Imagine how jank that game would have been on release if they tried varied procedurally generated biomes hahaha.
this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2026
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They're making a new game with that exact premise actually. Only one planet but still
A lot of stargates seem suspiciously located in abandoned quarries in the Pacific northwest
California, such diverse film locales
It's amazing how Quizxiolia Gemini III looks absolutely nothing like southern California!
Naquda mines?
Don't forget that if the planet is inhabited, it has only has one civilization that is mono-ethnic and mono-cultural. Star Trek is the most prominent ~~offender~~ example of this. Still a good series though.
In fairness, seasons and varied terrain aren't guaranteed.
Of all the bodies in the solar system, only Earth has such a wide variety of landscape. Mars is rocky desert or rocky desert with canyons. Pluto is ice ball or rocky ice ball. Etc.
Also, if humans were colonizing earth from outside, we would probably just build cities on the river deltas and skip the less habitable spots. Stories set here would then just be cityscape or river delta, even though the ice caps/mountains/jungles/deserts still exist. Colonized worlds will have different population distribution that organically settled ones.
Some Sci-Fi planet types are reasonable.
The Kepler program found a lot of exoplanets and has categorized them generally as Hot Jupiters, Cold Gas Giants, Ocean Worlds & Ice Giants, Rocky Planets and Lava Worlds.
If you ignore the gas giants because there's no surface to land on, rocky planets (and maybe desert planets) would be extremely common. Water or ice planets would also be incredibly common. And, if you're really unlucky, you might end up on a lava planet -- one that's small and very close to its sun.
What wouldn't be common are things like an entire planet that's a swamp, or an entire planet that's a forest of Earth-style trees. I'm sure it's entirely possible that on some planet there's a life-form that becomes the dominant form and that looks vaguely like Earth-style trees, but not the kind you see on a typical SciFi show filmed near Vancouver.
If you ignore the gas giants because there’s no surface to land on
Hey now. You can land on the surface of Jupiter if you're dense enough.
Metallic hydrogen sounds so cool.
Mars is rocky desert or rocky desert with canyons.
Mars has river deltas. It has flat plains. It has shifting rolling dunes. It has mountains and valley. It has a twisting series of canyons so constricted they're called the Labyrinth of Night. It has vast ice sheets and polar caps of frozen carbon dioxide and water. It has caves and frozen mud flats and a thousand other varied forms.
Mars is a world. It is a place. It has biomes as varied and unique as those of Earth.
Pluto is ice ball or rocky ice ball.
There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Well, not exactly biomes. That one it doesn't have.
Mars may have "river deltas", but without the river.
Mars is a world. It is a place. It has biomes as varied and unique as those of Earth.
Suuure. A biome is a geographical region with a specific climate, flora and fauna. Mars doesn't have much climate because it has very little atmosphere, and it has no flora or fauna. There's no way in hell that it has biomes as varied as earth.
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"Wait wait, you're from Doloron? Oh my god, I work with someone from the Swamp Planet!"
"Why does everyone call it that. It's a planet with one or two famous swamps."
"What was it like growing up in a mud hut?"
"We have other ecosystems! You know, mountains, fields, outlet malls..."
"How did you get to school? Bark canoes? On the back of a swamp snail?"
"No, like everyone else... In hover cars."
"Is it true you all have eggs sacs? Take off your pants."
"No I'm not taking off my pants!"
"Aha! We got a swamp monster here!"
"Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! (sigh) 50 years ago, Dread Trooper scouts landed in a swamp on our planet, and for some reason didn't bother exploring anywhere else. If they had gone one mile to the left, they would have found some beautiful beachfront condos. But they didn't. And now... we're the (air quotes) swamp planet. How do you think that makes me feel?"
"I uh..."
"Don't say anything. Let's just eat our lunch in silence."
"... Is that moss!?"
"It's a delicacy!"
Hmm. Still no resolution on the egg sac question, though.
Swamp monsters from the Swamp Planet find questions about their horrifying egg sacks to be very personal.
Moss is to be sorted by color not taste!
Stargate: every planet is either desert or Canada.
It's an ice planet!
Carter, after exiting the second gate on Earth
Always one of my favorite parts of that episode.
You can see a decent bit depending on terrain in most places, more if the terrain is higher than surrounding areas, but she pops out of a crack, looks around and sees ice for a few hundred yards, and gives up.
In fairness, without direction, some form of marker, or obvious landmark, wandering around in a blizzard would have been death for both of them... Not that they would have been able to walk to civilization even if they DIDN'T have injuries...
Still though, they've experienced varied terrain in plenty of planets, so assuming the whole planet is ice is something Sam would have corrected someone else on in a heartbeat. (and also made the argument that for all intents and purposes, for them it may as well be a whole planet)
I wonder how much better we could have had it if the location budget were like 4x what they had. Eventually you start to recognize specific rocks in the quarry... My wife likes to call one rock Terry because it has two vaguely eye-shaped holes, and "because it's terrible how often they use that place"
No, Carter had a point. Antarctica is a terrible place to put a Stargate. The Ancients usually put them in places where people can live. She didn't know they put Atlantis in Antarctica.
Assuming that people lived near this Stargate thousands of years ago, and it's now in an arctic climate, an ice age is the logical conclusion.
Don't quote me on this, because I can't remember the specific episode, comic, or book, but I vaguely remember the ancients settled places thy were most like their original homeworld of Alterra, and gave them the best comfort overall. That just happened to be what the Pacific Northwest region of North America looks like, so most of the planets are still pretty close to that. Some obviously have continued morphing over the millennia, but it makes a nice explanation for why everywhere looks like the same 30 mile area around their BC studio lol.
At the time they didn't really know much about the ancients, definitely didn't know that Atlantis took off from Antarctica 5 million years ago...
That's fair, however it always felt a little weird for the scientist of all people to make such a broad generalization.
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Or a really cheap single set piece that vaguely fits the theme of an ancient earth culture that has managed to not change at all in millenia, and then there is a single high tech alien device in the middle of it.
BTW, I say that with love. Stargate is the best.
Also Star Wars... Star Wars even have a city covering an entire planet.
From Irregular Webcomic!, #87 via https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SingleBiomePlanet
Imperial Officer: Lord Vader, the rebels have fled the ice planet of Hoth. After going to the swamp planet of Dagobah, Skywalker has rejoined his friends on the desert world of Tatooine. And now the rebel fleet is massing for an attack on the forest moon of Endor.
Darth Vader: I sense a great disturbance in the Force.
Imperial Officer: My lord?
Darth Vader: How else can so many worlds be totally covered with only one terrain type without regard to latitudinal variations?
Star Wars even have a city covering an entire planet
Yes, they copied it from Foundation. Trantor has a perfectly fine reason for being the way it is, that would apply to Corusant too.
That is, if physics actually allowed them to be that way. Apparently Asimov didn't run the numbers on that one.
In Foundation, Asimov suggests that spaceships start running on coal power, after civilization collapses so far that people forget how to build nuclear engines. He was always more of a Big Ideas Guy than a Fine Details Guy.
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I imagine No Man's Sky is doing this specifically to reference the trope as was originally commonly portrayed in e.g. Flash Gordon serials and various golden age comics. Similar to Starbound, this also has an intentional gameplay implication in that it forces you to leave the planet and find another one with the biome appropriate for whatever resource it is you need. Otherwise you could park your butt on one planet and never have any compelling reason to go anywhere else which really rather defeats the intent of the game.
As far as other works of fiction go, though, yes. It's just lazy.
No man’s sky also did it because of lazy. People may have forgotten, but that game released as pure hot garbage and only got better after tons of updates.
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To say otherwise would be to admit your story has no need for aliens.
Oh man, in general, people be raving about aliens, but never give two looks to the ants in their garden. Or you know, the entirety of Australia. Or the deep sea. We have so much life that's alien buzzing around us. Hell, we even have the Scottish – humanoids that speak an entirely cryptic language. It's so much more compelling story-telling, too, if they don't arrive here in a spaceship, but rather have been living among us all this time.
Oh man, in general, people be raving about aliens, but never give two looks to the ants in their garden.
Idk about that. "Honey, I Shrunk The Kids" did numbers.
I mean, not really? There's lots of reasons to use aliens in a story and I'm struggling to think of one that only works if you assume low-diversity planets
My favorite is how there is only ever one city and like 10,000 people on any planet.
Oh he went to this planet? Well, lets just go to the market, he's bound to turn up at some point.
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Well, look, the show has a budget. And the game also a gameplay.
Honestly i think it's quite possible that earth actually is rare on that regard. Most planets are majorly more uniform than earth. Conditions have to be juuuuuust right for a single planet to have water that exists in all 3 forms at the same time on different areas of the planet. That fact alone creates 4 of the 6 boxes.
Also there have been eras in earths history where it was basically like one of two environments. Like before the continents emerged from the oceans properly, or the several snowball earths, or the multiple times a super continent formed and created swamp land and desert land because of the fucken Appalachian mountains.
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Hey, be good if we wreck all this, which belongs to us all by birthright, so the ultra-rich could get to one of them and build a massive slave colony, with a green house exclusively for themselves to masterbate in, while we fight over oxygen, right?
The word for world is forest
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