The Biomes of Galatea 37

The biomes you travel and defend across: the four base-game zones, the DLC and World Expansion additions, their hazards, and the outposts that tie them together.

Galatea 37 is built from distinct biomes, and each one looks different and treats you differently. A biome applies its own environmental effects to Mr. Riggs, your base, and the creatures that attack it: heat, acid, radiation, cold. In Survival and Sandbox each biome is a separate map, procedurally generated from biome-specific tiles, so no two layouts are identical. In Campaign you travel between biomes by rift jump to complete resource missions, hopping from the starting Tropical Zone out to whichever biome holds the resource you need next. The practical effect is that the planet is less a single world to clear and more a set of hostile rooms, each demanding the right shielding before you can work there comfortably.

The base-game biomes

The four original biomes escalate in threat roughly in the order you meet them, from the moderate jungle start to the aggressive volcanic late game.

In-game name	Biome	Character
Tropical Zone	Jungle	Starting biome. Moderate threats, basic Carbonium and Ironium. The Headquarters mission begins here.
Radioactive Desert	Desert	Hot and open. Sand-burrowing aliens attack from underground. Radiation hazard. Home of the Stregaros Nest.
Acidic Plains	Acid	Corrosive. Acid pools and acid rain damage structures and the mech without acid shielding.
Volcanic Area	Magma	Extreme heat, lava, the most aggressive species. Erupting debris, earthquakes, ash storms. Source of magma energy.

The DLC and World Expansion biomes

The paid Metal Terror DLC and the free World Expansion updates added new biomes on top of the base four. The Cryo Fields, the newest, is the current difficulty frontier.

In-game name	Biome	Source	Resource
Metallic Valley	Metal	Metal Terror (July 2022), new Survival or Sandbox biome plus a paid Campaign chapter	Morphium
Crystal Caverns	Caverns	Later World Expansion content	(see note)
Fungal Forest or Fungal Swamp	Swamp	Later World Expansion content	(see note)
Cryo Fields	Frozen	World Expansion IV (March 2026)	Supercoolant, plus large Palladium deposits

The exact World Expansion (I through III) that each intermediate biome shipped in, and the precise resource ties for the Caverns and Swamp biomes, were not fully captured in the research. Verify the complete update-to-biome mapping on the wiki before treating any of it as definitive. The Cryo Fields on Brutal difficulty is called out as unforgiving.

How biomes hurt you

Each biome carries hazards that damage the mech and the base unless you have researched the matching protection. The hazards are not background flavor; they are a hard requirement to plan around.

Acid rain and acid pools in the Acid biome corrode structures and the mech, negated by acid environmental shielding.
Radiation in the Radioactive Desert is negated by radiation shielding.
Heat in the Volcanic Area is negated by heat or thermal shielding.
Meteor storms drop multiple meteors that each do small damage, and the shower tracks the mech, so you can lead it away from your base by moving.
Volcanic events add erupting debris showers, earthquakes, and ash storms.

Environmental Shielding is an Alien Research line that coats all base structures in a reflective protective layer, with variants for Acid, Sun, Radiation, and Heat. Researching the right shielding before you enter a hostile biome is the difference between operating there and watching your base dissolve.

Outposts: tying the biomes together

You do not relocate your whole base into each biome. Outposts are remote bases you build during planetary missions: they ship resources from remote deposits back to your main base through rift technology, and they let the mech reconstruct and respawn at that location. They are the practical tool for the rare-resource mission lines. Set up an outpost on a remote deposit, mine it, and pipe the resource home.

Because remote bases keep existing while you are away, you are not forced to babysit them constantly. An attack wave can target a remote base, but it does not actually trigger until you rift-travel to that location, so the risk is a wave waiting for you on arrival rather than a base lost in your absence.

Where to go, and in what order

In Campaign the biome order follows the resource missions rather than a fixed map route. The starting Tropical Zone gives you Carbonium and Ironium and a gentle place to learn. From there the rare-resource and -nite missions push you into the harsher biomes, each gated less by distance than by whether you have the shielding to survive it. The general arc runs from the jungle start, through the desert and acid plains, into the volcanic late game, and out to the DLC and expansion biomes, with the Cryo Fields as the hardest current destination.