Ha! Jokes on the captors, I'm striving on this planet. It's now mine! My planet, my rules. With that out of the way, just make sure you place down your tree spreaders a good distance away from your base or you'll have trees going through and it'll block you out of certain areas of your own base. (Be warned though: trees growing from the spreaders will grow passed the given ring that you can visibly see before putting down the object. I'm not sure if this was intentional or not.)

For everybody that is just now starting, yes the planet does look barren. What did you expect, a vacation? No, my friends, that comes after you've completed the planet's life cycle to the fullest. I will give you all another heads up: insect stage is slow, but the fish stage is even slower. (Could be due to the stage isn't ready and we're lacking more items to help boost up the numbers for the stages, or you could just spend about a whole day in real life spamming rockets to get those numbers up to a decent amount to make the insect/fish stage go faster. To put it into perspective, I'm in the 'TTi' stage of the game.)

Small hint: Don't be afraid to salvage your lower objects for higher ones. You get resources back to help craft the next level of heaters, spreaders etc. The game is still basically in the early beta access version of the game, but we do get a tad bit more items to use. It's not much, but it's nice to see something new in the game.

Good luck to you all, and I hope you'll have a fun time terraforming the planet.