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alt title(s): Single Setting Planet 
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?
Earth is a wonderfully varied place with an amazingly diverse biosphere. On this single planet, you can find jungles, mountains, forests, deserts, prairies... we must be the most interesting planet in the universe. Or you'd think so after seeing so many alien worlds trapped in solitary, homogeneous landscapes.
Planets in outer space will often be defined by a single setting. It doesn't matter if the events of the story only take place in on a small portion of the planet — we are still told the entire planet has one climate; specifically, the same climate as whatever location the program is shot in. Very rarely does any planet have the same level of environmental diversity as Earth, despite being as large and having a normal orbit. An ecological equivalent to the Planet Of Hats. The locals will often have a hat that resembles the human cultures that inhabit similar environments.
A creature well-suited to the local environment may be upgraded to horse status, if it's big enough.
It should perhaps be noted that we usually only get very small views of these planets. Many times there are lines to the effect that it is a fairly standard planet. Almost never are we shown or told that a planet is entirely a Single Biome Planet in television or movies, and the ones that are are almost always either very temperate, tropical, desert, ice, or water worlds, which all have a statistical probability of existing. We have several of them in our own solar system in fact, missing only a breathable atmosphere.
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 Fog 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 renewed in just 3 years by volcanic activity) and numerous Ice Planetoids (such as Europa).
Notable classifications:
- Ice Planets - Look like Greenland glaciers.
- Somewhat justified, as there actually are frozen over planets and moons (Neptune, several moons of Jupiter). Planets that normally have large oceans (like Earth) can look like this during a really deep Ice Age, and paleontologists believe that this has happened to Earth in the past in a scenario known as "Snowball Earth
 ."
- Desert Planets — Look like the cheaper parts of California, so 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. The obvious question on a desert planet is where the oxygen in the air comes from if there is so little plant life.
- Hell, even Mars has icecaps.
- Deserts are defined by aridity, not temperature level[1] (on our own planet, Antarctica is the biggest desert, not the Sahara). Lack of moisture is probably the primary problem for life on a desert planet: plants need moisture, and other forms of life need plants for carbohydrates and oxygen.
- So is Arrakis.
- However, in the books, even Arrakis had ice caps.
- And the desert is not the result of natural geographic/climactic processes; but is the result of the sequestering of all moisture by the sandtrout phase of the sandworm lifecycle.
- Ocean Planets — Few, if any, mountains tall enough to breach the surface and make islands; if there are, they're prime beachfront vacation spots.
- The Earth is technically 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.
- Jupiter's moon Europa is possibly a frozen-over version of this.
- Theoretically, they can also result from gas giant cores migrating into the inner solar system before accumulating a gas giant atmosphere—these can be so watery that an Olympus Mons couldn't reach the surface. (An oxygen atmosphere would be a likely scenario here.)
- An extrasolar planet, 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.
- Jungle Planets — Mind the bugs, they are positively enormous. Often home to the Cargo Cult.
- Swamp Planets — Like the Jungle, but easier to lose your shoe. Or your ship, just ask Luke Skywalker.
- 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. 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.
- Vancouver Pine Forest Planets — See Stargate SG-1 and the new Battlestar Galactica.
- Cloud Planets — The land is not where Newton wants it. If something or someone lives here, either the ground floats through the sky in chunks, or there are hover-cities. Either way, watch that first step. Sometimes Hand Waved by making them Jovian planets, although no known gas giants are anywhere near habitable.
- The upper atmosphere of Venus is, in temperature, pressure, and gravity, the nearest environment to Earth yet found, and oxygen-nitrogen is a lifting gas there. Making balloon cities would probably be easier than terraforming the planet, though why one would do so is another issue.
- Volcano Planets — Defined by earthquakes, smoke, rivers of lava, and lots and lots of unchained mountains you don't want to climb. Featured in Revenge of the Sith; the Y-class planet in the Voyager episode "Demon" is also similar to this.
- In the real-life solar system, that's a fair description of Jupiter's moon Io. Earth used to look a bit like this, too. Planetologists expect that any rocky planet will look like this in the first few hundred million years of its formation, so expect to see a lot of them. The air almost certainly won't be breathable, though, so bring your ventilator mask.
- Might be jusified if it's an Earth-like planet in tight orbit around a red dwarf star. The closeness will create strong gravitational tides like Io, but the star's low output doesn't roast the surface making it rather temperate.
- Planet City (Ecumenopolis) — Urban sprawl has taken over the entire surface of a world. Only possible with extreme technology and a constant inflow of resources from off-world. May serve as home base to a culture of Planet Looters. Often has a population in the trillions. The concept supposedly first appeared in the writings of 19th century spiritualist Thomas Lake Harris. The first recognised usage in science fiction would be Trantor in Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy. The planet Coruscant in the Star Wars movies would probably be the most familiar to modern audiences. The logistics of such worlds - how they get food, dissipate excess heat and so forth can be a subject of geeky speculation - as shown in multiple Irregular Webcomics. Coruscant is largely handwaved, the logistical demands of importing food to Trantor were played up, and the hive worlds of Warhammer 40000 are stated to rely on food imports, or their own, ahem, "recycling" - in a galaxy where space travel is a crapshoot with ships literally travelling through hell. (Even though oxygen would be a far greater problem.) See also Planetville.
- Interestingly, Trantor supposedly only is thought to have a food problem, as Prelude to Foundation states. Evidently, the planet is able to support itself based on vast yeast farms located in the lower levels of the city's urban environment - although it still imports quite a bit since it's the cultural center of the known universe. It's also not a true full-city planet like Coruscant... they still have oceans for instance.
- More or less 40k subverts this trope just as many times it plays it straight.
- Planet Farm — 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 Mid-West Wheat farm. Complete with hicks.
- You wouldn't even need one farm planet to feed a city planet. Have you never heard of factory farming? You don't need fields to farm, just some sun lights and plumbing. Shouldn't take more than a couple hundred skyscrapers, and city planets have trillions of skyscrapers along the surface.
- 40k also averts this, wendever there are maps of a once though Single Biome Planet, Armageddon (hive world) has a massive rain forest right in the middle of the mainland, as well as ice caps. The Ciaphas Cain are one of the best explains were whatever planet the book takes place in with have dozens of different biomes
- Death World — Let's just say you don't want to go there.
Contrast Patchwork Map. Near the polar opposite of All Planets Are Earthlike
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- Justified on Outlaw Star with the explanation that since the planet in question is a resort planet, they terraformed it that way on purpose.
- 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.
- Cowboy Bebop, one of the apparently few anime concerning living on different planets has about and inhabitable planet and moon in the solar system (presummably) terraformed and turned into one, as it seems. (e.g. Ganymede seems to be a water moon, Europa a kind of Western Prarie Moon, Titan a Desert Moon...)
- Earth is also one of these. As a result of being constantly bombarded by asteroids, almost all of earth is dry, craggy wasteland.
- Trigun is set on the planet Gunsmoke, which appears to be nothing but desert. Like Mars (or, more to the point, Arizona), it does have canyons that suggest more plentiful water in the past.
Film
- Star Wars is known for them: ice planet Hoth, desert planet Tatooine, planet city Coruscant, Vancouver pine forest moon of Endor, swamp planet Dagobah, cloud planet Bespin, ocean planet Kamino, etc. Nearly all the classifications described above occur in the movies.
- Technically the Endor scenes were filmed in northern California, but yeah.
- There are notable exceptions, however: Naboo, where the Everglades-esque area where the Gungans live in The Phantom Menace is contrasted with the temperate-forest-and-meadows area where Anakin and Padme vacation in Attack of the Clones. And the Earthlike Alderaan and Corellia.
- It is stated that in Tatooine's distant past, is was more diverse... until the Rakatans bombarded it from orbit until the entire surface was molten glass. The glass eventually broke up into sand, making Tatooine as we know it today.
- Also, Tatooine is divided into two hemispheres; a habitable one, and one even hotter than the sparsely inhabited areas.
- Similarly, Hoth is only habitable on the equator- The rest of the planet is too cold for any sort of life. The real logistical question is... What on Hoth do they Eat or Drink?
- Subverted in the second Knights Of The Old Republic game. You travel to the desolated Telos. Most of the planet has been bombed, and it's in the process of being terraformed. At first you land in a temperate forest, only to find out later that what you're really looking for is in the polar ice caps.
- This trope is lampshaded in the second Star Wars parody episode of Robot Chicken. One sketch features a krayt dragon and his wife as sea serpents in a body of water on Tatooine; when the husband expresses his desire to explore the world beyond, his wife insists that, as far as they know, there's nothing but desert on this planet. The husband then retorts that a Single Biome Planet is patently ridiculous, describing several planets that happen to exist in the universe as proof of his position and asking what kind of a cruel god would make a planet with a single topographical feature? About a week later his remains are passed by R2-D2 and C-3PO. A water-adapted creature in a vast desert it has no idea how to traverse likely would end up dead in short order.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 by analysis in Avatar; although Pandora is for all appearances a jungle planet, it's shown to have big oceans and said to have icy poles. It also has several sister-moons, which are probably also dominated (but not completely) by one biome.
Literature
- Arrakis, the titular world of Frank Herbert's Dune is a justified textbook example of a Desert Planet, with the nomadic Fremen and the black market on water. For example, the planet's polar regions are mentioned (though never shown) as a source for water traders. Herbert also explains why a desert world without any forests can maintain the CO2/O2 balance required for humans to survive. (It has to do with the worms, which release oxygen into the atmosphere.) There's a massive amount of detail on the ecosystem and geography in the Appendices that really show he did the research.
- Also, the reason it's all desert is mostly because the constant movement of the sandworms (which can grow to be hundreds or thousands of meters long and wide and are incredibly strong) means that the crust is being constantly churned into sand.
- More accurately, it's due to the sandtrout encapsulating any and all free moisture outside the polar regions, and converting it into a Spice precursor as part of their lifecycle, which eventually results in a few of them metamorphosing into sandworms. There is also a very hardy sort of vegetation present in the polar regions, as well as isolated pockets living in certain types of rock formations, which trap moisture in small pockets (enhanced and elaborated on by the Fremen to form their moisture-collecting windtraps).
- Subverted in Bruce Coville's Rod Albright series. When the main character's alien companion is reminiscing about his childhood swamp, he asks "Oh, you come from a swamp planet?" The other aliens then berate him for thinking that Earth could be the only planet with a diverse ecosystem then point out the ridiculousness of intelligent life evolving on a planet with only one biome.
- 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 (Better don't think about how that's supposed to work), 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 -180º C.
- The Hork-Bajir homeworld is a valley planet (sort of. It's 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 Planets because (as stated above) they find millions of species on one planet far too complicated and pointless.
- Parodied in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (the second Hitchhiker's Guide book), where the planet Ursa Minor Beta has not only a homogeneous geography (subtropical coast) but a perpetual Saturday afternoon.
- Lusitania in Orson Scott Card's 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.
- Several Territories in The Pendragon Adventure qualify. Cloral is an Ocean Planet, Zadaa is a Desert Planet, and Eelong is a Jungle Planet.
- Ursula K Le Guin
- In The Left Hand of Darkness, the planet of Winter is, predictably, an Ice Planet. However, what a few different characters observe is that Winter is actually very like Earth, except that the story takes place in the middle of one of the Ice Ages. A character native 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
- Andre Norton
- The Forest Planet Janus in Judgment on Janus and Victory on Janus.
- The Ice Planet in Secret of the Lost Race.
- Uncharted Stars includes an Ice Planet and a Planet City.
- Justified in the To The Stars trilogy by Harry Harrison. An imperialistic Earth has terraformed a number of planets (with a custom-made culture as well), each one dedicated to farming, production or mining of one particular resource. The idea being that none of them have the diverse resources needed to launch a revolt.
- Dan Simmons' Hyperion novels include several of these: the ecumenopolises of Tau Ceti Center and Renaissance Vector, the ocean planet of Maui-Covenant, the forest planet of God's Grove, etc. Because all the planets are connected together in a single WorldWeb this doesn't appear to be a problem, though the ecological absurdity of this becomes a plot point when the network of Farcasters connecting the planets collapse, causing single-city planets to starve...except for Renaissance Vector, which conveniently got its food from Renaissance Minor, an agricultural world in the same system.
- Deeply averted in Dan Abnett's Ravenor novels, where the villains speak with Ravenor after he comes through a gate. He has to go back the same way, but he can identify the location: not just the planet, but the actual location, down to a small sector, by the plants he sees.
- The Puppeteer homeworld in Larry Niven's Known Space 'verse was a city world. To deal with the heat dissipation problem, they moved the planet increasingly far away from its star, with other farm worlds growing food. Then they discovered that the center of the galaxy was exploding, so they organised their five planets into a "Fleet of Worlds" and fled.
- Known Space is also home to the sunflower plant, a genetically engineered lifeform that is capable of focusing solar rays to Frickin Laser Beams in order to burn all other life to ashes, thus creating worlds solely populated by sunflowers.
- Alan Dean Foster is addicted to this trope, setting Humanx Commonwealth novels on his own versions of Ocean Planet (Cachelot), Ice Planet (Icerigger), Desert Planet (Sliding Scales), Jungle Planet (Midworld), Jungle In A Swamp Planet (Drowning World), Even Soggier Than Vancouver Pine Forest Planet (For Love Of Mother-Not), etc. He's even got Vacation Paradise Planet in New Riviera.
- Parodied in a short story in Ray Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles." Some Earth-astronauts go to Mars, and the local Martians think they're nutters just claiming to be aliens, so the astronauts find themselves locked up in the loony bin. While there, several other loonies claim to be from Earth, and each say that Earth is a "massive jungle planet," a world covered with just oceans, or just desert, etc.
Live Action TV
- Star Trek has a tendency to either have totally Earth-like planets (class M) or Single Biome Planets. At least in the Original Series, they used so many Class M planets in order to keep production costs down.
- Ferenginar, the Ferengi homeworld, is a class M planet that's home to virtually constant, planet-wide torrential downpours, due to weather control technology and the Ferengi's preference for rainy days.
- Andoria, home of the Andorians, is an Ice Planet.
- 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 Breen homeworld is described as either an Ice Planet or "actually quite temperate". The planet itself is never actually seen, and this confusion serves to reinforce the mystique of the Breen.
- Though according to Weyoun, its actually quite nice.
- 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 does tend to be in a Vancouver-like pine forest, though...
- 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 the planets are actually Hell and Heaven respectively, with the former being ruled by what's hinted to be the Devil himself.
- Red Dwarf featured "ice planets" and "lava moons", and one ocean planet they picked for a fishing holiday.
- At least the ocean planet is plausible. Look at an map of Earth 700 million years ago.
- Red Dwarf also has a tendency to make many planets Earth-like.
- Andromeda's standard planetside-setting is the Vancouver Pine Forest Planet. This is somewhat lampshaded when the trees are once referred to as "terraforming Pines".
- Deconstructed in Power Rangers RPM, which takes place on a Desert Planet. The thing is, three years before the series takes place, it was earthlike- and the series takes place in a Please Insert New City Name version of Boston, most certainly not in a desert region, showing just how much of the planet is sandy wasteland. The cause of the mass desertification is subtly implied to be nuclear carpet-bombing. The background radiation is so high that long-distance communication is all but impossible, and orphans with cancer are prevalent.
Tabletop Games
- Some Magic The Gathering planes can come across as this. For example, Rath is virtually all flowstone (a magically animated substance under the control of the plane's ruler); Mirrodin is an all-metal world constructed by a planeswalker; Ravnica is a city that has ultimately expanded to fill its entire plane. Somewhat justified in that none of these worlds came to be that way naturally; also, even these places find room to squeeze in the five basic land types of the game (forests, islands, mountains, plains, and swamps) in some form or other.
- As noted above, many world in Warhammer 40000 fit this. They designate their planets almost entirely like the above.
- It's noted that City Planets, if cut off by a Warp storm are essentially screwed since it prevents food from being transported in.
- The homeworld of the Vespid is an interesting one - an entire world of stone islands floating in the upper atmosphere of a gas giant.
- 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 50 or so 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 subterreanean cities were promptly bored into the heart of the planet and the depths of the glaciars in order to escape the cold.
Toys
- Bionicle has the Endless Ocean planet the first Myth Arc took place on, though the new setting, the desert planet Bara Magna averts the trope by having at least several oases regions and some icy peaks to allow for the usual elementally themed villages.
- The single biome planets are eventually explained as having formed from chunks of the shattered planet Spherus Magna. The Endless Ocean was the former Great Sea, Bara Magna was once a large population center of the planet.
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 Skies Of Arcadia, which takes place on a Cloud Planet whose various floating continents contain the standard range of climates.
- 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).
- Kirby 64 has a similar thing going for it. The planets are differently named, however. And are all named as stars, despite clearing not being stars.
- The first two are puns at least (Pop Star, Rock Star), and some actually display quite a bit of variation- Neo Star moves from a jungle to a volcano, and Shiver star starts out in the snow but then goes into the clouds and then a shopping mall.
- Metroid Prime 3 has an example of many of these, most notably Elysia which is a Cloud City. Bryyo, however, is a triple biome planet at least. (The only areas you SEE are jungle, molten, and frozen)
- Bryyo is justified though: it's in the aftermath of a devastating equivalent of nuclear war.
- The main Metroid series is better about this, since most games focus on one planet at a time. In fact, they actually have the opposite problem. In most games you can find volcanoes, lakes, forests, glaciers, swamps & many others within walking distance of each other.
- Even more impressively, all of these landscapes and biomes completely exist underground, in the case of Zebes. One has to wonder how, exactly, the planet's surface doesn't cave in. (According to the manga, the surface itself is a largely uninhabitable desert, and the grassy area Samus lands on, Crateria, was specifically designed to be habitable so that visiting lifeforms can make it underground safely. Even with all of this in place, it's mentioned in various places that Zebes was a harsh environment and Samus herself had to be altered to survive on it, since no human could for long.)
- Meteos is chock full of these, containing most of the examples listed above and more. Canyon planet? Windy planet? Flower planet? Heated-iron planet? We've got it.
- Thoroughly averted in Halo. While on the titular Halo rings, one encounters several different biomes, from swamps, to beaches, to snowy mountains.
- 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.
- Ristar is made of this trope. Every level is such a planet. It gets especially ridiculous on Planet Sonata, which is made entirely of musical instruments.
- Mass Effect has hundreds of worlds with entire climates identical to one square kilometer area.
- Notable is the lack of flora and water on all side-quest planets, making most of these planets essentially 'meadow planets'.
- Well, seeing as you never travel outside that one square kilometer, there's no proof that the whole planet is like that. Though most planets are technically Desert Planets and thoroughly uninhabitable.
- Most of the non-landable background planets are single biome, but they're astronomically justified types like "Low-Gravity Iceball" or "Tide-locked mercurial hellhole".
- Spore... technically counts, just because there's no biomes in the first place.
- 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. 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.
- Star Craft 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).
- 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), Hail Fire 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 MST 3 K 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 can't seem to get anything remotely spacey right, though being Funny Animal and all, science isn't really a priority. But wait, in is this an aversion in the planet of Fortuna? In Star Fox 64, it was icy, but in Assault, it's a jungle level? Maybe they got this different biomes thing right ... oh, wait, turns out Fortuna is all jungle, and the ice planet Fichina was the one that we were supposed to see in 64, they just got the names confused in the American version.
- Star Fox Adventures, however, does get it right; there are a variety of biomes, though the planet suffers the same problem the Metroid games do, and biomes change a bit too rapidly.
- 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.
- Sigma Star Saga had a Forest Planet, a Fire Planet, an Ice Planet, a Sand Planet, a Ghost Planet, and an Ocean Planet. the Ocean Planet is Earth
- Most of the planets in the first two Master Of Orion games appear to be this, although "Terran" planets are supposed to resemble earth. Of course, the only effect that environment has on gameplay is determining maximum population capacity, and preventing players from colonizing half the galaxy until they develop technology to cope with hostile environments. The third game averts this, (or would if it existed).
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 "Lava Planet", "Ice Planet" and "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")
Web Comics
- Shortpacked shows us how theme planets sometimes don't work.
- As well as giving the quote above, Irregular Webcomic lampshades this heavily in one of its podcasts: when Admiral Akbar 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.
Western Animation
- Futurama frequently makes fun of this, and the Planet Of Hats, as every world the crew visits seems to have a single defining characteristic; Dr. Zoidberg's home planet of Decapod 10 is all beaches (referred to as "the Mud Planet" by its ambassador), Kif's is all swamp, etc.
- Nearly every planet in War Planets was a Single Biome Planet. Admittedly, this was largely because 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 by virtually every planet being designed and built, not evolved. The Cluster in particular was created as a quartet of interdependent worlds.
- 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, a Transformer's requirements for survival are a lot more forgiving than a human's.
- Well, okay, Cybertron is actually a 'Transforming Mecha' planet, in that it is 1. Populated by Transforming Mecha, and 2. Is a transforming mecha. Still part of this trope, though.
- 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.
- Somewhat debatable - supplementary materials establish that Velocitron has swamplands towards the planet's equator, flatlands and mountain regions are seen on the Jungle Planet, and Gigantion is a multi-layered city planet, with its innermost Core Layer being very Earth-like. Mostly Single Biome, but not purely.
- In Energon and Cybertron, most planets are named "[Biome] Planet," or will have a name but be nicknamed [Biome] Planet, and the nickname will see more use than the name. In addition to the above examples, there's Blizzard Planet and Circuilt Planet (all racecourses. Same hat as Speed Planet, but it's covered with highways, while Speed Planet, as far as depicted onscreen, is all desert.)
- In both the comic and cartoon humans visit Cybertron and are able to breathe with no problems, although logically there is no reason for there to be an atmosphere breathable for humans. The Beast Machines series seems to offer the suggestion that Cybertron was originally built around a habitable planetoid and that somehow has retained its atmosphere. This was actually the explanation given for the similar world of GoBotron in the Go-Bots cartoon series.
- Skyland is set on a cloud planet.
- Gobotron from Challenge Of The Gobots 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 cyborgs. They then set about salvaging their now-dead home by converting it into a technology-based world.
Real Life
- Look at Corot-7b, which is even being called "the lava planet".
- GJ 1214b appears to be a prime candidate for an ocean planet. It's estimated (by this physicist troper), 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.
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