(disr)Update 6 is out

I'm extremely happy to announce update 6 is (mostly) released.

This is a significant rewrite and restructuring of the Sixty Years in Space rules to make the main game solitaire friendly by letting you control a mission control instead of individual crew. This involved moving all the personal play rules to a separate Crewed Rules supplement and creating a new Sixty Years in Space core rulebook from large sections of This Space Intentionally. As a result, This Space Intentionally has moved back to an "ash can" style release which will be expanded in a later update, and is temporarily pay what you want to compensate.

Working on this restructure has delayed the full Colony: Subtitle: supplement for the future era. I've decided to also release this as an ashcan style release with a pay what you want price point. I'm extremely excited about this and there should be enough rules there to convey the direction this game will take.

One technical issue has delayed an updated version of the All Errors are My Own rules for a couple of days. As a result of restructuring the rules, I've also had to change the price point of a couple of sets of rules in the main purchase point. If you purchased at the $30 price point, you'll be getting a complementary copy of A Facility with Words shortly.

The full release notes follows:

All Rules

Removed references to Basal and Mission Control social units (BSU and MCSU).

The High Frontier pledge now accommodates games which don’t have the classic 4-crew set up.

Renamed Social impacts as Background impacts and Mission Control impacts as Personal impacts.

Sixty Years in Space

The Crewed rules (almost all the Sixty Years in Space rules) have been moved to their own rule book — with the exception of the introduction, spacecraft movement and the spacecraft cards and Sites chapter. Archetypes were instead moved to This Space Intentionally. The introduction chapter has been reorganised to include the Baseline and Upported era descriptions and new technologies.

Sixty Years in Space now incorporates a number of rules moved from This Space Intentionally to allow one or more players to play as the Mission Control; either to act as a game moderator or for solitaire play. This includes the launch site rules, Launchpads and Mission Log chapter, the encounter builder and prompts from the Encounters chapter and the Infrastructure, Operations and Accidents chapters.

Changed how tech readiness is achieved in the Baseline and Earthside era.

The HOPE launch pad had specified the incorrect spacecraft card — now fixed.

Spacecraft cards include a fuel strip with 16 fuel steps worth of fuel on them. Spacecraft card masses now include the mass of the crew module.

Random encounters now always add bumps when they occur. Renamed Space Travel encounters to Space Comms encounters and Site and structure encounters to Structured encounters.

You now always have at least one Space Comms encounter every year. Reduced number of dice to roll for the origin to reduce wristage and increase range of results.

 If a Structured encounter occurs as an event, this can be with your colonist payload if you are carrying one.

Replaced the New Factory faction event with an extra Space Comms encounter. If the Space Politics is Anarchy or War, this can result in claim jumping or factories being captured.

Trends now always apply impacts when they change (Suggested by Dan D).

Added several diseases and a new row on the Disease table to better align diseases with the Systemic shifts suffered in A Lot of Zeroes. Tweaked the rows a number of diseases appear on to better match the era they are likelier to appear in.

Added Space Politics and Space Agency as the baseline social and Mission Control trends.

You can choose to lose the election as a partial success on the Election Activism operation. Changed how both successful and failed elections are resolved.

Defects are tracked directly on factories now, rather than added to a “spectral type pool” of defects.

Specified the chrome conditions for each operation. Added chrome for a number of operations to make them easier when the crew’s Mission Control is in power - and a variety of other conditions for other operations. Clarified how first and second wave crews can get patents and licenses for early (Earthside and ET produced) technology levels.

A number of operation complications changed due to the removal of outlooks from the Crewed Rules.

Going AWOL now prevents some additional actions — see the AWOL operation for details.

Spaceport infrastructure is now built in the Baseline era and NEO infrastructure across both the Upported and Colonization eras.

Renamed future infrastructure to match the High Frontier futures (both 3rd and 4th edition) with the exception of Climate mirror future - this is instead named after site being terraformed (New Venus, Blue Mars or Waking Titan).

Floating bubble worlds are only useful later on when terraforming Venus.

Made ramjet runway and shielding swarm superstructures instead of futures and removed supernova shield from superstructures to align this with A Lot of Zeroes. Dyson forests are always a system-class super weapon now.

Moved Bio supremacy future to an Unlikely future in Colony: Sub/title:.

Added the Faction and Species builders and Dependency rules to Sixty Years in Space that had been removed from A Facility with Words in a previous update. This is intended to allow players to play only using Sixty Years in Space or with these rules plus All Errors are My Own. This is largely inspired by Dan D’s play through on the Throne of Salt blog.

Added a modified version of the Species rating table from the Crewed Rules to the faction builder rules. Updated the Altered Morphology table to bring it into line with a number of upgrades from other supplements.

All new species now change their dependency somewhat at the start of each new era; the Space Politics background impacts can further modify this.

Crewed Rules

The Crewed Rules are now a separate rule book, intended to support personal play. The majority of rules from the update 5 of Sixty Years in Space are now in this rule book.

Moved Mission Control chapter and migration and trade rules to This Space Intentionally.

Moves the access levels rules to the Assets chapter.

Added an Activities chapter which incorporates rules for EVAs, searching, phoning home and social occasions.

Reduced cable lengths for buggies to much more reasonable numbers (1 km instead of 100 km).

Reworked addiction.

Removed disposition, philosophy, outlook and sleeping arrangements from crew creation to try to reduce the overall complexity of creating the crew. Changed the adopted outlook, jealousy and shame complications to use different mechanics as a result. Remove card suits from the space politics.

Fixed a sign reversal error for applying nationality mix numbers (thanks to Dan D from the Throne of Salt blog).

Changed Afrispace to ASA (Suggested by Dan D).

If you spend a skill point to recover from a penalty, you can choose to condition the corresponding ability by adding an alienating trait.

Social interactions can now be made partially successful by adding stress to the person you are talking to if their social ability is less than 6.

Crew module sensor suites are now 16 kilograms when promoted, instead of 5 kilograms.

Renamed faction upgrades to personal upgrades.

Replaced the Future tech faction upgrade with Stocks which allow crew to invest in their abilities or skills to upgrade them faster, and the Operations program with Realms, which allows the crew to each replace one skill with a realm which gives them chrome for all pre-Future technologies when performing actions with that skill.

Gestalt minds species rating renamed to Gestalt solvers. IA species rating renamed to brain implants.

The first point of stress does not count as a penalty.

Crew deaths add 2 stress instead of 1.

Yellow counters are now used to represent stress.

Acute stress bleeds through to PTSD.

Phoning home now suppresses stress instead of temporarily removing it.

Reworked toxins.

(A)-Base (D)-Landing

Added rules for creating and managing colonists, including colonist names, abilities and skills, including an action selection and resolution system. This allows this supplement to be played as a stand alone game.

Immigrants with off-world loyalties are now triggered when placing a colonist on a 5 or a 6, instead of a 6. Fixed representation of this loyalty so it now requires a clear counter on a faction-coloured counter.

Slowed down failure rates of unmaintained buildings by a factor of approximately 7. If not sufficiently maintained for long enough they become abandoned.

Removed reference to breakthrough technologies in the Colony Administrator chapter.

Fixed issue where fitted load table was using the wrong template. Fixed mass ranges given on load tables. Fixed issue where size 14+ adjustment was incorrect. Adjusted size 9-12 load tables to have 2 white squares.

Diesel engines are now available from capability level 7-12 with different performance parameters instead of capability level 13. Clarified that diesel engines cannot be high performance engines.

Domestic robots can now act as members of work crews and as crew modules (for enabling actions only), instead of enabling various Colony operations.

Batteries breakthrough now allows instant charging of batteries.

Removed the Bernal constructor fleet and Starship control capabilities.

Switched Bernal and Earthside accomodation capabilities — allowing both to degrade with time. Increased advanced accommodation durations.

Renamed artificial consciousness as elevate consciousness.

Nuclear-powered robots can now beam power.

Reduced length of armoured cables used for energy storage capability.

The starship module capability is a now breakthrough. Added the Bernal module breakthrough.

Replaced the Home base logistics capability with the Orbitals capability.

Forking, dominance and submission now only results in a defect.

Self-quining now causes brain damage and is a breakthrough instead of a future update.

Universal locomotion now only applies to the subtype of locomotion, not the locomotion type.

Heavy components now called hardened components and add 1 damage box at each location.

A Facility with Words

Added a rule for compounding armour to prevent high armour values from allowing all attacks to be ignored. Reduce damage bonus for non-vacuum armour to x2.

Moved antimatter and superstable bottomium warheads to smaller super weapon classes, replaced pinwheel replicator superweapons with resonance flare super weapons.

Combined site-class superweapons with biosphere-class superweapons.

Moved some Breakthrough smart matter types to the Future era. Removed a number of blue goo types from the Smart matter table which were not sufficiently distinguished as a different smart matter type or were not deployable as smart matter; added descriptions for other types.

Added rules for targeting different size targets with smart matter.

Recalculated Stardust burns.

Renamed Pixie dust to Polter dust and Propeller-ants to Pixie dust. Halved the speed of buoyancy using pixie dust.

Made healing from medichines and bio-catalysts act like other smart matter types.

Reduced the rate at which bio-catalysts increase the healing rate and capped it at a lower value to ensure that recovery from penalties still has some impact at higher technology levels.

Capped the rate at which recovery from dysphoria can be accelerated, so that it always requires downtime points to recover from.

A Lot of Zeroes

Removed references to BSUs in the rules (Thanks to Bravo Lima Poppo 3 for the suggestion).

Sentient ecologies get extinction resistance, allowing them to discard a dedicated breakthrough cube instead of going extinct.

Young brains cannot spend mega points on Capital ability as a result of a form shift.

Giant shell worlds can be constructed around any planet with an aerostat instead of giant planets.

All Errors are My Own

Added rules for resolving trends and impacts if you don’t have the Sixty Years in Space rules.

Social trends for the Upported era are now called Goals; Stakes for the Colonization era and Visions for the Exoglobalization era.

Artificial consciousness outlooks now match the robot outlooks from the Crewed Rules.

Changed propensity card gift resolution as outlooks are no longer in the game.

Added 4 more Uncatalogued existential threats.

VALS revised to include both intelligences in virch and xeno (simulated) environments. God’s dilemma becomes an unlikely future and is replaced by the fourth wall trend.

Colony: Sub/title

Colony: Sub/title allows you to play as posthumans in the future era. Crew adopt one of 18 realms and 6 hard-to-kill responses to survive dangers like grey goo ecophages, titan storms and bio-weaponised monsters. Each realm includes 6 ventures to invest in to realise an incredible array of possible futures.

This supplement incorporates the In-atmosphere travel, Ecosystem builder, Species builder and Dependencies chapters removed in update 5 from A Facility with Words.

The core game loop involves travelling to the source of unrecognised signals in the deep sound channel, observing the biomes and exploring the points of interest found there.

You now also roll for the ecological impact of humans and other intelligent species on an ecosystem. This can significantly reduce the effective biomass of wild ecosystems.

Changed Prey detritus keystone ability to Prey biomass.

Added Xenoparous reproduction and fixed issue preventing population bottleneck origin stories.

This Space Intentionally

The majority of the rules from This Space Intentionally have been moved to the revised Sixty Years in Space rules - except for the Mission Builder, Interceptions, Politics, Site and Colony Builder chapters and Service Risks from the Mission Log chapter.

Archetypes moved to here from the Crewed rules to form their own chapter.

Added a Shipboard life chapter which provides  rules for downtime actions and points, and playing large time scales on small map scales, using worker placement mechanics. 

Added social space maps which replace Political trends and impacts in the Politics chapter.

Smart device glitches and aging now result in the crew member losing their entertainment library.

Fixed and reordered some valuables entries.

Reordered the Factory and Colony Construction types slightly to better align with technology levels; moving bases now use vehicle movement types.

Postscarcity economy type is now partially determined by the era number.

Elections are now resolved using the Space Politics diagram if you have these rules, where each faction also has a counter on the diagram indicating where their votes will move the space politics to, if successful.