This is where my working out worldbuilding goes. Here and Welcome to the World Factory. So. Eusocial aliens, taking inspiration from Photos of Dragons. First one I've got is based off the trilobite beetle. The workers are fully-sapient, with six legs each tipped in a prehensile five-toed foothand (two 'thumbs' behind, three 'fingers' in front), two wings as limb pair 3 (in between leg pairs 2 and 3, set high), and a hinged lifting surface, like the elytra on a beetle-these are not a limb pair and do not have proper limb-bones. They are more like a hinged crest thing that happens to be a lifting surface. Thrust is produced by the wings, the hinge on the elytra just allows them to fold back and somewhat over the wings. Workers have both reproductive organs, but neither are actually functional as such in that they don't produce any gametes. Workers can be metamorphosed into either a prince or a princess. This doesn't happen all the time, just when a dragon citystate needs a new broodmother/Queen, or broodfather/prince/King-consort. Princes look like beetles, generally. Giant beetles. Fully sapient. Queens lose both their elytra and their wings as such-instead, they have hardened plates down their back, and the wings become extra-jointed elytra that protect the tail. The tail loses its spikes and most of its useful glands, and gains eggsacks. Lots of eggsacks. They basically gestate their eggs on their massively widened tail, although they lay them the normal way. They generally can lay two clutches a day, with their six rows of eggsacks. Fully sapient. This species has the unusual quirk of being able to modify their own biology. Queens can self-fertilize to produce almost-clones of themselves, but this is usually only done when starting a new city-state. While a queen can modify themself and their germ line during the princess stage easily, as part of the biologically required metamorphosis between princess and protoqueen, or with somewhat more difficulty as a full queen, a worker is harder to modify and can only be modified in the shell without losing at least some of their memories, as their memories are stored entirely in their brains and so turning into goop and back gives them amnesia. Turning a worker into a princess or protoqueen causes them to put all their memories on their soul before their brain turns to goop so they don't forget things permanently. Also a queen sometimes can do a minor change without having to goopify themself in a chrysalis. Typically princesses change their colouration so they can be easily distinguished from their mother. They also typically set up several strains of modified broods, optimized for different general careers-construction and heavy lifting workers, farmer workers, scientist workers, and so on. If the changes were effective, one of each in-demand strain is taken as a consort. (Often volunteers-only but it varies depending on the citystate.) Typical social organization: one or two Queens ruling a city-state, populated almost entirely by their immediate offspring. ETA: These guys were created thousands of years ago to act as translators. At the time, they were feathered-but most of them moved to areas that didn't have any other people living there, and in altering themselves to fit, most of them shifted from feathers to chitin and fur. They're now slower fliers, but more maneuverable-their wings are more like bat wings than bird wings, and so they have greater control over their shape. They don't like the sea, and they don't like grasslands. They like everywhere else. Most of where they live is in higher-Cuil areas-they'd have a party on the Dual Worlds. May actually move these to the Dual Worlds and have them be naturally evolved there, and have a different species take their place as created translators here. FURTHER EDIT: Moving these guys to the Dual Worlds. They have a thing for harsh environments, partially because everything else was taken but also because higher-Cuil environments are harsher so their tendency to like high-Cuil areas also puts them in harsh places. You'd think a forest with flying islands wouldn't be harsher than one without but even ignoring the risk of the islands falling down or whatever, the life there. High-Cuil areas=weird magical life. Think Avatar's Pandora. But with magic causing the bioluminescence and causing magical evolutionary arms races. Trying to come up with something to replace them. Hmm. Eight-limbed magical beaver-things? Those wouldn't compete with the other sapient species on that world for anything except space.
The second alien species is from the same world and also has eight limbs-4 wings, 4 legs. It goes wings-legs/arms-wings-legs. Hind legs are not very dexterous (3 fingers and 1 thumb), while forelegs have a four-fingered, two-thumbed hand with a walking-pad on the bottom. These guys have way lower family sizes than the trilobite beetle guys. A typical family ends up with 42 or so birds, with the fertile 2 looking very much like the infertile majority and only laying 10 eggs every laying season. Laying seasons are far apart at first-infertile adults produce the pheromones that cause the fertile females to lay larger clutches more often. If an infertile/worker bird wants to go start a family, the flockmother can produce a substance that allows the bird to become fertile. These guys are mostly carnivorous-originally they ate small alien rabbitthings, but then they expanded into a new range where they were the biggest predators and there were a lot of large herbivores, so they started hunting in flocks which is where their eusociality and intelligence originally came from. They later took to also eating the eggs of other animals, and are now slightly omnivorous, eating fruit as well as meat, fish, eggs, and milk. Some of the animals they ranch include a pegasus-y thing-unsure if it has tiny grooming arms or not. EDIT: Pegasus thing has the grooming arms. Its wings are also like bat wings, not like bird wings. Typical social structure is a few flocks that have friendship-ties. Birds do not mate with their siblings or other close relatives. That's for the trilobite beetle things, those guys are weird and don't have to worry about inbreeding. ETA: These guys live on grasslands and some mountains-not dense forest, and not very hot places, either.
Species number three! This one has six limbs. They're shaped somewhat like Eastern dragons, with a pair of wings in between two pairs of legs and a long body. They are also descended from flying fish of all things-they evolved on a volcanic island very distant from all other land, and isolated ecologies get very weird. Originally, the fish had their middle fins as large wings and their end fins as small wings. They had a typical fish tail at first, but as they got better at flying and their swim bladder developed into lungs, their tailfins divided more until they had four, all of which could be either flattened to the long tail or spread. The sideways-facing fins are used to increase lift and stop the tail from slumping, while the vertical fins are used as rudders and while swimming. The wings, having originally been fins, resemble Earthly flying-fish wings-but with a difference: they are now somewhat more jointed, with some wing bones in between the rays and the 'shoulder', with fin joining up from the bodymost ray to the body itself somewhat far down. The forefins originally toughed to be used as canards, but a flying-fish that could keep itself properly orientated if it accidentally landed on a beach was more likely to get back to the water to take off again (they could push themselves with their tail and wings). Eventually the forefins got decent at land locomotion-and by that point there were also lots of land plants, with only crustaceans and insects actually eating them-lots of things toxic to alien crustaceans were not toxic to alien flying fish. The flying fish wound up adaptive raditationing once they got true powered flight down. The increased tail steering meant that the hindfins didn't need to be specialized wings anymore-they slowly also got better at pushing flying fish around on land. Flying fish could by this point sort of walk. After a few million years, the result was an amphibious dragonfish thing that could fly into trees and eat the buds or flowers. Sometimes, rafts of vegetation with things like fruit seeds would get onto the island, but the fruit would only be eaten by crabs, and the smaller crabs were being eaten by flying dragonfish-at least, until dragonfish started eating the fruit. Anyway. Fast forward another few million years, and the alien dragonfish have gotten smart and social due to the need to defend themselves from huge carnivorous alien turtle things. They've moved from 'lay a few thousand eggs and hope a kid survives' to 'build a sheltered underwater area, lay a few hundred eggs, and defend the eggs and wyrmlings'. They do not have vocal chords; instead they use magic to communicate. By the time they became sapient, they'd taken to building nesting burrows or nests in caverns, with the Empress(es) of a flight or her heiresses laying a large clutch and the clutch being cared for by her children or 'retainers' (dragons that came with her from her parent flight). Usually there's 4 or so fertile females per flight-sister, generally. In new flights, they're all the same generation; in older flights, sometimes an Empress may co-rule with her mother or daughter. Most of the wyrmlings are females. Both males and heiresses come only from fertilized eggs, and the metamorphosis to Empress only completes once the heiress has stored some sperm from a mating flight. Wyrmlings must stay in the water for the first few months, until their lungs are fully developed. The only castes are male, heiress, empress, and female from an unfertilized egg. These guys are omnivores in the sense of eating insects, small crustaceans, and plants. They've developed silviculture, aquaculture, and insect-farming, but don't farm large animals. Fruiting plants are relatively recent to their archipelago, but once there diversified. Typical society is a flight-smaller than a trilobite beetle dragon city-state, as although the Empress or Empresses lay more eggs per clutch, they take over a week per clutch. They still use magic to communicate. Flights trade between each other. Their islands are weird. There's some turtle-analogues that mostly lost their shell to become faster and hunt crustaceans better, for example. ETA: These guys stick to the shores-they can't stand the cold, and they have to swim in the sea every day or so for gill health. Dense rainforest, unbroken by sea, is not what these guys like.
"Typical social structure" in this is typical instinctive social structure that they can fully keep track of-so for a human it'd be 'bands of family/friends, up to about 100 individuals'. Species 2 and 3 are natural, species 1 is created. Species 3 has wyrmlings pick up a magical 'accent' or whatever that's unique to the flight-so any dragon can tell if someone's in their flight at a distance, and if they've met anyone of a flight, they can recognize that flight's magical 'signature' in any other flight member. That was co-opted for use in species 1 as a hivemind marker-species 1 communicates both via sound and via a citystate-wide telepathic link. Queens maintain the link and act as nexi-remove a citystate's only queen and the hivemind collapses. This is generally traumatic. However, if another queen wishes to, she can slightly modify her link to include the frequency of the collapsed city-state, and then extend it to the workers. Species 1 is also an omnivore. ETA: Species 2 uses sound to communicate-their magic, if present at all, merely reduces their effective weight in-flight. Species 3 can only talk to species 2 via writing or with a member of species 1 to act as translator-species 1 can learn species 3 thaumic languages, though some dialects can 'sound' like they're coming from the link. Since the link can encode information of most senses, this can be disorientating. EDIT: Species 1 is now moved to the Dual Worlds and is naturally-evolved. Dual Worlds are high-Cuil enough for that to work.
Anybody is free to suggest name ideas or whatever! Species 4 is from a different planet than the first 3. They're six-limbed, and look somewhat like a sungazer lizard. Also like sungazer lizards, these guys are burrowers, building underground cities. Unlike sungazers, they're eusocial. Each family-group consists of a single, large, nonsapient queen who lays eggs, and many, many sapient workers who do everything else. There's a few variants of workers-a winged one, that can fly but isn't very heavily armoured, a typical worker that looks like a sungazer but with long 3-fingered arms in between the legs (the arms are modified wings and so fold as such), and a more heavily-armoured, larger, stronger 'soldier' type with worse spikes, fangs, and claws, as well as chemical weapons (depending on exactly what the soldier was fed growing up, this could be acid, base, various poisons, oily material that catches fire when spat, or something consisting of 2 chemicals that have a strong ectothermic or endothermic reaction). They come from a dry planet-instead of The Sea and many lands, it has The Land and many seas. These guys are generally grassland or savanna people, and are ectothermic-they become lethargic if it's cold, limiting their range. They mostly farm insects and small vertebrates (of a myriad of different body plans-coming out of the seas happened many times here, with a lot of varying body chemistries and body plans), although some will also eat roots. Queens can either lay eggs or give birth to live young, although the latter is rare, usually happening only at colony-founding. Colonies always start with a group of older aliens going with the new queen. Queens are wingless and honestly they're basically like termite queens. Each colony has several queens of varying ages and with varying ancestries. Queens are ZW and so can self-fertilize to have both male and female children. If a hatchling or newborn is fed royal jelly, it'll develop into a hen or drone. Hens and drones are nonsapient, but both can fly, and go on a mating flight where each drone tries to catch a hen that's not closely related to him, while the hens do aerobatics-drones also try to catch the hen with the most impressive aerobatics, so virgin hens are generally good fliers. After the hen has mated twice, she reabsorbs her wings and becomes a queen, ready to start or continue a colony. Since these guys generally live underground and use the surface for farming (when they're not farming, say, worms), cities are often underneath the farms they're supplied by. Also these guys hardly drink any water-most of what they need, they get from their food.
The next few species are from a double planet, so they effectively have four poles-north, south, inner, and outer. The 'inner' pole faces towards the other planet, the outer pole away-half the world has another living world in the sky. So, #5. These guys are...really weird? They're truly hiveminded, with each individual person having more than one body. They look somewhat like blue dragon nudibranchs-if nudibranchs flew. Their home system has a relatively high Cuil level, meaning that there's a relatively large amount of magic around, unlike extremely low-Cuil Earth, where magic was totally irrelevant until sapient beings-protohumans-evolved. Even then it was only relevant in that every sapient being in this has at least the potential for opening tiny gateways to the place magic comes from. Anyway, back to Nudibranch People. They float, sort of. The many-tentacled 'wings' are used more for propulsion and as hands than for lift. They're mostly herbivorous-although they don't eat as much as expected, for their size and activity levels, as they supplement their diet with photosynthesis. Usually each individual has about 25 or so bodies. In each person, there's 1 fertile nudibranch, which maintains body number by parthenogenesis. When a nudibranch person wants to have children, they have their fertile nudibranch mate with someone else's fertile nudibranch to produce baby nudibranches that don't link up with their parents' hiveminds. The baby nudibranch person is considered an infant until they've got ~4 or so bodies, and 'teenager' in a nudibranch person means 'has 11-19 bodies'. EDIT: changed a few numbers
A common quirk of high-Cuil worlds in this is the tendency for thaumosynthesising organisms to evolve. Once they evolve, they fill the primary-producer niche in dark areas, so a high-Cuil world has 'plant' life in even very dark caves-although they tend to be less dark than expected, due to the 'plants' generally glowing as a side-effect of thaumosynthesis. High Cuil level also allows for organisms to relatively cheaply develop defense or attack mechanisms that'd be very energy-intensive in a lower-Cuil environment. It also allows for easier gains or losses of limb-pairs-a gained limb-pair here is likely to be paralyzed and nonfunctional. Not so on a high-Cuil world. Sapient life doesn't generally do well above Cuil 3.4. In fact it generally won't evolve in places with that high a Cuil level, and heading into areas with that high an external Cuil level without ability to control internal Cuil levels is a recipe for really weird health issues, or even losing your sapience as your brain becomes less and less efficient at thinking. Anyway. High-Cuil worlds tend to weird, magical life, lots of fliers (using the high local Cuil level to 'make physics look the other way' and let them fly with wings too small to produce enough lift without magical aid-pegasi, griffons, dragons, winged humanoids with solid bones, and so on), and a tendency for sapience to develop in species without dedicated hands. No need to dedicate an entire limb-pair to hands when tactile telekinesis is a thing you can get. They also tend to be harsher than expected due entirely to biotic factors. Fire-breathing, natural metal armour, having three heads, being made of living rock or wood, regenerating limbs, whatever. So, I have to remember that with my magical worlds. Some sapients will not have hands. High-Cuil worlds are deathworlds in the sense of everything is more likely to be able to kill you despite having lots of resources.
