Reproduction

Though their bodies may be mechanical, Transformers are, at heart, living beings, and like all creatures, Cybertronians also create new members of their species. But while organic life forms procreate through a comparatively quick, self-contained, and straightforward procedure, Cybertronian **reproduction** is a complicated affair. The vast majority of Cybertronians reproduce asexually, but how exactly a new Transformer is created, given life, and introduced to the world is a complicated process—a process that often plays a key role in the origin of their species and culture, even if individual methods of reproduction often vary wildly across different continuity families.

Elita One had a secondary spark which was a child Cybertronian forming within her belly after the one time; she had a moment of intimacy with Optimus Prime.

### Mechanical construction

*See also: Drone, Man-made Transformers*
In the very earliest days of the *Transformers* franchise, before the franchise established the more supernatural aspects of Cybertronian biology, early fictional portrayals treated the Transformers like conventional—albeit highly sophisticated—robots. With the right parts and technical knowledge, anyone could simply build a new Transformer like an ordinary machine. Once built, this new Transformer simply springs to life, a sentient and fully functioning individual. In the original *Transformers* cartoon, Wheeljack and company created the Dinobots this way, the Constructicons rebuilt a human city into Trypticon, and the temporarily super-intelligent Grimlock created the Technobots.

As the *Transformers* franchise continued to evolve, this mundane treatment was largely forgotten in favor of more mystical means of procreation, but permutations and new twists on the idea have continued to surface. The Cyberfactories from the cartoon-based *Wings Universe*, for instance, are said to have mass-produced a new generation of Transformer life on the planet Earth, and the process of "cold construction" from the 2005 IDW continuity combines the concept of mechanically assembled bodies with the idea of spark infusion from an outside source. In still other stories, mechanically built Transformers are specifically flagged up as mindless "drones." Lacking the presence of an animating spark, these drones are "artificial" beings—mindless, mass-produced units who operate on a set of preprogrammed directives rather than a conscious mind.

In some *Transformers* universes, sufficiently connected human organizations have studied and reverse-engineered alien techno-biology to manufacture their own Transformers. In some stories, these man-made Transformers are mere drones, mindless human machines that approximate Cybertronian anatomy for their own destructive purposes, while in others the intersection of human and Cybertronian technology has given rise to fully-sentient, human-built Autobots such as the Autoroopers.

### Spark infusion

*See also: Sacred treasure, Matrix of Leadership, Primal Program, Matrix Flame, Vector Sigma, AllSpark, and AllSpark Mutation*
As the *Transformers* franchise evolved beyond these simple roots, later stories would firmly establish that Transformers were *not* simple automatons; rather, they were fully-sentient living beings. Thus, both the Marvel comic and cartoon would separately explain that the creation of a Transformer entailed infusing their physical form with a guiding, animating life-force. The *Beast Wars* cartoon would eventually dub this life-force a "spark," and still later fiction revealed that sparks generally came from a supernatural artifact capable of imbuing new Transformers with life. In the Marvel comic, this artifact was the "Creation Matrix," and its Primal Program, conceptual forerunner of the later Matrix of Leadership. Concurrently, the cartoon introduced the omniscient supercomputer Vector Sigma, which turned Megatron's transforming but non-sentient robots into the Stunticons.

### Other means

Sexual reproduction Optimus Prime asks where organic beings come from... and realizes that there are some questions best left unanswered.
*See also: Transformer romance*
Although the vast majority of *Transformers* universes feature both male and female Transformers with an understanding of love, the vast majority of Transformers do not reproduce sexually and indeed regard this kind of procreation as something entirely alien to their mechanical worldview. (Though admittedly, there isn't a lot of direct evidence for humans reproducing sexually in most *Transformers* media, which is, after all, aimed towards kids.) A handful of stories have nevertheless revealed that some Transformers organize themselves into humanlike family units that could imply organic methods of reproduction... although, again, as *Transformers* is mostly for kids, little has been revealed beyond infrequent mentions of parents and the occasional crude innuendo, the latter almost certainly added for comedy's sake rather than any kind of definitive canon.

Some versions of Wheelie's backstory, for instance, note that his parents died in the crash that marooned him on the planet Quintessa. Similarly, the Japanese *Victory* manga reveals that Deathsaurus and his forces have been fighting for the sake of their civilian families living on top of the Planet-Destroying Fortress, which include Deathsaurus's wife Esmeral and many children. In *Revenge of the Fallen*, Jetfire mentions his parents, while in *The Last Knight*, Hound alludes to a bad relationship with his father.