Stargate: every planet is either desert or Canada.
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"Wait wait, you're from Doloron? Oh my god, I work with someone from the Swamp Planet!"
"Why does everyone call it that. It's a planet with one or two famous swamps."
"What was it like growing up in a mud hut?"
"We have other ecosystems! You know, mountains, fields, outlet malls..."
"How did you get to school? Bark canoes? On the back of a swamp snail?"
"No, like everyone else... In hover cars."
"Is it true you all have eggs sacs? Take off your pants."
"No I'm not taking off my pants!"
"Aha! We got a swamp monster here!"
"Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! (sigh) 50 years ago, Dread Trooper scouts landed in a swamp on our planet, and for some reason didn't bother exploring anywhere else. If they had gone one mile to the left, they would have found some beautiful beachfront condos. But they didn't. And now... we're the (air quotes) swamp planet. How do you think that makes me feel?"
"I uh..."
"Don't say anything. Let's just eat our lunch in silence."
"... Is that moss!?"
"It's a delicacy!"
Hmm. Still no resolution on the egg sac question, though.
Lower Decks vibes!
It's from an old College Humor Troopers sketch
In fairness, seasons and varied terrain aren't guaranteed.
Of all the bodies in the solar system, only Earth has such a wide variety of landscape. Mars is rocky desert or rocky desert with canyons. Pluto is ice ball or rocky ice ball. Etc.
Also, if humans were colonizing earth from outside, we would probably just build cities on the river deltas and skip the less habitable spots. Stories set here would then just be cityscape or river delta, even though the ice caps/mountains/jungles/deserts still exist. Colonized worlds will have different population distribution that organically settled ones.
Mars is rocky desert or rocky desert with canyons.
Mars has river deltas. It has flat plains. It has shifting rolling dunes. It has mountains and valley. It has a twisting series of canyons so constricted they're called the Labyrinth of Night. It has vast ice sheets and polar caps of frozen carbon dioxide and water. It has caves and frozen mud flats and a thousand other varied forms.
Mars is a world. It is a place. It has biomes as varied and unique as those of Earth.
Pluto is ice ball or rocky ice ball.
There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Mars may have "river deltas", but without the river.
Mars is a world. It is a place. It has biomes as varied and unique as those of Earth.
Suuure. A biome is a geographical region with a specific climate, flora and fauna. Mars doesn't have much climate because it has very little atmosphere, and it has no flora or fauna. There's no way in hell that it has biomes as varied as earth.
Some Sci-Fi planet types are reasonable.
The Kepler program found a lot of exoplanets and has categorized them generally as Hot Jupiters, Cold Gas Giants, Ocean Worlds & Ice Giants, Rocky Planets and Lava Worlds.

If you ignore the gas giants because there's no surface to land on, rocky planets (and maybe desert planets) would be extremely common. Water or ice planets would also be incredibly common. And, if you're really unlucky, you might end up on a lava planet -- one that's small and very close to its sun.
What wouldn't be common are things like an entire planet that's a swamp, or an entire planet that's a forest of Earth-style trees. I'm sure it's entirely possible that on some planet there's a life-form that becomes the dominant form and that looks vaguely like Earth-style trees, but not the kind you see on a typical SciFi show filmed near Vancouver.
If you ignore the gas giants because there’s no surface to land on
Hey now. You can land on the surface of Jupiter if you're dense enough.

I imagine No Man's Sky is doing this specifically to reference the trope as was originally commonly portrayed in e.g. Flash Gordon serials and various golden age comics. Similar to Starbound, this also has an intentional gameplay implication in that it forces you to leave the planet and find another one with the biome appropriate for whatever resource it is you need. Otherwise you could park your butt on one planet and never have any compelling reason to go anywhere else which really rather defeats the intent of the game.
As far as other works of fiction go, though, yes. It's just lazy.
No man’s sky also did it because of lazy. People may have forgotten, but that game released as pure hot garbage and only got better after tons of updates.
My favorite is how there is only ever one city and like 10,000 people on any planet.
Oh he went to this planet? Well, lets just go to the market, he's bound to turn up at some point.
And how there's usually a single culture on each planet.
Honestly i think it's quite possible that earth actually is rare on that regard. Most planets are majorly more uniform than earth. Conditions have to be juuuuuust right for a single planet to have water that exists in all 3 forms at the same time on different areas of the planet. That fact alone creates 4 of the 6 boxes.
Also there have been eras in earths history where it was basically like one of two environments. Like before the continents emerged from the oceans properly, or the several snowball earths, or the multiple times a super continent formed and created swamp land and desert land because of the fucken Appalachian mountains.
Water doesn't have to be the thing that brings variation. Titan has a methane "hydrology" with clouds, rivers, valleys, and beaches whose sand is made of ice. On Triton, ammonia cryovulcanism powered by tidal forces from Neptune create plains with ammonnia snowfall, ice mountain ranges, and underground lakes. On Miranda, the planet is ice, but there are massive terrain differences from 10 km cliffs to flatlands. Io has a massive variety of volcanic planes with color differences visible from space because of their entirely different chemical compositions. The turbulent atmosphere of Jupiter is streaks of water vapor clouds, upwellings from deep beneath the surface, cyclones and massive pressure drops that dent the atmosphere inward by kilometers, with ionosphere above and gas as dense as water below. Even an atmosphere-less grey rock like Mercury has basalt plains, craters, ridges, highlands and dust plains.
In No Man's Sky, many planets have life, which requires complex chemistry being possible at the temperatures the planet has using the chemicals that are available on that planet. This then naturally creates temperatures that are "too cold" for that life and "too warm" for that life, and complex adaptations made by that life to take resources from places that get "too cold" or "too warm" with less risk of predation or competition. Similar adaptation is possible to other extremes/variations, such as "submerged", "on land", "flying", "too dry", "too few nutrients", "too acidic", "too basic", "too steep", "cave", etc. And thus we get complex biospheres that vary across the planet.
A lot of stargates seem suspiciously located in abandoned quarries in the Pacific northwest
California, such diverse film locales

Don't forget that if the planet is inhabited, it has only has one civilization that is mono-ethnic and mono-cultural. Star Trek is the most prominent offender example of this. Still a good series though.
Imagine how jank that game would have been on release if they tried varied procedurally generated biomes hahaha.
Laughing in Metroidvania.
"This is all one castle."
To say otherwise would be to admit your story has no need for aliens.
Oh man, in general, people be raving about aliens, but never give two looks to the ants in their garden. Or you know, the entirety of Australia. Or the deep sea. We have so much life that's alien buzzing around us. Hell, we even have the Scottish – humanoids that speak an entirely cryptic language. It's so much more compelling story-telling, too, if they don't arrive here in a spaceship, but rather have been living among us all this time.
Earth is not your average planet. We've been looking for YEARS for goldilocks planets.
If anything, all those single-biome planets aren't extreme enough.
Whereas Horizon Forbidden West packs all of these into a patch of North America a few miles across (except that the cities are abandoned). The DLC adds a volcanic section.
Edit: the end-credits is a fly-through of much of it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVjufECOeHk
Is it the Pacific Northwest? Everything in OP's pic is within driving distance.
I would love it if something like star trek would address this. Even a handwavey "this region is the only area with humanoid life" would be good enough for me
Nature is just so insanely beautifull that its hard to come up with something even nicer without seeing it. I actually think that if theres life on other planets then earth is among the more beautiful ones because it is subjectively beautiful to us. Yes mountains and rainforests are beautiful, siberia and the chinese planes, but so is the sahara and especially the places we come from. Im from hungary, one of the more boring parts of europe based on nature if you actually look at it objectively but every time i go back i feel a connection to it. Think this is one of the reasons scifi doesnt work for me. The real cultures and nature and everything else we have on this beautiful planet is more than enough for me and nothing pains my heart more than when these places and peoples are distroyed and restricted. When i watch scifi, its kind of an escapism for me to see those very motifs that make us special but in a better light. But yeah i think we struggle to create something more beautiful than what we are basically coded to find as the most beautiful.
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