In part 1, we managed to build your first organism, now let dial that to 11 and engineer the whole planet ecosystem.

Getting habitability

Since the requirement for habitability is just for terrestrial plant support, we can start by focusing on that instead of building both aquatic and terrestrial biosphere. Let’s assume you have enough species slot from you environmental building, the amount of species you need depends on how much support they will give. You can probably go around six microbial species for this for the moon/mars if you follow this guide. Keep in mind that it depends from planet to planet (or moons) since the moon need between 3- 10 and Mars 6-20 and since it’s support that needed not number of species, you might just have 2 species of on the moon and be fine (if they give 3-4.5 support each). Note since the skyfarm get rid of the biosphere requirement, you may use easy route if your goal is just habitability.

Get those microbes everywhere

Our colonist will need plant and those plant will need microbial support. Good thing that in our previous entry we built a microorganism from scratch. Now we can do the same thing until we have enough support for our plant and some extra if you want those microbe that give credit. There are two main way to increase support. The first is by selecting a phylum that give support so either actinobacteria or fungus. Both give a base bonus of +50% to support. However species of the fungus phylum are less tolerant to arid environment (-15% tolerance low water). The second way if my selecting a gene attribute that boost support, for microorganism this mean either the Large gene (+50% support) and the Nitrogen Fixing. You can combine both ways them together and even stack attribute gene to give super organism that can give up to 10 of support. Since you cannot have organism with the exact same sequence you can mix large gene and nitrogen fixing to get more variety and still have a lot of support. Here, some example of the gene sequence you can build with high support that we repeat for each phylum.

Legend : L = large gene attribute NF = nitrogen fixing XX = low atmosphere tolerance, YY = low water tolerance (for fungus), AN = any

Actinobacteria = L-L-L, L-L-NF, L-NF-XX, L-L-AN, NF-L-AN (and if your feeling it L-NF-NF, NF-NF-XX)
Fungus = L-L-L, L-L-NF, L-NF-NF, LNFXX, L-NF-YY, L-L-AN, NF-L-AN (and if you’re feeling it L-NF-NF, NF-NF-XX)
Lichen = Same as actinobacteria, you might be able to pull off a L-NF-NF or NF-NF-XX because of the +10% tolerance bonus lichens has.
Protozoa = Same as actinobacteria

I don’t really like the using NF twice in a gene, but if you’re comfortable with it just go for it.
Honestly my first batch look like this:
Protozoa/actinobacteria/Lichen = L-L-L, L-L-NF, L-NF-XX, L-L-AN, NF-L-AN
Fungus: L-L-L, L-L-NF, L-NF-XX, L-NF-YY, L-L-AN, NF-L-AN
Total support: around 50+

You can even get 64 of support with one microorganism

With this you will be getting multiple high support microorganism quickly, invest money in them to give them better odds of surviving.

Now you can unpause the game if you want to see if they survive and let them grow a bit.
Once your microbes are thriving let get some plant to get our habitability requirement.

If you have Lagrange Academy or a few culture points you’re willing to spare, you can go in the culture screen and add a few points to increase biomass.
This will increase the birthrate of all you species.

Going Green

Now that we have a microbial ecosystem, let have some plant take advantage of it.
We’ll focus on terrestrial plant since they are the ones we need for habitability, but the principle work the same way for aquatic plant.

Tree require more support, but give more support. However, the extra o2 can be a pain to manage.
Shrub have a +50% birthrate and require less support (-25% required) Moss +15% low temps resistance -15% low water tolerance are not super useful if you have the Soletta satellite since your temperature is usually just right.
Grass +2 pop grow&+1000c/min can be cost effective if you reinvest that 1000c/m in their health or just let them make money for you.
Usually I got with a mixture of tree and scrub maybe a few grass to start, if you’re feeling frisky about the extra o2 pumping in your atmosphere, you could always go for a mixture of scrub and grass initially.

Adding genes to your plant

Stacking large gene is not has good has with Microbes because now they will increase the support required too.

If you really want gene that give support, look at the fruit bearing gene first. Similar to large gene but it give an extra +2 to population.
You can mix them together to have four species that have +150% support.

Other interesting gene

Cash crop: +2000c/m -30 low water tolerance, this gene is a nice addition for plants, except maybe for moss since they already have -15% low water tolerance.

If you stack 3 fruit bearing genes together (or a mix of fruit bearing and large gene) you’ll get about +150 support (+200% for tree) but +150% support required. Which is about 14 support required per species (20 for tree) and 3.4 (4 for tree) support given.
Not sure my math is right, but that what I’ve observed creating my plants. You can add some cash to increase their health and remove it once they get over 100%.

Since you can mix the Large (L) gene with the fruit bearing gene (FB) you can get 4 combination with +150%.
L-L-L, L-L-FB, L-FB-FB, FB-FB-FB

WIth 4 plant type you get up to 16 species with high support, but beware of the support they need from your microbes however.

Side note: In order to give the maximum of support a species need to be health at 100% or more.

Create a few gene to get to your 10 or 20 of support for habitability and you are now habitable.
That mean you need about 3 species on the moon, 5-6 on mars to be habitable if you create high support plant like I’ve explain here.

Road to Paradise

Paradise is actually simple to acheive. You just need to be within 5% of all the goals and have enough support from your plant to be way right.
 

If at the beginning of the game you chose the biosphere option instead of biomass this guide is for you. If not, go start a new game with it and we’ll be waiting for you.

If it’s your first time with the biosphere or you got burn buy it, this guide will help you get your head around the basic.

Note if you just want your planet to be habitable might not need to border with biosphere if the skyfarm is built. 

Step 1:
First even if you have the biosphere you need to make your planet at least habitable for plants and microorganism. So get your temperature & atmosphere right, sprinkle some o2 and water and you’re good to go. Be sure your four metric are stable before starting playing around your biosphere. You could always try to create an organism that has better resistance to your planet problems, by giving it gene with higher tolerance to these problems or making them extremophile. However it’s easier to wait and create them in a stable environment.

Step 2:
Note: this step can actually start while you’re still in step 1.

While your adjusting your planet, research some biomass aquatic & terrestrial building (Like Reef institute & Zoological Society) and build some. If you only want to get to victory you can only build terrestrial building since it’s the one counted in the victory screen.

Step 3:

Once the planet metric are stables and you have enough biosphere infrastructure to support at least nine species you can start playing around biosphere menu.

How support work

What is support? In nature, each organism lives with support of other, carnivore need herbivore for food, the herbivore need plant to eat, plant need microorganism to enrich the soil with nutrient. This cycle of life is represented through support in the game. In the circle in blue on the left, its represent the amount of support your microorganism give. The green circle in the middle is the amount of support your plant give and the red circle on the right is the amount of support your animal give.
When you create an organism, this organism will receive (“consume” if you will) support from the previous group and offer support depending on the type of organism and the gene selected. Microorganism don’t require support so you can ignore the +50% support required modifier when creating them. Be sure to have enough support offered in one group before making organism from the next group. The base number of support each organisms give is 1 before modifier (seem to be 2 for microbe)
Note that to achieve victory you only need a bit less that 20 of terrestrial plant support (on mars, 10 for the moon), so if you’re in a hurry you can only focus on getting these 20 of plant support.

Creating your first organism

Once you selected what group your organism is going to be, you can now select the phylum gene of your organism. Let’s pick Lichen for this example since it’s our first organism and lichen offer better base environment that the others with its +10% bonus to all tolerances.

Now that we chosen our phylum we can now pick three gene that will determine the base attribute of our organism. This is probably the best part of the biosphere, creating your organism. Do you want it to survive at all cost or allow it to generate a lot of support for higher up the food chain. Or maybe you want it to proliferate like crazy and give out O2 at the same time. Or actually make your planet some extra credit. You can all do that, for now let’s build a simple organism that we want to survive on Mars with our current temperature, pressure, o2 level and water level.

Since they can ignore support required, the Large Gene is very interesting since its give an extra 50% supports and no drawback. You can even pick it three times if you want since attribute gene can stack, but let’s pick it once for this example. Another interesting gene unique for microorganism is the Nitrogen fixing gene. Its give 50% supports, but reduce resistance to low pressure by 30%. We could counterbalance that drawback by giving it the resistance to low pressure gene (+30% tolerance low pressure -30% tolerance high pressure). Since our pressure is high and stable and lichen already get a +10% to all tolerances, we will add another gene instead like one that increase the birthrate so our lichen can proliferate. The High metabolism gene is probably our best bet since it provides a boost of 100% birthrate and its drawback is that it need 50% support, but since our lichen doesn’t need support we can ignore it. Other viable options are either the Nocturnal gene (+100% birthrate -30% low temperature tolerance) or the Invasive gene (+100% birth rate -2000 credit/m). Infectious is another option, but it reduces your population grow and Airborne would be nice, but it has a -30 % tolerance to low pressure and since we already got -30% from Nitrogen fixing we don’t want them to stack together.
Now name your organism and you’re good to go. Now that you know have built your first organism you can start playing around and build a whole ecosystem.

Other tips that can help your biosphere creation and that your species survives.

• Invest money on each species to increase their health and help them survives.
• You can play around the biosphere menu and create your species while the game is paused.
• The culture modifier that usually help the biomass will help all your species birthrate instead.

Stay tuned for part 2: building a whole ecosystem and optimizing your biosphere to make your planet habitable.