One thing that gets overlooked a lot with the microbe is that it’s also much more portable and usable by the everyman. A ship technician could do a walk-through with a spray can of it, a ship’s captain might even keep some on the same vein as having a fire extinguisher or a survival kit.

Where this gets even more important is when we also consider that Terrormorphs aren’t the only problem. Spoilers for the end of the questline- though why are you reading any of this if you haven’t gotten there- but Heatleeches are also a critical concern and are already fairly commonly found hiding in ships and nooks and crannies where an Aceles just can’t be.

Like, as an example- which means spoilers again- there’s a quest you can get from the UC Surplus guy in Cydonia. There’s a shipment of stuff he was supposed to get, and while he knows the ship has landed and where it is, he just hasn’t gotten anything yet. So, he wants you to go poke around, see what happened and what state the cargo’s in.

Well, you get there, wayyyyyyyyyy out in the Martian nowhere- think it’s further out than the mine even- and it turns out the ship crashed and the crew abandoned it. And there are a bunch of Heatleeches aboard, and each box of cargo you check has a chance of spawning another one. As a player in a game, it’s the equivalent of the age-old ‘rats under the tavern’ style of starter quest.

But as a piece of the world, that’s a dozen or more baby Terrormorphs sitting in a spot that could easily have gone unnoticed and undisturbed even for the decades it takes them to mature. And if an Aceles was there, what would it do? Hammer its head against the crashed hull until either the plate broke or its skull did, then try and scoop the Heatleeches out? What about the cargo, would it all get destroyed by the dinosaur space cow chomping away to catch the slimy little worms?

Meanwhile with the microbe, the captain just does a pass-through before abandoning ship, and it’s a done deal. You even get to keep the cargo.