Survey Missions/Gamemode

PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS SUGGESTION IS NOWHERE NEAR COMPLETE
I’ve had this in my mind for a while and just wanted some place to sort of archive it. I’m also usually busy so I will be adding new ideas/updating this with any feedback as soon as I get some free time to check the thread. I also have very little knowledge with BYOND code, so I don’t even know if some of these things would be possible - if that ever is the case for something I’ve written, please let me know.

This idea came to my head after thinking about how the Whisp is actually an exploration cruiser but it never does any exploration, only fighting. I’d also like to make it clear that I got a lot of inspiration from Stellaris.

Main idea of these missions would be going around the systems scanning anomalies. Now of course two issues arrive with this, and I unfortunately only have a solution for one.
Firstly, there are very little anomalies currently and it would get boring very fast. My suggestion would be adding more anomaly types - new star types, ranging from basic things such as different classes to neutron stars and maybe even ones that aren’t real, new asteroids that aren’t made for mining, maybe even remains of something else entirely.
The second issue is the fact that the astrometrics system is very barebones - it’s nothing more than clicking a scan button and waiting for it to finish. I’m not very smart so I don’t really know what to change here.

You would also be able to find ruins, albeit rarely. Ruins would require a science team to be sent down to investigate whatever might be going down there that’s causing the ship sensors to go wild. I imagine it as some sort of replacement for the gateway. Objectives for these ruins could range from finding remains to analyzing some sort of data, and you might even get a neat reward that benefits the ship in the end.

Again, this is very incomplete and this text is just a basic copy and paste with a few corrections and descriptions from a small thing I had in a notepad file. I apologize for the very barebones suggestion, but I just wanted to finally post this instead of letting it gather dust on my desktop. I’ll be adding more things in the future.

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I think this is a very good way for the crew to be more engaged other than being stuck doing one thing the entire round. Maybe make it have a gravity well sector that ships cannot ftl out of without researching why this ruin is doing it. It may just be completely optional but always there as something to do

One thing that’s already in the game and needs a bit of both hunting and preparation are wormholes. I think “travel through x wormholes” could be an ok objective.