Well, that list does not sound unreasonable overall. Here’s my two cents:
In terms of cities, I could see some kind of settlement mechanics in the cards. Not necessarily procedural cities, but a way to evolve your bases into something that has meaning in the game space (and then you can leave it to the players to build the cities…). Something like that wouldn’t be a lot of effort in its basics. I mean, basically just make vendor stalls a buildable base item, and make rooms assignable for “rent” or something, and after a while somebody moves in. One could put as much complexity into this as to almost literally make it a new game within the game, but you don’t need to. Putting in something basic would be nothing but an extension of current base building mechanics, and HG have regularly updated those, so there would be logic to it.
Something will be going on with space stations, that much is clear. They didn’t put the interactive core in there just for giggles (I hope… though HG seems to have put a lot of stuff in there just for giggles… has anybody figured out a use for basalt yet??).
New enemy race… potentially, it would be nice to see all that lore lead up to something. More dungeons would be very welcome. Especially the abandoned space stations effectively scream to have something like that put in, and most of the logic would exist already. Would potentially require a whole swath of graphical assets, though, but we haven’t seen many new art assets in the game since origins, and all those modellers have been doing something since then, so… there’s probably going to be something that involves a good deal of new assets, but there’s not really any guarantee or indication that this wil be it (though dungeons in abandoned space station you have to crack first would play nicely together with space station ownership, and my gut tells me that that is a thing that we’ll actually see).
Waterfalls/Rivers, no. Just no. I mean, I’m not going as far as to say that they are absolutely impossible in an unconstrained system like NMS, but if you crack that problem you could probably write a mathematical doctorate about it…
Worlds from a past era… errr… Depends on how you look at it. I would just interpret this as a new exotic planet type with lots of ruins and stuff. I could totally see that. Not expecting any time travel mechanics, though.
Some trade rebalancing, sure, that could always happen, especially if some part of the addon focuses on settlement building.
All in all, that list doesn’t sound unreasonable, and in my oppinnion there’s nothing that would render it completely utopian (apart from the rivers thing… seriously, forget about rivers. If we’ll ever get them I’ll sing praises and burn some sacrifices, but as far as we know that shit is outright impossible).
No save editor used.
