Never fear, more mod ideas are here!
Interstellar zones & drifting systems - We know that systems can have zones in which various objects can spawn or effects implemented. I wonder if we could do the same at the interstellar level. Imagine if you will, that like in real life, systems drift like a cloud of particles throughout interstellar space. The recent innovation of flow networks for the economy may have another place in this stellar drift, though the specifics would depend on implementation. Interstellar zones would remain static, but they would apply different effects to any systems that drift through them. What effects these are could range from higher ore regeneration rates to global speed multipliers, more/less unstable wormholes to more/less systems with pretty nebulae skyboxes. The possibilities are near endless and would be a serious attack on the war against sameyness.
Groundhog System - The movie Groundhog Day, apply it to a system in LT. The system is locked into a time loop by a number of creatively named "Time Locks" Some of these need to be destroyed, some have a puzzle minigame to unlock them, some need to have resources brought to them. Until all Time Locks are broken, you cannot leave the system and every 4 real hours (or if you die), the system resets. It is definitely possible to unlock all the time locks within 4 hours, but may take several attempts as you have to figure out where all the locks are, and then in what order they need to be unlocked to do them all in the time limit. As an added difficulty there could be several additional dummy locks, which are suspiciously easy to unlock, but have no effect on whether or not you get out
Stalker - You are being followed. Someone has placed a hit on you and there is a mercenary out to get you, and they will not give up until one of you is dead. You must switch callsigns and identity beacons, blend in with crowds and hide from this unknown hitman. Eventually you will be able to identify your would-be killer, and you can either attack them outright, or place a hit on them, or get your allies who owe you a favor to do it, or join a faction and if/when the hitman attacks you, it's counted as an attack against the faction and they have the whole faction turn on them
Scavenger Hunt - Every so often there is a Scavenger Hunt event. Several dozen tokens have been placed throughout a couple systems. Players and NPCs can go to the starting Station to join the hunt for these tokens. Participants must find and return them to the Starting station before the time runs out. Whoever returns with the most tokens wins. Even if you have the most tokens, if you haven't returned them to the station, you lose. The winner receives a nice big prize. This would be a fun exploration activity, but would be significantly easier for professional explorers than amateurs due to their having better sensor equipment.
Pokeverse - Pokemon, but better. It's possible to research and create Pocket Universe Containers, each of which contains a small, empty system. You can go around space and spawn wormholes into these pocket systems that will grab anything in range and pull it into it, be it asteroids, ships, or stations. You must perform research on these Verseballs
to increase their capacity, wormhole size & duration, and deployment duration. You may travel into these systems and construct various facilities for mining, manufacturing, ship training, and enemy pacification to gain both portable infrastructure and minions. However, construction is limited to the materials and ships/stations you have put into it. These pocket systems are only destroyed if the Verseball itself is destroyed. Like with pokemon, you may deploy ships contained inside, however they have to return to the Verseball within a given time before your control over them fails and they become neutral or hostile to you. Ships inside gain XP which multiplies their health and damage, and can gain XP through combat in a deployment or training within the Verseball.
Yes, you may capture your enemies in a wormhole, but they will still be hostile, and unless you have sufficient pacification facilities inside, they can and will try to escape.
White noise - If you like this one, you hate your eyes
This is mostly a graphical mod. Basically, every texture except the UI is white noise. The skybox noise remains static while ships, stations, asteroids and other objects shift and can only be seen by their noise pattern moving across the screen
. As this will make detection much more difficult, this severely reduces the scanner capabilities so the AI doesn't really have any advantage either.
Gravity Arena - Ships have their own gravity well, and will pull on each other with exponentially increasing force as they get closer to one another. This is by team, so your own ships won't pull on each other. If two ships collide, both are destroyed, but create a wreckage the sum of their masses to be an even stronger well on the others. As the gravity well extends across much of the system, ships give away their position, and a cluster of ships on the same team will be that much more obvious. The last team standing is the victor.