glossy viper
This is meant only as an idea thrown into the void, no serious suggestion to solve some problem.
Sometimes you just wait for things to get done, whether it be crew construction, travel time, mining, scavenging, ammo fabrication, etc.
To kill some time, but not do so pointlessly, we could have an in-game minigame with minor monetary rewards. Nothing big, just some pocket change to feed your hungry missile silos or to save up for when the ship gets hit a bit too hard.
You'd just click a button to open the interface and play for a bit.
The minigame could even be faction specific, changing based on what system you're in or how well the factions like you. The point is that while you wait you can simply open the window and click around to get some rewards.
The basic game available to everyone would be a puzzle, something with ones and zeros to give off the vibe of crypto mining, just manually. Like a find 3 puzzle, but you're trying to connect the edges with a line of one of the numbers.
Monolith could have a stock market minigame that's about quick responses and lots of clicking to buy or sell stock with each click. With every stock you sell the price drops and when you buy up it goes up, but it also wiggles randomly on its own.
Empire could have a voting site where you have to make important decisions, like increasing the nuke budget by 0.00001% (It's a lot, trust me) or vote against spending state tax on blankets for the non-citizens of the empire.
Cabal will give you quizzes on which books are banned and which stupidly named rank is allowed to make what equally stupid decisions. Like: Which of the following is allowed to eat lab grown meat on Solday? A) Supreme grand priest B) Superb grand priest C) Supreme great priest
Io can have a social site, but exclusively for their conspiracy theories, where you get revenue for reacting to their posts.
If none of the factions like you, you can hack into PirateHub, where you can solve puzzles that reveal stash locations.
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