Race the Zaahir

I'd say rework from the ground up. You might end up making them drastically better, or still just okay. You never know what wonders/flops you might discover when remaking something.

 

"What do you mean, "*They* cut the power"? How could they cut the power, man? They're animals!"

 

Part of me feels like I shouldn't give helpful feedback to my rival, but...

The eyes on the female look broken because of the yellow squares at the base of the antennae. The antennae in general are very long and distracting from the face, making it look cluttered. The feather on the female turban is too small to tell it is a feather, try using the avian feather headgear as a base. The turban also kinda looks like a ball (so did my first attempts at a turban, it's hard!). The joints don't really look segmented, especially the knees with end up looking like they have circles on them or something. The male's belly appears to have a problem with the pixels. The fluffy neck on the female and spiky shoulders of the male might not work well with non-racial armors. This is probably due to re-sizing issues, but not all of the pixels are the same dimensions. The female skirt has two yellow pixel on her hip on the right side of the skirt, probably because you thought it was a part of her hand or something.

I like what you did with the purple guy's horns, though. I've been having a hard time doing any better when I've tried making beetle-themed armor.

 

Bug people! \o/

 

It seems now that Starbounds theme with Race Lore is becoming realized by more and more people, races like this come out in greater abundance. I honestly have to say, this sounds far more made for Starbound than a good deal of other ideas (Barring such ideas as the Novakids, Gemitoile... etc...)

However the male horn motif, while representant of a stag beetle, is highly distracting. I suggest a redraw of that area, as well as maybe some intermediary lore for people not quite able to fill in the lines between. For example: They live on a hot arid desert planet. What reasons do they have to build in mountains and under rock cliffs? What of the multiple body shapes of the race itself? I see stag beetle, wasp and moth. Those are some very different arthropodic designs there. Are they meant to test the palatability of the race in different forms? What kind of a planet is it that they come from?

As you can obviously see, Im interested, but I also think you could possibly do it a little bit better in areas, thatd make their implementation a little more believable and a bit more pleasing to the eye

 

Perhaps the Zaahir decided to build their cities like that to provide them with lots of shade (especially during the middle of the day), as well as to escape from predators that lurk in the sand below? That's one guess that I have for why they'd want to build upside-down cities underneath cliff faces.

 

I think this race could be paired with the Arachneidi (the same way both the Anodynes and the Novakids were chosen by the devs- though the Anodyne influences haven't been incorporated at this point) to the benefit of both. They fill very similar roles as far as culture and animal influences go (heck, some of the Arachneidi armors are even patterned after Hercules beetles, like the male Zaahir that's been sprited), and I think working together would be beneficial.

I do really love the architecture and city planning of this race, though. I would personally love to journey through one of their upside-down mountainous cities. ...Though I suppose I said the same thing about the Arachneidi's subterranean systems...

 

Hmm, Maybe you should add a religion or belief of some kind to the lore. I was thinking that since they're based on the Middle Eastern area, maybe a pre-hebrew belief would be adequate. Like, based on the Summerians gods, or maybe the Babylonian gods? For example, the king of the gods could be a golden-exoskeleton'd stag beetle. And likewise, the god of death would be a black cicada ( because cicadas are underground for most of their life )? Just spitting out ideas.

 

Nice idea, would love to see the Zaahir implemented.

 

This concept has potential. I'd love to see their ships maybe being made out of glass and them having glass based technology.

So their spaceships look gigantic genie bottles.

 

Insectiods, heck yeah!

 

This is very similar to a race I have been fleshing out for a homebrew table top game.

I approve

I would very much like to see this in the game.

 

Like the upside down city structure. Very insect like. Lets hope if this won't make in vanilla game that there will be someone making mod for it.

 

Upside-down cities might be all well and good, but what about sideways cities on walls? Don't they also have something like those?

 

The whole point is that the cities are like insect hives. They'll build a city in the corner above your front porch if you're not careful.

 

This is my top choice out of all the fanraces produced so far, seconded closely by the Oscurans (who lose out a bit due to unsatisfying spritework). I really hope to see these guys ingame, if not as an actual race, then as a mod at some point.

 

i would love this race

 

So from what I can gather, the Zaahir are fairly conservative, rarely developing or accepting new ideas despite having important trade lines between more advanced races. As long as the leaders are content with what they have, they see no reason to change their attitudes or work towards any sort of advancement. Leaders are only concerned over the well-being of themselves and their cities, the rest of the upper class hold even less concern for their community, and workers are deemed expendable and only exist to serve the upper class. Due to the callousness of the nobility towards the workers despite their accomplishments, reports of "mysterious disappearances" or "accidents" among the upper class would be increasingly frequent in large cities.
Being born on a desert planet, I suspect that water holds high value among the Zaahir. My assumption is that the Zaahir have three main methods of collecting water: using gigantic reservoirs above the city to collect rainwater, tapping into underground aquifers, or trading with other races who have access to abundant water. The latter might be an explanation as to why the Zaahir have become pigeonholed as traders. If their home planet used to have large bodies of water, then fossil fuel might have been one of their main exports, as desert areas tend to have deposits of crude oil buried underneath massive layers of compressed sand. Apart from that, they may also have traded valuable ores that they have no need for, primarily because they lack the scientific knowledge or tools necessary to make use of them. Additionally, they could also have made trade goods that look pretty, but have no real use otherwise (like jewelry, or statues). These things could be made from their resin or other refined excretions, or they could be pieced together from the hard remains of deceased workers, whose empty husks would most likely have littered the ground below their cities (because the lower class isn't important enough to warrant burial rites).
Typical Zaahir armor would have been cuirasses or other light or medium armor that would allow greater maneuverability than most other armors and is fairly inexpensive to produce. Since the Zaahir army would be mostly comprised of the lower class and thus are deemed as expendable as workers, defense would not have been much of a concern as long as the Zaahir could quickly overwhelm the enemy and destroy key targets in order to achieve a swift victory.

Of course, this is all just my thoughts, not what Lucid_Dakou may have officially stated. Still, it would be interesting to see how this race will play out if it gets accepted (translation: I LOVE THIS U ARE BEST!!!!!!11111).

And I also want this guy to be a Zaahir variant:

The termite with a gun for a face.

(I also wanted to do some kind of arthropod race myself but I scrapped that idea because the other people had better concepts. You can see the remnants of my idea in my race thread [OH SNAP SELF-PROMOTION IGNORE IT]. Plus I like mantids)

 

I had wanted to wait to post again until I had some revamped sprites or something to show for my absence, but I haven't gotten a chance to work on those yet, so oh well.

I'll work on expanding on that. That's a pretty good jumping off point.

Wow, I actually really like that. Do you mind if I incorporate that into the Zaahir main post? And Termite gun head is also a good idea. When I get around to trying to sprite head variants, I'll try and include that.

 

That's a common misconception regarding where oil is located. You see, oil is formed when life that inhabited the region "a long time ago" gets buried underneath tons of earth, and the pressure transforms these dead decomposed organisms into coal and oil. Whether or not the land that "currently" lies above the oil is a desert, tundra, sea floor, temperate forest, or jungle is irrelevant, since that is "present life", although I'd guess that the reason WHY oil is so commonly "extracted from deserts" is because there is less risk to the environment in the event an accident occurs.