Melnorme
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Template:Infobox Star Control race The Melnorme are a fictional race of beings featured in the second installment of the sci-fi Star Control computer game series.
The Melnorme are a race of merchants, primarily selling and buying information. They will provide history, current events, fuel, and technology in return for biological data and the locations of certain colorful worlds known as Rainbow Worlds. They use large Trader vessels to seek out, contact and strike deals with potential customers. Though in possession of a great deal of powerful artifacts and better grasping the events than any other race, the Melnorme come across as mostly benign and harmless. Trading with them is not required to complete Star Control II, but makes the game vastly easier to finish.
The Melnorme are highly secretive of themselves and their origins, and while they are technically ready to divulge such information, the prices are ludicrous. The race's psychology, homeworld, and goals are all a mystery. They are known to have based their culture entirely on equivalent trade and reject the concept of charity, and place a great emphasis on colour, to the point of basing their own names on different shades (the one pictured is Trade Master Greenish).
The race itself is not talking, but their similarities have led many to believe that the Melnorme are the descendants of the Mael-Num.
The game designers have since confirmed the Melnorme - Mael-Num link.
Being as secretive as they are the Melnorme will not reveal the reason why their background changes its colour when they begin to trade. Given the player can scuffle the necessary credits it is revealed that the Melnorme back-colour is in fact reflected from the monitor in front of them (just outside the picture), when they switch the computer to trade-mode it changes colour and so does their background (apparently one species did pay for this information and got very angry, the Melnorme could not understand why).