Barren Biome

The Barren Biome is a non-feature biome that appears in several variants, including a base version, a CO2 Lakes variant, and a Solid variant. It is characterized by its extreme cold and by having very little of the usual life-supporting terrain found in more active biomes. In practice, it is mostly an inhospitable stretch of rock and frozen materials, with only a few notable exceptions that make it worth visiting.

Its temperature range depends on the variant: the base version is cold, the CO2 Lakes variant is very cold, and the Solid variant is extremely cold. The biome contains no gas in the base version and no liquids in the ordinary sense, while the CO2 Lakes variant includes a liquid carbon dioxide lake. The Solid variant is especially severe, with oxygen frozen into liquid oxygen and carbon dioxide frozen into solid carbon dioxide. This variant has no terrain features and is used in the Frozen Core World Trait.

The Barren Biome can contain a small number of useful points of interest, most notably an Anti Entropy Thermo-Nullifier, ruins, and 0–2 random buried geysers. The CO2 Lakes variant also includes a Sand Deposit feature, while the base biome may be surrounded by hard frozen materials such as granite, ice, polluted ice, and snow. Because the biome is so cold, liquid carbon dioxide can naturally appear in it under the right conditions.

From a practical standpoint, the Barren Biome is easy to pressurize with your own gases because it has so little gas content to begin with, but it can take time to dig through because it is made of hard rock. It is often worth exploring once you are ready to handle the temperature, since it can provide early access to buried structures and resource pockets.

• The biome has no critters.
• Melting ice and snow tiles directly yields twice as much water as mining them first and then melting the result.
• Be careful about venting excess heat into a frozen Barren Biome, since doing so can disrupt wild Sleet Wheat.
• The solid variant is especially valuable for Frozen Core playthroughs because it preserves extremely low temperatures and has no terrain features.
• The biome may contain large amounts of sand and sandstone in its sand deposit, along with surrounding igneous rock.
• In some variants, the biome can serve as an early source of materials needed for automation once a duplicant can reach and mine them.