Now to keep this brief, the colony came on a ship that traveled slower than light, and they found a planet surrounded by dust so it is more hidden than most (towards the galactic core), and the colony wants to remain separated from the rest of humanity.

The mist, after learning about the humans (the mist can create physical beings, including human ones, when it want to) and what the humans were...it took measures to contact the rest of humanity. The base principal is that the mist believes that ftl travel should be possible and humans would eventually figure it out. It's taken over a thousand years (I'm still determining a time line) to reach other humans, but now the colony isn't unknown anymore.

The current motivation I have for the mist is that it lacks the ability to feel, so it has created the human versions from itself to feel for it, but it wants more.

While this is ok, I was wondering if there might be some better motivation for the mist intelligence. Running out of resources isn't it, that would require a faster solution and they would have contacted the humans on the planet for help not long after. At the start of the story the humans on the planet will have not discovered that the mist is more than just what it appears to be.

There was a B sifi movie where a planet was to be conquered by the local meglomaniac. They gather a group of people who will defend them. It had Robert Vohn and the guy from the waltons.

Anyway, one of the ship defending them were basically clones of the one. they can feel, taste, see and touch all the same things. They were out among the stars because they were bored.
What one experianced, they all did.

Excuse me for running amok and making all sorts of assumptions...

Your mist (is it a single mind, or a group of minds? - I prefer and will assume a group - linked, but individual - voices in the dark ); I assume they are the only "intelligent" life on the planet, & since the planet is dust shrouded (is the dust another kind of mist being?...hmmm), anyway, since their planet is hidden, the humans are the first intelligent life they have encountered.

Here they are, nothing new to think about or experience for eons, and along come these beings who are capable of space travel (the mist should not be). They are able to sense enough of the human's thoughts that they are excited by the possibilities of what they can experience with the humans - but after being with them for a while, they have gained what they can from the colonists, but also are frustrated, because the humans they are dealing with are isolationists who want to stay hidden and homogenous, but the mist have had enough of that and want to experience more - if only they could draw the attention of people / beings who are more interested in traveling / living / changing - so the mist can gain new experiences from them (or maybe even be able to go with them).

There will be conflict - the colonists might have very good reasons for wanting to stay hidden, beyond being anti-social. The dust around the planet might be like parents of the mist, keeping their children safe and protected from the outside.

The mists are essential for life to exist on the planet. They were formed with the planet and held in the water and kept the bright starlight from killing off all the micro organisms. The intelligence it evolved is due to the living creatures (very tiny ones) that live in the mists. After it became aware of itself, and what surrounded it. It discovered small creatures crawling over the surface of the planet. These creatures (now long replaced) served as the template for how physical life should be. The mist has created, removed, and created new life many times over the millenniums. Still, none were more than animals, and no matter how big it made them, they never did have the ability to speak.

The humans arrived in a big ship, and like all curious humans, they went and checked out to see what was below the mist. So, the mist knew there were new creatures on the planet it did not create. Not only did it not create them, they were intelligent, they spoke to each other, built things, carved a home into the mountains. This got the mist curious enough to create it's own humans to explore their world, learn why they had come, who had created them. It wasn't pleased to find out the humans had come to the world looking to escape from the rest of it's kind. The concept of war and servitude were not something the mist really understood. The idea formed that maybe this group had cut itself of from their creator (still believing humans were created by a mist entity like itself) to be free of it. The mist wasn't sure how the creating mist would feel if it killed off the humans, so it decided to try and reach out to other humans that were still loyal to their creator. Mimicking the radio and higher frequency transmissions, the mist was broadcasting an SOS that it realized would take a long time to be heard. Time meant nothing to the mists, other than its own anticipation of meeting another of it's kind, it was fascinated with humans. As time moved by, the number of humans that were children of the mist had grown to about five percent of the population. There was little that went on that the mist did not know about. The only group it had failed to integrate itself into was the council. Since the mist was still unsure if killing humans was the correct thing for it to do, there was never a need for a replacement for a council member (they all stayed in stasis most of the time, sometimes for a decade or two).

Once the mist makes contact with what it believes will be loyal humans that will take representatives of this mist to the humans mist. There is no need for the mist to leave the planet as long as it can send out physical creations that are connected to it. The connection does stop once a physical creation is far enough away from the planet (few thousand kilometers), but they remain the physical entity they were. They still serve as messengers.

The dust around the solar system is just dust, it hides the solar system's star from optical view so it isn't seen by any form of telescope. The star can still be seen by xray and heat, but being closer to the core and the type of star it is...it is not a prime suspect for a system with a habitable world.

So, does that sound like it could be believable? Sorry to be in a hurry, but Nov 1st is next week and I still have to hash out who the humans that arrive from outside the planet are, and who they represent...and how it is going to make a mess of everything for not only the colonists...but the mist as well.

Oh, the physical sensations are part of it as well, but I think that the mist's need to find another entity like itself is it's driving need.

One big question for you: how basic do you want to go?

For example, stimulation - pleasure, excitement, or interest - is a very basic motivation for humans. It's part of a fundamental goal/reward process that keeps us alive. Happiness (a feeling of joy, peace, etc.) is another. Pain is another. People experience them in different amounts and in response to different stimuli. These basic motivations give rise to more complex, more abstract ones.

I see no reason to believe that these motivations must be universal for all life forms in the universe. We're not even sure they're universal on this planet.

So, to rephrase my question, do you want to assume their basic motivations are more or less identical to ours and that they think and feel more or less the same as we do? Your search would then be for a higher-level motivation such as loneliness. Or would you rather start from scratch, inventing low-level motivations better suited to an intelligent mist made of tiny, stupid creatures, and then move on to the higher-level ones?

The second path is much harder, and may not work very well - it's hard to identify with such creatures - but if you're good, you might pull it off. If you can convince me to feel "brackish" (so-named because the feeling reminds the life-form of a certain kind of pond) along with an alien protagonist, I'll be highly impressed.

Maybe one day I'll be good enough to pull off what you are suggesting, but in a month of hard core writing...I wouldn't expect it. It does give me some things to think about though.