I am new to inkscape and experimenting with different techniques. I am trying to recreate something similar to this pattern:



This is what I have so far, and I would like to bring all of the objects closer together, without changing their relative posistions or sizes. How could I do that? Or is there a clone tiling option that doesn't spread them all out in a circle, but keeps them in the space specified?

There is the tiled clone panel at the edit menu were you can set everything precisely for repeating patterns.

What you have so far is a totally different thing, it seems totally random, without any order whatsoever.
To bring the object closer to eachother,
open the transformation panel -by pressing Shift+Ctrl+M,
then use the scale option twice:
tick on the scale proportionally,
untick the apply to each object separately box,
and set like a 25% for the scale factor, then apply it to the selection.
After that, while still all selected,
tick the apply to each object as well,
set a 400% scale factor, and apply it.

Thank you, that makes sense. I'll give that a go. What I have looks random, because I added a random factor to the clone tiling for both the rotation and the spacing. Then I think I did something with the distribution that made them less in a circle.

Yes, that worked, but I had to deselect then reselect them in between scaling, otherwise they ended up the same as before, whether grouped or ungrouped.