[For the hiatus, I’m going to be posting a bunch of the development art I made for the series. It’ll be posted in the order it was made, leading up to the week the comic resumes]

This location changed dramatically since the first draft. Originally, the TACO was going to be stored on this room with a nice balcony and lots of sunlight; a very pretty location.

Realistically, though, the best excuse I had for Foundation A doing that was “hiding it in plain sight,” which just would not be wise given how important the TACO is. Instead, I came up with the concept that it’d be hidden deep inside a DNA/seed storage area instead, hence how this developed.

The big challenge with that idea, however, was creating an environment inside which was visually interesting, since only the most hardy of flora would be able to survive inside. The double-layered terrariums were a start, but the storage cases were still bland. Then, it started to occur to me that, since KttFF takes place in the cat version Minnesota, there’d be a good 1/3 to 1/2 of the year where everything’s gonna be dead and ugly anyway!

So to make up for that, I devised a concept that locations which deal with snow will frequently put up colorful lights and/or have lots of delightfully painted surfaces to make up for the lack of flora during these times. Here in the freezing seed lab, FA has people who can come in and paint the storage cases with the flora and fauna stored within. Plus, just some nice day/night backgrounds along the walls to make the view less drab.

For convenience, there are also lights along the ground that can point scientists towards specific samples as needed, along with computer terminals in the corners (which aren’t really seen in the comic).