Living ships are a category of ships which possess the living trait. The living trait gives all living ships a small amount of passive regeneration, exactly 1% of their health points per second. This makes attrition warfare against these ships ill-advised. Living Ships cannot mount Repair Bots, but they can still use Repair Rays. The player can also add cloning modules to them to provide a swarming strategy.
Living ships are primarily used by the Jurgans, the Taraniak, and the Contagion factions.
The Swarm's ships are an odd exception with one of them not considered living ships despite its biological appearance. It is unknown if this is an intentional choice on the developer's part or if it is a minor error to be patched in a future update. The faction's Destroyer Bug, their Cruiser Crab, and their Capital Ship Jormungandr, are considered living ships. The faction's Battleship Wormship, is the only ship in the faction not considered a living ship despite it looking like one.
Free stars have a single ship, Corn that is considered a living ship.
A non-living ship can be made into a living ship by either crafting an Improved Ship with the living trait added automatically as a bonus, or by manually adding it to a level 50 ship at a shipyard for a minimum cost of 10 stars. Note that this will add a 1% regeneration bonus but it reduce the ships health points by 30% and they still won't be able to equip a cloning module effectively making them pseudo-living ships.