Abandoned Colonies / Ancient Ruins when in Caravan

[Keychan]

Yoko and Jake have been travelling for days to Harmony's Mesa. They hope make a hefty amount of silver for the smokeleaf joints the colony's made, but something strange comes up on their sensors. An ambush?  Manhunters?  No, what they saw in front of them was the ancient remainder of a colony.  But that's strange, nothing showed up on the world map.  It belonged to no known faction on the planet.  Oddly enough many of the buildings seem intact, hiding their history.  Warily the two walk through the ruins.  They could see remainders of strange mechanoids never seen before and old signs of a struggle of the last moments of the locals.  As they quickly walked away, they write down the location and quickly go on their way.

With the new caravan system introduced into the game it would be great to have player's stumble upon ruins of colonies that do not appear on the map.  These would only appear if a player caravan has traveled over an area set to be an abandoned colony or ancient ruins.  These ruins could be 'fresh' colonies just like the player's but failed miserably early and left simple goods, or they could have been from an ancient civilization with treasures and mysteries waiting to be found.  This could be a great new way to add more to the world travelling system and could add more to other parts of the game.  In the world creation menu you would be able to choose to have many or no ruins to spawn on the world map.  Treasure hunters would be another 'merchant' type, that is similar to exotic traders, but sells more of what you'd fine in these ruins, expect a lot of glitterworld tech, medicine, and maybe even some mechanoid type items.  What do you guys think? Anymore ideas on how to use the new caravan system?

[b0rsuk]

The best part is you could crowdsource these ruins from players. Whenever player performs "Abandon" on colony world map, his colony would be uploaded to a server and used as a base for ruins. There would be some filters applied, for example nearly all machines break down, walls erode, items deteriorate to nothing, animals escape into wild (and potentially reproduce with a simple algorithm).

[Jorlem]

The best part is you could crowdsource these ruins from players. Whenever player performs "Abandon" on colony world map, his colony would be uploaded to a server and used as a base for ruins. There would be some filters applied, for example nearly all machines break down, walls erode, items deteriorate to nothing, animals escape into wild (and potentially reproduce with a simple algorithm).

And if they had placed a few colonists in cryosleep chambers...

[Keychan]

The best part is you could crowdsource these ruins from players. Whenever player performs "Abandon" on colony world map, his colony would be uploaded to a server and used as a base for ruins. There would be some filters applied, for example nearly all machines break down, walls erode, items deteriorate to nothing, animals escape into wild (and potentially reproduce with a simple algorithm).

I could already see the hidden caches of human leather clothing, smokeleaf joints, and corpses unnaturally missing body parts.

[DarkXanatos]

This actually sounds like a neat idea.

Currently, I have no reason to create a caravan that will prove very costly in resources. Its hard enough to keep my own colony fed without a cook none-stop making meals. If the cook stops, the meal-supply dwindles pretty damn quick. Sending off colonists might sound like a fix, but they need many days worth of meals or they will starve, so its the same issue. Just in a different way.

So, I just wait for random caravan events or just use the com station to call in a caravan. No point in making my own caravans. Plus, faction bases are so basic right now, I don't feel its worth interacting with. No offense to the dev-team, as they did implement an excellent addition to the game. Which will certainly mature as they work on it.

Searching for ruins could prove highly valuable or highly risky. I also think some ruins, if glitterworld, might have some functional defenses. To make it more exciting. Maybe even remnant survivors who stuck around and are small in number, like a tribe - but with high tech stuff. These remnant 'tribes' could become a new faction, be a one-off battle, or what not.

As for the idea of using player colony templates, I think it is a cool idea too. I think people would just love stumbling upon one of their old colonies, in game. Would make some feel giddy.