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.