Sun is curious now if Amentans and crafters have similar aesthetics. Here are the ten most popular artworks on a popular art uploading site, as of the last local update from the homeworld; do they look nice to lone sassafrass?

...drawings of people are kind of offputting; less-realistic representative styles are too, but she expects she'd get used to them if she saw them often. They seem to have pretty similar ideas about composition and color palettes; crafters favor simple primary colors a bit less and like texture and other visual effects a bit more.

Here's a site dedicated to color palettes and another one for textures you can download for Pixelpaint?

The color palettes all look fine to her; someone who was more interested in art might have more to say about them, though. The textures aren't bad, but if it's supposed to be showing best-of-class type ones, they're more simplistic than she'd expect.

They're intended to be small parts of larger artworks, like this example here, if you zoom in you can see this texture was used for the cloth.

...yes, even so? - this is probably a manufacturing difference; she doesn't have any kind of guess yet at how Sun's species does things but crafters can give arbitrary things near-arbitrary visual properties. There's nothing actually stopping her from doing up her clothes in any of these aesthetics except for the amethysts being too awkward to practically wear at that size.

That does seem like a manufacturing difference. There's another thing crafters have to trade, then, cool custom fabric.

Sure, if they want. She'd do some of that, maybe, once she's got a little more time.

Now Meston wants to do the talking for a bit about walkers and other cool crafter vehicles!

Lone sassafras continues to be a giant vehicle nerd! And very curious what Meston thinks of the walker they've been trying out, she personally has some opinions on the gait options on that model.

He likes it and is curious how it figures out how long a step to take on uneven terrain! Amentans haven't been able to do very much in this area because it gets too close to robotics.

With some very clever sensors! Complicated machinery like this can be a bit tricky since while crafting material can be made to react to the states of other crafting material around it, it can't react magically to non-crafting-material objects, just physically - if a leg comes down on a rise in the ground it'll move differently than if it comes down on flat ground, see, but without some other kind of sensor none of the machinery can know what the ground is like before the leg hits it. Meston's walker uses sonar in the legs to get around that - if they look close they'll see a tiny protrusion a bit less than a handspan up from the bottom, that's the sensor, it makes a brief, very high-pitched noise and then 'hears' it and vibrates when it bounces off the ground, which takes longer if the ground is farther away, and that way the leg can tell if it's close and adjust appropriately. Some models use light for the same kind of thing, but that's harder to design around.

OH that's so cool. Does it work less well in noisy conditions?

A bit, but it's listening for pretty much the exact sound it makes, so it's not usually a problem, you just might see a minor misstep from time to time that the other legs will compensate for. You can add a system to listen to the sounds around the machine and pick a specific one to make that nothing else is making, but she's not sure that's ever actually necessary, and it's fiendishly complicated to get the ear working with it; she'd add another set of legs, practically speaking, before she tried to solve a real problem that way.

This will be a huge boon to whatever brave souls want to try to develop robotics more! Amazing.

- they have something going on that makes this kind of thing dangerous?

There are some elements in Amentan society deeply opposed to the development of robotics. The crafters shouldn't worry, though, they won't be allowed out of the city.

Huh. Weird. She's curious what their issue is.

Advanced robotics would make a lot of jobs unnecessary, and for Amentans, that affects how many kids members of the relevant castes can have. They have to buy child credits and a caste that recently became much less useful won't have as many to go around.

This child credit thing sounds like a real lousy situation all around, to her. - also isn't purple the moving-things subspecies? Meston doesn't seem upset about walkers existing at all.

Purples do lots and lots of different things. Many individual purples will need to change careers to accommodate robots, but on a population level, they'll be fine. There's another caste with a much more restricted career set that has murdered roboticists in coordinated actions before though.

...huh. Well, if they can't get to her, she won't worry.

(That sure sounds like a potential genocide in progress, she doesn't say. This species is weird about violence but weirder about taking valid grievances seriously and treating people well. She'll check her notes when she gets home and see if she can figure out which subspecies it is with the problem and whether there's anything she wants to do about it - unfortunately keeping them from learning about machines is probably a lost cause, too many of her people know about them, but maybe there's something.)

Once Sun manages to take over from Meston she wants to know how crafters govern themselves. It sounds like "not much" but how are disputes in general resolved?

Really not much, yeah, they very much don't go for restricting each other and backing off from doing something that would hurt someone is pretty natural and automatic for them. Sometimes people will have a complicated misunderstanding or otherwise get stuck in a situation where everyone is coming out worse for it and ask community elders for advice, which works well. Someone accidentally harming someone else is handled by them explaining how it happened and what they would do differently now or why they wouldn't have been able to avoid it, and spending a little while mourning the harm with the person who was harmed. Serious intentional harm - more than just a minor destructive expression of anger that can be taken as a communication and talked out - is very rare and taken very seriously, they'll need to explain themselves to most of their neighbors and are liable to be run off or worse; that hasn't happened in her community in her or her parents' or grandparents' lifetimes, though, she's just heard stories.

Sun speculates that maybe since they have to invest so much effort in interacting at all and their BATNA (she laboriously explains this concept) is pretty good with the magic, they are unlikely to wind up in many of the situations that provoke serious disputes among Amentans, but they would probably still have, say, breakups resulting in custody issues, or maybe intellectual property issues if they've got that concept, or nuisance complaints about noises or smells...?