A biome is the unit of distribution and capability in Xema. Unlike a traditional plugin, a biome can extend nearly every plane of the platform at once via its manifest: registering agents and skills, publishing contributions, mounting controllers, shipping zero, one, or many optional backend sidecar services as components[] entries — each with an artifact whose path is the single source of truth for where that component's source lives, required with no default, so nothing has to guess a directory layout — declaring collections served by the shared biome data plane, and registering lifecycle hooks for install / uninstall / upgrade / enable / disable. Biomes are installed into an organization, versioned, locked, and governed by environment-grant rules. At install time the kernel validates the manifest, computes the lockfile, and reconciles the biome's contributions into the Object Registry. The full BiomeLifecycle state machine (draft → sandbox-installed → review-required → org-installed → store-submitted → store-approved → archived) gates every promotion behind a capability call and a default requiresApproval=true rule. See the Biomes overview for the full state machine and the Manifest reference for the manifest grammar. To run logic around an operation, see the hook plane.