so, there are some loose restrictions on corporeal freedom. it's definitely possible to be a strictly virtual being, though people usually prefer to maintain some kind of mobile body in the physical world instead of living entirely on a server somewhere. if you live on a server your "physical body" is often at the mercy of the operators, and SC isn't overall a utopia. but it does happen sometimes.
you can also be a ship mind, or a building mind, or a mech mind, or any weird structure you can think of, but there are some similar anxieties about autonomy and also varying laws around that sort of thing, also cost. most people can't afford a 20 foot tall body off the bat, though it's possible to grow that big gradually. governments and orgs don't want just anyone embodying a weaponized mech or spaceship and so forth, or embodying a building that sensitive documents and correspondence pass through, etc.
but structure-minds do happen commonly enough and are in demand, i think. one of my OCs i still need to draw, a boy named Vesper, is a former shipmind on a pleasure cruiser. also macros and hyper people exist, which also includes aliens who evolved at such sizes. this has some impacts on economics due to the different consumer goods usage of different size tiers and biochemistries.
