After Spore’s release, Maxis has stated many times that their Flora Editor would be included in a future patch – it was tucked away in the game hidden due to the many bugs but was still accessible (couldn’t do much with it).  A year later, and we still are waiting for them to release it.  Well, apparently Patch #5 must of included some minor coding for the editor, as one person on the Sporums was able to actually create a plant using the hidden editor.

Well, I was messing around with the flora editor this morning, and I decided to come up with a little guide to creating a plant and using it on a GA planet.

First of all, this may only apply to Spore after patch 1.04 and GA. I have not tested it otherwise. Also, certain pieces may cause spore to crash, as of yet though it has never caused any damage to my SPore.

Use the flora editor at your own risk

FIrst of all, here’s a picture of the flora editor:

The background of the editor is black, thank you GA.

Also, you will notice that when you move your mouse over the plant’s base, the blue ‘limb’ orbs appear. You can move these about, but do NOT EVER resize them unless you want ‘exception raised – do you wish to debug it?’.

There is one FATAL part that must NEVER be used. See that 3 pronged one? On the bottom row? There’s a ‘hidden’ part next to it. It will become visible once you mouse over it, but don’t be fooled. USe it and Spore’ll die on you.

This is a picture of the detail section.

The only two parts that are usable here are the first two on the second row. They look nothing like the detail images and one’s invisible.

Paint mode is tricky. I haven’t done much research into it, so I’ll post more detail no that later.

Paint mode screenshot:

Special keys:

CTRL click: this works like ctrl click in the building editor, but only user on a part that is not attached to anything and has nothing attached to it. Otherwise you have a crash on your hands.

Shift click: this is a bit of an unknown, because it has crashed Spore a couple of times. I do know that it does something with only one plant segment.

None of the ‘leaves’ or ‘fruits’ parts work.

You can only save with this mod.

When you have saved, Spore loads as normal. For some reason, the plant is always saved under your computer name.

You can use these plants in GA, and you will probably find them in game. Remember, there is no plant tab on ‘my creations’ section, so you have to find the plant in ‘everything’.

My plant in GA:

Up-close view from the ground:

Video (click it) (when the screen goes black at the end I’m in paint mode):

New screenshots:

And if you are eager to give it a shot yourself (keep in mind it can and WILL crash on you) then Sporedum has the instructions to access it (for Galactic Adventures users, use the proper .exe file to make changes to):

  • Right Click on the Spore Icon on your Desktop, click on “properties”, and go to the target field. (or find the SporeApp.exe in the address below)
  • Add the following to the end of the target:
    • -State:floraeditor (there should be a space before the -state:)
    • So that it looks like this:
    • “C:\Program Files\Electronic Arts\SPORE\Sporebin\SporeApp.exe” -state:floraeditor (different operating systems will need different names, for XP if should just be: SporebinSporeApp.exe-state:floraeditor while XP will be the one above.)
    • Make sure that you have it exactly as above and no spaces in the name, copy the Underlined part, including the ” at the beginning.
  • This will then boot your game in the Flora Editor.

Removing the Flora Editor

  • To remove the Flora editor, simply remove the-state:floraeditor which you have previously added.