TerraGenesis - Space Settlers Wiki

I rarely write reviews, but this game was so well-designed and enthralling that I felt that I had to do so. The graphics are stunningly beautiful and this game has consumed my attention since I downloaded it. It gives you the option to watch advertisements to gain currency, culture, and “Genesis Points,” which allow you to build faster, but offers the option in a very inobtrusive way, unlike so many games with obnoxious ads. I watch them occasionally to speed things along and support the developers. I also purchased Genesis Points because I love this game so much I felt obliged to pay something. At this rate, I’ll likely purchase the options to terraform other planets and moons as well. This is a game that is truly enjoyable without spending a cent or watching a single ad, though, and that can be won simply with some patience— which you’ll need anyway! I love the educational aspect and basis in science, and with just the most basic math and science abilities, you’ll enjoy this game as well. I’m looking forward to the next planets and moons already. I also loved the book recommendations in the information section! The developers clearly prioritized the quality of the game and educational aspect over making a quick profit. I hope others purchase the optional moons, planets, and GP so the team can keep working on this game and more like it. This is the best I’ve played on iOS to date.

I’ve been playing this game on and off for two years and it never gets old, and there are plenty of world to play with. If you’re playing with a simple developing biosphere you can terraform a moon/planet in 4-5 days without spending any real money for in-game boosts (called Genesis Points or GP), 2-3 of you do buy these boosts. If you play with a biosphere you can fine tune it’s definitely more of a challenge and terraforming this way might take you 4-5 days with boosts, a week or a little longer without. WATCHING ADS IS COMPLETELY OPTIONAL, YOU WILL NEVER BE FORCED TO WATCH AN AD 🙌🏻 (putting that in all-caps because ad trap games are everywhere these days) but watching the offered ads gives you bonuses to your income and even 1-3 GP sometimes. Watch enough ads and you could have income bonuses for days (literally). Random positive and negative events that can affect your income, structures, organisms, or culture keep you on your toes if you leave the game open, but you don’t have to worry about bad events happening while the game is closed and the terraforming continues when closed, so this game is great for people who don’t want to have to play all the time to succeed. The game can also be paused so you don’t have to worry about letting things go for too long and accidentally destroying your progress. Graphics are pretty and the game runs smoothly. Definitely earned my 5 star rating!

I didn't want to like this game, because I've never really been into terraforming or sci-fi games. Terragenesis is an exception to that, and with good reason. This game offers the challenge of having to balance environmental, socio-political, and economic challenges in a way that really makes it come to life. The attention to detail does stand out, with how different levels of Temperature, Pressure, Oxygen, and other things will change the appearance of your planet. The best thing about this game is easily watching your planet change. Watching as the structures and cities you build and all the facilities can change a barren planet like Mars slowly change into a beautiful, thriving planet like Earth, or even watching as Earth slowly decays from a tropical paradise to another copy of Mars. Whats more is the developers aren't greedy with in-game purchases. The difficulty curves can be overcome without the help of Genesis Points (though it is not preferable,) the developers offer frequent ads that in turn boost credit revenue or give the player free Genesis points (Pretty rare for devs to hand out special currency like that) and the ads aren't very intrisive either. The game doesn't require an internet connection so it can be played on the go, the game will continue to change, so if you are playing a volatile world remember to pause when needed, and start on Mars, the easiest planet.

I’ve played this game for years off an on and I’ve always loved it. I still do. A while back I had to get rid of it to free up some space and just recently came back to it. I have to say, I’m very disappointed that they’ve added a “forced tutorial”, ie, one that can’t be exited early or avoided altogether. I do appreciate them adding a bit of guidance for new players, but there needs to be an option to skip the tutorial. I have played the game before and don’t need a guide dragging me around and forcing me to do things. It doesn’t help that you can’t cancel actions except by exiting the game and fully closing out of it. With no way to be precise—especially when choosing where to put your cities—it’s really obnoxious to have to close and reopen the game to reselect where you want your first city. That’s to say nothing of not being able to pick where to put your first mine. The game is great, but it still needs a few tweaks, such as being able to skip the tutorial, and maybe arrows that you can tap to be more precise in location selection (these already exist in the mining interface). Some planets have very little “safe” area to build on—so they aren’t destroyed as the water level rises—so precision is pretty important. Otherwise, it really is an excellent game that I have had and will continue to have loads of fun playing.

I really was enjoying this game a lot. I finished a few planets and then it was time to do earth. When I started earth it was already inhabited and everything was where it was supposed to be with oxygen, etc. I thought this strange. So I started doing research and mining. Went to bed. Got up next morning and my mines were lost to rising seas and all the inhabitants were gone. So I checked all the stats and everything was still perfect with oxygen,water, etc. Weird. So I built the thing that causes minus 4 water and built more mines. Next day it said they were lost to rising waters but that was impossible since the water had actually gone down a couple of hundred. So aggravating. So now I’ve been waiting for the population to build back up. My next culture point is at 4 billion so I’ll be waiting a while. Lol Was really enjoying this game until this happened. You have to be able to do math and figure out actions and counter actions. Taxes the brain. But when the game just erases things built and people for no apparent reason it’s frustrating. If you judge this game on the first few planets I played it is an amazing game. I was actually going to buy one of their packages but decided to wait after this earth catastrophe. If it goes back to normal I will probably wind up purchasing a package. It’s that good a game when it plays right

I love this game. I’ve been playing for a few months. I also love how doing things in the game can help the planet by planting trees. However, I have two suggestions. One is that you should be able to transfer credits back and forth between games. I’m currently in the process of terraforming two different planets, and one is really struggling economically while the other is doing great. It would be really nice if I could loan myself some money to build the space elevator, or even just to demolish existing depleted mines so I could build new ones and get myself out of the hole. My other suggestion is that you should be able to get new planets and moons to terraform without paying for them. I finished with all five terrestrial planets long ago and now I’m just stuck with them. I want to terraform the moons of other planets and planets in other solar systems. I want to terraform a planet with a native population detected, to see what it’s like. But no. I love this game but I as a rule do not make in-app purchases. Why bother making people pay for planets anyway? Maybe you can make them cost gp so people will pay for that but could also save up for it if they didn’t want to spend real money? Overall, though, it’s a great game. I really love how you just give out special currency for the price of watching an ad. Keep that up! And please consider my ideas!

Yes, this app is as cool as it sounds, if not cooler. While apps across the App Store get simpler, and frankly, more boring, TerraGenesis will bring life back to your game list. Literally! This app truly has the depth of a computer game, and it runs great. It is very realistic and everything generates very slowly and visually so that you can truly see your planet, whether it be in our solar system, on the moons of the gas giants, dwarf planets, or many many other options (at least thirdy, each with its own intense description, plus randomly generated planets). It is visually appealing, and very high quality. This being said, the game may not be for everybody. You have to have SOME kind of interest in Geology or Astronomy to truly fall head over heels for this app. It’s still a great building and idle app if you don’t, but you may not be as fanatical about it as me. Also, as I said, it is mostly an idle app. You can have the moon’s atmosphere pressurizing in your pocket, but while on the app there isn’t a WHOLE lot to do other than manage everything for about 10-20 minutes a couple times a day. You will not be on this app all day, but the app will be on all day. Keep this in mind. Overall, if you’re thinking “this looks pretty cool”, GET IT. Seriously. It is NOT pay to play, it’s not cheap, it’s not buggy, it’s not boring, but it is sexy. Do it.

Great game! I just want to point out that the way people talk about the moon, they don’t say “the moon”, they just say “moon”. For example, when I enter the game I see: “Your colonists on Moon have earned 50,000c!” It would be better for them to say: “Your colonists on THE Moon have earned 50,000c!” Obviously it wouldn’t be like that, it would say: “the Moon” not “THE Moon”. Another way you could do it is to name it “Luna” instead of Moon. It looks nicer either way. One unrelated thing I suggest is to get a notification if your planet is starting to reach inhospitable levels of something. It wouldn’t notify if you are already inhospitable and are going towards hospitable, only if you are hospitable and going to inhospitable levels of something. And also notify if you are at a perfect level of something and should balance the loss and growth so you don’t go towards inhospitable levels. Another one (sorry I just keep getting new ideas), please make it so you can link two devices progress. I only play it on my iPad, but I want to play it on my phone too, but it's separate. If you could make it so we can link two devices progress that would be great. And when I say "link", I mean if you do something on one device, it automatically puts it on the other device, once they are connected to the internet.

Hey, this is the single most epic game on the App Store right now! I love how technical this game gets. When you increase air pressure, the temperature goes up because of atmospheric thickening. Same thing happens when you thin the atmosphere, only the temperature goes down! I still only have the terrestrial planets + the moon, and I’m having a blast! There is so much to do in just the base game that you don’t need the expansions to enjoy the game to its utmost potential. I love the fact that natural disasters like quakes, meteors, and plagues happen. It makes the challenge that much more awesome. I think it would be amazing if you guys could make it so that you can set up trade routes between your planets to give a little boost to your economy or population growth. I also think that adding more disasters like occasional volcanic eruptions from the Martian volcanoes, violent dust storms, or even wildfires (when you actually have biomass). Maybe also sea trade routes is a good idea for cities along the coast line? That would be so awesome! I only have one bug to report. I went back to review Mars after I had moved on to Venus, and all of the plantlife had disappeared. 4.6 billion people had left the planet because all the biomass disappeared. It was very confusing. Other than that, I have no problems with the game! Keep up the good work!

I honestly don’t know where to start, it’s a great game and I love the idea of it. I like how you get to see the planet change as you add atmosphere or water, I have finished all the planets that don’t require money and I enjoyed the result of seeing the whole solar system terraformed, I like normal mode as you have to check your game often to increase revenue, i like how you have to balance everything. my overall recommend strategy is to go with the Gaians, and make the planet a paradise, fill it with cities, and fill the cities with coral reefs, coral reefs increase people, revenue, and biomass, so they are the best things in the game. Now for me often society collapses every 2k years or so, but starts back up right away If I had to add anything it would be more interactions with the people, like taxing them to increase revenue, and they could have like a happiness rate, if it’s to low they could destroy facilities, if it’s higher than facilities could cost less, this happiness rate could also have its toll on how many people move in and move out! You could do a lot with this idea so I’d like to throw it out there. I doubt it will be added as the game is focused more on the planet than the in game people. But still a suggestion nonetheless.

The title says it all. This game—which is based in real NASA science—allows you to colonize and terraform planets such as Mars, Mercury, Venus, and so on. While fun, this game definitely requires patience! Even the fastest levels generally take a few days. While only the inner solar system (Mercury, Venus, Earth, the Moon, and Mars) is available for free, that is still plenty of playable content, and the many more colonizable worlds are available for cheap prices—this isn’t the type of game that charges you 50 dollars for one level. Speaking of which, while in-app purchases do exist in this game—premium currency and such—they are definitely not needed. It is possible to complete the worlds without spending any money on in-game currency, not to mention that the game will basically donate the premium currency (known as Genesis Points) to you from time to time. That said, I have noticed a few small bugs—namely, city lights on Mars are sometimes blue for some reason, and if you change the language and an event pops up, any logs or history of that event will remain in that language, even if you switch the language again. Overall, however, this game is incredible, and the recent 5.0 update only made it better. Keep up the good work!

If you’re someone who really loves watching progress happen in simulation games, then this is probably one of the most satisfying games you’ll play. After working for days to set up Mars for sustainable human life, I saw greenery spreading for the first time. I was mesmerized, watching it start from the shorelines and spread inland. And then coming back later to see that as the greenery thickened, it grew darker as well was pleasing. My only downside is the time. This game requires you to be punctual if you don’t want to spend a lot of time undoing what you should have cams back for earlier to stabilize. I didn’t realize this in the beginning and turned Mars into a gas giant. It took so long to come back from that that it would have actually been better off to restart the game. Now I’m at the point where humans are living amongst Mars life freely, but I’ll be waiting a long time before I finally achieve victory because I put very few culture points into independence before. Now I just have to stabilize everything for the next few days while I wait for enough people to live on the planet before I can claim victory and am able to move on to other planets. All in all, it’s a great game. Just make sure you pay attention to when you need to log back in to change things, or it’s gonna become a never ending nightmare.

When I saw this game allowing players to use scientific reasoning to terraform planets, I downloaded immediately and spent a day carefully terraforming Mars. I am an environmental scientist who studies algae, so naturally I ate up all of the references to algae terraforming powers. Now that I am nearly done with Mars, I don’t feel as if there is anything more that I want to do. I wish this game was more complicated to make it replayable. Even starting with a vastly different planet, the strategy is basically the same. I hope that this game will add more features as it develops. I could see a PC version of this where you can see the cities grow and change with architecture styles and building choices, the genetically engineered animals and plants you unleash on the surface, etc. Some suggestions I have for new indexes are a happiness index increased with entertainment buildings, room in habitations, governor popularity, and whether they eat fruits and vegetables or just plain algae. Maybe plagues and starvation could decimate populations unless you have contingency plans in place. When oxygen rises, temperature should decrease. There could be volcanic eruptions. Maybe you can’t choose governors,but they are randomly elected once an out of game day. You should have the ability to set up natural parks. I just need more choices to make.

I had this app for a while, and then deleted it to save space because I wasn't using the game anymore. I recently came back to it, and have been playing a lot. I was working on terraforming both Mercury and the Moon almost simultaneously, and had just about finished Moon. All I needed was some more water, as sea levels were just barely above minimum for habitability, and population to get Culture Points to reach 100% independence. However, I came back today and was hit in total with the "time traveler" event a total of 5 times within several minutes. For those unaware of the nature of the event, it stems from cheating by changing the time on your device. However, I was not cheating in any way and have hardly even been on my phone today. I went from a near-perfectly terraformed Moon with an almost perfect ecosystem to a Moon with over 2,000,000 pressure and total mass extinction of all my 20+ species, not to mention other terribly affected statistics (surprisingly though, oxygen was only a little over 1,000 ppm away from perfect). To top it off, my credits went from around 50,000,000 to 100,000 in a matter of minutes. I understand that the point of this event is to prevent cheating, but by randomly activating without me cheating all it has accomplished is driving away me and my money I was once considering spending on more worlds than the basic three you start off with.