I did a search and nothing came up. Regolith is a big problem in terraforming, turning it into soil seems to be a laborious process now. I'm working on homebrew faction in 40k because I loathe the Imperium, and they're religious terraformers. Like that's their way of worship, to seed every planet with life that can hold it.

Now given my options I could have them do the grunt work of terraforming, like solar mirrors/shades, starting a rough hydrological cycle and then seeding the planet with Ork spores, which for those not in the loop are a fungoid bio weapon left over from millions of years ago that's slowly consuming the galaxy, precisely because they create their own ecosystem, and rapidly too. Then these terraformers do horrible grimdark stuff to the orks until it overwhelms their local gestalt field and they all die of despair. All of them, the entire orkiod ecosystem down to the spores.

And while that's fitting for setting, I think I should ask if there's a hard sci fi option for rapidly breaking down regolith and creating soil that doesn't involve abusing fantasy tropes for fun and profit. The way I'm approaching this entire faction, the more hard sci fi, the better.