Board Thread:Fiction Universe Discussion/@comment-5080468-20160505144206/@comment-47205-20160505153711

It has been mentioned, but it's never been of vital importance or greatly elaborated on; an in-universe justification may be that it's made of fairly simple compounds that can easily be synthesised with 29th-century tech, so while it's still useful there isn't quite the same level of dedicated spice-mining and -processing industry that we see in Spore. I also remember introducing the idea that spice is the organic waste products of subterranean silicon-based microbes which were spread throughout the universe by panspermia, but I don't know if this is still written down anywhere.