Mechanical Lifeforms are "lifeforms" that are considered natural but have mechanical inner workings; basically robots or "living machines". This comes with the question on how they live or come to be, and what kind of environment could support their living.
One common answer is that their ecosystem is also mechanical.
The concept of Mechanical Lifeforms applied to an entire setting. Not only are the "people" robots, all the animals, plants and sometimes even the landscape itself is mechanical in nature. Like the lifeforms, how the ecosystem came to be, despite the concept, tend to be unexplained and just be accepted as "part of its nature". It could be that someone, usually a more "proper" lifeform, started all this, but it's not necessarily so.
Often overlaps with Mechanical Evolution, depending on the ecosystem's history.
Compare and contrast Reclaimed by Nature, another juxtaposition of the natural and artificial, but in a different way and with a different meaning: that the mechanical is not normally part of the nature, but has since been "assimilated" into them. Also compare and contrast Organic Technology: machines that use organic lifeforms as part of their working system.
Examples:
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Fan Works
- In the Bucky O'Hare and the Toad Wars! webseries continuation, mortal enemies Bucky O'Hare and Toadborg find themselves stranded on a semi-unknown planet covered in what appears to be a forest of metallic trees. As they travel to an abandoned Toad listening post, Bucky, trying to prevent Sanity Slippage due to hearing voices and seeing disturbing visions, attempts to get Toadborg to help speculate on what could have caused this phenomena, but Toadborg isn't interested. Turns out this planet is actually the homeworld of the Aniverse's owls, an isolationist population of wind mages. When they proved too difficult for the Toad Empire to conquer in the past, Toadborg used an orbital heat ray to smelt the planet's iron deposits, flooding the surface in molten metal in a manner similar to what Mt. Vesuvius did to Pompeii. The supernatural phenomena are the vengeful spirits of the Owlerians trying to kill Toadborg.
- The Cybertronic Bestiary
contains one fan's depictions of the frequently mentioned but never seen wildlife of Cybertron.
Films — Animation
Literature
- The James P. Hogan novel Code of the Lifemaker features one of these as the result of a self-replicating and self-repairing alien mining ship that had gotten itself slightly fried by an unfortunate supernova and accidentally wound up on Saturn's moon Titan a million years ago. As a result of the damage to the ship, instead of an orderly landscape of alien factories the machines on Titan rapidly become a whole landscape of mechanical lifeforms diversifying and adapting to local conditions through evolution by natural selection.
- The planet Laoth in The Dark Side of the Sun: as Dom rides his robot horse through the "countryside", he sees mechanical insects recharging from solar-powered flowers, only to be eaten by larger mechanical insects.
- Eldraeverse: "Silverlife" composed of Nanomachines is one of three orders of life on the Precursors artifact that serves as the eldraic homeworld, along with Ultraterrestrial greenlife and alien bluelife. Silverlife "organisms" range from microscopic bots that act symbiotically in the bodies of the eldrae and other multicellular organisms, to giant terraforming robots that the ancient eldrae mistook for elemental spirits.
Tabletop Games
- DragonMech has "gear forests", areas in the bowels of the various city sized mecha that have developed their own ecosystems, there's even a Ranger class that specialises in these.
- Exalted has Autochtonia, a world built on the comatose body of the god of invention, all life there is mechanical.
- Mirrodin from Magic: The Gathering was created by the Golem Planeswalker Karn in his image, making everything on the plane mechanical in nature, including living things.
- Planet Mercenary has a couple mechorganic ecosystems that blend cybernetics with biology. The Pereri Ring is inhabited by many mechanical plants and animals presumably engineered by the ancestors of the Esspererin to survive vacuum after whatever happened to their home planet. While Ellwor's natives wiped themselves out millions of years ago and their nanotech went wild and formed a Hungry Jungle of critters with wires for nerves that squawk mating signals over radio.
Video Games
- The planet Hob takes place on is artificial and made entirely of Sufficiently Advanced Bamboo Technology. The landmasses are a Patchwork Map by design and can be moved around by switches.
- Horizon Zero Dawn is a variant in that the environment is normal, but is maintained by a veritable ecosystem of Mechanical Animals. Said robot animals are part of a large terraforming system meant to restore Earth to health after the Robot War that devastated it by filling in important ecological niches as the planet is repopulated.
- Popstar becomes this in Kirby: Planet Robobot after the Haltmann Works Company takes it over.
- In one possible ending to Mass Effect 3, all organic and synthetic lifeforms in the galaxy are transformed into cybernetic hybrids. This includes simple plants and animals — at one point in the penultimate cutscene, tree leaves with visible wires are seen.
- Any time nature is presented in the Mega Man X series, it is this trope taken to the extreme. Forests are populated by robotic trees, woodpeckers, and caterpillars. Oceans are teeming with robotic fish and sea creatures. Deserts have some species of robotic cactus in addition to robotic desert animals. You can even see mechanical bits in the rocks and dirt.
- The world of Narita Boy looks like a fantasy setting made from Cassette Futurism technology.
- The original Palm Tree Panic level from Sonic the Hedgehog CD becomes this in the Bad Future; it's a Polluted Wasteland and all the trees are mechanical.
- Machine Worlds in Stellaris are only habitable by robots.
Web Original
- Orion's Arm has a fair number of machine ecologies scattered throughout Terragen space, most the result of feral Von Neumann probes, though Bothyga M'Vau was intentionally seeded as an art project and Stanislaw might be of Xenosophont origin.
Western Animation
- The Transformers: While not shown on-screen, a wide variety of Cybertronian wildlife gets namedropped.
