A planet in Spore.

Planets (or Terrain in Spore gameplay) are objects that orbit stars. In the Space Stage planets can be colonised to harvest Spice. Planets feature a wide variety of terrain, such as mountains, oceans, lakes and plains. Planets can be populated by flora and creatures in varying quantities based on terrascore. Habitable planets may be found in varying stages of development, including worlds with creatures, tribes and civilizations.


There are an extremely large number of planets in Spore. Gas giants are very possible, and even habitable moons orbiting gas giants have been displayed. Rings around Gas giants are very common. Rings around habitable or rocky planets may sometimes appear. The size of rocky planets, however, has remained small in comparison to gas giants, but that is natural.

Computer-Generated Planets
  • All planets in Spore are made by hand.
That is to say, they are created by algorithms. The Spore Development Team is including a wide variety of algorithms, making anything from Near-impossible worlds with pink grass to very whimsical planets. Water seen from E3 2006 have ranged in colour from a Pearlescent yellow to a Ferric blue, to even grape juice (???) hinting at the variety. The terrain can also be painted from a very cute green, to a really dark red.

There are some exceptions to this, most notably the Sol system.

Player-Created Planets
  • While vanilla Spore does not have a planet editor, players are able to customize planets with the Spaceship's Planet sculpting, coloring and atmospheric, tools: making modifications to the terrain, the colors of the land and water, the climate, and so on, although making large changes to the terrain (such as adding a continent) would probably be impractical. The Galactic Adventures expansion pack introduces the Adventure Creator, an editor that can create adventure planets which can be uploaded to the Sporepedia, however the Adventure Creator cannot be used to modify non-adventure planets.

Forms Edit

Barren planets/dead planets

  • Ice planet - A cold planet with an extreme amount of ice on its surface.
  • Lava planet - A hot planet where lava and fiery clouds have formed on its surface.
  • Rocky planet - A dry planet with nothing but rock and dirt on its surface.
  • Water planet - A humid planet with an extreme amount of water on the surface.
  • Flurry planet - A cold planet with no ice on the surface, which is primarily rock.
  • Arid planet - A hot planet with no liquid water, and sand covering the surface.
  • Boiling planet - A planet that still has liquid water, but which is starting to boil.
  • Melting planet - A planet that has ice on its surface, but also has patches of liquid water.
  • Gas giant - A planet that cannot be colonized, but usually has moons.

Habitable planets

  • Homeworld - The planet in which creature has developed in the previous stages. Multiple empires, and other races may have T-3 homeworlds. T-3 and Civilization stage homeworlds have a number of cities not obtainable in a non-homeworld. T1 and T2 space stage will have only one or two cities, they are simply glorified T1/T2 planets.
  • Category-1 planet - A planet with a little life, acceptable atmosphere and temperature.(T1)
  • Category-2 planet - A planet with a good amount of life, good atmosphere and temperature.(T2)
  • Category-3 planet - A planet flourishing with life, has perfect atmosphere and perfect temperature.(T3)

Other Types

  • Cube planet - A cube-shaped planet added in Patch 1.02. They might be appropriate planets for sciency types...
  • Storybook planets - A specially sculpted planet, they are very,very rare.
  • Crater planet - A strange planet with an astonishing amount of Craters.
  • Ruined Planet - Found on the player's second mission, a few piles of rubble found on the surface.
  • Saved Game - Another Spore Game of the player's.
  • Unnatural planets - Strange rare planets with impossible geology such as super mountains, etc.
  • Adventure planets - Planets with an adventure in it. The information that appears in the solar view does not correlate with the adventure's actual appearance.
  • Moons, asteroids and comets - Other planetary bodies in most star systems.Moons can still be terraformed into habitable places.
  • Destroyed planets - These planets have been destroyed by a Planet Buster. They look like stars shrunk to planetary size. They eventually fade away.

Planet DangersEdit

All uninhabitable planets have two dangers. A lava planet would have Fire Storms and Fire Jets. Arid planets have Fire Jets and Meteor Showers. Rocky planets have Rock Geysers and Meteor Showers. Flurry planets have Ice Geysers and Meteor Showers. Ice planets have Ice Geysers and Electric Storms. Water planets have Electric Storms and Whirlwinds. Boiling planets have Electric Storms and Fire Jets. Occasionally a Homeworld will have an Epic Creature on the surface. Homeworlds often have volcanoes on their surface as well. Oddly enough they cause no damage to your ship, although it looks as if they do. Be warned that the damage from planets affect a percentage of your Health, not a certain amount.

Threats Minor Damage Medium Damage Major Damage
Fire Storms - X X
Fire Jets X X -
Meteor Showers - X -
Rock Geysers X - -
Ice Geysers X X -
Electric Storms - X X
Whirlwinds X X -
Epic/SS Creatures - - X


Spore 2010-09-06 16-20-45

Moon (upper) and planet (lower) orbit tractors.

Every planet has a fixed orbit, and the shorter the distance between the planet and the star, the smaller the orbit will be (and hence the less time required for the planet to go around the star once). There are five types of orbit in the game, ordered in distance from the star. Starting from the closest, these are orange, green, lime, turquoise, blue and white. The color of the 'trails' (tractors) indicate which type of orbit the planet is in.

Gas giants normally have blue orbits. Sometimes they have green orbits, and are rarely found in orange orbits, depending largely on the planet's distance from it's parent star. Gas giants can rarely be found in turquoise orbits.

Moons always have the same type of orbit as the planet around which they orbit, but their orbit tractors are shorter and more transparent than those of planets.


Orange orbits are the second most common orbits in the galaxy. Planets with the orange orbit are closest to the star, and have the shortest year. These planets are always hot and tend to be boiling or lava planets. Mostly, they have too much atmosphere. Their atmosphere color is usually orange, red or pink; the ground is usually red or pink; and the seas tend to be red.


Green orbits are third most common orbits in galaxy. Planets in green orbits are more easily terraformed (and hence are easier to colonize). In addition, these planets may already have plants, creatures, tribes, civilizations or empires.


Lime orbits are the second rarest orbits in the galaxy. Planets in lime orbits generally are T3 planets with flourishing life, therefore, fully terraformed and a perfect place to colonize. Homeworlds rarely have Lime orbits. (They usually have Green orbits, though rarely they might be Orange or Blue due to a glitch.) Lime orbit planets can be generally made by terraforming a Green orbit planet into T3. Then, it might turn into a Lime orbit planet.


Turquoise orbits are very rare. These orbits are somewhere between the green and blue orbits, and planets with these orbits exhibit some of the characteristics of planets in both blue and green orbits. The color of their atmospheres, seas, and land vary greatly.


Blue orbits are most common orbits in galaxy. Because planets in blue orbits are far away from the star, they are always cold and are normally covered in ice. They have ice geysers and asteroids falling onto the ground. These planets tend to have gray-coloured land and have very little atmosphere.


White orbital planets are the rarest in the Spore galaxy, and only exist in some Binary OO systems (double blue stars). They have almost the same characteristics as blue planets but they are extremely hard to terraform: the second you stop terraforming, the T- score will immediately drop to where it was before (usually the lower left). Even when using the staff of life, the planet will try and force itself down to T0, meaning that they have very fragile ecosystems. These are also the only type of planet which its orbital color will change to pale grayish blue when it is closest to its star and back to white when it moves farther out into its orbit, as these planets, as well as many others, will have irregular orbits.