My thoughts about the potential for Pioneer

thoughts.md

I have played Pioneer and I woud describe it as a game with potential. Currently Pioneer like a number of other openworld games has an acute content problem. It is relatively easy to simulate a wast empty canvas, but a much bigger challenge is to fill this space with enough stuff for the player to see and do.

The current randomly generated missions fail to fill this void for me. They feel generic, abstract, same. Every cargo mission feels exactly the same as every cargo mission, every taxi mission feels exactly the same as every taxi mission, etc. The fact that in for many builds there is one optimal mission type (in terms of profit) aggrivates this issue. Plus: after a certain point trade becomes more profitable than missions, but again every trade feels exactly the same as every trade before it.

Games that in my opinion are both openworld and don't have a content problem:

1. C:DDA
2. Hyperrogue
3. EndlesSky
4. Thrive

I see two potential directions for pioneer: story-focused and mechannics-focused

Story-focused

This is the approach EndlesSky took. EndlesSky is, in essence, an exceptionally well written choose-your-own-adventure book with simulated space battles. In the EndlesSky "spaceport" (not to be confused with the "job board") you can find many unique quests, short quest chains and longer campaigns.

Note: I am NOT suggesting we sould copy everything exactly how EndlesSky does it.

With sufficient time and effort Pioneer could become a choose-your-own-adventure book with simulated Newtonian physics. This too would require writing many quests, quest chains and a campaign or two. To make the task merely challenging instead of outright impossible we would have to cut the number of populates star systems to a more managable size.

I do not posess the writing experience necessary for such a large undertaking.

A note on large language models

I see two ways one could try to sidestep the need to manually write the missions:

1. Using a large language model to pre-generate a sufficiently vast library of quests
2. Embedding a permissively-licensed large language model in the game

I would like to warn of a potential pitfal in the option 2: in my (very limited) expirince with large language models they appear to be much more demanding on the hardware (RAM in particluar) than pioneer is now. This would limit the potential player base. I do not know if there exists a large language model that generates sufficiently good content and has more reasonable hardware requirements.

I aslo have no plans to explore option 1, but would be interested to see the results if someone else gives it a try.

Mechannics-focused

This approach relies on adding many new mechannics and interactive elemets - many new thigs the player can do.

My thoughts so far:

1. Mining
2. Crafting. Maybe remove the ability to buy gear for the ship and make it craftable instead or maybe require the player to buy "schematics".
3. Growing the "mothership" by adding bits. Maybe instead of having several fixed hulls to chose from we could make every ship a bunch of pars bolted together.

Maybe borrow some ideas from cosmoteer?