Update 5 was a massive amount of work over a very short time period: I wrote over 100 pages of rules in 3 months during the development process. I'm still really happy with what I was able to do across multiple systems, especially in making the Exoglobalization era feel like humanity moving throughout the solar system in a way that honours the core conceits of the game as well as a lot of the changes that made it into High Frontier 4All, and in fully realising A Lot of Zeroes as a standalone game which had been a long held dream of mine.
Commercially, it unfortunately doesn't appear to have paid off. While the visits to the itch pages have been as high or higher than many of the other updates, the sales bump from this update has been drastically lower. I think this is as much a marketing issue as an accessibility issue. I dropped a whole new game without much marketing, and then gave it away to everyone who had already bought the supplement it was based on (I am very smart).
I'm going to try a different approach for update 6, and see if it has any impact, by breaking up these big updates into a lot of smaller, more frequent ones.
First, I'll be releasing an incremental update for A Lot of Zeroes. I realised almost immediately after releasing the latest update that there was something I could do to significantly improve the economy of the game which at the moment doesn't provide incentives to entered civilised space. I've mentioned this elsewhere, but this update (call it 5a) will add in fragments, which you collect from system infrastructure from within civilised systems, and which allow you to work incrementally towards answers in even smaller ways than currently possible. It's been a very quick turnaround from conception to implementation, to the point where 5a will probably come out within the next 2 weeks. 5a will include a bunch of small changes all over the rules because fragments touch the game at so many points.
Secondly, I've got to get the new supplement for the Futures era to the point where I'll be able to release it. It's called Colony:Sub/title and will focus on political intrigue, exploration of living ecosystems, and atmospheric and undersea travel. Because that includes a bunch of rules that were excised from A Facility with Words, I'll initially be releasing it as pay what you want, before making it a full priced supplement after a suitable time interval (which may include a full update). It'll also include a chapter on Shipboard Life chapter for crews to have more ways to spend their time during extended voyages.
Thirdly is the alternate release strategy I'm working on: I'll be releasing a lot of smaller supplements, rather than big monolithic books. These are going to focus on a particular area of the game in more detail. I've talked about Epic Hazard Operations, and had hoped to include it with update 5, but it hasn't worked out quite that way. EHO will instead be released as a standalone game - a rules light introduction for the map-based play that doesn't rely on the High Frontier map. It'll be in the exoglobalization era, and A Facility with Words will act as the expert set to EHO's basic rules, as it were, allowing you to just buy those two books without having to get the Crewed Rules (if for instance, you want to play a pure High Frontier 4All compatible game).
Then I have a big list of potential ideas for further supplements. I don't want to reveal titles and much in the way of contents at the moment, although a close reading of the text may reveal some, but there's essentially going to be supplements for each era, that provide more detailed interactions for specific parts of the game. Think of them as adventure modules, but as if some of the adventure modules allowed you to replay the base game in radically different ways. Others will just be a bunch more stuff. For instance, I have faction specific missions for about 60% of the factions in All Errors are My Own which I ended up cutting from those rules, that I should probably release as a supplement at some point.