I'm currently working on a sci-fi campaign setting for my players, and I was looking for some advice...

Yes. Closest thing I could find to what I was thinking of. I don't have much in the way of organic weapons and armor, aside from some tyranid stuff. I'd love to have more.

Can anyone remind me why alies from Prey loved biotech so much? I've kiled their aesthetic.

The collector stuff from Mass Effect works rather well.

Race came from a highly parasitic/mutualistic world. Almost every species has some other species either using it or being used by it for some task or another. Often this takes the form of mutual gain.

Their technology is simply an extension of those ideas already existing in the wild. Using metals and alloys is as foreign to them as using living flesh is to us. Why use a rock to tip your spear when the [SPECIES NAME] already grows sharp and hard as a tool for [A DIFFERENT SPECIES].

Each individual is still an individual though. Many families have proud lines of breeding stock for some technology or another. And there is fierce competition for new genetic material that can be added to their programs.

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This is exactly what the yuuzhan Vong are. They got caught in the middle of a massive war between 2 mechanical races and ever since then they've hated machines. Instead they used organic tech, which was possibke given the rich biodiversity of their world and some possible divine influence

Get rid of the "ship" element, replace with corn or potatos - a species of space whales is found that can do FTL and has a bunch of other useful space technologies in its body - it's also found to be a bit plant/fungus like and under the right conditions you can take a chunk out of the space whale and cultivate it into a particular organ that does a specific task.

By the time the physics underpinning what the space whale can do, the entire civilisation's economy and technology base is now geared around manipulating and interfacing with whalestuff/and whales have been bred and domesticated to do their weird space shit better than technology can replicate easily.

Bonus point: In that alien races' area of space there's loads of "wild" bioships, where crews have died and the ships have managed to live on without anyone in them for a while.

So when another alien race comes into that space and spooks a wild ship into attacking them, that can also be a good starting point for wars as well as an excuse for SPACE COWBOYS corralling them and selling them back to breeders.

you could even go full retard and basically turn the setting into Pokemon... IN SPAAAAACE!!!! by having lots of different space whales and the players operating a carrier ship that flings out space whales they've captured and trained for various tasks

They are a race that can bind lower races to their will, or possibly their first empire was super high tech, but their enemies caused all their Suns to release constant EMP waves and so advanced technology dosent survive long
Also helps explain why they haven't been fire bombed yet

>Vong
Yeah look at the vong. Right up your alley. Some people don't like them, but I dig em

I like the Vong. Just not the whole sadism aspect or the anti-force stuff.

>yo Bob, what do you think of this new armour design?
>it looks cool, nice and protective, but the knees look a little weak
>yeah, I should fix that. Come on beetles, pip pip, get up there!

>what are some reasonable ways an alien race might go for organic tech over mechanical?

Their home world had little to no metal that could be mined. Most sharp tools were made from animal bones. Just like humans have bred livestock and crops to suit our food industries, they also bred creatures with bones of different shapes and tensile strengths for different purposes, and with different hides that produced different leathers. With the advent of genetic engineering they were even able to make creatures that could function as tools while they were still alive. If they were a species like frogs that laid a multitude of eggs, most of which die before reaching maturity anyway, they might have had no qualms about breeding/genetically modifying themselves for different roles; warrior castes, worker castes, thinker castes, computing castes etc.

You had me enthralled right up until that spoiler user

Do a blend.

A great example is the Protoculture from Macross. Even before we knew their origins, they had a pretty heavy focus on biotechnology. Genetically engineering new races, interfering with the evolution of planets, and the ships of their warrior clone race have a distinctly biological look to them.

We eventually discover that they got all of their best technology from discovering and studying a species of absurdly dangerous space bugs called the Vajra. Faster than light travel, weapons that destroy the fabric of space/time, armor materials that's become stronger the more electricity you run through them, gravity control... all of it the bugs evolved first, and the protoculture learned to copy.

This is why all of the best protoculture has a weird organic bent:because it has organic origins and was reached through a study of biology rather than physics, even if they replicate it effects with machines instead of organic ship.

They even could do FTL communications, but they chose not to because it was the same transmission system used by the space bug hive mind, which triggered the fuck out of the bugs. And those bugs would wreck your shit until you stopped.

For understandable reasons, the Protoculture basically worshiped the bugs. Both to make it taboo to mess with them further, and as a respect for the source of their power.

Fading suns - symbiot sourcebook would help ya.

Or:
I remember the old sci-fi (light) short story in polish fantasy/sci-fi magazine Fantastyka about space worms making jumps using psychic powers. Some arrived at earth, people lobotomized them, inserted human beings into them and bootstrapped cargo to them. The worms could only jump to predistined earth like planets. It used lots of spanish (or portuguese, i can't tell) terms, like calling worms [i]los rocketos[/i] or referring to themselves people as "segor?". I can't remember name of that short story. I may got the terms wrong.

It could be that their mechanical systems just resemble biological ones by our standards. All life is fundamentally mechanical anyways.

it might have just been the way their technology went with.

We made our first tools from carving rock, they made they're first tools but growing plants into molds. we used more and more metal and stone, they used more and more biological material.

What about the Kroot from 40K? Don't they do some kind of gene modification based on what they eat?

Organic tech can be grown with rudimentary brains and basic survival instincts. Your organic ship will automatically pilot itself away from danger if the overrides aren't engaged. Your organic gun will only fire if the operator smells familiar.

The species had a symbiotic relationship with another species on their home planet. They transported [Beehives] between different food-rich locations. In return, the [Bees] would defend the nomadic [Aliens] from predators.

When the species began to develop advanced tools they mostly used bone, sticks, and exoskeleton fragments from the wildlife. As technology advanced, the [Aliens] began selectively breeding the wildlife to suit their needs. Advanced weapons were instead trained fauna, food harvesting was done with the assistance of selectively bred wildlife rather than advanced machinery.

The idea of stone (and then metal) didn't enter the culture for a loooong time, and was mostly treated as a luxury building material.