If we as players discover a new solar system through a jump point and find a planet in a habitable zone, could we establish our own settlements or colonies and have other players or even NPCs come and build them out over time?

Well, yeah, we talked about this. This will be a longer-term thing in the game. It wouldn't be at the beginning, but part of the long-term plan is to have more procedural exploration, so we add more systems and we generate landing zones that you could go and land on. And then at some point, one way to really add game content is you start a colony, and then there's all sorts of missions to bring in the basic materials for the colony and build it up. So you sort of make that a player and NPC thing. I'm not promising we're doing it.

But I'm just saying we'd start small, in regards to before you actually get to the point where you can establish your own colony and build something up from scratch, you would probably have the ability to seize control of something that exists within the game that we've constructed and basically operate it, manipulate the levers to maximize production or whatever that particular production node does. And then once we've got all of that functionality refined and working, then we would move on logically to allowing you to actually build these things from scratch, which would require more interface work, more back-end logic. I'm not talking about making it like a SimCity where you're like, oh, I placed this building down here. No, I'm just talking about nodes.

I would say that longer term, that's basically one of, if you want to call it, the end-game style gameplay, where we're deliberately going to have parts of the game that players will work together to take over, to defend, to build up. So we've already mentioned space stations and asteroid bases. They're two examples of places that players can take over or would defend. And building out a colony in the future would be a place that you would build up. An earlier version of that would be building up an economic node, so you take over this small little weapons factory and you can build it up into one that produces five times as much stuff, but you need to make sure you've got demand, you need to make sure you've got the equipment, you need to make sure you've got the employees to do that.

Yeah, and there's a whole slew of information that we would need to provide you behind the scenes, and levers we'd need to give you to operate, to actually make that not only an enjoyable experience, but one where better players do better than others because they're more adept, they've practiced more, they've got better insight, they're paying more attention to what's going on around the system.