I will preface this by saying if we had the option between single/multi-biomes and some of you played with and actually liked the multi-biomes, then that’s perfectly fine – it’s all subjective, and just because I know I wouldn’t like it doesn’t mean you wouldn’t, too. My view is from the fact that we DON’T have multi-biomes, and I believe that the majority of people that think they’d want multi-biomes on planets would actually have less enjoyment if they ever got their wish, and here’s why.

Have you ever tried flying around a planet in NMS? I’m not talking about circumnavigating it, I mean flying over rougly every square mile of the planet. And if you actually have, did you ever do it a second time? My guess is that 99% of people are going to say “no” to at least one of those questions. So why is that? Because these planets are large, and doing so would take wayyyy too much time.

I don’t know about you, but I spend more than enough time on individual planets as it is, and if I knew that each planet could have multiple biomes, as an explorer-type gamer, I would want to see each of those biomes because… well, what if one of them is reaalllly cool? That is why most of us go visit a planet, in regular NMS, right? To see what it is offering? After visiting hundreds of planets, I still want to check out almost every planet I come across, even if I only give a planet a few seconds to form my opinion of “eh, this one isn’t very special/new”.

And that’s my main point – with how big planets are, checking out multiple biomes on each one would guarantee adding a bunch of waiting as we pulse over to the next biome. Let’s do some numbers here: Let’s say you have a solar system with 3 planets. In normal NMS, you’d dip into a planet, explore as much as you want, leave, and then pulse to the next planet. That’s gonna be about 3 breaks in between. In the hypothetical multi-biome NMS, if each planet has 2 biomes, then each solar system gets 6 breaks total. 3 biomes would have 9 breaks total, and so on.

TL;DR Abstracting planets into single biomes instead of pursuing realism makes NMS more digestible and fun, because it allows us to immediately judge within seconds of visiting a planet whether we want to spend more time on that planet. If multiple biomes were added, then more than a few minutes of waiting would have to be invested into searching a planet before we even could make the decision that “yep, there’s nothing interesting here, let’s go check the next planet”. And not only would it slow us down in how much time we have to invest in each planet, it would then multiplicatively increase the amount of time spent in each solar system, which is the opposite of the point of the game. They didn’t give us quintillions of planets to explore because they wanted us to spend all our time in each solar system. All that said… if they could give us the option for how many biomes could appear on a planet, then everyone could be happy, and I have no problem if there are some of you that would enjoy what I described above.