Slylandro

The Slylandro are a fictional race of beings featured in the sci-fi Star Control computer game series.

The Slylandro are a race of ancient and friendly gas bag people that inhabit a gas giant planet. They are ancient and long-lived enough to have records of contact with the Precursors prior to their disappearance. Because that they have no methods of physically recording history, long chants of past events have to be memorized in order to preserve the past, and it is this method that is used to recall the Precursors when The Captain enquires about them.

Their home world contains two areas that affect the Slylandro's behaviour. Below their inhabited area are "the depths", which grow darker and more hostile as one ventures deeper. When a Slylandro sinks deep enough into the depths, their gas bag is almost ruptured by the pressure, causing scarring to occur which is believed to attract potential mates. Above the inhabitants is "the Void", which when ventured into, causes a Slylandro to "grow giddy and behave inappropriately."

Although the Slylandro remember their history with chants (they have something like 10,000 different ones for clouds), in the past they did try to fashion technology. However, due to the weight of these objects, these Slylandro sunk into the depths, possibly dying due to their freefall.

The Slylandro are very shy about their "glowy bits" being seen by the human eye simply because they are their reproductive organs. The standard measurement of time for the Slylandro is the Drahn, which is equal to 4 million rotations of the planet.

Slylandro Probe

Since they cannot create tools, much less spaceships, they purchased a model 2418-B self-replicating probe from the Melnorme using data about their own unique biology to pay for it. Their intent was to use the probe to peacefully explore the universe. They made an error programming it, however, setting the priority of the self-replication activity too high (Priority Setting: 999) in an attempt to maximize their return on investment. As a result the probes would seek out alien spacecraft (their highest priority target for exploration), transmit a standard greeting declaring their peaceful intent, and then immediately switch to replication mode instead of trying to collect data. The first stage of this involved attempting to break down the nearest source of raw materials (the alien spacecraft) with a lightning cannon for use in the replication process. While this may be unpleasant to the target ship, the alternative is a little more horrifying (particularly to fledgling players in the early stages of the game) — the Probe ship is supposed to be armed with a missile battery for defensive purposes.

The seemingly schizophrenic probes spread rapidly and terrorize the quadrant until the protagonist contacts the Slylandro homeworld and explains their mistake to them, at which point the deeply apologetic Slylandro provide a self-destruct code for the probes to make dealing with them easier. They also reprogram returning probes with instructions to transmit the code to any of the misprogrammed probes they encounter.

See also

• Berserker probe

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