39,327
edits
Single-Biome Planet: Difference between revisions
m
Mass update links
m (Mass update links) |
m (Mass update links) |
||
Line 29:
* [[Landfill Beyond the Stars|Garbage Planets]] -- The entire planet is being used as a dumping ground for useless waste. Likely to act as home for scavengers looking to make a quick buck, treasure hunters seeking some long-lost treasure, and large numbers of mercenaries and criminals. The actual surface conditions can range from desert-like to incredibly hostile if the Phlebotinum is leaking out of ships.
* Ice Planets -- Planets whose entire surfaces look like Greenland glaciers. Somewhat [[Justified Trope|justified]], as there actually are frozen over planets and moons (for example, several moons of Jupiter & Saturn). Planets that normally have large oceans (like Earth) can look like this during a ''really deep'' [[Ice Age]], and paleontologists believe that this may have happened to Earth in the past in a controversial scenario known as "[[wikipedia:Snowball Earth|Snowball Earth]]". The obvious question on an Ice planet is how it sustains life if there are so few plants to provide oxygen and a food chain; this paradox can be somewhat solved by allowing for a narrow equatorial band warm enough to support plant life, or by limiting life to the sea and having the food chain be based on geothermal energy/chemosynthesis (i.e. how we think life on Europa would work).
* Jungle Planets -- Mind the bugs, they are positively ''[[Big Creepy
* Ocean Planets -- These tend to have few, if any, mountains tall enough to breach the surface and make islands; if there are, they're prime beachfront vacation spots. Earth is arguably an Ocean Planet, just one with a lot of tectonic activity to create islands and continents (and even so, the average elevation of the Earth's surface is still well below sea level). This was even more true 500 million years ago, when the only life that existed was in the sea, and there was much less land above water than there is today. An extrasolar planet, [http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/12/super-earth/ GJ 1214b], has cropped up practically next door to us (a mere 42 light-years), which does appear to be an ocean planet, albeit a very hot one, and extremely non-livable.
* Swamp Planets -- Like the Jungle, but easier to lose your shoe. ([[The Empire Strikes Back|Or your ship. Just ask Luke Skywalker.]])
* [[Lethal Lava Land|Volcano Planets]] -- Defined by earthquakes, smoke, rivers of lava, and lots and lots of unchained mountains you ''don't'' want to climb. Featured in ''[[Star Wars|Revenge of the Sith]]''; the Y-class planet in the ''[[
Contrast [[Patchwork Map]]. Near the polar opposite of [[All Planets Are Earthlike]]. May overlap with [[One Product Planet]]. See also [[Planetville]].
Line 43:
** Heck, it's not even a [[Single Biome Planet]], given the existence of snow-capped mountains.
* ''[[The Five Star Stories]]'' has only two of these, out of the half-dozen or so habitable planets that orbit the titular stars. There's Juno, which is a relatively young planet currently in a jungle-covered mid-mesozoic phase & Pestako, a tiny, clapped out mining planet that has no natural atmosphere & is slowly being terraformed into a city planet, complete with roads so big you can see them from space. The rest are Earthlike, with some minor variations in their average temperature & terrain.
* Terraformed planets and moons in ''[[
** Earth has also become one of these. As a result of being constantly bombarded by asteroids, almost all of the planet is dry, craggy wasteland.
* ''[[Trigun]]'' is set on the planet Gunsmoke, which appears to be nothing but desert. Like Mars (or, [[Space Western|more to the point, Arizona]]), it does have canyons that suggest more plentiful water in the past.
* [[Dragon Ball
== Comics ==
* Although [[Jerry Pournelle]] famously parodied this trope with the phrase "It was raining on Mongo that morning", the original planet Mongo in the old ''[[Flash Gordon (
* The 1980's British science fiction comic ''Starblazer'' had a variety of such planets.
** [[City Planet|City Planets]]: See that page
Line 65:
== [[Fanfic]] ==
* Taken to ridiculous extremes by the [[Warhammer 40000]] [[Fanfic]] ''[[
Line 81:
** Another exception is Kashyyyk, the Wookiee homeworld. Famous for its forests that greatly resemble Endor's, but in Episode Three, there's a battle on a beach. It is still often regarded as a jungle planet though.
*** The [[Legacy of the Force]] novels have gone and shown that the wroshyr forests range from very short, to half a kilometer tall, to many kilometers tall.
*** According to ''[[Knights of the Old Republic (
** In the Expanded Universe, the Twi'lek homeworld, tidally-locked Ryloth, is basically a three biome planet: desert planet where it faces the sun, ice planet where it faces away from the sun, and a narrow habitable band in between the two.
*** [[Star Wars:
** 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.
Line 91:
* In ''[[Starship Troopers]]'' there is an entirely single biome ''solar system''. Even the ''moons'' are desert.
* 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 (
* 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!).
Line 103:
*** And significant portion of Universe, subsequently, become fucked for natural Spice. Be careful what you wish for!
*** And the Fremen who wanted more water so badly realize that after generations of adapting to a dry environment their bodies can't handle the increased moisture.
* Subverted in [[
* Played straight for dramatic purposes in ''[[
** 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)
* Parodied in ''[[The Hitchhiker's Guide to
* Lusitania in [[Orson Scott Card]]'s ''[[Ender's Game|Speaker for the Dead]]'' series is a Forest Planet with a bare handful of species to its name. This is totally justified, though - [[Precursors]] terraformed it using a virus to suit their needs.
* Lampshaded in the Planescape novel "Fire and Dust," 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.
Line 115:
** 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''
Line 154:
*** 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.
** Risa, the "pleasure planet", uses technology to make the entire planet into a tropical paradise, as long as your idea of paradise is a sunny day in Hawaii (as noted before, the Federation consists of a large number of diverse societies with a large number of diverse homeworlds, so relaxing at the beach [[Your Mileage May Vary|may not suit everyone the same]]).
* ''[[Stargate]]'' (both ''SG-1'' and ''Atlantis'') generally avert this trope by rarely showing much of the entire planet (just a ''small'' area around the gate). The Stargate itself tends to be in a Vancouver-like pine forest (which is brought up and discussed; the eventual conclusion is that the Stargate makers only put them in places they could live, which is why they are all so similar), but there are also a fair number of worlds where the gate is in an arid desert.
** Subverted in the ''[[Stargate SG-1]]'' episode "Solitudes", wherein Captain Carter manages to get out of the cavern she and Colonel O'Neill are in, revealing the surface is a desolate ice planet. Only, it turns out they're on Earth, in Antarctica.
** Also subverted in ''Atlantis'' with the planet where they find Atlantis. They assume it to be an ocean world, but later find out that it has several large land-masses that are inhabitable.
** ''[[
* The third (second?) season of ''[[Lexx]]'' has the Lexx trapped in orbit between Fire, a volcanic planet covered in endless desert, and Water, a planet almost entirely covered by water. It could be somewhat justified as {{spoiler|the planets are actually Hell and Heaven respectively, with the former being ruled by what's hinted to be the Devil himself.}}
* ''[[
** At least the ocean planet is plausible. Look at an map of Earth 700 million years ago.
*** The lava moons are as well - look at a map of the Earth a few billion years ago.
Line 173:
== Tabletop Games ==
* Some ''[[Magic:
** Shards of Alara pushed this further. Naya is [[Jungle Japes]], Bant is [[Arcadia]], Esper is also a planewide city (although somewhat less packed that Ravnica, apparently), Grixis is [[Mordor]] and Jund is [[Lethal Lava Land]].
** Serra's realm from the Urza's block is a cloud world. You can even see it on ''Urza's Saga'' plains. By contrast, Phyrexia is a [[Death World]], to the point that everything in Phyrexia is a carnivore.
Line 207:
== Video Games ==
* Many planets in ''[[Freelancer]]'' are themed. Pittsburgh, for example, seems to be a barren desert filled with mines, Cambridge is a planet full of blissfully green plains, Hokkaido is an Archipelago Planet, Manhattan is a Planet City, New Berlin seems to be a Snow Planet, Leeds is a Heavy Industry Planet capable of blowing out entire nebulae of smoke, and so on.
* Both played straight ''and'' averted in ''[[
* ''[[Rogue Galaxy]]'' has several of these, from the desert planet of Rosa, to the jungle planet of Juraika. The US release added an ocean planet to the mix.
* ''[[Kirby]] Super Star'' and its [[Video Game Remake]], in the "Milky Way Wishes" subgame, reveals Pop Star, which is pretty much Earth-like with its multiple biomes, to be in an entire ''solar system'' full of these - including three textbook examples in the form of Aquarius (Ocean Planet), Skyhigh (Cloud Planet), and Hotbeat (Volcano Planet).
Line 226:
* ''[[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]].
* ''[[Spore]]''... technically counts, just because there's no biomes in the first place. Either a planet is an ice planet, a lava planet, or (varying levels of) lush and green.
* According to the supplemental material, the planet of Kharak in ''[[
* ''[[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).
Line 237:
** Farm: Agria's name suggests it is one of these, and the terrain does indeed have numerous farms.
** Garbage: Deadma's port.
* ''[[Super Mario Bros.|Super Mario Galaxy]]'' has plenty of [[Single Biome Planet]] s, in single biome GALAXIES. You've got the Good Egg Galaxy, which is mainly grass planets, Melty Molten Galaxy which is all lava planets, Beach Bowl/Drip Drop/Bonefin Galaxy which is all water planets and quite a few more strange single biome ones including a haunted house galaxy (Ghostly Galaxy), [[Hailfire Peaks]] (Freezeflame Galaxy), two battlestation themed galaxies/planets (Battlerock and Dreadnought Galaxies) and one where all the planets are autumn themed. Might be justified in that the so-called "galaxies" are (at best) a collection of several small planetoids. Just chant the [[MST3K Mantra]]...
* ''[[Thunder Force]] series'' often has each stage a separate single biome planet. Sole exception is ''V'' where it take place on Earth.
* Poor ''[[Star Fox (
** ''[[
** The original SNES game portayed Fortuna as being very Earth-like, complete with plant-filled plains and expanses of water. It also was home to big-ass creatures.
** Subverted and justified with Aquas in ''64''. It used to be a perfectly normal planet, but after one of Andross's bio-weapons shattered the ice caps, it flooded over and became a pure ocean world.
* ''[[Sigma Star Saga]]'' had a Forest Planet, a Fire Planet, an Ice Planet, a Sand Planet, a Ghost Planet, and an Ocean Planet. {{spoiler|the Ocean Planet is [[Earth All Along|Earth]]}}
* Most of the planets in the first two ''[[
* A lot of space colonization games appear to do this. ''Imperium Galactica 2'', for instance, only has single biome planets, where the type of planet influences which races can settle there effectively. (Though the surface views of such planets do sometimes show a mix of terrain.)
* There are four kinds of planets in ''[[Sins of a Solar Empire]]'': Terran Planets (like Earth), Ice Planets, Volcanic Planets, and Desert Planets. Averted impressively by the planet textures, however. Some of the desert planets feature large seas, for example, and greenery can be found on peninsulas extending into the oceans.
Line 251:
** 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 ''[[
* ''[[Descent]] II'': Quartzon=water planet, Brimspark=[[Lethal Lava Land|lava planet]], Limefrost Spiral=[[Slippy-Slidey Ice World|ice planet]], Baloris Prime=[[Shifting Sand Land|desert planet]].
* Every planet/track in the [[F-Zero]] series. Ranges from Mute City (not specifically stated to cover the entire world, but is commented on in the manual as a single city of BILLIONS of inhabitants) to Port Town to Death Wind, Sand Ocean, Fire Field, White Land, you name it. A veritable catalogue of one biome worlds.
* ''[[Dragon Quest]] [[Dragon Quest Monsters|Monsters 2]]'' has this: A desert world, an ocean world, an ice world, a cloud world, and [[Mordor]]. Also, all the "optional" worlds.
* ''[[Populous]]'' goes nuts: There are plains worlds, desert worlds, ice worlds, volcano worlds, [[Computer World|computer worlds]], alien worlds, worlds made of cake, worlds where everyone's a pig, worlds where everyone's French, worlds where everyone's Japanese...The architecture reflects this, as do the inhabitants, but on plains, desert, ice, and volcano worlds, they'll always be toga-clad humans who are promoted to medieval knights, with the religious center being either an ankh or a skull.
* ''[[
* ''[[Minecraft]]'' heavily averts this: there are several biomes available, with varying degrees of probability. If you start in an arctic biome and don't like it, just keeping walking until you find a biome you do like (note: may take a ''very'' long walk).
** It should be noted, however, that most of the biomes look alike. A grass block in one biome looks exactly like another in a different biome, only a different shade of green. Except for deserts, all biomes have grass; it is only the kinds and amounts of trees which separates them. And, since you can plant your own trees wherever you feel, you can create this in a limited area.
Line 267:
== Web Comics ==
* ''[[
* As well as giving the quote above, ''[[Irregular Webcomic]]'' lampshades this heavily in one of its podcasts: when Admiral Ackbar calls Endor a forest moon, C-3PO corrects him heavily, saying that it has a small ocean, two deserts, and a mountain range with an extensive cave system. Thankfully, by then, he was turned off.
** [[Shown Their Work|He's right.]]
Line 278:
* Satirized in College Humor's ''Troopers'': "[http://www.collegehumor.com/video/6464165/troopers-swamp-planet The Swamp Planet]".
{{quote| "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'd gone one mile to the left, they would have found some beautiful beach front condos. But they didn't. And now we're the "swamp planet". How do you think that makes me feel?"}}
* Part of #3 of ''[[Cracked
== Western Animation ==
* ''[[
* Nearly every planet in ''[[War Planets]]'' was a [[Single Biome Planet]]. Admittedly, this was largely because [[Merchandise-Driven|the play-sets were designed first]], but the writers have nobody but themselves to blame for the set-up whereby the inhabitants of the desert planet could only survive -- on the planet on which they had evolved -- by stealing water from the ice planet. This case, however, is [[Justified Trope|justified]] by virtually every planet being designed and built, not evolved. The Cluster in particular was created as a quartet of interdependent worlds.
** The adaptation took it a lot further. Bone provides food, Rock provides minerals, and Fire provides energy. They even have world engines inside.
* ''[[
** 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'.
* ''[[
* 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.]]
** There's also the planets in ''Transformers: Cybertron''. Velocitron the Speed Planet is a Desert Planet, the Jungle Planet is... well, that... and Gigantion is a City Planet.
Line 296:
** 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
* ''[[Star Trek:
** "[[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.
** "The Slaver Weapon", based on [[Larry Niven]]'s short story "The Soft Weapon". As in the original short story, one of the planets in the Beta Lyrae star system is a "icy little blob of a world", AKA an Ice World.
* In the old ''[[Flash Gordon (
* Lampshaded in a Star Wars skit of ''[[Robot Chicken]]''. The sea monster ends up as the skeleton C-3PO found in the middle of the desert.
Line 307:
* [[wikipedia:CoRoT-7 b|Look at Corot-7b]], which is even being called "the lava planet".
* [http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/2009/pr200924.html GJ 1214b] appears to be a prime candidate for an ocean planet. It's estimated that the ocean on its surface would be roughly three to four ''thousand'' miles deep. Yes, the ocean depth is a large percentage of the total radius of the planet. Additionally, because the planet is definitely hotter than boiling point, the ocean doesn't have a defined surface. Instead the atmosphere just gets thicker and thicker as you go down until it becomes as dense as water, which can't compress anymore, meaning the ocean and atmosphere just blend together.
* Today, Earth is the ''only'' aversion in the solar system. In the very early stages of formation, Earth was a lava planet, and if the [[wikipedia:Giant impact hypothesis|Giant Impact Hypothesis]] of the Moon's origin is correct, the Earth and the Moon were balls of magma for a while after the impact. It was probably a kind of ice planet at various points in the [[wikipedia:Cryogenian|Cryogenian]] era (850-625 million years ago), particularly during the Marinoan Glaciation. This hypothesis is called ([[Exactly What It Says
** Venus has an extremely dense atmosphere that distributes heat very efficiently around the planet, so its [[Death World|surface of volcanoes and sulfuric acid]] is hot enough to melt lead from equator to pole and through the 60-Earth-day ''night''.
** Mars is basically a desert world. A very cold desert world. It does have polar glaciers though--made of frozen ''carbon dioxide''.
| |||