Easter Eggs to enhance the game's sense of exploration and mystery

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Rationale

One of Hades' Star's design pillars is exploration. The magic of uncovering new sectors and discovering new stars revolves around that principle. However, as Andreas has admitted himself, the "wow" factor goes away pretty quickly.

Benefits and drawbacks

While adding easter eggs would increase the game's file size and require extra artwork and programming to be done specifically for non-gameplay elements, the game's eye candy is a huge factor that keeps new players attached (first impressions matter!). More important, players posting about rare Easter eggs that they encounter on various social media would help foster community activity and possibly increase the visibility of HS.

Possible ideas

To help convey the idea that the game's universe is full of undiscovered wonders, adding some small cosmetic Easter eggs could help, including: (please read these, I think these ideas could be good)

• Comets occasionally orbit around your Yellow Star in highly elliptical orbits like they do in real life (the apoapsis is far beyond the bounds of your solar system) , displaying large tails as they approach periapsis near your star. Comets would appear infrequently, every 1-6 months and last ~1 week.
• Lines of tiny civilian ships and ferries could be added traveling in between planets and space stations across sectors and on Warp Lanes. More ships would appear on routes that are more "busy", such as a Research Station filled with Artifacts or any location that has a Battleship undergoing repairs.
• Rare chance for non-Yellow Star systems to spawn as binary stars. This would have no effect on gameplay, since you can't move directly to a star. But it would be a cool thing to talk about.
• Binary star systems can spawn as a variety of systems: "Ordinary" stars orbiting each other, contact binaries that share a gas envelope, asymmetric binaries consisting of a white dwarf or black hole orbiting the larger "main" star and sucking up gas into an accretion disc.

Ideas continued in first reply!

Yellow Stars could have "weather" like we have on our irl Sun: Solar flares, coronal-mass ejections, and sunspots would really help convey the realism of a living, breathing game universe. Solar weather would last hours to days.

• Planets in the process of upgrading display temporary, large construction-focused structures appear on the planet.
• Stars could spawn in a range of sizes, reflecting the size variation of real-life stars. The in-game frying-pan noise you hear when zooming very close to a star would vary based on size. Sizes would be normally distributed, thus making unusually small or unusually large stars an uncommon encounter.
• Red Stars undergoing Supernova would leave behind a neutron star or black hole (depending on their size) like their real-life counterparts.
• ~20% of Yellow Stars (or skins) could spawn with asteroid belts orbiting the star.
• Rare chance for a small Voyager probe to fly by your star (people keep talking about how Voyager will reach another star system in millions of years). The probe would take several days to cross your star system. Would only occur once per player account
• Leaving the game unattended for a long period of time while in a Yellow Star would cause the game to enter a "cinematic mode", with the normal UI disappearing and the camera zooming in and moving around to display various shots of cool things in your star system
• ~0.0001% chance for a random Cerberus ship to take on its old pre-DN appearance. Would only be possible in RS6+
• ~0.001% chance for a player ship to play the Wilhelm Scream sound effect when defeated instead of the standard sound effect. (Thanks @blissful sleet for the idea)
• HS currently plays noises for ships firing, but an additional noise could be made when Alpha Shield is active so a hit lands but fails to take damage. This noise would inherently imply that no damage was being dealt, like a (quiet) "clang" of hitting a heavy pan against a surface

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• Rare chance for White Stars to be surrounded in a large planetary nebula, mirroring their real-life counterparts (white dwarfs).
• Rare chance for White Stars to be spinning and emitting a stylized radiation beam, mirroring their other real-life counterpart (neutron stars and pulsars)
• When zooming in on a planet, rare chance for the planet to be faintly broadcasting the Arecibo message in audible beeps.
• Terran planets experience yearly seasons and change appearance.
• Desert planets occasionally receive large swathes of green from rainfall, before gradually returning to their usual appearance.
• Ice planets experience yearly seasons, growing temporary rivers and oceans during the summer and refreezing in the winter.

[formal trout]

Golden cerberus is the only easter egg I want 😭