Update 3 is out

Update 3 is out. And I'm incredibly proud of it.

There's enough changes here that in many ways, this feels like an 1.5th edition. But the key improvement is I've found the shape of the game in a way that was unfortunately lacking in earlier versions. I've slimmed down the core (now called the Crewed) rules and put the focus firmly on space travel in the core game.  It includes significant revisions to the way actions work and a lot of new actions and activities such as phoning home, immigration and hull breaches, and moves the whole exploration of the surface of worlds to a new supplement (A)-Base (D)-Landing where it belongs: as a preamble to a whole new base building scenario for those players who like the idea of exploring and exploiting extraterrestrial worlds in much more detail.

The key change is tying encounters to the expansion of exoinfrastructure. As you move on the High Frontier map, you'll see other factions building factories and colonies and anchoring Bernals in a way that should make the solar system feel much more of a living and breathing thing without having to learn a whole lot more rules in This Space Intentionally or All Errors are My Own. And encounters have been expanded and simplified by adding encounter cards, so you can quickly create adversaries and allies without having to roll on a whole lot of tables every time you have an encounter.

In making this change, I've also tweaked and enhanced rules across all the supplements. But the Crewed Rules (the new name for the core rules) have received the most attention and polish to make Sixty Years in Space an easier version of the hardest sci fi TTRPG.

The full release notes follow:

Crewed Rules

The Sixty Years In core rules is now called the Crewed Rules. A lot of the more complex travel and map designer rules have been moved to a dedicated supplement (A)Base-(D)Landing which provides rules for how to explore and exploit uninhabited sites. Abandoned Structures have moved to A Facility with Words. Service risks, the weapons locker and weapons permits have moved to This Space Intentionally.

The Breakthrough, Mission and Singularity eras are now possible types of Directions eras that follow the Future era — the Mission era has been renamed the Exodus era to distinguish from the Mission era in A Lot of Zeroes. A lot of the era-specific information including many upgrades which had rules not explained in the core rules have moved to the supplement that includes the relevant rules. The Directions eras are now described in the Absent Without supplement, to be written.

A dice value of 6 is now a bid of 6 when bidding. The Rule of Or has been tweaked to allow bumps to be more effective and renamed to “Odds, Evens or Upside”. Penalties are now added directly to rolls, instead of being halved. Orange dice are used to track defects.

Added an actions chapter which describes possible player and crew actions. Cleaned up a lot of the action design. Performing multiple actions and actions in a shorter time interval now has a more significant fatigue cost. Streamlined bidding rules for determining action order. Easy actions now include any action any player at the table could complete. Moved Space Politics to the actions chapter.

Replaced secrets with a trouble counter which is incremented when an action dice has a face value of 3. The trouble counter is used to consume oxygen and other resources periodically in situations where they are not used up every game turn.

Added a day planner for tracking day/night cycles on extraterrestrial bodies.

Changed mission goals to include Luna and modified the frequency of a number of goals and destinations. Ensured a crew’s first mission is to an ISRU 4 location if they only have an ISRU of 4.

Reorganised the crew module design and added additional crew module equipment descriptions and an extra airlock. You can still run your biosphere if your life support is damaged, however evacuating air from a hab module will kill it. Moved crew module platforms to the (A)-Base-(D)-Landing rules.

You always have chrome with your stack, but this only counts for actions which target your stack, such as repairing it.

Removed a couple of core competencies that were no longer relevant. Robotic crew starting abilities determine their species rating.

Increased crew, mission control, star system folios, world worksheets and load out table font size to 11 point.

Oxygen loss, blood loss, fatigue and stress are now given tracks on the crew folio — a number of other penalties have also been added to the folio. Hot bunking no longer affects the recovery of stress. Fatigue penalties now apply to either physical, mental or social actions, depending on the fatigue level. Long term fatigue is now called burnout and is harder to recover from. Water tallies now represent 0.5 kg of water instead of 1 kg of water.

Clarified you always get spare time skill points but can’t spend them on skills while in space. Operational skill points can now only be acquired by performing an operation. Provided a lot more detail on how bypass actions work. Ecology skill now covers life-support equipment. You can now reverse engineer ET produced and Advanced technologies provided you have the inks. Researching Earthside technologies is limited to what you have acquired. You begin the game with all Baseline technologies licensed.

Reduced the mass of soft, hybrid and hard space suits and PLSS. Increased the mass of ballistic helmets. Planetary suits now have inserts but have an increased suit penalty.

Moved sensors, kits and tool sets to survival equipment to (A)-Base (D)-Landing and weapons locker to This Space Intentionally.

Ultracapacitors allow you to add only half a battery tally if you choose success with a cost, instead of acting as tie breakers. Ship drones can now carry a variety of pods with different functions. Hard shell suits have one less layer. Clarified how carapace armour works.

TIP muscle power is limited for most battery types.

Only dry world survival rigs recycle drinking water. Wet world survival rigs don’t require base stations to perform ISRU recovery. Free fall survival rigs have three different functions.

Body parts are now called parts and are a lot more configurable. Rigs can now have parts. Reordered a number of part types so they occur at different technology levels. Robotic crew start with parts instead of capability levels or built-in assets.

 The Implanted species rating is now called Augmented and the Augmented species rating is now called Converted. Converted species can now change their body plan and Exospecies can now change their mass.

Clarified how armour works including for occupants of vehicles and buildings. Smoothed out continuous damage so it more correctly applies. Modified rad-hardness and radiation damage so it is consistent throughout the rules. Leg damage now halves your movement points instead of fast blood loss.

Added structure damage rules and defined how structures share atmosphere between cards or within a card at various scales. Added hull breach and fire fighting rules.

Moved the majority of surface travel rules including terrain to the (A)-Base (D)-Landing supplement. The crewed rules still allow you to climb in free fall and walk and run under the influence of forces such as spin, thrust and gravity. Walking is now distinguished from running.

Added the ability to search space and locations to recover fuel and equipment.

Renamed the Observations chapter as the Sites chapter. Moved the Encounters chapter to the crewed rules. Every random encounter that is a transmission from another site improves exoinfrastructure at the site it originates from. Provided more detail on placing counters on site hexes to represent claims, factories, colonies and Bernals.

Added Migration and Trade rules to make the core rules about travelling through space to inhabited sites rather than exploring unclaimed sites. This is centred around a number of activities consisting of mandatory encounters that are resolved using action checks.

Structured maps now place airlocks to allow ingress into pressurized structures.

Moved the obstruction rules to the core rules and modified obstructions to include doors, security doors and IEDs. Hazards are now represented by orange dice with a counter underneath the dice indicating the damage type and twice the face value of the dice determining the damage amount.

(A)-Base (D) Landing

This new supplement incorporates the survival equipment and site travel rules from the core rules along with the site map designer for most map types except structured maps; and the robot designer from A Facility with Words.

Fuel reserves apply to all vehicles, not just spacecraft.

Added base-building to allow you to build solar flare shelters, mine materials, assemble or 3D print buildings and grow biospheres into a complete colony. Simplified digging so you don’t have to do multiplication when determining mining and tunnelling rates for most cases. Robot digging locomotion types are better differentiated from each other.

Roads, bridges, ramps and tunnels are indicated using stacks of counters on the map once they are placed.

Massively simplified terrain penalties so that they don’t require a table lookup; and made rolling resistance determined by coloured counters on the terrain. Modified the definition of partitioned cards to mean any two overlapping cards, and added submerged, overgrown and congested terrain. Access roads renamed to graded terrain and access road movement point costs only apply on tunnel and road networks.

Added looms to allow printing of fabrics (Thanks to Irrationalactor for pointing this out).

Rewrote the robot designer to better match the order of operations needed for designing a robot and included sizes, shapes and streamlining in the robots chapter to avoid having to flip around the rules. Robots are less resistant to radiation. Smaller robots are smarter but may not necessarily speak languages. Robots always have a locomotion type and some kind of power. Robot shapes are not limited by technology level. Payload locomotion is now a type of hitching locomotion and confined locomotion has been added. Added Robot builds to ensure that small robots have some additional abilities.

Fixed Disembodied Intelligences so that they have a useful skill at any intelligence level.

Fleet ops now includes arrays which allow robots to have any item of a specific size and class through a combination of on-board equipment and mobile fleet. Hull ops now includes the length of time the hull provides protection for. Replaced cargo loads with more variety of cargo carrying types, improved cranes and allowed gofers to carry much heavier objects. Provided more meaningful statistics for bridges, included deploy times in structures and added robot sizes to structures size to avoid nonsensical values. Added cable and maglev structures.

Improved batteries only double battery run time instead of quadrupling it and are built at C labs — they now double tallies as well. Improved capacitors which halve the size of laser weapons, electronic warfare, rail and quench guns and are built at D labs. Simplified battery charging times for fast charging batteries

A Facility with Words

Promotions can be applied to the crew without needing to perform an operation but cause dysphoria instead. Each crew can only have one promotion at a time, but can change or remove them.

Started work on revising civil functions. This will be completed in the next update and will include networks being placed by certain civil functions.

Moved body size and plan and animal locomotion to the Ecosystem Designer. Better differentiated animal digger locomotion types and provided locomotion speeds.

Removed combat groups temporarily until the next update.

Subsonic weapons now do GUN damage.

Ammunition is now specified as tallies per time interval instead of using Desperate, Limited, Extended. Rapid fire is now a straight exchange of ammo for rate of fire.

Added light laser weapons. Lasers smaller than heavy weapons can (and normally) use crew battery tallies when being fired, but this is limited by battery power output.

Revised alert levels and opportunities during exfiltrations.

Moved the Robot Designer to the (A)-Base (D) Landing supplement.

Abandoned structures moved to this supplement. Abandoned structures have now fallen into disrepair which makes them much more interesting to explore without needing explicit challenges or rewards. Revised the collapsing challenge and fixed some issues with the way defences were run.

All Errors are My Own

Removed large colony, faction and Bernal social trends.

Revised divergent Super gift resolution to override action outcomes instead of modifying bumps; and changed a number of divergent abilities.

Fixed an issue where Zone War social trends couldn’t occur (Reported by Zhaoqi).

This Space Intentionally

Unlicensed items get defects rather than penalties. Drop sickness only acts as a penalty in free fall.

Removed references to language skill points. Languages are chrome.

Encounters with intercepting rockets are now resolved using new activities rules.

You now always generate unrest at colonies.

The Weapon’s Locker and permits have been moved to the Politics chapter from the core rules and now includes weapon ranges. Added Political Will section on ability to perform arrests and use deadly force.

Combat operations now take 1 month.