Exploration is a relaxing, enjoyable experience. It's amazing the beautiful things you stumble across as you travel across the galaxy. So I've done a fair bit of it: Made maybe 6-7 billion credits.
And while it's been enjoyable, it's never quite been satisfying, and I was never sure why, until Xenobiology came out and really cast it into high focus.
Here's the thing about Exploration and Xenobiology: You go out there and find all sorts of cool things, but then what do you do with it?
Not much. I look at my list of discoveries, and the larger it gets, the clearer it becomes that what I'm finding are just random pieces on a random board, in a puzzle I can never put together. And I want to put that puzzle together!
That's what my #1 request would be, as far as exploration goes. Not just going out and seeing things, but using what I find somehow.
Take Xenobiology. Why do I find the same species of grass on planets light-years apart? How did they get there? Did they just convergently evolve, or do they actually have a common ancestor, spread there millennia ago by some massive collision?
I'd LOVE it if I could explore multiple plants in the same sector of the galaxy, and chart the locations of plants, and be able to trace their spread. Eventually I find it, and it says COMMON ANCESTOR DISCOVERED in huge text on the screen. And then you could trace THAT one back, and maybe it just vanishes somewhere, the chain broken, but maybe it keeps going! Maybe the life that's spread across the galaxy all ties back to just a few common ancestors, from the primordial formation of the galaxy.
Give me not just pretty things to look at, but mysteries to solve. Something to ponder as I slowly hop my way through the black of space.
