So had this idea, and been talking about it a bit with the Bay12 forums. Basically, instead of crashing on the planet, you instead play aboard the ship without crashing. Instead of generating soil and mountains, mapgen would create steel floor and metal rooms. 'Space' would be a black/starfield tile with -5,000 temperature, and then add in spacesuits that would give -2,500 temperature each for the suit and helmet, but with significant movement penalty. Combat and Maintenance suit types could exist. Glittertech skinsuits could work the same but give no movement penalty. To avoid having them be too common, a new 'race' of human could be made with the right temperature range and said to be wearing the skinsuit. Butchering one of these glittertech spacers could provide meat, human leather, and scraps of skinsuit material.
The 'world map' could be the ship, with biomes being things like 'engine' and 'cargo' and 'cryo' and such. These could all have separate events to them, like being in the Engine gives you access to the powerful drive engines that give huge energy at map gen, for free, but you suffer radiation in areas, heavier radiation pulses, temperature fluctuations, psychic waves, and raiders trying to take the area for themselves to get the power source. Cargo, on the other hand, might have tighter hallways and certain rooms could shift with events similar to the 'crashed ship' mod that drops solid cargo pods and later removes them at random, so you get tighter defensive corridors and easier resources, but suffer more from space events (solar flares, meteors, etc) and get random energy shutdowns when things happen off-map at the engine area.
The -5,000 temperature would bleed through the walls, causing rooms to become very cold, but the interior rooms could have power + heat structures at mapgen, keeping the interior of the ship warm and the rooms closer to the hull becoming progressively colder, so further out you'd need more heat generation or wintery gear.
Map should probably be a bit larger, but without as many plants and animals sucking up CPU it should run fine I think.
The 'world map' could be the ship, with biomes being things like 'engine' and 'cargo' and 'cryo' and such. These could all have separate events to them, like being in the Engine gives you access to the powerful drive engines that give huge energy at map gen, for free, but you suffer radiation in areas, heavier radiation pulses, temperature fluctuations, psychic waves, and raiders trying to take the area for themselves to get the power source. Cargo, on the other hand, might have tighter hallways and certain rooms could shift with events similar to the 'crashed ship' mod that drops solid cargo pods and later removes them at random, so you get tighter defensive corridors and easier resources, but suffer more from space events (solar flares, meteors, etc) and get random energy shutdowns when things happen off-map at the engine area.
The -5,000 temperature would bleed through the walls, causing rooms to become very cold, but the interior rooms could have power + heat structures at mapgen, keeping the interior of the ship warm and the rooms closer to the hull becoming progressively colder, so further out you'd need more heat generation or wintery gear.
Map should probably be a bit larger, but without as many plants and animals sucking up CPU it should run fine I think.