I was thinking about this a little bit this morning and had a few things to throw in. I'll add in some details to some of the others suggested as well.
Solar System/Galaxy Wise:
- Anomaly Detected. Scan or interact with. Could have various effects ranging from warping somewhere random to lowering shields to doubling energy production when nearby.
- New wormhole. A star collapses producing a new wormhole or maybe one just opens up near by.
- Super Nova. A star explodes reducing an entire system to asteroids and derelicts.
- Planet explodes. A planet explodes shooting asteroids from the center.
- New Planet. A series of asteroids forms a planetoid or something similar.
- Extreme radiation/solar wind. Strips ships of shielding or causes damages to ships not hardened for radiation. Players in astronaut mode are cooked.
- Meteor shower. Micro-meteorites or regular sized ones move quickly across a sector hitting whatever is in the way.
- Space dust. Causes very limited visibility and constant shield damage relative to how quickly you move through it.
- Gravitational distortion. Causes ships to move in one direction or another. Must be compensated for or get dragged/propelled.
- Weird star. Things such as neutron stars, pulsars, brown dwarfs a detected and need to be investigated along with the appropriate dangers/graphics.
- Interference. Either a strong EMP event, radiation, or even solar flare effectively jams all communication and disrupts anything electronic on a ship. In game terms this could result in weapons that cannot recharge and in-game chat being disabled send and receive.
- A comet or moving meteor. A large ball of ice and rock that orbits a system. Could have valuable materials or scientific benefit.
Planet Wise:
- A new resource is discovered on a planet or an existing one disappears.
- A new species of flora or fauna is discovered. This can tie in with the spiders and upcoming creatures. It may have a benefit to bring back a sample or it may produce a rare material needed for cloaking or whatnot.
- A geographical feature discovered. This could be a mountain, volcano as suggested, maybe a cavern collapses?
- There is a planet wide cataclysm. Perhaps the crust sinks into the lava below leaving an uninhabitable shell of a planet.
- A new colony is formed or disappears.
- Alien Artifact. Something new and wondrous is discovered and needs to be recovered and/or destroyed. I would think it would either be something you can sell for credits, something that looks great on your ship, or something that grants a buff and/or debuff.
- Ruins. You discoverer ruins of some old civilization that might have relevant loot (we have a little of this already).
- Planet anomaly. It could be extreme high or low gravity, it could disable engines if you get too close, it could shut down shields or energy generation. For those of you who played Knight of the old republic, think of the planet with the 1000s of space wrecks
- Storms. There could be wicked lightning or wind or rain storms with a variety of different types of atmospheres.
Civilization/Ship Wise:
Most of these are your standard game missions as mentioned by many of you already.
- A derelict ship is discovered. It may have some of the stuff mentioned above going on or it may just be a good source of salvage. We have this already but it can be fleshed out. You might even find a log on it that sends you on a separate mission.
- Space battle in progress. You stumble on a space battle in progress. You may interfere if you want...but you know how that can end up.
- A group of pirates are raiding a station or another ship.
- A ship requests escort through an area.
- You are asked to deliver something somewhere with the appropriate level of compensation.
- You are tasked with destroying a station, asteroid, or ship.
- You are asked to place a colony beacon (or faction module?) to expand a faction's influence.
- You receive a distress call and choose to respond. It may be tied in with the derelict or any of the other situations.
- You are asked to sneak somewhere without getting within a certain distance of another object.
- You are asked to purchase (or mine) a certain amount of material that is worth more somewhere else.
- You are asked to scan something (as mentioned earlier). Could even be like the old LucasArts tie fighter games where you scan cargo ships and find a bad cargo and then have to board the ship to retake it.
- You are asked to board something to retrieve/take over/capture.
- You are asked to mine.
- You are tasked with checking in on a space station/planet that had a communication outage. It could be a number of things...
- You are asked to smuggle something illegal with the appropriate repercussions.
That's just what I came up with. On these thoughts, it would be great if there was a few more AI factions that maybe generate procedurally and act on their own accord. You could ally yourself with these to get missions, but if other players select a different alliance they may end up receiving the opposite mission. For example you could be allied with the Terran Federation and are tasked with delivering a political prisoner. As you do so someone in the SpaceCorp Collective gets a mission option to intercept and retrieve that prisoner
