A Lot of Changes

A lot of work has gone into this update, inspired by feedback from the player community about the initial game release. This is largely a summary of the changes that have been made - you are strongly encouraged to read the parts of the rules that have undergone the most revision, namely the Travel and Map Designer chapters in the core rules and the Advanced Travel and Map Designer chapters in the A Facility with Words supplement. Although the concepts from the initial game have largely stayed unchanged, extensive work has gone into simplifying them where possible and expanding on them where you will be spending most of your time. 

The mission goals have been moved from the Mission Designer in A Facility with Words to the Mission Control chapter of the core rules to allow players without that supplement to get a guided start to exploring the solar system. This was a key piece of feedback from the first edition rules - players needed to more guidance on where to start once they had created the crew. A section on Spacecraft has also been added to the Assets chapter to provide an overview of how spacecraft operate in the game.

The crew module also comes with a secondary platform function which gives the crew additional abilities when exploring: such as drilling for fuel anywhere on the site or more accuracy when landing due to satellite assistance.

Opposed skill actions has been revised to tie it to alert levels which are another concept which has been added to the core rules from the A Facility with Words supplement.

A lot of work has gone into reducing the complexity of tracking resources during extravehicular activity. Personal life support systems and portable ISRU units have been changed to have much longer durations due to improvement to CO2 scrubbers that have assumed to occur. The result is that you now only need to track water and oxygen consumption rates using tallies, rather than kilogram by kilogram, and only one of them - depending on your distance from the sun.

The load table has changed to be more physically accurate and scale better at heavier loads - with corresponding changes to the Manoeuvring unit specifications. Portable fuel cells have been removed, network cabling kits have been renamed to wiring kits and a number of heavy tool sets have been added to assist with in situ resource extraction (mining). Tables providing run times vs power output for various Earthside batteries have been provided along with charging times using solar panels. And printing times have been expanded to include times required to 3D print with a preprepared wiring harness and for equipment which doesn’t require wiring.

Radiative cooling skins have been added to allow longer exposure closer to the sun. TIP muscles can now vary the amount of strength they provide which impacts the rate that they consume power. Impossible and Polymorphic updates have been altered to better align with technology levels elsewhere, and Universal updates have been added as a Future technology.

The Observations chapter has been moved earlier in the rules to provide an introduction to sites and the hazards at those sites. It also contains some example robots for use with the space dungeons featured later in the rules.

The surface travel rules have been extensively rewritten to make exploration a lot simpler and more rewarding and to provide more detail on activities that the crew will want to focus on. This includes a completely new section on Extravehicular Activity, covering water, fatigue and fuel management rules, and slopes increasing movement point costs rather than reducing maximum speeds. Percentage grade slopes and control speeds have been removed completely and replaced by a much simpler slope value system tied directly to the face value of cards used to place some terrain types, and a maximum safe distance value. Movement bonuses from low gravity are now given as low gravity points which can be used to increase the maximum permitted slope or load carried or to allow wheeled vehicles to move further. These changes also applies to atmospheric surface travel in the Advanced Travel chapter in the A Facility with Words supplement.

The Map Designer has been extensively rewritten to make terrain much more varied and impactful, and to bring a lot of the concepts from the previous Advanced Map Designer chapter into the core rules. A number of handouts summarise these rules - which is needed because the rules themselves have increased from 22 to 54 pages. Cards for natural terrain now encode slope or wind/current speed and direction, and the edges of cards have obstructions or defences in some circumstances. Please read this chapter thoroughly, absorb it and give feedback - there's a lot to take in here, and it may be too much.

And, as a big part of the map design chapter, abandoned structures aka Space Dungeons can be investigated for salvage or even more useful prizes, and can be defended by security forces, robots, traps and worse.

The Advanced Map Designer also includes rules for entirely mapping the world, rather than just the sites at the world; and for flights and crossings, which provides more interesting navigation across sloping terrain and through aerostats and water by extending the core rules for creating climbs.  At the Complex scale, counters represent food for detritivores and producer species and green dice represent the territories of eater species (herbivores and carnivores) -- individual species are placed on the maps at the Room and Facility scale using the same methods.

With so many changes occurring, it is likely that there's still some rough edges to be ironed out so I'm keeping the game in early access a while longer. It's already happened once: I've updated all the rules again as an "update 1a" to largely clean up some formatting and text errors I found while writing this blog post - and to add "crew replacement" rules back in that had been removed from prior to the first edition - so if you rushed to download update 1 I recommend you download the files again