composed of individuals from several other "donor" hives, reproductive adults are integral to keeping an oral tradition of history and regional events.

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Possess the basic trappings of a written language, primarily for cataloguing purposes; symbols representatives of numbers and common items or concepts exist, but use of symbols to represent syllables or sounds is almost nonexistant. Clay tablets and bark sheets are both used for writing surfaces.

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Agriculture is divided between personal crops and livestock crops. Personal crops are often grown in bunker-like "greenhouses"; lirok staple crops are a variety of fungal-like decomposers and a few fruiting plants native to marshland. These personal crops are fed with organic refuse.

Livestock crops usually take up more space and are grown on the surface. Lirok don't eat these crops most of the time; they're reserved for the animals that the lirok breed for meat and incubators.