Depending on how you play in all stages before the space stage, your species becomes a certain "archetype." Archetypes all carry their own unique, active ability that you can use anywhere in the space stage.
While this active ability is important, it is also flexible. You can change your archetype after encountering a sufficiently advanced civilization.
What is more important is the passive abilities you gain at every stage. These abilities are just as powerful as the active abilities, sometimes even more so. Most of this guide actually focuses on those but it does contain comprehensive information about every archetype you can become.

The archetypes you can become are:

• Wanderer. Complete no stages whatsoever by skipping straight to the space stage.
  
• Trader. Complete at least 3 of 4 stages with a blue, flexible route.
  
• Warrior. Complete at least 3 of 4 stages with a red, aggressive route.
  
• Shaman. Complete at least 3 of 4 stages with a green, peaceful route.
  
• Zealot. Complete 2 stages with the green route, and 2 with the red route.
  
• Scientist. Complete 2 stages with the red route, and 2 with the blue route.
  
• Diplomat. Complete 2 stages with the blue route, and 2 with the green route.
  
• Ecologist. Complete 2 stages with the green route, and one each with the other routes.
  
• Bard. Complete 2 stages with the blue route, and one each with the other routes.
  
• Knight. Complete 2 stages with the red route, and one each with the other routes.

If you do less than a full game run, then your options become more limited. Each specific section will tell you about the best combinations for those.

Depending on how you end a certain stage, you gain certain abilities in all later stages. I'll list all the effects previous stages have on the space stage, and compare give them a number ranking 0-4.

• 4: consistently game-changing.
  
• 3: consistently helpful or situationally game-changing.
  
• 2: consistently convenient or situationally helpful.
  
• 1: situationally convenient.
  
• 0: negligible impact.

If you do not know how to get a certain passive ability, check the progress screen in the bottom-right hand corner when you're in the relevant stage. It will show you the 3 endings you can get, and how to get there.

R: Power Monger: 3/4. Grants 1.5x ship power for everything, not just weapons. Highly recommended on most guides.
G: Social Suave: 1/4. 20% off social items from your empire. Best to buy equipment from other empires. Lots of tools are flagged as "social" that you may or may not care about.
B: Gentle Generalist: 0/4. 20% off ship passive upgrades (like health and cargo size) from your empire. Best to buy equipment from other empires. These upgrades are one-time purchases, and therefore becomes actually useless rather than mostly useless rather quickly.

R: Prime Specimen: 3/4. Grants 1.5x ship health. Highly recommended on most guides.
B: Speed Demon: 2/4. Incredibly convenient. This cannot easily be felt but does speed things up considerably when running a large empire.
G: Pleasing Performance: 0/4. Rebellion doesn't happen on well-built colonies, so this ability is totally irrelevant.

G: Gracious Greeter: 4/4. This will allow you to be on much better terms with any empire than you normally could get away with. Friendly empires now are allies after a single mission; Empires that would normally fire on sight will now merely have an embargo; empires that normally embargo will be totally fine with you after just saying hi. Highly recommended on most guides.
B: Colony Craze: 1/4. 20% off colony items. Best to buy equipment from other empires. This only includes the Incredi-Pack and colony upgrades, like the spice storage and bio protector; terraforming abilities are not covered.
R: Arms Dealer: 0/4. 20% off weapons. Best to buy equipment from other empires; however, if you are trying to be independent, these are both normally very expensive, and very helpful to that style of gameplay. They suffer the same drawback of the most important arms being one-time purchases, but a handful aren't.

B: Spice Savant: 4/4. 20% spice production. This game runs on spice. Having 20% more of it makes your empire and spaceship both grow 20% faster. It's actually slightly higher because of a snowball effect. Relative to you, enemies will seem to grow 17% slower. Highly recommended on most guides.
G: Green Keeper: 2/4. Failing these missions can be pretty catastrophic, but they are also rare to begin with.
R: Pirate B Gone: 1/4. Though it can be convenient, pirate raids aren't that bad if left unchecked.

Some abilities provide discounts when purchasing from your own empire of up to 20% off. This is nice, because your empire will otherwise always sell things at full price, and you're always going to be near your empire. However, it's never ranked particularly high because every item in the game is sold by someone for up to 50% off.
Here are all the items affected by these discounts. These are sourced directly from the game files. If an item can be purchased multiple times, it is in bold; items you should never care about (for various reasons) are in italics.

Boosted by Colony Craze. Cannot be picked alongside Arms Dealer, as they are both in the Tribal Stage.

• Colony
  
• Spice Storage
  
• Uber Turret
  
• Bio-Protector
  
• Bio-Stabilizer
  
• Happiness Booster - not only is the effect negligible, it appears to be bugged and merely slow down unhappiness.
  
• Loyalty Booster - not only is the effect negligible, it appears to be bugged and merely slow down unhappiness.

Boosted by Arms Dealer. Cannot be picked alongside Colony Craze, as they are both in the Tribal Stage.

• Planet Buster
  
• Anti-Matter Bomb
  
• Anti-Matter Missile
  
• AOE Repair
  
• Laser Upgrades
  
• Proton Missile Upgrades
  
• Auto Blaster (+Upgrades)
  
• Bomb (+Upgrades)
  
• Pulse (+Upgrades)
  
• Shield
  
• Cloak
  
• Rally Call

Boosted by Social Suave. Cannot be picked alongside Gentle Generalist, as they are both in the Cell Stage.

• Monolith
  
• Create Creature
  
• Creature Tweaker
  
• Species Eradicator
  
• Supersizer
  
• Wildlife Sanctuary
  
• Happy Ray (+Upgrades)
  
• Mind Erase
  
• Global Mind Erase
  
• Fireworks
  
• Embassy
  
• Crop Circles

Boosted by Gentle Generalist. Cannot be picked alongside Social Suave, as they are both in the Cell Stage.

• Cargo Upgrades
  
• Energy Upgrades
  
• Health Upgrades
  
• Interstellar Drive Upgrades

Terraforming abilities and travel abilities cannot be obtained at a discount from your empire. Like every item, you should look for an empire that gives you the 50% discount.

• Cold Ray
  
• Heat Ray
  
• Cloud Ray
  
• Cloud Vacuum
  
• Cold Cloud Ray
  
• Cold Cloud Vacuum
  
• Hot Cloud Ray
  
• Hot Cloud Vacuum
  
• Ice Storm
  
• Rain of Fire
  
• Atmosphere Generator
  
• Drought Generator
  
• Ice Comet
  
• Ice Cap Seeder
  
• Volcano
  
• Asteroid
  
• Energy Packs
  
• Repair Packs
  
• Planet Scan
  
• Wormhole Key

As of 8/18/2022, the discount purchases have been updated to reflect which ones you're likely to buy ammo for. Arms Dealer and Gentle Generalist mostly help one-time purchases and are therefore the worse discounts.

The cell type you get -- herbivore, omnivore or carnivore -- affects what mouths you can unlock in the creature stage. If you start with an herbivore, you can never unlock an omnivore or carnivore mouth, for example the Dietrap.

You can sneak a proboscis on your creature, enabling it to eat both meat and fruit. This advantage does carry over into the creature and tribal stage, making food significantly less of an issue. However, this doesn't affect what mouths you unlock throughout the creature stage. If you have decided on a specific mouth you want your creature to have, eg the Dietrap, you must choose the appropriate cell type for it.

If you do a full game run, the following combinations are not possible:

• Diplomat with carnivore mouth
  
• Zealot with omnivore mouth
  
• Scientist with herbivore mouth

All of these archetypes can be achieved with any mouth type if you start in the Creature or Tribal stage; you should seriously consider skipping the Cell stage to get the mouth you want (unless you are planning on being a carnivore, since Power Monger is very nice).

At the end of the creature stage, you are given your last chance to edit your creature's appearance, so the DNA and parts you unlock there have a permanent impact on your creature. You may want to spend extra time here to make sure you can do that.

The tribal ability you choose will affect your first city in the civilization stage. This isn't permanent. You can always take over the correct city type and make it your own, but you should be careful if you want to win economically and did not start with an economic city. Save scumming is recommended.

The civilization stage keeps the buildings you have placed. Given that the money you have doesn't carry over, you might as well spend all your money on these at the end of this stage.

Do not worry about the outfit, buildings or anthem you use; these can all be changed at any time in the Space Stage.

When playing start to finish, you get the most abilities.
There is only one build that is even arguably better by skipping the Cell stage, and that is the RGB Trader. See Straight to Creature.

The score listed by the archetype configuration is the sum of all its abilities. For example, the RRGB Knight has R1 (tier 3), R2 (tier 3), G3 (tier 4) and B4 (tier 4), which is 3 + 3 + 4 + 4 = 14. So, the build is listed as RRGB/14.
I've attempted to list every build with a score of 8 or higher, and then judge that build, good or bad. Some viable alternatives, especially ones with a different choice in the Cell Stage, are listed. If I've missed one, feel free to contact me.

These numbers have been adjusted as of 8/18/2022. Under the old system, it was out of 20; now, it is out of 16. This is to keep things consistent across stage changes (since having a useless ability is worth 0 points, not 1.)
Knight:

• RRGB/14. Generally cited as the best build. The two "must-have" abilities are there, alongside increased health and energy.
  
• RBGR/10. If you really want speed, you can have it. But it will cost you.
  
• GRRB/9. Other than as an herbivore build, this is pretty bad.
  
• BRGR/8. Other than as an omnivore build, this is pretty bad.
  
• RBRG/7. An unorthodox build, to be sure, and a waste of a knight -- but nothing here is totally useless.
  
• BRRG/6. It's less than 8, but this lets you have an omnivore mouth with a slower paced game.

Bard:

• RBGB/13. Serious contender for best build - you trade increased health for increased speed.
  
• BRGB/11. This effectively trades Speed Demon for Gentle Generalist; that is a bad trade.
  
• GRBB/9. Herbivore build. Slightly better armor but you give up speed.
  
• GBRB/8. Herbivore build. You go fast and can fund your own wars.

Zealot:

• RRGG/12. Very good runner-up for best build; also, Zealot has an incredible active ability. It's sad to drop spice savant, but green keeper isn't bad.
  
• GRRG/7. It's less than 12, but allows a zealot to fund its own wars, which it will have to do anyways if it breaks galactic code regularly.
  
• RGRG/6. Similar, but a carnivore build, and gets you health rather than energy.
  
• GRGR/9. It's an herbivore, but otherwise pretty terrible and not special.

Ecologist:

• RBGG/11. Some guides also recommend this as the best build in the long run. Green keeper and speed demon are good alternatives.
  
• RGGB/11. Even though the numbers are equal, you will not find anyone recommending this build because G2 is the worst pick; you can get a direct upgrade as Knight or Bard with R2 or B2.
  
• GRGB/12. Very similar to the above, but uses a herbivore mouth.
  
• BRGG/9. B1 isn't terribly helpful, and the other builds avoid this waste of an ability.

Warrior:

• RRGR/11. You gain the ability to make friends. It's less important as a warrior, but you really don't need the discounts.
  
• RRRB/10. You should be able to fund your own wars with this setup.
  
• RRRG/8. Makes for a quieter game.
  
• RRRR/7. Straight up warrior is generally not such a great plan because Pirate B Gone being directly surpassed by Green Keeper.

Trader: (See "Straight to Creature" for the best Trader build.)

• BBGB/10. Gracious Greeter is good enough to remove any hope of alternatives. Not all that bad a build, all things considering.
  
• RBBB/10. Alright, technically this one is good too, but who would honestly give up gracious greeter as a trader? For power generation, no less.
  
• BRBB/8. Now this is just ridiculous.

Diplomat:

• GBGB/11.
  
• BBGG/8. Loses Spice Savant to Green Keeper; makes for a quieter game.
  
• BGGB/8. Please don't be fooled by the high rank, this build is a direct downgrade to the first. You will never need Gentle Generalist badly enough to get rid of Speed Demon.

Scientist:

• RRBB/11.
  
• RBRB/9. You're giving up the 2R start for a speed bonus and the ability to purchase your own weapons. Given that you can never make friends easily, this isn't that bad a setup.
  
• BRRB/7. It's not at all ideal to give up the 2R start for better a better self-buy.

Shaman:

• RGGG/9. The power upgrade works well with the Return Ticket, letting you travel across far more distance than you normally would ever hope to. Quite fun if you like exploring.
  
• GRGG/10. Health is only useful if you engage in combat.
  
• GBGG/9. Speed also works well with the Return Ticket; you'll explore less distance but you can make more trips.
  
• GGGB/9. Can't go wrong with Spice Savant; the problem is that other abilities replace trash, while this gets rid of green keeper. You may find yourself returning to the homeworld just to clean up trash quite often.

Straight to creature has a number of notable quirks that allow these builds to fare better than you might expect.
Bard, Ecologist and Knight are impossible to obtain without a full game run.
Diplomat and Trader are comparable to creatures built from the cell stage, and the trader build is totally unique among its archetype!

Trader: RGB/11. You can give up Speed Demon for Gracious Greeter and the comparable Prime Specimen.
Diplomat: BGB/10.
Zealot:

• RGG/9. Close to the conventional best build but with less energy.
  
• RRG/5. Zealot is the only class where you should seriously consider giving up Gracious Greeter, because it's so useless when you're always at war with everyone. Cheaper weapons is okay.

Scientist:

• RRB/7. Funding your own wars is helpful in the absence of Gracious Greeter.
  
• RBB/8. A direct downgrade to the first option, but it does make the Civilization stage easier.
  
• BRB/6. Trades health for speed.

Warrior:

• RRR/4.
  
• BGR/7. Gracious Greeter is amazing, to be sure, but ultimately R2 and R3 are both helpful for warmongering. Your call.

Shaman:

• GGG/6. Still the best build around, giving a good ability and a good substitute.
  
• RBG/6. This gets you health but loses gracious greeter.
  
• BRG/4. This gets you speed but loses gracious greeter.

We will only list classes with leeway here; Traders, Shamans and Warriors have no choice and thus to list them would be to state the obvious.
A shaman starting at the tribal stage isn't missing much at all - it is comparable to creatures built from the cell stage.

Diplomat: GB/8. Best abilities in the game, hands down. Comparable to creatures built from the cell stage.
Zealot:

• GR/5. Pirates B Gone isn't great, but you really don't want to give up Gracious Greeter.
  
• RG/2. If you want to spam conversions anyway, Gracious Greeter won't do you much good. The other two abilities are okay for an independent run.

Scientist: RB/4. Arms Dealer isn't great, but you really don't want to give up Spice Savant.

Going straight to the Tribal stage gives you the advantage of having all 2000 DNA and creature parts to work with.
If you want to mix mouth types, you can do so by using the creature editor in the "create" menu, and then choosing that creature when starting the game. This is the earliest stage you can start at to control a race with mixed mouths.
It is possible to include creature parts from the cell stage using a similar method; create an early cell in the "create" menu, and then edit that in the normal creature editor.

As none of your options give you any leeway, this will simply rank your options.

Trader grants you Spice Savant, arguably the most important passive in the game.
Shaman gives you Green Keeper, which is recommended in some builds for its sheer convenience.
Warrior gives you Pirate B Gone, which is less convenient, and a worse ability. Even if you intend to play as a warrior, Trader with Spice Savant is probably better than Warrior with Pirate B Gone.

Even traders are very poorly off, as Gracious Greeter is one of the game-changing abilities worth considering. The other two options are not really comparable.

If you are going to go through the effort of the Civilization stage, you might as well also do the Tribal. The only conceivable circumstance where this would be ideal is if you wanted to farm achievements, since very few (if any) full game runs have you go red in the civilization stage.

You can only be a Wanderer. Unfortunately, this class doesn't even have an ability. However, again, the abilities and such are only a small part of the game, and you can do just fine as a Wanderer.
You are also free to change your archetype to any class you want. This will not get you passives, but it will get you a better ability than none.

A noteworthy bug when considering which archetypal ability is best: saving and reloading a save resets the countdown on all your abilities. So, even though most abilities have a 20 minute cooldown, you can really use them as frequently as you'd like. I never found a name for this exploit, so I'm calling it the reload-to-reload exploit. All abilities are ranked assuming you are willing to reload-to-reload. If you are not, then the order changes considerably.


The most important ability is the active ability granted by your archetype, or philosophy. When ranked, these are:

• Zealot: 4/4. Who needs friends when you have all of their planets?
  
• Trader: 3/4. Very helpful for trading missions, especially if you're already swimming in spice.
  
• Bard: 3/4. Soothing Song allows you to have a minimum relationship with 0 for all empires you enter. This lasts for about two minutes, so you can do trading runs between hostile nations, or just totally blow off all wars. This does NOT work on the grox.
  
• Diplomat: 3/4. (Promoted from 2/4.) TheDazok pointed out that this ability can be quite powerful, and I quickly realized that it's far better than the other combat abilities. If you are stuck with a frontline along Grox territory, this might be the one thing you need to keep your territory safe -- even better, your ground-based turrets are far better against sitting ducks, if you're on the defensive!
  
• Scientist: 2/4. (Reduced from 3/4.) Very situational, but very powerful when you do need it. However, you have to rebuild from scratch for conquest, and you break galactic code to use it. Though I haven't used it for this, it might be ideal while fighting the Grox, as they actually like you breaking galactic code, and you wouldn't have much use for the place if you used conventional weaponry anyways.
  
• Ecologist: 2/4. (Reduced from 3/4). Abducting two of every plant and animal helps with some missions, eco-disasters and terraforming a great deal, making it one of the most convenient abilities to have. It's rarely anything more than a convenience, however.
  
• Shaman: 2/4. Allows you to explore far more of the galaxy without worrying about how to return home. Especially good for finding good wormholes!
  
• Knight: 2/4. This is incredibly helpful at the beginning when you have no allies and scales very well (since the mini-ship gets your upgrades). Still, most ships in the endgame don't struggle.
  
• Warrior: 1/4. More ships on your side is nice, but is hardly a game changer. Also, I swear, these pirate ships are made of paper and duct tape.
  
• Wanderer: 0/4. Does nothing, literal garbage.

If you are not willing to use the reload-to-reload exploit, then the tier list changes entirely - none of the abilities are tier 4 or 5. With that said, most of the powers are still fun and helpful, although for different reasons each.
This lists how long each ability lasts and why that changes the tier ranking; for more details about the original tier list, see above.

• Bard: 2.5/4 (from 3/4). Cooldown of 10 minutes; lasts for 2. This is still an important ability, but as you can no longer blow off all wars, this is no longer situationally game-changing - helpful, but not quite consistent enough for tier 4. I would recommend this, but I have no guides to back me up, and honestly haven't spent that long in my Bard playthrough.
  
• Zealot: 2/4 (from 4/4). Cooldown of 30 minutes, the longest cooldown. You will be fighting the entire galaxy if you rely on this ability, and only get a free planet every now and then. It might honestly be a more fun way to play then repeatedly save scumming, but it certainly is a huge downgrade.
  
• Trader: 2/4 (from 3/4). Cooldown of 25 minutes from use. No longer can you buy the galaxy instantly, but still very convenient.
  
• Diplomat: 2/4 (from 3/4). Cooldown of 23 minutes; lasts for 3. You can no longer use this when you have two important battles back-to-back, making it situationally helpful.
  
• Scientist: 2/4. Cooldown of 22 minutes. You no longer have the option to throw the galaxy back to the stone age, but ultimately this wasn't much more than a meme that ends up ticking off the whole galaxy anyway, so it remains the same tier: powerful ability with major drawbacks that you use sparingly.
  
• Shaman: 2/4. Cooldown of 1 minute. Still consistently convenient.
  
• Knight: 2/4. Cooldown of 2 minutes; lasts for 2. This means you can always spawn it, and the cooldown has no effect. This doesn't seem right based on my experience, but I'm going off of the wiki.
  
• Ecologist: 1/4 (from 2/4). Cooldown of 22 minutes. You probably weren't doing this every second anyway - the inventory clogs - but this makes the difference between a consistent convenience and an inconsistent one.
  
• Warrior: 1/4. Cooldown of 20 minutes. Ultimately this ability was never more than a convenience or a distraction, so having that convenience less often doesn't bump it down to 1 or 1.5. It is still pretty disappointing; play as a Knight if you want to be a warrior who has fun.
  
• Wanderer: 0/4. It is still literally nothing. Nothing changed.

Note that if you only play for very brief sessions, like 10 minutes, then you will use the reload-to-reload exploit whether you intend to or not, putting the actual tier list something in-between these two.

I made this guide because I didn't like making permanent decisions for my species without knowing the facts first, so I put what I knew and thought was important here.

I have not played Spore recently, and have never played it extensively. Even though I have achieved every single archetype here, and can say which ones I enjoyed and why, I can't tell you how to play the game.

In philosophy there's an idea called convergence to the truth: if many educated people come to the same conclusion, then that conclusion is more likely to be correct. With spore guides, I am not finding all that much convergence on "which abilities are good", except for the following big points:

• RRGB knight is fantastic and all of its abilities are great
  
• Zealot is busted if you reload-to-reload, and really fun without
  
• Discount abilities aren't great
  
• Pleasing performance is actually worthless

Still, I am confident with what I have presented, even with the more minor and controversial issues. If you want to be sure of these, consult other guides and see which ones you think are right. And if someone knows better, please let me know and I will update the guide. Steam doesn't let me get a break from your comments, even if I wanted to take one.

Thank you all for coming to my Ted Talk.