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“Heliocentric Zone” is used both for distance from the sun and distance from Earth. Should this be split into heliocentric and geocentric?

There's 3 quite interesting answers to this.

1. The heliocentric distance (absolute value of solar power) is used as a proxy for the exoglobalization expansion rate: it is approximately equal to the number of burns required to move to that zone from Earth (which is presumably why High Frontier uses a value of 2.5 km/s as a burn). It's heliocentric because the gravity of the sun is the overwhelmingly biggest force you have to overcome in space travel once you get sufficiently far from an individual planet.

2. Paradoxically, Mercury is the closest planet (on average) to every other planet in the solar system. You can read https://engaging-data.com/mercury-closest/ for a fuller explanation of this weird fact but it means that measuring from the heliocenter is a good approximation to measuring from Earth for linear distances such as for determining the energy received from beamed solar power from a powersat in Earth's orbit.

3. If you are close enough to Earth (or another body) where the geocentric distance really matters, all sorts of other factors come into play, such as the amount of the beamed power you can generate. As this is often dependent on the amount of solar power you can capture, the distance to the sun is still a factor.

(Update 7+) The Faction Politics event should be rewritten to say it triggers the active social trend impact, rather than just Space Politics (since dedicated Space Politics trends doesn’t last past Era 1)

The trend doesn't last past era 1, but human nature does. If a faction isn't non-human enough to have its own background impacts, then baseline human political factors come into play.

Late game new species should probably take the Mission Control into account instead of space politics if they’re the result of Mission Control trends. Likewise, for a species generated via a mission control trend, is their dependency specific to my faction or is it applicable to society in general?

As space gets bigger, the impact individual mission controls have starts to fall away. Dependencies apply to the species that created the new species: if your Mission Control is still human, then the dependency will apply for all humans.

"I stopped tracking skill increases once I was out of Era 1; the overwhelming majority of your operations are going to have chrome from the beginning (since in order to use the component in the first place, you need the patent for it), so once I hit skill level 6 most checks became automatic successes and I was just rolling to see if a complication occurs. [...] This was ultimately what drove me to “treat the crew as a collective” approach. "

Congratulations. You've been Triangle Agencied. Update 7 will include more rewards* for ensuring your compliance with faction doctrine.

* By rewards, I mean demerits for not complying.

"Accumulating defects was also not much of an issue: the few times it happened for components, I just spent an extra turn at the next site manufacturing a replacement."

Defects are intended to be "bad thing that you should avoid at any cost". Please ensure you have a correctly researched replacement for the spectral type of the next site and that the site is capable of manufacturing that component type at all.

"Bumps were abandoned (and forgotten) fairly early on, as I was auto-succeeding nearly every roll and had no real use for them."

Bumps are not intended for assisting your skill checks. They are supposed to be for improving rewards and avoiding bad stuff happening to the entire Earth.

Why do GW thrusters feel like a downgrade?

Many ET produced technologies can feel like a downgrade. This is an artefact of the board game and as mentioned, Sixty Years in Space tries to preserve as much as possible from the board game rules.

X has a weird name or is a weird system, that doesn't really make sense for what it does.

Again, this is often a result of inheriting something from the board game. Sixty Years in Space attempts the balancing act of trying to preserve compatibility with multiple editions of the board game despite the rules changing between editions, and is successful at this surprisingly often.

Apologies. Thanks. Fixed.

Update 7 is out for A Lot of Zeroes.  The ashcan release of a new game 60 Virs10ns about being a sailor or aviator belonging a pre-industrial or industrial people on an alien world is also out.

Feel free to follow what I estimate will be 2-3 months solid work at https://bsky.app/profile/andrewdoull.bsky.social/post/3mi3f353b2c2v

Update 7 is now turning into an attempt to bring the majority of rules into line with High Frontier 4All. That means a lot more work, if simply because I'll be adding 40+ additional trends to All Errors are My Own, which has now been separated into two books, the second of which is titled All Terrors are My Own and includes all the trends for the Futures and Directions eras. However at the end of it, I shouldn't need to do more global updates which should mean an improved release cadence.

I realize I say this for every update.

As this stage it looks like the atmospheric travel and ecosystem builder rules from Colony Subtitle and the world building rules from A Lot of Zeroes are going to end up in a new game about exploring a world using aeroplanes, air ships and/or sailing ships. I’ll release this as an ashcan for the coming update so I can focus on what I’ve planned to do for update 7.

If you bought the game at $50 at release, and each PWYW release, you should now own $80 of game for $50 plus however much you contributed.

TSI should be PWYW as well at https://half-apress.itch.io/this-space-intentionally until the next release.

In general:

1. If I reorganise the bundle order I make any game removed from the bundle PWYW for 3-6 months.*

2. All PWYW releases convert to a purchase of the book when it goes full price.

* There’s one exception where I gifted everyone who bought at a specific price tier the book that had its order in the bundle changed.

You can get C:st for PWYW at https://half-apress.itch.io/colonysubtitle until I do a full release of it.

If you purchased Sixty Years in Space at the $20 or more tier, you’ll own a copy of the Crewed Rules. If you did not, you’ll have to rebuy it. I’m happy to discuss this further.

Noting in passing that this predated the 6 7 meme

Looking back at my update 6 plans, they ended up much more ambitious than I had originally thought. When I decided to pivot to the major restructure that update 6 ended up involving I was  only halfway through the Colony: Sub/title: design (which has been released as an ashcan release in largely the state it was in at the time), and the amount of work required to do the restructure is significantly less than the work required to finish C:St: let alone create and release any of the additional supplements I’ve been planning (for some time now - looks at EHO).

So let’s dial it back for update 7.

I’m going to concentrate on getting the edges smoothed out - the second half of my response to the Throne of Salt play through that resulted in the restructure. This is going to involve a lot more play testing - which is extremely time consuming - but should result in a cleaning up of rules in many places which are likely a little jagged at the moment.

I’ll also finish off Colony: Sub/title: and the revised This Space Intentionally - making the later into a trading/economics simulation focused supplement in the style of Elite but concentrating on the few trade goods that the game sets up as being valuable enough to trade.

One thing I suspect I’ve done in making Sixty Years in Space a minimum lovable product is thrown the baby out with the bathwater: in the sense I’ve probably stripped back what defines crew and personnel too far.

So I’m going to reinvestigate Outlooks or some other variation of traits to help define your crew and Mission Control staff with a little more detail. This is likely going to be heavily inspired by the triple-O approach to solo games, which Cesar Capacle writes about on his blog: https://capacle.substack.com/p/playing-solo-rpgs-as-the-gm. The system he talks about is going to be released on backer kit with a lot more detail and, as an inexperienced solitaire player, I look forward to trying it out.

The completely fixed file has now been uploaded.

That accidental omission of G-H allowed me to pinpoint the exact line the fault occurred on. A fixed version of the document should be coming out shortly.

OK - I've temporarily split All Errors are My Own into 3 files, as the formatting issues appear to be occurring due to the document size. I've not spent a huge amount of time validating this is correct, and this will definitely result in further links breaking between the files. If I do have to permanently use this fix, I'll split the document by era rather than alphabetically but this will take a lot more work.

Apologies for not picking this up and this temporary state of affairs shouldn't hopefully last for too long.

OK. I can see the issue. I’m not sure why this is occurring - the document is built using a very old version of LaTeX and I have barely changed this document between updates. I’ll have to start digging. This could take some time.

Can you give me some example pages you’re seeing this on?

Those aren’t the formatting errors I was aware of. I’ll have to look further into it.

I've added the updated infrastructure chapter excerpt, which I had missed from the original release.

Update 6 makes the core game playable solo.

I've updated All Errors are My Own to update 6's text. I've been unable to fix what is a bug with about 8 or so references in the rule book that I've spent multiple nights trying to unsuccessfully fix. Hopefully it won't affect you.

I've also done a minor cosmetic update to the Crewed Rules to remove some blank pages.

It could just be everyone ticking "not human" on the latest census form. It's really up to you.

Update 6 is now out. I said it would be modular but it’s ended up being the biggest single update to the game.

so far

Normally you’ll only visit 1 solar system in a sector  so you can just generate the systems on a table and choose one.

I’m less worried about sharing LaTeX source because it requires a version that I don’t believe is available any more.

With regards to the issues with coloured dice, dropping counters and so on, I think the minimum lovable product version will be the best approach. That way you can solitaire play the major part of the game with much reduced record keeping. All of the counter/dice interactions are for “zoomed in” parts of the game and zooming in is intentionally optional.

A Lot of Zeroes is also a standalone space exploration game that I’ve published except the scale is up to 30LY/cm and up to million year long turns.

I design in LaTeX which supports various epublishing formats as well.

Is the more complex tables something that would be more useful to expose as a spreadsheet in e.g. Google docs?

There is a high frontier site list which has the burns to each site from LEO at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1TGDLdBEEjtkLFcg0j19R_sgRlkmSeIGXIhT_Pyj_rfw/htmlview#gid=0 I had thought someone had made a map planner in Python but all the map resources I can find are visual planners

I can also try rendering the PDFs in various accessible formats, but I really don’t know how to make tables work for someone who is visually impaired: the tables are really complex in some instances, and can also use colour to convey some information.

However I think the actual fix is something I’m planning for the update after next which is a cut down version of the game which features the “minimum lovable product” which will have you playing as a Mission Control moving your spacecraft around the solar system and rolling for trends.

Throne of Salt is doing another solitaire play through of Sixty Years in Space at http://throneofsalt.blogspot.com/2025/09/60-years-in-space-return.html

At this stage of the design it’s a worker placement board game.

Just a heads up that it looks like the Shipboard Life rules will be going into This Space Intentionally instead. Colony: Sub/title is morphing into a much bigger thing than I had initially planned. It's all under control, but it just means it'll take a little longer to release.

(they actually do share the same actio resolution system, but half of them are roll over, half of them are roll under, and then there’s A Lot of Zeroes which ultimately doesn’t care and so the SRD system version of this just ends up being extremely confusing to read).

I know you say it's end game content, but A Lot of Zeroes is designed as an introductory game to the series and has much simpler rules than its prequel.

This is a paradox of the whole series of games. For the most part -- (A)-Base (D)-Landing excepted -- the complexities of space travel and colonization get simpler the higher the technology level is. I am flirting with releasing A Facility with Words and Colony: Sub/title as standalone games for this reason -- both have their own character generation systems and I could introduce a different action resolution system that makes sense for each of them (if you think about it, the fast combat resolution in AFwW already is that).

But then I end up in a situation where I benefit from writing an SRD that has the rules common to all games, but the SRD won't have character generation or action resolution mechanics in it which just feels incredibly weird.

I think I know how to square the circle on this and CSt might end up being the first rules I try this with.

OK. I’ll prioritise this and see how much I can get done for the next update. The work I’m doing on Colony: Sub/title touches so much of the rules that I’ll have to do an update for all the Sixty Years in Space rule books anyway.

If I’m going to do it, I’d rather use eg PDF layers to allow you to toggle the notes on/off and at that point page references are the least complex of part of what I’m trying to do

This is the sort of thing that’s quite hard to do using the current development pipeline I use. I’ll investigate what options there are.

For anyone else reading, I’ll respond with answers to more general questions here: this is for typographic stuff which won’t have much relevance for anyone reading after the next update.

My email is andrewdoull@gmail.com

Looks like I missed cleaning up the references to BSU in a few places. You are correct - this is a High Frontier 3rd edition concept.

I do need to introduce the colours a bit better as well. The Development path table is the best place to try to understand what these are in the current rules. 

Thanks for the feedback.

I ended up deciding that the A Lot of Zeroes update was large enough to qualify as a full update -- update 6. It is out now.

Update 6 for A Lot of Zeroes is out - you can now get the first 48 pages for free. The full release notes are at the link.

At the same time, I've released some minor updates to Sixty Years in Space which fixes a long standing bug with the indexes, and one formatting issue in Sixty Years in Space.