The lore that has developed around Nicemice so far hasn't focused very much on their homeworld. I suppose all of my focus has been on this pervasive idea of a huge armada full of starships that act as the colonization spearpoint in addition to simply being a large, imposing distributed weapon system.

A lower resistance to physical damage due to their small size makes sense to me, as does a lower health pool overall.

Unique weapons for nicemice will eventually revolve around "domestication" which is their nicemiceism for sophisticated slaver tech. Species that meet criteria for being part of the upper class of citizens enjoy luxuries built upon a combination of automation and slave-labor, but prisoners and species deemed 'not nice' get to go work in the mines or perform other similar tasks.

Movement speed bonuses make sense from a lore perspective, but are usually awful from a gameplay perspective. Jump bonuses fall into a similar category because the existing movement speed, move bonuses, augments, etc are already in a pretty good spot out of the box. Adding to those values often feels like over-tuning.

Now that I think about it...

Is there a way to toggle individual race trait options on or off in the race traits mod?

If not, then instead of just adopting race traits mods made by other people, the correct path would be to insert those race traits into the nicemice mod itself at the core level and give players some kind of UI to enable or disable species-centric benefits as they see fit.

No way to disable specific traits. It's an all or nothing deal, in my experience, but what traits are given to the race are something you can be very specific about, should you choose to do so. Ashspeaker's House of Peace also went the route of baking racial traits into the species itself, though they never gave an option for disabling those traits. That made the race fairly OP way back in the day, though it's a mixed bag now. Giving really strong elemental resistances and weaknesses is incredibly unbalancing almost no matter what you do, and I personally wouldn't suggest anything more than 20% in either direction.

As for weapons... perhaps they're good with Whips? Traditional imagery and all that. Bit of a weird mental image, I admit. What about drones and other 'summoned' physical labor? Don't see those much, though I expect that's because they're probably a pain in the butt to manage. I know Lastree had some drone-based weaponry in it.

No arguments on jump and speed bonuses; those can get out of hand pretty quickly without careful management. I'm really just spitballing ideas based on what (little) I know about Earth mice! It's a shame stealth isn't really a thing in Starbound, given how well many species of mice are able to camouflage and otherwise go unnoticed.

Another thing to consider is if they have things like higher or lower maximum energy, energy regeneration, health regeneration (very powerful, and usually needs some fairly potent drawbacks if present), and an innate attack bonus or penalty.

Omeruin's mod doesn't do weapon specific bonuses or penalties; that seems to be primarily the realm of FU's traits. That sort of thing does tend to encourage certain playstyles though, and that's something I appreciate with my mindset. Lean into strengths or cover weaknesses? Things like that.

Another thing that seems to be exclusive to FU's traits is the concept of Charisma; that is, increases pixel return on trades (or penalties if negative, of course).

Essentially, my thinking runs along the lines of Tabletop Role Playing Games (TTRPGs) in the idea of if I was playing a member of this species, what classes would they be innately suited to? And then tweaking along those lines to fit the idea. Obviously, any species can be any class in a decently balanced game, so you don't want to push too hard in any one direction.

It's your species though! What you do flies and I'm really just trying to encourage thinking and ideas along lines that are of interest to me and which will hopefully lead to those kinds of character building concepts I enjoy.

In a lot of ways, it feels like the backpack augment system already does a lot of what race traits wants to do.

Because the race traits mods currently out there don't offer granular options to enable or disable specific features on a feature-by-feature basis, it would be a better path to just build my own system into Nicemice.

Probably some kind of float-tank or similar laboratory furniture where players can check boxes on-or-off with a cleverly-labeled save button to apply gene splicing or something like that.

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Elemental resistances seem like a hit-or-miss feature. In vanilla you have four elements to worry about, but with mods like FU as more and more damage types get added into the mix, any single resistance becomes less relevant overall. You get diminishing returns for the number of enemies using new elemental damage types, so as a modpack's gameplay experience approaches vanilla, elemental resistance gains more utility.

Elemental immunities fall into a similar basket.

I feel that the direction I would probably want to go is generally only in the negative or handicap direction so players can increase their difficulty but not decrease it from what vanilla would normally offer.

No amount of resistance editing I do on the race side is going to compensate for the plethora of overpowered gear available in many of the most prolific modpacks though, so taking this entire design process too seriously is also a mistake to be avoided.

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Generally speaking Starbound's difficulty is set up for a player to tackle challenges solo. An appropriately-equipped crew makes mincemeat out of most boss encounters, even modded ones, and mods like Shellguard add plenty of firing support to show just how busted that gets. (The spider mine launcher is still a lot of fun, though.)

I'd like to be able to call support down in drop pods, ODST style, from the MAUS fleet, eventually.

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Energy regen was the route that Bullitt went with their FU patch, and the reasoning that went into that decision was that Nicemice developed high-tech solutions to compensate for their smaller size overall. Critter engineering aka cringeneering is a fun trope, so the direction of industrious, mechanically-inclined playstyles is likely in or near the target zone.

All told, I'm just happy the thought is there and you have some ideas for it! Gene splicing would be a very interesting angle and I'd love to see it if you can find a way to implement it.

Yes, vanilla's difficulty is pretty much exactly where I like things to be. It's nice that people have options, but I build my own collections / modpacks and do my best to exclude anything I find to be blatantly overpowered as a result of that. Despite that, I do find that I need to use that 'more difficulty + more loot' mod to help even the field because modded Starbound always has powercreep and such. That's fine, as long as I have ways to tune it back into what I like!

I'm an artificer at heart, so I'm very happy to see some glimpses of what the future may hold here.

I suppose this is just another way of saying that granular control over traits would be something I would very much appreciate when and if you were to implement them. ^.^ Thanks for your thoughts, Lofty!