Looking at you, No Man's Sky

Stargate: every planet is either desert or Canada.

I mean we have deserts in Canada too.

It's an ice planet!

Carter, after exiting the second gate on Earth

Yeah but they’re cold and boring. Doesn’t make great tv.

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

Prairie deserts, they exist in every climate.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SingleBiomePlanet

Not a desert but Vancouver is perfect for the screen!
https://youtu.be/ojm74VGsZBU (Every Frame A Painting - Vancouver Never Plays Itself)

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.

But the planets in our solar system, except Earth, have not a lot of different biomes. To me this is one of the proofs leaning toward the simulation theory. Why make different biomes if your players and NPCs are only on one planet?

Always one of my favorite parts of that episode.

You can see a decent bit depending on terrain in most places, more if the terrain is higher than surrounding areas, but she pops out of a crack, looks around and sees ice for a few hundred yards, and gives up.

In fairness, without direction, some form of marker, or obvious landmark, wandering around in a blizzard would have been death for both of them... Not that they would have been able to walk to civilization even if they DIDN'T have injuries...

Still though, they've experienced varied terrain in plenty of planets, so assuming the whole planet is ice is something Sam would have corrected someone else on in a heartbeat. (and also made the argument that for all intents and purposes, for them it may as well be a whole planet)

I wonder how much better we could have had it if the location budget were like 4x what they had. Eventually you start to recognize specific rocks in the quarry... My wife likes to call one rock Terry because it has two vaguely eye-shaped holes, and "because it's terrible how often they use that place"

That's probably more realistic. Most planets are just barren rocks that are too hot or too cold, aren't they?

One way this could work is having biomes so far apart that it's more resource efficient to hyperdrive to another planet than traveling all the way.

Outside of that, it probably wouldn't change No Man's Sky much if a planet's poles were colder and had mildly different features

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.

They do. You have to go to different planet types to find materials from the different star types in order to have better warp drives.

My psyche doesn't like this.

To get real pedantic, the planets in the solar system besides Earth don't have any biomes because they don't have any life as far as we know.

I wonder if a single-biome planet with life would actually be more likely to produce predators that could threaten a human visitor. Like, would Wampas actually be more likely to evolve on a fully frozen planet like Hoth than a planet with some temperate climates that creep into their niche occasionally over the eons? Sci fi loves when dangerous native fauna threatens an advanced human visitor.

Dr Who: Every planet is a disused quarry.