Single-Biome Planet: Difference between revisions

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Earth itself could fairly be considered a Water Planet. In its history, it has been an Ice planet more than once, though, as well as periods when most of the landmass was Desert (early Mesozoic) and of nearly uniform lush growth (mid-Mesozoic). By similar standards, Mercury could be a Desert Planet, Venus a Cloud/Volcano Planet, and Mars another Desert Planet (a cold desert this time). If you allow the moons of the gas giants, you also have Io (a Volcano Planetoid - it has been said that the entire surface of the moon is repaved in just 3 years by volcanic activity) and numerous Ice Planetoids (such as Europa & Enceladus). Most of the outer solar system dwarf-planets are also Ice Planetoids.

Note that a [[Single Biome Planet]] is not necessarily a Single ''Climate'' Planet. Even on planets and moons lacking atmospheres, there are bound to be variations in temperature due to latitude if the planet or moon receives a significant amount of radiant heat from a star. A planet or moon with atmosphere will of course have much more complex weather patterns due to wind and precipitation.

'''Notable classifications:'''

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* Cloud Planets -- The land is not where Newton wants it. If something or someone lives here, either the ground [[Floating Continent|floats through the sky in chunks]], or there are hover-cities. Either way, watch that first step. Sometimes [[Hand Wave|Hand Waved]] by making them Jovian planets, although no known gas giants are anywhere ''near'' habitable. Venus again is a prime example, as some levels of its upper atmosphere would be pretty nice and potentially habitable -- if not for these pesky [[Death World|sulfuric acid clouds]] around.

* Dark Planets -- Like the Desert, but owe their lack of plant life to perpetual night; usually due to constant opaque cloud cover or spooky ominous fog. If inhabited, this might be the product of [[Gaia's Lament|industrialization run amok]], with the clouds being clouds of pollution. Home of the [[Big Bad]], look for the [[Evil Tower of Ominousness]] with the perpetual lightning storm. It's like Planet [[Mordor]]. This is kind of like the real-life Venus, which even comes complete with the lightning storms. However, such planets in fiction are invariably described as "barely habitable", whereas the real version is of course ''completely uninhabitable''. Dark Planets could also be Rogue Planets that do not orbit any star, although then there is the issue of what is keeping the atmosphere warm enough and replenishing the oxygen. Some of these planets could be tidally locked to their star with one side permanently facing it, rendering the facing side uninhabitable due to temperature and the dark side extremely cold, usually with a small habitable strip on the divide. These worlds also generate extreme weather, which can add to this atmosphere.

* [[Death World|Death Worlds]] -- Not a biome in and of itself, but can be any of the aforementioned types. This is a world where [[Everything Is Trying to Kill You]], but you still have compelling reasons to go there. After all, except Earth (and, possibly, Mars) all other Solar System planets are unquestionably those (though Venus takes the cake, as if it's some sort of planetary Australia), and there is thriving research activity around, with a regular expedition and terraforming proposals popping up.

* Desert Planets -- These [[California Doubling|look like the cheaper parts of California]], and are thus very common. May have aliens that act like Bedouin or Touareg, and a thriving black market on water. Multiple suns are common. Mars is sort of a desert planet, but with no breathable atmosphere, although recent discoveries pretty reliably show that it's an Ice Planet as well -- it's just that all that ice is ''under'' the desert.

* Farm Planets -- If a Planet City is lucky, there will be another planet in the same system which is dedicated entirely for food production. Most of these are like a giant version of an American Midwest wheat farm. Complete with hicks. Technology level may range from highly advanced (in which case they are often largely automated with a population as low as hundreds or thousands) to feudal.

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*** [[Star Wars: The Clone Wars|Filoni's]] Ryloth is a desert world.

** The Hutts' homeworld of Nal Hutta is a swamp planet, most of its natural resources were stripped mined, and its environment makes it close to a [[Death World]].

** There are at least three different junkyard planets: Ord Mantell, Raxus Prime (like Ord Mantell, but with much older junk!), and Lotho Minor (like Raxus Prime, but on fire and populated by cyborgs!). ''Star Wars'' can get kinda redundant with these things at times.

** Coruscant is far from the only city planet; there exist several others, like Denon, Christophsis, and Alsakan, and even a city ''moon'' in the form of Nar Shaddaa.

* In ''[[Pitch Black]]'', the planet the plot takes place on starts as a desert planet, then turns into a night planet due to an eclipse.

** ''Chronicles of Riddick'' starts on an ice planet, heads to a desert-ish planet, and winds up on the heat-scoured Crematoria.

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* In the TV movie ''Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer'', Earth itself seems to have become a Cloud Planet, or at least a Single Weather-System Planet. While the song's "foggy Christmas eve" might merely have left Santa socked in at the North Pole, the movie shows the entire world drowning in a pea-souper from dusk to dawn.

* Averted in ''[[Avatar (film)|Avatar]]''. Although most scenes take place in a jungle region, far away shots show that Pandora has vast oceans as well as polar ice caps. When gathering allies they visit one Na'vi clan that's living along some sea-side cliffs and another dwelling in an area of large, open grasslands. Most of the plot just focuses on the jungle region. [[Word of God]] suggests the sequel will also show the oceans in detail.

* The setting of ''[[Hunter Prey]]'' is a desert planet.

* Kevin Costner's film ''[[Waterworld]]'' is set in a future where global warming has turned our earth into an ocean planet, with dry land as nothing but a legend (and science be damned!).

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* Played straight for dramatic purposes in ''[[Animorphs]]''. One Yeerk in book 6 mutters about the insane number of species Earth has, while the Yeerk character in book 19 is even more impressed with Earth...

** Another ''Animorphs''-example that both does and doesn't fit the planet archetypes is Ket, homeworld of The Ellimist. At first glance it looked just like a standard volcanic planet. But it was in fact a low-gravity world with a very dense atmosphere, which allowed for giant crystals to float freely in the atmosphere. The planet's civilisation of winged aliens lived entirely on (and off) those crystals. One character calls it "the rarest of all environments".

*** Saturn's moon Titan has 150% of Earth's atmospheric pressure and one-seventh the gravity; a human could strap on wings and fly there. Pity it's all at -180ºC.

** The Hork-Bajir homeworld is a valley planet (sort of. It's [[Justified Trope|justified]] by a catastrophic impact in the past which left a ring of steep valley around the equator as the only habitable part of the planet. Come to think of it, between the valleys, the Outside, and the Deep, it's got quite a bit of diversity over quite a small habitable area). It's also stated that the Yeerks artificially make the planets they conquer [[Single Biome Planet|Single Biome Planets]] because (as stated above) they find millions of species on one planet far too complicated and pointless.

*** The Hork-Bajir world apparently was once closer to Earth's atmosphere, just with less oxygen and more nitrogen. After the impact the 'real' race of the planet realized that the small equator, while liveable, was highly unstable. Unable to terraform but masters of genetics they created the Hork-Bajir (who feed on bark) and gave them a diet that would make THEM take care of the trees and the environment. The Deep, an area with numerous monsters, was created by the original race to keep the Hork-Bajir from bothering them (they live on the other side)

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* Lampshaded in ''Fire and Dust'', a [[Planescape]] novel where the protagonist points out that most people who claim to come from, say, an 'ice planet' just came from a polar region of a totally normal world, and never realized it because travel between planes is generally easier than travel between continents in D&D.

* Several Territories in ''[[The Pendragon Adventure]]'' qualify. Cloral is an Ocean Planet, Zadaa is a Desert Planet, and Eelong is a Jungle Planet.

** Cloral currently has one piece of dry land. Eelong is never stated to be completely jungle, the whole book just happens to have taken place in a jungle region. [[All in The Manual|In the expanded works]], Denduron is shown to be almost completely covered in ice with only some temperate zones near the equator.

** Zadaa isn't entirely desert, either. The Rokador Elders blame the drought, {{spoiler|which they are actually deliberately causing at Saint Dane's suggestion}}, in ''The Rivers of Zadaa'' on low precipitation levels in a mountainous region to the north of the desert Xhaxhu is located in. Then there's the fact that nobody questions Bobby's cover story of coming from a vast forest region.

* The Hainish Cycle novels of [[Ursula K. Le Guin]] have a few of these :

** In ''[[The Left Hand of Darkness]],'' the planet of Winter (otherwise known as Gethen) is, predictably, an Ice Planet. However, what a few different characters observe is that Gethen is actually very similar to Earth, except that [[Justified Trope|the story takes place in the middle of one of the Ice Ages.]] A native character remarks that the scientists have predicted a rise in temperatures across the planet and a mass melting of the ice. The character observes, "I'm glad I won't be around to see that."

** ''The Word For World Is Forest''

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** Andoria, home of the Andorians, is an Ice Moon.

** Vulcan is somewhere between Earth-like and a Desert Planet.

*** Deep Space 9 once featured a minor character (a date of Jake Sisko's) who said she and her parents often visited lush forested parks on Vulcan. So much so, she thought it was a forest planet before realizing that that is not the biome most people associate with Vulcan. Also, she didn't realize that Vulcan had any indigenous people... You know, come to think of it, Nog may have had a point in suggesting she just keep quiet.

** The homeworld of the Breen, who are ''always'' shown wearing opaque full body environmental suits, is known mainly as an Ice Planet, but according to Weyoun is "actually quite temperate". The planet itself is never actually seen, and this confusion serves to reinforce the mystique of the Breen.

** ''[[Star Trek: Voyager]]''. In "Thirty Days" the ship comes across an ocean world with no landmass whatsoever. In its center is a machine created by [[Precursors]], that stops the water from dissipating out into space.

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** It also has a [[Single Biome Planet]] that doesn't technically fit. Hive Worlds are worlds where, for various reasons, humans have been forced to live into massive city-buildings that can house billions of people, usually because the rest of the planet has been rendered uninhabitable by untold eons of industrialization and rampant pollution. The most atypical Hive World is [[Necromunda]]; about ten thousand skyscraper-based Hives scattered amidst an endless desert of ancient ash and chemical dust, but there are many others. Valhalla, for example, suffered a cosmic collision that knocked it out of orbit, rendering it an Ice World- huge subterranean cities were promptly bored into the heart of the planet and the depths of the glaciers in order to escape the cold. ''Earth'' is a Hive World, with no remaining recognisable features.

* Classic ''[[Traveller]]'' had desert planets (hydrographic % = 0), ocean planets (hydrographic % = 100, called "water worlds" long before the Kevin Costner movie), and ice planets (such as Mithril in Double Adventure 2 Mission on Mithril).

* ''[[Call of Cthulhu]]'' supplement ''Curse of the Chthonians'', adventure "The City Without A Name". If the investigators are very unlucky they can go through a Gate to the home planet of the Chthonians, which is a "monstrous violent world of volcanic upheavals and earthquakes", i.e. a Volcano Planet.

* ''[[Call of Cthulhu (tabletop game)]]'' supplement ''Curse of the Chthonians'', adventure "The City Without A Name". If the investigators are very unlucky they can go through a Gate to the home planet of the Chthonians, which is a "monstrous violent world of volcanic upheavals and earthquakes", i.e. a Volcano Planet.

* ''[[Dungeons and Dragons]]''

** [[Planescape]] setting solved this by splitting planes into layers and realms, each of which is easy to describe, because the areas that stand out would rather form a separate layer. E.g. [http://images.yuku.com/image/pjpeg/45536ba641a897edcc85536f05a293fe97906a7c.jpg The Nine Hells of Baator] - the whole place is [[Death World]], and most layers are quite uniform, but the whole gets more diverse the further "down" you go - the only constant being that it gets considerably more horrible with each level. The surface Avernus is along the lines of a volcanic wasteland under dark red skies, the second layer is the iron city of Dis where petitioners are slaves raising and tearing down structures with bare hands, and it's scalding hot there; the third is Minauros - a foul bog with ridges of volcanic glass scoured with razor-sharp hail and corrosive rain; then there's fiery Phlegetos, frozen sea of Stygia, endless pile of rocks Malbolge, Maladomini - land of ruins, mine pits and so on, glacier mountains of Cania, and finally Nessus - the place of extremes: a plain shattered with botomless rifts, with fires and ice and everything.

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** Only two rings have been seen up close, and the control room of the Ark implies that each ring is mostly a single biome (when seen from a distance, at least).

** The Ark both averts and plays the trope straight. It's shaped like a flower, with the massive ring production facility at its center. Each of the "petals" is a completely different biodome.

** The [[Expanded Universe]] does contain a few examples of this trope, however. Such as the homeworld of the Drones, a rainforest planet; and the Grunt Homeworld, a swampy planet with a methane atmosphere.

*** Also in the [[Expanded Universe]] (the fifth novel, Contact Harvest) one finds the titular planet Harvest, which is a prime example of the earlier established Planet Farm.

*** According to Eric Nylund ([[Word of God|who is responsible for establishing much of the extended canon]]) the reasons for certain planets to be devoted over to farming or mining or urban and industrial centers has more do to with economics than anything else. For example, some planets have more hours of daylight than is typical for Earth and happen to have huge tracts of very rich volcanic soil, leading to very large crop yields. Raising crops on such planets inevitably becomes very inexpensive, and it costs less on other planets to have the food imported from the farm worlds than it does to grow it locally. As the war rages on and many of the outer colonies where much of the farming goes on are lost, and the Cole Protocol restricts intersteller travel, many inner planets reluctantly take to growing their own food instead of having it imported.

** Reach also averts this. There are mountains, urban areas, lakeside areas...etc.

* ''[[Ristar]]'' is made of this trope. Every level is such a planet. It gets especially ridiculous on Planet Sonata, which is [[Band Land|made entirely of musical instruments]].

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* According to the supplemental material, the planet of Kharak in ''[[Homeworld]]'' is a subversion that's gradually becoming a straight example; the huge equatorial deserts have been slowly expanding to cover more and more of the surface for tens of thousand of years at least, with the remaining temperate regions screened only by mountains. Since the planet is reaching the end of its geological activity, said mountains will eventually be eroded flat and reduce Kharak to a true Desert Planet. {{spoiler|Except that the deranged ruler of a vast interstellar Empire orders it carpet-bombed with thermobaric weapons for no particularly sensible reason and it ends up being a Black Glass Planet instead.}}

* ''[[Starcraft]]'' seems to follow this trope with Aiur a lush jungle world over its whole surface, Korhal a blasted post-atomic wasteland, Mar Sara a desert, Shakuras as an ice world etc. The only planet in the whole game with varying surface features seems to be Tarsonis, the Confederate capital, and even that is only discernable in the rendered cinematics, not in-game.

** However, to be fair, Korhal was blasted very thoroughly by the Confederacy fleet and pretty much all the Terran planets except for Tarsonis seem to have been undergoing terraforming (and no one is seen without life support systems, except for the Zerg).

* [[Starcraft II]] covers mostl of these categories with some world or other.

** Desert: Xil. Meinhoff and Mar Sara also lean in this direction.

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* ''[[Ratchet and Clank]]'' does this with several planets.

* Averted in ''[[Killzone]]''. The planet Vekta contains cities, beaches, swamps, jungles, snowy mountain tops and some other stuff inbetween.

** Also averted in Killzone 2 and 3 where Helghan has oceans and at least two biomes- arctic and desert in gameplay- and is described in canon as having predator-filled jungles. Mostly wasteland, having a toxic atmosphere, and everyone there trying to kill you makes it a [[Death World]].

* Completely averted in ''[[Dwarf Fortress]]''. Each of the randomly-generated planets created have dozens if not hundreds of diverse, interconnected biomes that track everything from vegetation, to temperature, to elevation, to even individual rock layers.

* Subverted in ''[[Major Stryker]]''. The planets are referred to as "[[Lethal Lava Land|Lava Planet]]", "[[Slippy-Slidey Ice World|Arctic Planet]]" and "[[Shifting Sand Land|Desert Planet]]," but all three have different biomes for different levels (for example, Lava Planet has "Water Zone" and "Land Zone" in addition to the "Lava zone")

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** The adaptation took it a lot further. Bone provides food, Rock provides minerals, and Fire provides energy. They even have world engines inside.

* ''[[Invader Zim]]'' has Zim banished to the planet of Foodcourtia, an entire planet of fast-food outlets. Similarly, Zim avails himself of the services offered by the planet Callnowia, which is devoted to the taking of catalogue orders and the shipping of products. Other Irken-dominated planets include Conventia, the convention center planet, recently-dominated Blorch, now a parking structure planet, and Dirt, the garbage dump.

** This probably deserves a Justified Trope, as it's specifically mentioned (All There in the Manual) that Irkens just really like redesigning planets. Renaming them, too. See 'Blorch'.

* ''[[Silverhawks]]'' featurs the Dollare Bank, a ''money vault planet'', and Penal, a prison planet.

* In most ''[[Transformers]]'' series, Cybertron is a city planet. Many series, especially ''Energon'' and ''Cybertron'', contain further examples. Of course, [[Puny Earthlings|a Transformer's requirements for survival are a lot more forgiving than a human's.]]

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** Some series have partially [[Subverted Trope|subverted]] this and made it surprisingly diverse for a planet made of metal. It often has its own mountains, canyons, and even a sea of rust somehow. It's still made entirely of metal, though.

* ''[[Skyland]]'' is set on a cloud planet.

* Gobotron from ''[[Challenge of the Go Bots]]'' is a city planet. This is [[Justified]] in that the planet's biosphere was destroyed ages ago in the inhabitants' civil war, forcing the race to become [[Brain In a Jar|cyborgs.]] They then set about salvaging their now-dead home by converting it into a technology-based world.

* ''[[Star Trek: The Animated Series]]''

** "[[wikipedia:The Jihad|The Jihad]]". From what we were shown of it, the planet where the Soul of the Skorr was kept appeared to be a Volcano Planet.