Basically to disappoint you at the top of the thread and to give a tl:dr, most updates will need someone interested in digital art to help me out. But pie-in-the-sky here are the things I'd like to do:

A bunch of planets don't actually have their short 1-2 line descriptions written yet. If anyone is interested in writing these with me, let me know! It's a simple thing I'm just creatively drained right now. In the meantime they use generic descriptions from their class.

I have several other cool ideas for planets I'd still love to add and I'd really love to expand the planets even over 100. You can see some of them on the spreadsheet already. As far as the UI art is concerned I can make things quickly and comfortably, but surface textures for the actual planet models are the big sticking point that means I can't go much further.

(I would especially love to do some habitable worlds with a bit of lava/volcanism on them. Because you can use emmisive textures for that and they look soooo good!)

I'm not aiming to hit a threshold number of any one archetype or another. (E.g "We MUST have ten of all world types!!") You'll notice the mod has a great many desert, ocean and continental varieties, but far fewer tundra ones. I don't see that as a problem. There are no gameplay mechanics here anyway! I'm simply adding what I hope are great ideas I'm excited about, and then letting the numbers end up wherever. I think this is a healthy approach because it means I'm not forcing myself to invent new planets that just don't really "work". To look at Tundra as an example again, I frankly already feel that "Tundra" is a very specific idea that realistically deserves to be a variety of Arctic world rather than an archetype of it's own. Vanilla declares it as one of the major types, though, so on those grounds it's been grandfathered in and that's fine - but I'm not bending over backwards to find 15+ subtypes of Tundra landscape just because I have a lot of great Ocean ones.

It occurs to me that some themes/biomes/ideas are appropriate for not just one climate type, but all of them. Mushroom worlds, for example, I've assigned to Tundra. But we could totally have a Continental mushroom world, a Desert mushroom world, a Tropical one. What about volcanic or lava strewn worlds? Alpine Lava worlds work, but so do Savannah Lava worlds, and so on.

So an update in the future might bring out these "bulk" ideas. I'm hesistant on two grounds for now:

a) Keeping them locked to just a single class gives them that extra pop and makes them feel extra special
b) I'm concerned about the gameplay/habitability flow here. A player could fairly ask "My species is happy living on this type of Mushroom world, so surely they should also be happy living on THIS mushroom world". But they won't be able to without gameplay changes, which are a line in the sand for me.

Another great concept is that of an eyeball world:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyeball_planet

Any class can in theory be tidally-locked and I think these things just look amazing. You can find them in both PD and RS:NF. Even though they are likely common in real life I'd probably make them uncommon in game. In truth the bigger reason I've held off on these ones (and the lava worlds) is because I'd want actual panet model textures for them and I don't have the art.

The mod currently doesn't do anything with Ecumenopoli, Relics or Habitats. They're mostly just cut for time and the fact that I'm not too enthusiastic/inspired about working on them. Candidates for a future update, maybe, but I doubt it.

I'm happy to regenerate any AI art any time. It's not a problem as far as the UI is concerned. If a piece is wonky and you explain why, or submit your own, I'm fine to change things.

With an actual artist with me I'd love to go for real city_view art as well, but again that stuff is hard. Check out "Uncharted Worlds" on the workshop for the best ones I've ever seen (with regard to art style and meshing well with cities). I have no idea how Piet made them so good. As mentioned above, I'd love more building tiles, too.

Hopefully you've read the compatibility thread above which explains this mods reliance on "Immersive Galaxy" which has been a god-send.

...However. It would be much much better to have art made for the planet class. A planetary Delta world could look like it has a giant delta from orbit, for example. Real space executes this flawlessly. I don't really love that my one just looks like a sort-of-different regular desert. The whirlpool world should have a giant whirlpool on it! And whatever else. I've done my absolute best to assign the closest art I can but having a more fitting texture for each new world would have been a dream come true.

I have another mod coming up that revives a bunch of cut content (the classic strategic resources), and it would be really useful to have a dense carbon/crystal style uninhabitable world to be able to mine the crystals from (like Yurantic, Aldar). I could in theory just use the Vanilla "rare_crystal_asteroid" but... it's a bit fantastical and is meant to be rare.

So at some point I'll probably add one new archetype of actual real planet classes for a new type of uninhabitable planet - themed around minable glasses/crystals/precious stones. Like an obisidan world, diamond worlds. Some of these ideas already appear in other mods and work quite well! Speculative ideas are on the spreadsheet.

As mentioned in the IG section in the compatibility thread above, I've opted for 2k textures for the first release. Perhaps in the future I'll see whether 4k are a good idea, but I doubt it. If anyone makes a patch let me know how it plays!

On a personal note, I'm quite interested in mods like "Landmass" for my load order which makes planets much bigger (check it out!). You can have full scale space battles in the looming orbit of a habitable planet in the background, it's pretty cool. Anyway with planets scaled up larger the 4k textures would probably really shine. So it is, ultimately, a topic I'm open to.

That's all I have! Do you have a cool idea I could add to this?

And if you think making planets (it's a lot like map making) sounds fun please never hesitate to message me. I'm available. As long as this message you're reading right now hasn't been edited/removed, it means i'm still looking for an artist.