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Right now, you can have planets with no surface water but with non-water-based xenobiology that end up with full-blown ecosystems full of trees. These can also be fully edible. The problem is that when you play these worlds, everywhere will be "too arid" for xeno farms even though the native flora is growing right there.

Assuming these edge cases aren't just oversights, I suppose the issue to be that there's supposed to be a resource management tradeoff with water for agriculture. If the plants don't need water, there's no input resource, and it's basically free food. However, the existence and spread of plants suggests that there's still some conception of arable terrain being worked out, so there would be room for making the output vary with the location - and the output could just be nerfed b/c of the difficulty of "watering" plants based on peroxide, sulfuric acid, etc. It may just be too much work for very rare situations, though.

More broadly, though... it would be nice if xeno areal didn't look the same as Terran areal. Ideally, xeno areal would match the local plant color palate for a given plantet, so e.g. if you were on a pinkish planet, you'd have pinkish fields instead of bright green ones...

Real world industrial agriculture uses immense amounts of water to grow crops at densities that you never see naturally. I assume the xeno agriculture is the same. Like: yes the plants are growing there natively, but not nearly dense enough to provide meaningful food output if you don't add water to the system.

And on subject of coloration: I'm like 90% sure I've seen yellowish plants when I rolled a sulfer based biology? Might have just been the scrub tileset now that I think about it.

Really though it should be based on the spectral class of the star: photosynthetic plant analogs would have evolved the coloration that most effectively absorbs the local star's light wavelengths.

I agree re: additional moisture; therein lies the problem since we can't accumulate peroxide, sulfuric acid, etc. as a resource like water. OTOH, in my experience a reasonably plant-covered water-based world has enough zone water collection to support an awful lot of farming w/o needing supplemental water extractions. Hmm. Substitute fuel or energy for water in the base upkeep to portray liquid collection and consolidation efforts? Again, probably more trouble than en edge case merits, but it's a bit annoying immersion-wise.

There are a handful of plant colors, yes. I mentioned pink for a reason. [;)] I've seen enough variations on single planets that it's definitely not starbased, though. I'll pay attention next time I roll a bunch to check if it's tied to biology or more random.

As it is now, I don't see the point of having xeno vs earth agriculture; plays the same, feels the same

I like when game differences equals different play style. In shadow empire you can pick alternative A or B or C and it the results are the same; maybe for planet X you can only do A but that is it, afterwards it is all the exact same