Spice

Spice is the primary commodity of the Spore Universe. It is used for power, building, consumption, and occasionally as a floor polish or sleep aid. There are many different types of spice which vary in rarity and price. Spice can be collected from your own mining colonies, stolen, or bought from other empires for Sporebucks. The spice is then sold on for a higher price and, depending on play style, is one of the primary sources of income for a player.

Note: On this page, costs in italics have not yet been verified in-game, but are instead calculated based on what is known about Spore's "economy". These values should not be off by more than a sporebuck or two, but please correct or de-italicize any you can verify.

Spice Types
There are 6 different colors of spice available in the space stage:


 * Red spice is described as "rare," when in fact it is the most common form in the game.

Planet Types
Each planet produces one color of spice. According to the strategy guide, the color of spice that it produces is determined by the color of its star and the temperature of it's planets' surface (indicated by the color of their orbit trail). Moons need not match the spice color of their parent planet.

Sometimes extremely rare white spice can be found on gas giants with alien colonies. This is a glitch resulting from the rules which Spore uses to determine spice colors.

Note: Your homeworld orbits a yellow star, but it typically produces red spice. (Occasionally, it is yellow Spice, instead.)

Selling Spice
When you first make contact with an alien colony, a price will be presented to you that will remain the same so long as you don't visit any other foreign colony (visiting your own colonies is fine). However, depending on your spice production and the speed at which you can produce each variety of spice you may want to reset on occasion to sell more expensive spice. For instance, red spice may be your primary source of income (selling for as much as 1.2 million sporebucks per 99). But if you have more than six colonies producing other spices as feverishly you could sell as much as 2.4 mil per. Also, it is important to note selling to your own colonies will not affect the asking price of alien colonies. A colony never wants to purchase the color of spice it produces and will only pay a tiny fraction of its value. Additionally, two other colors are chosen at random and also purchased at minimum price. Of the three colors that remain, each is randomly assigned a price between one and five times the "buy price" of that color, as per the charts below. Finally, the Normal and Hard difficulty levels have their prices reduced by 20%.

Other than colonies never wanting the same color of spice they produce, there does not appear to be any weighting to the randomization. That is, all spice colors seem to be equally likely to be wanted and all potential prices seem equally likely. Early in the game, If you have a system which contains both a colony paying premium prices for a particular color and another which produces it, you can keep flying back and forth indefinitely with less time wasted on zooming in and out. (Though this ceases to be a good use of your time once you have a large enough empire.)

Gaining Spice
There are a number of ways to obtain spice. Your ship's cargo hold can contain up to 99 units of each color at a given time, after which no more will be picked up.

Friendly colonized planets can produce spice that the player can purchase from shopping or trade routes. The places where spice is produced often offer the spice for a low price; you can sometimes re-sell the spice to nearby systems for much more. Trading spice is a nice way to start making your first Sporebucks fast. (Highly recommended for all empires to grow and prosper)

Setting up trade routes with neighboring empires is a good way to get a variety of spice that may otherwise be hard to obtain. Trade is collected when visiting your endpoint of the trade route (typically the closest planet in your empire, but not always.).

Once you have cash to spare to place colonies, terraform, and build factories, your empire can begin its own spice mining operations. The amount of spice storage space available depends on the number of colonies on the planet. Each colony can hold 5 units; however, placing a Spice Storage doubles the amount each colony can hold. Except for the Homeworld of each empire, each planet can hold up to a maximum of 3 colonies (one per T-Score level). The amount of spice generated is rated in each colony per-hour, based upon the number of factories and the links between factories and housing. For example, a planet with three colonies, each listing a production of 120 spice per hour, will generate approximately 6 units of spice per minute. For a fully equipped colony planet (with maximum colonies and a Spice Storage device) this equates to reaching maximum capacity in 5 minutes.

There are methods for acquiring colonies that have a spice storage capacity of greater than 30 in a star system. There are two common methods, depending upon your species' philosophy. The start of this is the same for both. First, raise the planet you want to a T-Score of 3. Next, place a monolith on the planet to uplift one of the species on that planet to be a spacefaring species. (Note: It is significantly faster to uplift a planet that already has a sentient species, but you don't have to.) Once the species is spacefaring, there are two methods of acquiring the planet for your own empire. For Trader species, the most common method of obtaining the colony for your own is to establish a Trade Route and then use the Cash Infusion ability to enable you to buy their star system immediately. For all other species, it is usually quicker to simply militarily take over their planet. (Note: It is advisable to save before attempting to take over their planet militarily, as an accidental overuse of force can destroy a colony, which will then lower your spice storage capacity after you have taken over the entire system.) Done properly, this can result in a spice storage capacity of 100!

Visiting your colony in the solar system view will automatically pick up the spice waiting for you, if there is no current crisis (pirates raiding, enemy empire crashing the party, etc). While you are in orbit or in the atmosphere, spice will continue to be refined. You can collect it by leaving the planet or system, and then re-entering orbit; opening communications and 'purchasing' it (for free! There's no charge for this service) through the trade option; or, alternatively, you can practice your pirating skills by hovering over a colony and 'abducting' the crate.

If you don't particularly care what your neighboring empires think of you (not a good idea), steal spice from them by hovering over their colony and using your Abduction Beam on their spice crates and fly away. Stealing from a space stage empire will give you negative Relation Bonus.Stealing from a pre-space or non-spice collecting (cell, creature, tribe) civilization doesn't. Stealing 50 crates in any number of games grants you the Thief Achievement.

Pirate Attacks
Occasionally Pirates will try and loot spice on one of your colonies, with as few as three squadrons. When this happens, you cannot automatically pick up spice, or "buy" the spice in the trade menu. However, while on the planet you can 'abduct' the spice and therefore stop the pirate raid (pirates cannot loot the spice if it is not on the planet). In some instances, as is the case with the tribe stage and raided food, addressing a more pressing issue may be worth more than the price of the spice lost. Interestingly enough, fully upgrading a colonies defenses (especially Uber Turret) will entirely prevent pirates from plundering, but not from attacking (it takes a couple of seconds for the Uber Turret to kill them). This may convert some of the "Spice plundering" missions into full-fledged attacks by the pirates with two or three more attack squadrons.

Don't bother even responding to these spice calls, they only take 1 spice unit, which (at max) is refilled in 2 minutes, and that would probably be less than you going there, finishing them off and coming back.

How to Farm Spice

 * First of all, the player must have the Monolith tool, all Terraforming tools, the Wildlife Sanctuary, and the Spice Storage colonizing tool, beforehand.
 * The player must find planets with valuable Spice and terraform them to T3, and use the Monolith to promote the inhabiting race to space as quickly as possible.
 * Then, the player must buy the solar systems. The Homeworlds will have between 6-10 colonies and, with spice storage, can produce 60-100 spice, sometimes maximizing production in less than ten minutes.
 * If the player contacts their new colony before landing on the planet and witnessing the huge number of colonies, the game will automatically reduce the number of colonies to 3, so It is better to be on the planet when you buy the solar system.
 * Then, the player should terraform another planet to T3 and make it a zoo planet, so that you can store an unlimited quantity of Spice in it without it disappearing. Placing spice crates on a zoo planet (created with the wildlife sanctuary tool) will cause them to stay there and not disapear as they would if placed on a colony.

Alternative method

 * Purchase These Items


 * 1) Colony Incredi-pack x3 at 75,000 each (from Shaman)
 * 2) Spice Storage: 250,000 (from Bard)
 * 3) Uber Turret: 375,000   (from Warrior or Knight)
 * 4) Bio Protector: 150,000 (from Shaman or Ecologist)
 * 5) Bio Stabilizer: 150,000 (from Shaman or Ecologist)
 * After Terraforming the planet to T-3 place all Colony tools on the the planet, then maximize each colony with the layout shown here, and place all 8 turrets
 * The Total cost all said and done if tools are purchased from the cheapest vendors is 2,225,200 Sporebucks
 * Storage: 30 spice
 * Output per colony: 132 per hour
 * Total Output: 396 spice per hour (fills up in 4.6 min)
 * Total Happiness: +6 (+2 per colony)

If done with green spice sold at an average rate, it will pay for itself in 14.4 minutes (just over 3 sales of 30 spice) Purple spice at max cost will pay for itself in one transaction of 30 spice. At the end of the day, if done with Green, Pink or Purple, although the initial cost is high, it shouldn't take you any more than 30-40 min. to pay it back and begin making profit. You need not visit the system to defend it from attacks (full turrets and Uber turret will wipe out anything), Eco Disasters are rare, but still a threat. No need for loyalty or happiness boosters since each colony has an implicit happines of +2.

Some find it to be more cost effective than than purchasing another homeworld you evolved for a 3 reasons
 * 1) Quicker to set up. You need not wait for the species to evolve or trade to progress
 * 2) Cheaper to set up. You need not spend 5-10 million sporebucks purchasing a system (a savings of 3-8 million sporebucks)
 * 3) Comparable production rate Homeworlds produce spice at a slower rate than colonies. So you won't see much difference between 3 Colonies and 10 Homeworld cities.

White Spice
There is a rare glitch where a Gas Giant, or of the two spiceless planets, has spice. The spice is white and has been reported by some players to be worth 100 000 sporebucks.

Reference
Spice may have been inspired by either the spice trade of human history, which involved the trade of edible spices, or Spice Melange, a rare but valuable resource and drug featured in Frank Herbert's Dune series.

Spice Amounts

 * You can calculate the number of cities on a planet by using the spice production amount.
 * Spice per city on regular planet: 5 Spice per city
 * Spice per city on planet with spice storage (one of your planets): 10 Spice per city


 * T0 Planets can have 1 city with no spice, with the exception of Grox colonies.
 * T1 Planets can have 1 city with up to 5 Spice
 * T2 Planets can have up to 2 cities with up to 10 Spice
 * T3 Planets can have up to 3 cities with up to 15 Spice
 * Homeworlds Bought by Trade route can have up to 10 cities with up to 50 Spice
 * Homeworlds bought by trade with all cities intact, with the spice storage, can have up to 100 spice.
 * Your homeworld can have 10 cities and 50 Spice well. However, for some reason, the cities only produce up to 5 spice at a time, unlike a T1 colony which can produce as much as 60 spice for its city.
 * Spice Storage doubles the spice storage on your planet.
 * Your Space Ship Cargo will only allow you to hold 99 of any Spice at one time.


 * On easy mode, if you sell 99 of all 6 types of spice at maximum Price, you will get 24,300,648 Sporebucks. On Normal or Hard difficulty, you will get 19,437,561 Sporebucks.

Especia