Forced to get new SSD, logged into Spore, world/savegame is gone

If you're still able to access the contents of your old HDD, you should be able to find your old Galaxy at "%appdata%\SPORE"

unfortunately, my old hdd was wiped clean with diskpart...

I will most definitely look into this, as I still have the HDD. For now, I'll mark this as the solution. Thanks a ton, bro. Though it may be small, the Skorps Empire has hope yet!

Np, best of luck hunting down that Galaxy. If you do find the files, let me know if you need a hand dropping them into place on your new drive. Until then...fingers crossed.

Yep. Since it'll be a couple weeks, how would you suggest I use Recuva on the HDD? Would I have to get something that would allow me to view/use it as external storage on my own computer?

Well...yes, you'd need to connect the drive to a computer. Whether it's as connected as external storage or not is largely irrelevant. I'm not too familiar with the details of how you'd go about doing so, unfortunately. (I take it this isn't an external drive with a USB connector or something? :P )

It's the HDD that came in my laptop. One of my main concerns is that I can't just pop it into a pc as the functioning drive and work from there; as part of diskpart, my OS on it was uninstalled and wiped, and any attempt to reinstall Windows or use the drive normally in the first place ultimately fails because of whatever happened to it, thus making the consideration of such an option at this point out of the question. My best bet at this point would probably be to install Recuva on this computer, find a way to connect the HDD to it, then work from there. Recuva says the things that it can work on include external, damaged, and/or newly formatted drives. I can only hope something works out in the end...