To me, sprials are neutral. Sure, they could be friends with the gremlins, slimes, wolvers, and such, but they are not going to spend time befriending those that attack them. They are in a predicament, and survival comes first.
We're the bad guys.
Spiral Knights have a sense of smell, breathe the air, occasionally eat, have gender identities and emotions. Our suits have environmental seals that it's important to keep working when we're using poison weapons. I figure we're living beings, but our relationship with our suits might make us cyborgs.
ITT the knights are really in a sort of purgatory/hell after a mass extinction resulting from the Skylark crashing into the sun. That's why the Fiends are there to begin with.
OR The Gremlins came to the place with the same predicament as ours a looong time ago and are telling us to give up on trying to reach the Core since it's impossible to power the Skylark with it for the same reason you can't power a standard internal combustion engine car with a slab of uranium. Also there's a Cthulhu in it.
Maybe we are the bad guys, but so what? Who's to say that there are any good guys? Just because there's evil doesn't mean there's also good. Really, everyone involved just sort of seems... neutral. However, both parties are going about it totally wrong.
The knights want to leave. The various creatures within the clockworks want the knights to leave. The logical course of action would be for the various creatures to allow the knights to harvest some of the core's energy, just enough to get their ship off-world, and then wave good bye as the knights sail(is that the proper term to describe space ship travel? i mean, space ships don't really have sails... i guess 'ride' might be more appropriate?) off into the void.
tl;dr: everyone is chaotic neutral.
Yeah, I'm never fond of the fact that on the first level, you end up slaughtering gramlins. Also, think about this... the gremlins come at us with WRENCHES and HEALERS in the first tier!!! For all we know, they could have been trying to come to the surface to fix our ship and heal our injured until we attacked attacked them with swords and bombs.
lol, necro.
Anyways - What do you think it would happen if you kidnap and trap some random creatures on one small and dull place without food (unless everyone can survive on stone blocks and grass).
They'll become crazy and propably resort to cannibalism. Luckyly for them, some strange little guys showed up for dinner! ( we may be made of metal, but they dont know it yet, they'd rather kill us and find out later)
That explains the behaviour of beasts, slimes, fiends and gremlins (and the robots they made to hunt us).
Then we have undeads, wich are tired of being... non-dead and atatck us so we can release them from their curse.
Cradle supposedly eats worlds, so most of the inhabitants probably aren't native. I think a cool twist after opening the core would be to find it's much bigger on the inside than the outside, and holds entire worlds.