Resource - Progression

From what I can tell, you (Keen) have chosen to go down the combat road for this game (which I totally agree with). I've logged over 1100 hours in the game to date and still love the game. But the truth is that mods are what make the game playable past the first dozen or so hours of gameplay (in single player). There is massive chunk missing from the game, which is the feeling of working toward something. There is a hard cap on how far you can take your game, and it is a severe bottleneck in this game's future if you ask me. Even in multiplayer, what is there to do except build up and hunt other players? There is no reason to collaborate, no unifying goal or mission. There are already mods out there that address these issues, but there is only so much a few modders can do. First of all, I think the resource system needs to be overhauled. I KNOW this is simple because there are a million mods out already that change resource spawning and the like. Mining should not be a grind. I don't want to have to check 40 asteroids to find uranium. You are wasting my time by making me do so. The same goes for platinum, but in a different way. Platinum is so scarce that it would take hours upon hours and 20 different deposits to harvest enough platinum to manufacture and build ammo and ion thrusters enough for a late game vessel. I am not saying make it easy, I am saying make the act of mining the resource easier. In stead, make the resources a lot harder to get to. For example, you could make platinum insanely heavy and put it multiple kilometers under the ground on some of the outer planets for instance. Can't go in there with a mining ship due to the weight, so you have to build a mining outpost and maybe use a specialized drill blueprint that you get from defeating some boss or what not as the only way to efficiently harvest platinum. You could do the same for uranium. As it stands, there is absolutely no reason economically to explore any of the planets. You can get platinum on the moon and uranium from asteroids around earth. Like why leave? We need a reason to go out and expand, and resource harvesting is a good way to combine an aspect of progression with that reason to explore the system. Not to mention the ore detector which has the range of a potato gun. There are mods for this of course, but it really should in my opinion be a part of the game. Heck, perhaps you could even integrate it into a tech tree system so that as you progress you unlock better and better detectors. Speaking of tech trees, the current one doesn't really add any content to the game. The blocks don't scale, they just have different functionality. An ion thruster is not better than a hydrogen thruster, it just has a different purpose. Now if you had some currency in the game that you could trade in exchange for better technology, a Hydrogen Thruster Mk2, or a drill with a bigger effect radius, so on and so forth, and you made it so that we had to go to increasingly less livable planets and defeat increasingly more difficult AI for example in order to access those techs, now all of a sudden you have progression in the game and the foundational building blocks are already there to fill in the storyline. A storyline is I think needed. Our character has no personality, no meaning to him at all whatsoever. He doesn't have enemies or friends, or a reason to build and explore. There are no NPCs or towns or anything. The best we get are unmanned cargo vessels which for some reason are just there, came from nowhere, are going nowhere, just exist to be shot down by the player. You have an extremely active community with events and servers and ideas up the wazoo. LastStandGamers built his channel around the idea of the drone army. Captain Jack is known for his imperial behemoth sized ships. The empire versus an invading AI drone army, there you have an idea for a storyline. You get to pick a side and not unlike Skyrim, move up the ranks, complete side quests, and ultimately vanquish your opponent. Something like that is sorely needed, especially now with how fleshed out the game feels functionally. You can take ideas from games such as Kerbal Space Program, Stellaris, or even Elite: Dangerous and The Outer Worlds. There are good models out there for progression and storytelling as well as character development and an XP system. I am not saying do EVERYTHING, but it just feels like SE is missing something, and these might be some things that could fill in the gap.