Most scapes do not fail at setup. They fail around week five, when the soil stops leaching ammonia, the plants have not rooted yet, and something green starts coating the glass. This is the order of operations we give people in the showroom.
Footprint matters more than volume. A 24 x 12 inch base gives you room for a foreground, a midground and a background; a tall 16-inch-wide cube gives you a stone and a wish. Low-iron rimless glass is not vanity — you will be staring through the front pane for years, and the green tint of standard float glass shifts every plant colour you chose.
Depth front to back is the single most common regret we hear. Twelve inches is workable. Fourteen to eighteen is where slopes and depth illusions actually work.
Light drives everything downstream. Once you commit to a fixture you have committed to a growth rate, and therefore to a CO2 requirement, a dosing volume and a trimming schedule. A high-output RGB bar over a nano with no CO2 is a guaranteed algae farm.
Run the light on a timer from day one. Ramping up and down over ten minutes is nice but optional; a fixed photoperiod is not.
Pressurised CO2 makes a planted tank easier, not harder — plants outcompete algae when carbon is not the limiting factor. The catch is that it must be stable. A regulator that drifts as the room heats up will swing your pH twice a day and stress every fish in the tank.
Turn the gas on 60 to 90 minutes before the lights and off an hour before they cut. Aim for a drop checker that sits green through the whole photoperiod. Blue means you are under-dosing; yellow means stop and open a window on your fish.
Start at one bubble per second on a 20 gallon, then adjust by a quarter turn every three days. Never chase a number in one afternoon.
Aquasoil comes loaded with nutrients and leaches ammonia for the first two to four weeks. That is normal, and it is exactly why you do not add fish on day two. Cap a nutrient base layer with 2 to 3 inches of soil at the back, tapering to an inch at the front — the slope is what makes a small tank read as deep.
Do not rinse aquasoil. Do not mix it into a gravel. Do not disturb it once planted unless you enjoy a week of cloudy water.
Dry-scape for an hour with the tank empty and the light on. Move the stone eleven times. Photograph each version on your phone — the camera flattens the composition the way the front pane will, and a layout that looks balanced in person often collapses in a photo.
One dominant stone, one secondary, and small supporting fragments in an odd number. Bury the base of every piece so it grows out of the substrate rather than sitting on top of it. Soak ohko stone and driftwood for a few days first; both will cloud your water and float otherwise.
The single best predictor of an algae-free start is planting mass on day one. Half a tank of plants in a full tank of nutrients is an invitation. Buy more stems than feels reasonable, plant them two inches apart, and accept that you will be pulling out a third of them at the first trim.
Plant into damp soil with the tank only an inch or two full. Fill the rest slowly over a plate or a bag so you do not blast craters into your slope.
Email a photo of the tank, your light model, photoperiod, dosing routine and water change schedule to hello@liquidforest.buzz. We answer these seven days a week, and we have almost certainly killed the same plant you are killing.