Lifeforms give each of your planets a race — a population of living beings that grows over time and powers your Civilization: empire-wide Civilization Structures raised by spending population, and account-wide technologies gated on how large each race's population has ever grown. Every planet starts as Human; the three alien races are discovered through expeditions and can then be settled on any planet. Lifeforms are a long-term progression layer on top of your normal economy and fleet — they never replace mines or ships, they amplify them.
Open the Lifeforms page from the left menu. The resource bar also shows your current planet's Population and Food next to the other resources.
The four races
Each race specialises in a different domain, so there is no single "best" race — pick per planet:
| Race | Theme | Signature |
|---|---|---|
| Humans | Research, energy, population protection | Planetary Shield, Research Campus |
| Rock'tal | Raw metal / crystal / deuterium production | Magma Forge, Citadel |
| Mechas | Shipyard speed, fleet logistics, fastest growth | Automatised Assembly, Foundry |
| Kaelesh | Expeditions, planet fields, moon chance | Bio Modifier, Trade Nexus |
Population & food — the core loop
Population is the currency of the Lifeforms game — and since the Civilization update it is a real currency: raising a Civilization Structure consumes population from that race's empire-wide pool. Your people regrow on their own; your job is to keep the engine running.
- Housing (e.g. Residential Sector) sets your living space — the population cap. Population grows toward this cap on its own.
- Farms (e.g. Biosphere Farm) produce food. Population only grows while food production covers what your people eat.
- ⚠️ Housing and farms occupy planet fields — 1 field per level, like any normal building. Dedicating a planet to population is now a genuine choice against mines and solar plants; roomy colonies make the best population worlds.
- Growth is slow and time-based — it is not sped up by the server's economy speed. Population is the one thing resources and Dark Matter can't rush; you grow it by keeping housing and farms ahead of your population and waiting.
If food runs short, you get a soft famine: population gently shrinks toward the level your farms can feed. Nothing is destroyed, research in progress finishes, and only buildings whose population requirement is no longer met become unbuildable. Fix it by adding farm levels — there is no death spiral to panic about.
Rule of thumb: keep your farm level a little ahead of your housing so food production always beats consumption. Housing raises the ceiling; farms let you actually reach it.
Food is a real resource — it flies, it burns, it can be stolen
Population never leaves its planet, but food is a genuine cargo resource:
- Transport it. Food appears on the fleet screen like metal or deuterium — haul it from a farm world to a hungry one to break a famine, or to keep a Bio-Fuel planet fed. Delivered food is durable: stock above the planet's own food storage cap is kept and simply drains over time (your farms just won't add to it while above cap).
- It can be plundered. A successful raid on a lifeform planet can carry food away — but only in cargo space left over after the regular metal/crystal/deuterium loot. Your minerals are never displaced by food; a dedicated food raid needs dedicated cargo space.
- Burn it for energy. The Human Bio-Fuel Converter is a metered power plant: each level generates energy while draining 500 food per hour. If the planet's food stock hits zero, the converter's energy stops until food returns — keep the farms (or the food freighters) running.
- Spy reports show it. A sufficiently deep espionage scan reveals the target's race, population and food alongside the classic sections.
Energy upkeep — power your bonuses
A race's signature-tier buildings and structures draw 1,000 energy per level and its capstone structure draws 5,000 energy per level, around the clock, on every planet settled with that race — your civilization's works draw power where its people live. Housing, farms and tech halls are free. A fully developed lifeform planet is a real power consumer — plan solar/fusion (or a Bio-Fuel Converter on Human worlds) accordingly, because negative energy throttles your mines exactly like overbuilt regular facilities do.
Discovering the alien races
Rock'tal, Mecha and Kaelesh are unlocked account-wide, in that fixed order. Two ways to discover the next one:
- Expeditions — a rare lifeform signal outcome discovers the next race. Both the signal chance and a hidden pity counter scale with the value of the fleet you send: real expedition fleets close in on a guaranteed find, while probe spam barely moves the needle.
- Dark Matter — impatient? Buy the next undiscovered race outright from the Lifeforms page (the price is shown on the button).
Once discovered, a race stays unlocked forever and can be settled on any of your planets.
Settling a race on a planet
On the Lifeforms page, pick a discovered race and press Settle to change the current planet's race. Notes:
- Switching a planet's race resets its population to zero (it regrows under the new race), and starts a 48-hour cooldown before you can switch that planet again — no Dark Matter shortcut.
- Your building levels are preserved per race. Switch away from Rock'tal and back later and your Rock'tal buildings are exactly as you left them.
Because switching wipes population, don't hop races casually. Decide each planet's identity and grow into it. A common plan: keep your homeworld Human, and settle mining or fleet worlds on the matching race.
Planet buildings — the population engine
The buildings that grow your people live on each planet and use your normal building queue (same 20-deep queue, same instant low levels). Their resource cost is trivial; their footprint is fields (housing and farms) and their output is population.
- Housing + Farm — living space and food (build these first; each level takes a planet field).
- Tech Hall — unlocks that race's technology tree and speeds up lifeform research and Civilization Structure construction. Needs some housing and farm levels first; takes no fields.
- Growth boosters (Skyscraper, Production Assembly Hall, Chrysalis Accelerator) — extra living space and faster growth, unlocking at planet population thresholds.
- The Human Bio-Fuel Converter — the food-burning power plant (see above).
Civilization Structures — spend your people, empire-wide power
Each race's great works — its production forges, defensive citadels and trade nexuses — are no longer built planet by planet. They are Civilization Structures: raised once for your whole account on the Lifeforms page's Civilization tab, and their bonuses apply to every planet you own.
- One structure builds at a time, account-wide, in real time — queue a level, come back later. Cancelling refunds everything.
- Each level consumes population of the structure's race, drawn proportionally from every planet where that race lives. Monuments are built from people — and every level costs more people than the last, so deep ladders need several dedicated population worlds regrowing between builds.
- There is no level cap. The ever-steeper population price is the only ceiling — a civilization that keeps growing keeps building.
- Structures draw energy upkeep on planets settled with their race, so a thriving civilization is a real power consumer.
The twelve structures:
- Rock'tal — Magma Forge / Crystal Refinery / Deuterium Synthesiser (+% metal, crystal, deuterium production on every planet) and the Citadel (faster defence repair + auto-recovers part of battle debris over your planets).
- Mecha — High-Performance Transformer (+% energy), Automatised Assembly Centre (−% ship & defence build time) and the Foundry (returns part of your ships destroyed on defence to the repairable wreck field).
- Human — Planetary Shield (protects population in attacks) and the Research Campus (−% research time; at level 20 opens a second parallel research slot).
- Kaelesh — Bio Modifier (+2 planet fields per level on every planet — the empire terraforming ladder), Psionic Modulator (cuts the population cost of all structures) and the Trade Nexus (cuts Import/Export prices and marketplace fees, boosts moon chance from battles; at level 20 grants +1 expedition slot).
Your class matters: structures of your class's affine race (Rock'tal ↔ Collector, Mecha ↔ General, Kaelesh ↔ Discoverer) are +10% stronger per level; Human structures give everyone +5%.
Technologies
Lifeform technologies are researched once, at account level — never per planet. They sit in four trees (one per race) of three tiers, and are researched one at a time in a dedicated lifeform research slot (independent of your classic research).
Each tier unlocks on the highest empire-wide population that race has ever reached:
| Tier | Requires (the race's peak total population, across all your planets) |
|---|---|
| Tier 1 | 1 million |
| Tier 2 | 25 million |
| Tier 3 | 150 million |
The gate is a ratchet: it reads your peak, so spending population on Civilization Structures — or a famine dip — never suspends technologies you have already earned. Grow a race past a gate once and its tiers are yours for good. Deeper technologies still reward genuinely committing a slice of your empire to a race, not just dabbling.
Technology families include mine production, ship Mk II / General Overhaul upgrades (which boost all five stats of a specific hull — including the capital tier: Tempest Mk II, Leviathan Mk II, General Overhaul: Juggernaut and General Overhaul: Reaper sit in the tier-3 trees), expedition finds, fleet fuel, phalanx range and more — every family is capped (individually and as a family aggregate, server default 40% per family), so stacking four races' techs never runs away.
Working with your character class
Lifeforms and your Academy class reinforce each other:
- Affinity kicker — Civilization Structures of your class's affine race (Rock'tal ↔ Collector, Mecha ↔ General, Kaelesh ↔ Discoverer) are +10% stronger per level, Human structures +5% for everyone; the same kicker applies to a planet's own race buildings (like the tech hall) when its race matches your class.
- Class-enhancer technologies — each race's tier-3 tree has an enhancement tech that amplifies your matching class's own bonuses (up to +30%). Reachable only by actually growing that race to the tier-3 population gate.
Lifeforms in combat
A battle that destroys a defender's units on a settled lifeform planet also costs that planet some population (proportional to how much of its defence was wiped out). The Human Planetary Shield building mitigates most of this loss (up to 80%). Population loss is deliberately mild — it is never the main reason to raid a planet — and never drops below a small seed, so a settled planet always recovers.
Getting started (a practical path)
- Pick one or two roomy colonies as your first population worlds — housing and farms take fields, and colonies have far more free fields than a built-up homeworld.
- Build Housing + Farm there and let population climb; add the race's tech hall and start Tier-1 technologies.
- Run expeditions to discover the alien races, then settle each population world with the race whose structures you want — Rock'tal for mining power (a Collector's best friend), Kaelesh for expeditions and fields.
- Open the Civilization tab and start raising structures as soon as a race's pool covers the next level — the queue runs while your people regrow.
- Keep food ahead of population everywhere, and push one race's population toward 1M → 25M → 150M to open its deeper technology tiers (a peak, once reached, is kept forever).
Tips
- Population growth is a marathon — check in, top up housing and farms, queue a structure, and come back. There's nothing to babysit hour-to-hour.
- The bonus sheet at the bottom of the Lifeforms page lists every active lifeform bonus and its source, so you can always see what you're getting.
- Kaelesh's Bio Modifier structure adds fields to every planet you own, permanently — the long-term answer when your homeworld runs out of building space.
- Don't switch a planet's race on a whim: it wipes that planet's population and starts a 48-hour cooldown. (Your structures and technology peaks are safe — they never un-build.)