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Dan D from Throne of Salt has written up a blog post of the same title at https://throneofsalt.blogspot.com/2026/08/so-you-want-to-play-60-years-in-space.html

This is probably a little premature; and looking back at my previous planning posts I keep promising features that get pushed back and don't make the release. However I'd like to lay out more of a shape of the game post to try to indicate where things are going.

Update 7c is going to be a "straight forward" release in that I just need to add all the Posthuman and Directions trends I'm planning to add. I jokingly say straight forward because 5 of those trends are also the titles of supplements that I'm thinking about writing at some future date for a post 2100 sequel to Sixty Years in Space...

Then there's some reorganisation work, which is what always complicates things. If I remove a set of rules from one supplement, I end up feeling like I have to give away the new supplement that those rules are in (for a while) by making it pay what you want. This is always a risk with discovery writing the game -- and it's hurting the viability of the game because I end up releasing supplements way too early.

I need to get realistic and recognise that I've got to keep the game financially successful enough to sustain it as a business. That's not a high bar (because I'm not paying myself anything) but I'd like to increase the amount of original art in the game, which means that there has to be money coming in. And the best way to generate that is new supplements that are not PWYW.

So I'm planning on releasing "Collectors edition" supplements. These will just be alternate cover art supplements at a higher price point and more dpi. But they'll also serve to sign-post that "this book is finished" (minus some editing), which has historically been a problem, as I'll outline below.

If you look at the three of the four era-specific supplements -- This Space Intentionally, A-Base D-Landing, A Facility with Words  -- they all started out as ways of segmenting out more complicated rules (the robot builder, detailed combat, smart matter etc) into eras where those things mattered the most. This began to change with A Facility with Words where I figured out that you could play the game as a Traveller-style life path system on the High Frontier map. I have an aversion to character generation systems in general, but this was too cool to ignore. What I recognised as a part of developing this idea, is that character generation is going to be fundamentally different for each of these eras -- in fact the setting your characters' appear in is the primary thing that should determine how they are created: think of this as the diametrically opposite approach to almost all generic TTRPG systems.

Colony: Sub/title: is the first attempt to build that idea from the ground up, and the Archetypes and Colonists chapters in the other two rule sets are me retrofitting this idea to these other rules.

However what has resulted is these supplements are effectively half a game. There's really interesting ideas about character generation, there's some systems that they can interact with, and then ????

You may have noticed in update 7b that the Combat rules have moved from A Facility with Words to This Space Intentionally. This is the first step in fixing this problem. What I'll be doing moving forward is adding end games for these four supplements,  which will then feedback into the additional rules that need to be included. This Space Intentionally will end with the War for Independence but is going to have a lot to say about the role of robots in space; A-Base D-Landing is going to end with Project Exodus (or another kind of exodus); A Facility with Words will end with successful Epic Hazard Operations (instead of that being a standalone supplement); and Colony: Sub/title already has the ending (Futures) but needs the middle added in. And for an example of "rules to be added in": This Space Intentionally is going to expand on what's happening with uncrewed exploration of the solar system. A lot of those missions are going to end up with glitched robots. Your PCs are going to want to board those glitched spacecraft to salvage equipment. And the glitched security robots on board those spacecraft are not going to like that. Which is why Combat has ended up there rather than A Facility with Words.

And while I'm talking about This Space Intentionally; this rulebook ended up being a dumping ground for a lot of optional rules that didn't make the cut for Sixty Years in Space -- mostly because I hadn't figured out (until now) what the players would be doing in space. That'll be changing with release 7c with the release of a new supplement All Eras RE:0Mi55ions. This will be the last "giving it away for free to start with" supplement that I'll be doing. The shape of that supplement is going to be "the players can't be everywhere, so how do they affect the solar system where they can't be" but it's going to also include Spacecraft components and a greatly expanded mission builder.

I've updated the 60 Years in Space rulebook to fix a formatting issue in the Mission Logs chapter; as a bonus I've finished the Technical colonist entries in the Crewed Rules.

You should download these two files again if you have already done so for the new release.

Sorry. It’s the rules.

 All Eras Re:0Mi55on5 is going to be expanded rules for the core game. Historically these all ended up in This Space Intentionally but it really made no sense for them to do so; and TSI really wanted to be its own thing.

You may want to read the Lloyd’s Salvage Co entry a bit more closely; or perhaps not, before you do that.

It’s only 100 pages of new material or so

I've added the introduction chapter to the list of freely downloadable content for the game.

Sixty Years in Space is driven by more than a small dash of annoyance about the direction taken by No Man’s Sky since launch so this is probably consistent with that.

I’m fine. You?

The spacecraft cards that take 2 operations to flip are the cards on pages 69 to 76 - ie a whole spacecraft.

Current page counts are:

All Errors are My Own - 362 pages

All Terrors are My Own - 423 pages

Which is 124 pages more than the current rule set. So both books will be something like 1,000 pages together for a 33% increase in All Errors are My Own content to support HF4All.

I'm now almost exactly half way through the updates for All Errors are My Own. This may sound like progress, but I have the same amount of work again in the new book All Terrors are My Own, which means I'm only a third of the way through the remainder of the update. Assuming I keep working at the same rate, I probably have another 4 months to go. I think I'll release All Errors are My Own as another intermediate update although it means the Future and Directions eras will have a number of undefined entries you'll have to just reroll to avoid using.

Yes; that’ll be in the part B update.

The FAQ has been updated for the new release.

“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.

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. [Edit: In update 7 part B, if the faction has an origin story, the origin story will be used as the background impact if the faction has no background impacts].

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 included more rewards* to make some of the early and mid-game push back a little harder and simplify some of the crew management but the fact there are 3 paths you can take has been intentional since 2015 and is a core part of the game.

* By rewards, I mean demerits.

"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. Update 7 included some name changes which fixed a couple of the more egregious examples because they were fixed in High Frontier 4All.

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.