New endgame scenarios

[elemur]

Hi! Sorry to have my first post on the forum to be critical but I played through spaced out a couple times since full release and had a thought about the endgame. Spoilers of course. So we have this system of six outer planets: Tree, Water, Cow, Ice, Moon, and Lava. I think these are great, they're really well balanced, every planet has multiple reasons to exist, and also they're basically all optional. This isn't directly related but here's my quick take:

Tree planet: mostly required for both resin and tungsten. But they're not plentiful, the planet slowly produces the resources, prompting the player to set up permanent structures (automated or dupe-run). Great way to introduce/force the player to build an outer colony without too many environmental risks.

Water planet: if for any colony you need water from off-planet, you can transport it from here. Tons of lime for late-game steel mass production, and a source of graphite if you prefer it to a gilded asteroid field.

Cow planet: A semi-challenging side-quest for early late-game, or an easy side project for late-late game. Not what anyone would call efficient but it's a fun option.

Ice planet: I love this planet. The iron volcanoes are the other missing ingredient for steel mass-production, but harvesting them is harder than you'd think: even though everything's frozen you always get P-ice --> Pwater --> dirt and steam --> sand blocking the volcano. So it requires some thought to do well, but also you can just take what you can get and run. Additionally, you need not only radiation but power to get radbolts for the TT opener, and the low light levels force the player to find a non-solar solution.

Moon: regolith is a great resource for filtration and vole food, but it's easy to skip. Kind of a holdover from base game, but actually it's more challenging than base-game space biome because you don't have your base's infrastructure underneath you. Great late-game challenge, I had fun with this one.

Lava: grab 5kg of niobium and get out is the standard thing, which is an interesting early late-game challenge on it's own. For serious late-game stuff you can tame the volcano and/or build a base here.

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Anyways, that's kind of a diversion but my point is that I really like this endgame, I think Klei did a great job here. It's balanced, it gives the player tons of freedom and "invisibly structured" possibilities, and it has an ideal difficulty curve. But, it's only one scenario. There's a wealth of options for the inner planets! But eventually you get to that midgame place when you have steel, plastic, atmo suits, midgame rockets, plenty of food/power/O2. You have a functioning, self-perpetuating base with all the midgame infrastructure, and exploring/colonizing the outer planets is...always the same. Of course on different playthroughs you can choose to colonize different planetoids and ignore others, and there's plenty to do. But creativity really has to be supplied by the player here: I can choose to build different things but my options -- and the challenges and rewards for each -- they'll always be the same.

I'd love to see new options for outer planets, or even scenarios that mix up the mid-game/late-game materials. Just a random example: a scenario where you get resin and/or graphite early, but oil and/or lime only exist on some challenging outer planet. It feels to me like there's a huge wealth of possibilities here, like the endgame mechanics have been fenced off since the base game, and they're really ready to be shuffled into the game as a whole. As it stands, it kinda hamstrings replayability of SO for me. I feel like SO still has a ton of intrigue left for me in its systems, but when I consider starting a new colony I feel like there's nothing new to see.

Anyways, I'm hoping something like this could be added as the game develops! I know that this is way more difficult than it looks (even though it'd be a low-tech addition): the current SO endgame clearly took a lot of thought, to design late-game planets which are challenging and rewarding. Still, I think this would do a lot to really add breadth to the endgame using mechanics that are already present.

Related: are there any mod recommendations for this? I didn't find much with a quick search but I'm sure someone here knows more than me.

[Sasza22]

Maybe they could make the harder starting conditions more rewarding. Like you get some heavy volcanism on our starting planetoid and overall high temperatures making it challenging to survive but in exchange the ice planetoid is much closer and can be reached ealier than usual.