We originally made the combat update for 2.1 privately, and offered it to Ludeon first, in case they had plans for something similar, or wanted us to contract with them to finish it with DLC level polish. They said no, but for good reasons. The system is super cool, but hard to maintain, was hell to optimize, hell to ensure it's compatible with all the mods out there, and hard to ensure it fits with every playthrough.

So it was suggested we make a new game and pursue that. Which we did! And it's coming along great: https://www.patreon.com/c/RadianHelix

SOS2 is a concept I've wanted to pursue for a long long time. (Even started a game like it in 2014 before we lost that funding opportunity: https://www.indiedb.com/games/shadow-star )

If you search the web for games like SOS2, there are a lot of them right now.

Stardeus
Space Haven
Starmancer
Cosmoteer
The Last Starship (by prison architect devs!)
Wayward Terran Frontier
Nebula

Even RimWorld itself was originally a Starship Simulator! Before RW was a mercenary sim, then a colony sim, it was a starship sim called Eclipse Colony.

So it's obvious this is something players want. There's just a LOT of competition out there. Not all of it doing as well as we'd like to see. It's not enough to make a game like RimWorld and bolt ships onto it, or just make a ship sim with rimworld like pawns. That's demanding you not only make a better RimWorld -- which is obviously a high bar to begin with -- but again, there's a lot of competition in that RimWorld-like space. It's building the community over from scratch too, which is impossible.

Eventually I'll revisit the idea of a Modular Starship Construction and Crew Management Game. Shadow Star was 3D, akin to what Mothership Zeta for Fallout 3 was like, an FPS-RPG-Bridge Simulator. That became Starfield, which, obviously as a AAA game had far more resources, and still in many ways failed to achieve what it hoped.

We developed SOS2 during the Pandemic. Times have changed since then. We just have so much less time, plus a new game to develop. I'm happy with SOS2 being a mostly open source project anyone can contribute to and continue while we're onto the next thing. If it became a RimWorld DLC, that'd be cool. If another modder makes a space mod like SOS2 as a Space Framework with an open galaxy sim & vehicle-like ships -- cool.

I think SOS2 is the space mod it was always meant to be right now, with the inherent limits being its only remaining faults. There are places where RimWorld just isn't flexible enough, or performant enough, to do what SOS wanted to do: go to space, travel to new planets, and return.

Which is why we're doing something a little different on Project Morningstar. It's more unique to us, with an individual personality as a game. Still very reminiscent of RimWorld, but with a more StarSector twist, where you're playing as a party of characters who build a town as part of a broader open world exploration narrative, rather than just playing as an individual or a full blown colony sim. Still, there's some competition akin to it, but nothing quite like this hybrid of something akin to Project Zombiod, StarSector, and RimWorld.

If that works out as a base game, we'll build onto that with an SOS like DLC one day, opening what promises to be a very open universe ready to accept that kind of Land-Sea-Air-Space building, fighting, looting game.