Personally, if my body could adpt or if technology was good enough - ES B2F! :)

[DMT]

If they could in some way manipulate their crystalline growth, they could perhaps fashion themselves into simple machines, which could in turn produce more complex machines.

All they need to do is turn into wheels with arms. Then they can do what they want

I like the way you think. And I love finding common ground

Whether or not sentient beings in, for example, crystalline form could become mobile or not, now that's a good question!

Wheels or they could phase shift in and out of dimensions if they need to travel. Their ships operate in a similar way maybe, that is how they get around? They found that shifting dimensions was not limited to their habitat

You could, for example, imagine a race of intelligent crystalline structures which function like advanced quantum computers. They could trap light inside their forms, bouncing it around inside themselves to alter the quantum states of their individual particles to achieve sentience. Such immobile life forms would not use technology of any kind, since they cannot manipulate the world around them, but they could very well exist in a virtual society. They could even be mobile in some mechanical way. Such life could exist on a planet almost regardless of the gravitational conditions.

Win and they would have very fast Internet, even from the first days of the Internet in their technological history

So, not to worry, I'm not saying you've got your facts wrong, I'm just "dreaming" if you like

Keep dreaming, its fun!

[EisenKreutzer]

I think I prefer them as stationary, or atleast unable to move by their own power. Their society is entirely virtual, with individual consciousnesses dwelling in a formless world of free exchange of information. An individual of this race would be a particular crystalline structure, acting like a quantum computer that stores the core elements of the personality. Their virtual community consists of billions of these individuals linked together like a highly advanced information network. Basically, they live on the internet.

They are able to direct the growth of the crystals they inhabit, which allows them to interact with the physical world, but without sensory organs this was at first limited to spawning new entities (kickstarting the growth of new crystal computers, thus creating "children") and widening the size of their individual structures in order to grow and access new memory and higher functions. So the oldest of these beings would be the size of hills or even mountains, while the youngest adults might only be a few centimeter in circumference.

Maybe they slowly grew aware that there was a physical world around them, and developed more sofisticated techniques for exploring the physical world. They can control their own growth, so they could develop lenses and circuitry in order to process light-based vision, and could grow their bodies into mechanistic shapes and even tools to manipulate the world around them. They might even grow themselves into wheels or orbs in order to roll along the ground, as DMT suggests. I think I prefer them to be ball-shaped.

Their ships could be made up of a single crystalline entity, it's body modified both by directing natural growth and artificially through specialised equipment and technology to house other entities and even to have weapons systems later on when they encounter other species.