Fair enough.
I suppose what one really wants, at a Doylist level, is the clichéd idea of what the place is like. Planet A sets its media in the three-dimensional urban jungle, while planet B’s shows are all about how you survive to crawl 300 miles with a broken leg to get help from your nearest neighbour.
My aesthetic, at least, would be to avoid having “ice moons” and “swamp planets” and that sort of thing. Planets should have diversity. A setting where a planet can be summed up as supporting just one type of scenario is a setting I’d rather not use.
Yes, point taken. But I think that’s for the fuller textual description; in the short entry, one probably wants the way the majority of people live.
While the biomes in Flat Black are diverse across planets, I think part of the setting assumptions is culturally most planets are actually pretty homogeneous for both Doylist AND Watsonian reasons. Settlement patterns are influenced by both of course, which makes the whole thing harder.
On reflection, describing entire planets without a folder of maps (terrain, vegetation, climate, population, economic use, etc. etc.) is going to be sharply limited.
Is now
Social units
A brief description of the groups in which people socialise, the structures through which they take part in society. There are usually details that require treatment in the running text.