Infrastructure

The Colonisation of Space is an effort over generations by a massive swath of the population seeking out adventurous lives, a more affluent environment or a climax to their religious duties.

Of all sapient beings of the Orion Spur, Humans and Tajaran are the most ardent terraformers, as both prefer very specific habitats, although they can survive and thrive in less-than-ideal conditions.

Immediately habitable planets are far and in-between, with the systems containing such a “Garden World” already either inhabited by a native sapient life-form or extremely hostile to actually settle and tame. This makes ideal Garden Worlds a dream come true to any polity that can find one and catapults it to interstellar power plays between any faction that is aware of them.

Most of the time, parameters of a planet are off, not ideal or completely hostile to unsupported life. This is where the engineering genius of the species comes in - either they create an artificial habitat or transform one or more parameters to be more hospitable.

Space Habitats

Artificial habitats are the choice of many colonies due to their relatively small resource footprint they need to be set up - transforming an entire planet into a habitable zone is quite the undertaking and without ample resources it is an exercise for generations. While many religious orders following the teachings of Moreau undertake this even with limited resources it takes a long time to truly make a world a new Garden Eden. So even these colonies build artificial habitats.

Asteroid-Hab

Asteroid-Habs are the eponymous sign of a spaceborn civilization. The concept is dead simple. An asteroid is hollowed out of bedrock and its ore resources, atmospherically sealed and finally set to spin in a stable orbit to simulate gravity.

Asteroid-Habs range from small, ricket-y homesteads held together by hope and quick-printed civilian-grade components to an elaborate affair of tightly clustered asteroids, connected into a careful scaffold and tunnel network maintained by a quasi-city state’s engineering department. Old Asteroid-Habs often develop their own quirks, architecture and fashion, slowly transforming itself to a culture unique to itself, much like an isolated island as the small, minute improvements on the infrastructure allows for more and more people to settle.

Asteroid-Habs often either are home in an asteroid belt for a thriving mining industry, orbiting a gas giant to syphon gasses from it, or tugged into a stable orbit around a planet as staging point, military base or conurban outcrop of the planet’s polity.

Some Asteroid-Habs are only seasonally inhabited, especially in the cases of Kosaky Fleets - there they serve as “wintering” camps, where Kosaky replenish their stocks, divide loot and earnings amongst themselves and hold their rituals and competitions to decide policy and leadership. During the times of wintering, Kosaky often trade with nearby polities and colonies and offer services for when they embark again.

Touching a Kosaky Habitat during their voyages is allowed - if one gives back what they took. Superstitious spacers love to tell stories about the people who decided to dupe this honour system.

Terrarium

Where Asteroid-Habs are almost just the logical conclusion of asteroid mining, Terraria are always a planned expansion - without a strong support base from somewhere they are impossible to create. A Terrarium is therefore almost always created either by corporate sponsoring or with the money of rich patrons.

Terraria, too, are hollowed out asteroids that have been atmospherically sealed. However, they take things a step further than simple Asteroid-Habs and realize a fully functional biosphere within the reclaimed volume. Giant holes are drilled into the rock, which are then lidded with glass and transparent ceramics. Gene-engineers carefully adapt lifeforms and hawk over the fragile ecosystem. Water is imported for seas and lakes. Like a (comparatively) tiny Garden Eden, life is fostered where cold bedrock was before.

Most Terraria exist for luxury habitation or wildlife preservation, although some serve a more industrial purpose in factory farming.

Biomes within a Terrarium are often boreal, alpine or tundric in nature, as limited sunlight makes it harder for more temperate or hot climates. They are not unheard of, however. Due to the sheer amount of effort needed to maintain the biosphere, virtually any Terrarium only has one biome present.

Asteroid-Hab Complexes may have one or several Terraria incorporated, however this is a sure-sign of a really old and established City-State within Space.

Terraria exhibiting pelagic biomes are called Aquarium or Aquaria.

Generation Ship

Generation ships have been concepted since the times Humanity has been dreaming of colonising xenoplanets and didn’t master any form of bluespace manipulation. Since the invention of the stutterdrive and finally the bluespace drive happened quicker than STL Generation ships, it never happened.

However, where planned generation ships might not be a reality and nobody needs to be subjected to travel the stars just to die before reaching their destination, nomadic lifestyles have created something quite similar to concepts of old.

A generation ship of today’s time is a hacked together mess of modifications, additions, revisions, recoveries and everything in-between, only loosely resembling the original hull they have started with - often a surplus civilian or military ship salvaged or bought for cheap.

Common modifications for such a generation ship are obviously additional berthing, the addition of higher powered hydroponics and the refurbishing of cargo holds into rooms needed for a more comfortable living situation.

Most ships are, by necessity, very large, often old cargo haulers or decommissioned cruisers. Smaller ships and boats are often just “satellites” for a larger generation ship, off-loading burdens to them and becoming more specialized as a result - some ships being treated as the community hydroponic garden or as a hospital or quarantine zone. Other ships retain their original purpose or become work vessels for mining, combat or cargo duties.

Although there is a smaller version of the Generation Ship and Fleet, used as mobile homes for roving workers or families - a converted Courier ship. These “Space RVs” have recently had something of a renaissance as corporations such as Hephaestus Aeronautics and Aether Atmospherics released lines of purpose-built vessels where someone does not need to know how to install amenities and hydroponics. All they need to know is how to fly a brick of a ship.

Station

Stations are entirely artificially made habitats, which orbit a celestial body, either in the Lagrange points or other stable orbits which self-corrects. Stations are relatively rare for permanent habitation as hollowing out an asteroid is more economical - asteroids are resource rich, provide a solid superstructure already in place and protect from celestial radiation quite handily.

However, stations have certain advantages - installing new technology and expanding them is as simple as attaching more modules to it, as well provide exotic configurations for tasks that would stump an Asteroid-Hab. Stations are not really made for cities, but made for infrastructure and industry.

Drydocks, refuel depots, waystations, outposts, navigation ansibles are all completely artificial stations as they require a very specialized setup in their build. Smaller tasks also don’t quite necessitate a hollowed out asteroid - small space labs, listening stations, or traffic monitoring also are often artificial structures instead of hollowed out asteroids.

Often, stations are actually part of an Asteroid-Hab, either built as a module to the hab or orbiting nearby to fulfill a specific task (like the aforementioned ones).

Naturally, they are created by already established colonies as a way to stake claims - usually bordering the Bluespace Escape line of systems and continuously broadcasting who exactly the system belongs to.

The last and most important use might be however are the kill-sats, which come in different forms and sizes - usually used to hurl a mass of projectiles or being giant energy emitters. These are used to defend habitats or planets from dangers. Such as pirates, invasions or celestial objects trying to impact. After a dedicated fleet, they are the first line of defense.

Space Structures

Structures within space are usually stations fulfilling a specific purpose, but some have a much more specialized usage - they are the dams, radio towers and roads of Space - unmanned infrastructure to ease life within a system or for an interstellar polity. Space structures are built more often than not after a colony has established itself as solid polity. Resources can now be diverged to problems and issues not necessarily linked to survival or habitation.

Bluespace Gate

A marvel of modern engineering and the true effort on a megascale are the Bluespace Gates - permanent anchors into Bluespace worming a hole through this strange metadimension to another gate. Bluespace Gates are the “highways” of interstellar travel, allowing ships and material to pass at highly compressed speeds from one end to the other.

However, this comes with with several cave-ats, especially in the need of energy required to keep the gates running - usually fusion, fission or phoron generators keep working day and night to run massive capacitor banks and SMES rows going before being pinged by a preceding signal and establishing a connection to its sister gate.

Bluespace Gates always come in pairs. One gate is linked to another and that is it. Gates that are “diable” run into energy problems and the issue of translating massive data packets from one end to the other, necessitating “hardcoded” bridges.

Bluespace Gates are also massively resource intensive - and such they are most often found in well travelled systems where the volume of traffic necessitates such a bridge - therefore the Rimward Periphery only has one Bluespace Gate that is known about. The Coreward Frontier Station, linked to a gate near Zeta Virginis, cutting down travel time from Commonwealth Core Territory to the Frontier from months to just two to three weeks.

Especially in the oldest star systems of Humanity (and presumably the other species who have the resources and time to do so, such as the Unathi and Skrell), Bluespace Gates are a common sight and even further refined into Gate bridges - a pearl string of Gates from one end to the other to further cut down travel times. Indeed, this logistical improvement has nearly eliminated shipside Bluespace drives altogether - as barges just slip through these gates to deliver goods and people, simplifying cost of operations and allowing for more space for other purposes - like cargo or amenities for passengers.

Bluespace Ansible

Bluespace Ansibles are a less complicated affair than Bluespace Gates, but might be even more important than the gates - they are the relays for information traffic from planets, habitats and stations. Each Ansible is a receiver for electromagnetic communication, which is then translated into encrypted optical signals which are shot through miniscule bluespace tunnels to another ansible, who decrypts and transmits the data back in form of more conventional electromagnetic packets.

This allows information to cross vast distances in a relatively short time, allowing for ease of communication and data transfer across entire star systems - however there are a few issues in transmitting data due to packet loss, quantum uncertainty and other such things - as discussed on the page for Bluespace.

Ansibles, which either come in a giant tower on a planet surface or, much more likely in newer colonies, as satellites in orbit, are often the very first effort of an established colony to connect them back to the greater communication network. Some Bluespace gates act as ansible as well, especially in larger systems. Each ansible can connect to another ansible easily or hold multiple connections to other ansibles - the only caveat is the fact that radio communication can take time to actually reach the ansible - newer colonies rely on ansibles of other inhabited spots of their system or even from distant star systems - prolonging any communication attempt to hours, days, weeks or even months.

Dyson Drones

Dyson drones are a relatively new invention and marketed as a “stopgap” measure between current energy production and the idea of a Dyson Sphere, a colossal structure that encases a sun and uses it to produce electricity by converting its light emissions into electrical charge.

Dyson drones are far below this, but better than planetary solar cells by being a swarm of semi-autonomous vessels who swarm just outside the corona, charging SMES banks through photovoltaic and heat exchange means, before returning to a depot handled by either robotic or human assistance to switch out SMES banks, repair damage and maintain their ion drives.

Dyson Drones increase the available energy in a system by a magnitude or two, but the high amount of resources, logistics and man hours needed to create a functional DDD (Dyson Drone Depot) limits its usefulness to places where energy generation exceeds conventional means, such as fission or fusion generators, phoron combustion engines or renewable energies.

DDDs are still a very rare sight in Human Space, with the first ever built in Proxima Centauri by a collaboration effort between NT, Hephaestus Industries and Ward-Takahashi GMB at the commission of the Terran Commonwealth.

Mag-Rail Network

Mag-Rail Networks are a collection of magnetic accelerator rails placed in orbits around Asteroid Habs or colonies, aimed to ferry large amounts of goods between two different locations within the star system as quickly as possible. This is possible by encasing them in magnetized graphene casings and shooting them across to another rail, who catches it through the same electromagnetic force.

Through this, large amounts of resources can be transferred relatively quickly without the involvement of ships or drone barges. While this doesn’t make sense for small amounts of goods or goods that can be easily damaged, massive scales of raw or refined materials often necessitate a solid Mag-Rail network which can work in many different orbital configurations of a planet, often involving large laser “warners” for ships within the system to know when to move out of the way of the transport projectiles.

Human transport is naught but impossible through Mag-Rail means. At the speeds where humans would survive, a ship would be more comfortable and using a Mag-Rail at full speed with a sapient would be a death sentence - although Bluespace engines have inertia dampening fields, they are incapable to dampen the near-relativistic speeds of Mag-Rail projectiles. Any and all organic would literally be mulched upon impact of the projectile. Synthetics similarly cannot use the Mag-Rail through the extreme electromagnetic effects involved in firing it, which has adverse effects on their operating stability - cyborg, drone and positronic alike.

Mag-Rails are often important for terraforming efforts to quickly import massive amounts of raw resources to a planet in the form of water ice or elemental nitrogen. And, while not openly discussed most of the time, also for the defense of a star system too - simply turning off the warning lasers to fire empty graphene projectiles to slam into enemy ships is a possibility - which is why Mag-Rails are the first thing to be destroyed when a system is attacked. Either to stop them from being used to destroy the hostile fleet or to stop the hostile fleet from using them against the defender.

Colony Designs

Colonies follow a variety of shapes, forms and sizes, depending on local conditions and amount of people. Much like the cities of old it would be an exercise in futility to fully catalogue every single design iteration and permutation.

However, there are certain similarities which can be described here.

Planetside colonies are complex logistical challenges and are only attempted in the most favourable conditions possible and only if the expenditure actually outweighs the sheer cost of sending masses of personnel, material and technology into a gravity well. This includes large amounts of some resource at the colony’s site, a terraforming candidate or a rare, coveted Garden World, which allows for settlement with comparatively little adaptation.

Ship Assembly Shelter

First landfall on a colony is always the thing that makes or breaks a colonization effort. If the first roots rot the entire effort is usually abandoned until another venture tries its luck. Ship Assembly Shelters are the first tentative seeds of civilization on an otherwise wild planet and rarely anything but the very first settlement of a planet.

The principle of them is simple. A colony ship or colony ships lands on a planet and are specifically designed to be easily deconstructed and reassembled into pre-fabricated building blocks. Ship Assembly Shelters are at best utilitarian and at worst cramped hellholes, but contain everything needed for a colony to hold about 1000 people. This includes industrial-sized 3D printers, hydroponic facilities, a medbay and mining equipment. Energy production varies, with older models relying on fusion and internal combustion generators, while newer models use supermatter shards of various sizes.

Ship Assembly Shelters are designed to be eventually cannibalized fully and disassembled into their base components. A cultural quirk is often to leave a memorial or statue of a ship at the original Landfall location.

Colony ships themselves can be automated, called a “Spore”, housing an artificial intelligence directing drones to assemble the initial buildings or even provide further infrastructure. These usually house a positronic brain who is promised citizenship in the colony after it has carried out its duty.

Underground Shelter

If a planet is particularly dead, has a weak magnetosphere or has otherwise unfavourable conditions on the surface, many people opt to live underground, either in old lava tubes of the planet’s crust or simply drilling themselves a tunnel network.

Underground shelters are a claustrophobic affair and aren’t favoured that much anymore as more expedient and just as safe alternatives exist. Some planets are too hostile to consider anything but building underground to be shielded. Examples include the few research facilities of Mercury or the exotic material forges of Titan.

A variation of underground shelters are the submarine shelters, which function on the same principle, although either in floating “bubbles or stations built into the seabed. Europa is the classic for such submarine colonies.

Bubble Shelter

Bubble shelters are the solution to planets generally hostile to a human-miscible biosphere, either due to radiation, atmosphere (or lack of thereof), local life forms or other considerations, but not enough to warrant an underground shelter. The general idea is that a barrier, the “bubble” , is erected over existing infrastructure to protect it from outside influences.

Bubbles come in various forms, shapes and styles, not necessarily even looking like a dome or bubble in the first place. It’s just one of the easier ways due to the relatively low amount of material used per volume. Bubbles are not usually built into flat terrain, but rather use landscape features like cliffs, craters or fissures for the pragmatic reason of being able to use less material to create an enclosure.

The classic image for this kind of shelter is usually that of plasteel and glass - and is still widely in use as the construction is in general very sturdy and does not require especially complicated supplies. Local silicates and asteroid mining can easily be covered by local industries. Drawbacks are, naturally, the relative immutability once constructed, the high amount of time needed and the engineering challenge it provides due to local conditions easily making glass domes collapse or crack when built too big or shoddily.

A widely used alternative, especially on Mars, are “tents”. Tents are large, light coverings of a large area held up by pillars who are made out of sturdy meta-materials, usually offering layered protections against radiation, tears and even micro meteors, as well providing insulation. The nature of the complex plastics, ceramics and other materials used to weave tent material makes them fairly expensive, however.

The last alternative is a rather esoteric, new addition - the use of large energy shield emitters covering a settlement. Virtually impenetrable by anything that it is modulated against, it uses the same mechanics used by shield emitters on ships on a much larger scale - and comparatively also guzzles more energy. This makes supporting shield bubbles more of a question how many gigawatt hours a colony can spare to maintain it.

Aerostat

Only possible on planets with a sufficiently dense atmosphere are aerostats - platforms built into the air and tethered to the ground or just free-floating through the air. Aerostats are often only used when necessary or expedient as their high initial cost deters many sponsors, even as running costs are quite low due to their ample supply of energy through wind or thermoelectric means utilizing the temperature differential between the upper and lower atmosphere.

Aerostatic habitation is often highly specialized in their industry exploiting the unique conditions of highly toxic atmospheres, such as Venus with its status as highly effective agricultural production center due to its high amounts of sulfuric acid, elemental nitrogen and carbon dioxide. After the initial construction of Aerostats (often done in low orbit and then towed into position by specialized astro-aeronautical ships), expansion is relatively easy through often modular designs.

Ironically, many Aerostats end up incredibly wealthy through their highly specialized industry and therefore the most populous. However, optimal conditions to make an aerostat worthwhile are far and inbetween, as many venus-like worlds are simply not worth the effort or too turbulent.

Aquastat

Prominent on near-panthalassic and panthalassic worlds are the aquastats or “ship-cities”, as the common colloquialism goes, although many aquastats are instead platforms anchored into a shallow portion of the ocean or above an economically viable resource deposit.

Since the dawn of the ocean platform, its design has been refined over and over again leading to a credence to a module-based approach, often in hexagonal shape, which are either assembled on site by a fleet of construction ships or delivered per suborbital dynamics and anchored by an on-site team.

Aquastats are easy to maintain even when the atmosphere itself is quite hostile as air and drinking water can be easily derived from the host ocean, by purifying sea water or splitting it into oxygen and hydrogen via water-splitting processes.

Some Aquastats are, however, truly ship-cities, either made up of a large number of house boats, reconfigured space vessels and sealiners (a favourite among the more downtrodden panthalassic colonies) or purpose-built platforms with inbuilt locomotion. These, however, are rare and mostly born of specific circumstances that necessitate a mobile existence.

Arcology

The pinnacle of Human engineering is the arcology, an edifice of carefully sculpting not only a self-enclosed city on extremely high densities, but also shaping the society within to function in extremely close quarters, combining sociology, construction and architecture into a cohesive whole.

Arcologies come in quite a lot of shapes and forms, but their characteristics are similar to each other, with a high verticality and usually featuring a central spire surrounded by smaller, adjacent buildings. The earth below an arcology cluster are usually kilometer long tunnels and maintenance facilities set in the bedrock, ceaselessly dealing with air purification, waste recycling and other unsavoury services, indispensable but unloved - jobs in the maintenance facilities is often relegated to the poorer clades of an arcology or directed by AIs in a bid for citizenship.

Arcologies are found on any planet rich enough to afford them as their relatively small footprint and self-contained systems make them an extremely attractive investment - living in an Arcology comes with a hefty premium and many offer up most of their paycheck to live even in the lower levels. Where cities were the beating heart of commerce and services in the 21st century, the 23rd has the same symptom with Arcologies.

The most famous arcologies are on Earth, the cradle of Humanity and the concept of the Arcology - the planet doesn’t have any sprawling metropolises anymore as most converted into Arcologies, attracting the population to settle there, making most of the surface a pristine jewel as nature reclaims old ruins and former farmland, towered over by hyperdense clusters of glittering silver towers of human artifice.

Terraforming

Terraforming, or to call it by its more proper term, “Geoengineering” is a hybrid discipline of Engineering, Biology, Ecology and Socioeconomics aimed to recreate a terran environment on a planet which did not have it before.

Terraforming is, ultimately, the goal of any colony who settles a planet which falls into parameters that Humanity (or any other species) is capable of Terraforming.

The forefront experts on terraforming are the Unathi, who employ technologies not known to Humanity (and they are not inclined to share), shortly followed by the Skrell (who also keep their expertises secret). After this follows Humanity and the rest of the sapient diaspora, where leading experts are the Ares Confederation - who happily share their expertise for anyone inclined to join them - or at least make their investment of resources worthwhile.

Geoengineering has varying degrees of difficulty, depending on the type of planet and its issues which would make a biosphere compatible to its host species impossible. A completely dead rock has the biggest investment in resources and expertise to make it a garden world, while a planet who already has an unadapted biosphere is comparatively easy to deal with.

Below are the most commonly used technologies to create a large-scale habitation of a planet.

Halbach Satellite

A Halbach Satellite is exactly what it says on the tin - A Halbach Array set in one of the lagrange points of a planet, a large permanent dipole magnet, which creates a magnetic field protecting the planet from solar radiation and winds.

Naturally this is used for planets who do possess a calcified core and are incapable of providing their own magnetosphere, such as Mars. This artificial field is easily maintained, as a Halbach Array is not electromagnetic in nature. However, micro impacts and dust can abrade and lower the quality of the satellite itself, requiring manual replacement of ablation plates of non-ferrous material from time to time.

Halbach maintenance technicians operate with completely non-ferrous equipment, making it one of the most hated jobs in the Orion Spur, due to how tedious and finicky the tools are. However, many polities pay quite a lot of money for their services. Nobody likes to be irradiated by the primary of their system, after all.

Solar Shade or Mirror

Brought to an apogee by the Unathi, solar mirrors and shades are the definite tool to lower or raise global temperatures of any celestial body as they are surprisingly quick and cheap to produce if someone has access to advanced 3D lathe technology - such as most of the sapient diaspora.

The concept itself is dead simple. Large shades or mirrors are assembled in the low orbit of a celestial body to absorb or refocus sunlight from its surface or atmosphere. More primitive designs are static, however, many species have access to ion-engine assisted arrays which automatically re-adjust and prevent re-entry.

Some shades double as solar panels for electricity production, while mirrors do not possess that quality - this makes hotter and closer planets more popular as first colonisation choice into a new system as the early leg-up in energy production enables a quicker kickstart to industrial or robotic purposes.

Aerobraking

Aerobraking in the context of geoengineering is the ablation of material in an atmosphere - sometimes assisted by high-intensity lasers if the planet itself has little to no atmosphere to aerobrake asteroids into. The purpose for this is to enrich the planet with foreign materials, such as water ice, oxygen, nitrogen or carbon dioxide.

Aerobraking is a tedious and slow process, but the goal is ultimately to create an atmosphere and/or hydrosphere for the host planet. Identifying, transporting and finally ablating the right asteroids is an industry in itself. Freelancers, drones or government workers all are utilized and the amounts needed to actually achieve perceptible change are quite high - making it a lucrative business for the more capitalistic-minded societies.

Aerobraking usually follows both temperature and magnetosphere adjustments - to both allow the material to properly sublimate and to not have it stripped away by solar winds.

Atmospheric Reprocessing

Atmospheric Reprocessing has found its first use on Earth itself, being a mass project of changing the make-up of an existing atmosphere to be more favourable for life. Toxic, greenhouse or otherwise unfavourable gasses and particles are filtered out by enormous pumps, filters and storage tanks, either to be industrially rendered inert, utilized in manufacturing processes or simply thrown into the nearest black hole.

Reprocessing is a tedious, slow and very expensive operation, making it the most unfavourable of all terraforming techniques - Venus is still like it is because the sheer resources and effort required were deemed not worth the project. However, there are alternative ways, which are more effective, but simply not used by Humanity due to lacking technology.

Unathi, for example, use highly complex low-orbit releases of particles who rapidly react with the gases they want removed to create heavier-than-air particles, who are then sieved out or ignored - as most of them are inert. This “snow” method has been attempted by Humanity before, but only with limited success - they lack Unathi's knowledge of low-temperature catalyst interactions.

The Skrell, however, approach the reprocessing similarly to humans. However, their close relationship to Diona enables them to just… use them for this purpose. The adaptive, organic and quickly growing facilities with diona assistance allows an atmosphere to be “mulled over much more quickly than with conventional means. In fact, the Skrell are the masters of this technique and assistance of their Atmos Engineering Technicians is highly sought out and the envy of polities.

Biosphere Seeding / Gaia-ing

The final steps of any terraforming project is the Biosphere Seeding - or how it is often called colloquially “gaia-ing”. In truth, many steps of it are taken during atmospheric reprocessing, aerobraking or other, more exotic methods to introduce an atmosphere simply to augment and stabilize any gains of atmosphere.

Gaia-ing is simple on paper, but rather difficult in actual execution. Lifeforms are designed or imported and then transplanted on a planet to create a biosphere to support higher intelligent life.

The devil is always in the details.

Many plants need soil to function and soil is hard to come by on previously dead planets, as it takes centuries for soil to develop through endless cycles of microflora and fauna to break down more mineral elements and absorb sunlight to biological material which can be absorbed by more complex, multicellular life.

Microbiology and Trans-Botany are the two most important fields in these first steps of Biosphere Seeding, usually calling the “Composting Phase”, drawing biological waste of other planets, artificial fertilizer mediums and transplanted or designed microbes and extremophile and mixing them together into “Compost Starters”, a sort of artificial primordial soup, which is then dusted in valleys, ridges and waters of a virgin planet.

Under close monitoring, these motes spread in a reasonable time frame to generations (depending on effort and Compost Starter spent) throughout the top covering of the planet and transform it into biologically active soil. After this, higher life forms are introduced en masse, sometimes wholesale imported from other planets, transplanting forests from tree nurseries and cloning animal populations to form a stable biosphere.