I like to play with a random seed and not preview the maps. After spending 15 hours on Lignumis I landed on Nauvis and everything is desert and evolution is at 30%.

I tried planting trees in the desert (seeing as there are trees there), but squares are yellow and it won't plant. This seems to have hard-locked my game. I brought a full ship with literally everything, but even if I go around collecting the dead trees I won't have enough wood. Belts can be made with iron, but splitters, inserters, assemblers… everything needs wood.

How would you suggest I proceed? Hopefully there is a setting to plant on desert or something. If not, this is something you should warn new players about or design the mod around.

For anyone else who encounters this situation, after searching around I found a patch of darker soil under a biter nest and after clearing them out I managed to set up a handful agri-towers. Hopefully, this small amount will allow me to eke my way through the early game.

(I don't usually use tree seeding in the vanilla game, so had no idea there are some desert spots where trees can be planted. You learn something every playthrough.)

Check out Zen Garden. It adds fertile soil that can be put on the desert. Lignumis has compatibility for it and moves it to red science instead of green. Make sure to check the settings to only add what you want as the mod has more content. Disable everything to only get the soil.

The evolution part confuses me because I fixed that a while ago and reset it when you go to Nauvis for the first time.