AE-Plex, a cultivator technician, doing some regular repairs on a console somewhere in the various tunnels of his homeworld, myrmidon. i think this is the most i've ever rendered a piece and i'm really proud of it!!!

cultivators have castes just like bees or ants, the most common of which is a technician, like plex here. they're workers who form the bulk of cultivator society, and they organize themselves around different 'hivemasters', a caste roughly analogous to queens. each hivemaster commands a different hive, and they each are assigned a different two-letter combination-- which is appended onto the front of the technician's names. AE-Plex naturally belongs to the AE hive!

myrmidon looks like a barren grey planet on the surface, but cultivator cities are all underground (with a lot of skylights), structured like an insect nest with a lot of different tunnels and chambers. technicians who are not currently away on missions get assigned to survey and do mundane fixes to the tech throughout the city on a daily basis. the rock-like formations and the columns similar to basalt are not actually natural rock formations but are purposefully built and carved out by the cultivators (it's technically regurgitated material, lol). the fungi in the background are of a species that grows symbiotically in cultivator nests and bodies!

their technology also looks very organic and is usually difficult to decipher to non-cultivator species; there's usually no outward controls and the consoles often only respond when touched by a technician. when plex is next assigned to a mission, he'll rejoin his hive in their ship, which is currently slotted into the ground on the planet, and will slide out once it departs. while at rest it enmeshes with the rest of the city and can be just walked into like a natural extension of the tunnels.