What if there was a kind of quest given to you occasionally by your tenants and such that would go something along the lines of "My buddy <<name>> runs a prison on a planet somewhere. The inmates got loose and they ran amok. The guards tried to stop them, but they had no luck! I hear you're a good fighter. I'll give you the coordinates. Go there and take the prison back. And hey, I'll give you an extra reward if you can do it without healing." You can then go to SAIL and use the mission like you would any other story-related mission. The mission would start in a sort of "pocket world" like the story ones, with something blocking the way so you can't go anywhere but the dungeon. In this case, you would have to kill all the inmates and get to the teleporter on the other side of the dungeon. You also get a special reward if you don't regain any health during the mission. If you die, you fail the mission. You also fail if you beam out. Either way, once you start the mission, it is removed from SAIL's interface. There could be other various scenarios, like "free the hostages at the Apex Lab", where you would get a special reward if no hostages died while being escorted to the extraction point. The difficulty of the mission overall would increase with the difficulty of the planet the quest-giver resides on. You could have harder bonus requirements, such as "don't take any damage" or "clear it within 3 minutes". Each race would have its own set of missions. The humans would have the prison one, the Apex would have the hostage one, the Florans could have a mission where you have to kill a bunch of dangerous creatures (a hunt), Novakids could have a manhunt for an outlaw and his posse, Hylotl could have an obstacle course through a water dungeon where you have to find and disarm bombs or something like the water level from TMNT for NES, Avians could have a timed mission where you have to rescue captives before they're sacrificed, The Glitch could have it where a king mad with power is planning an assault on the colony and you have to fight across a field, then storm his castle and commit robo-regicide. And if, by some miracle, my lizard race actually makes it into the game, you would have to solve a series of puzzles, because wizards love a good riddle.
I kind of like that, even though mostly just because I like the idea of a quest that could encourage you to go offworld for reason other than "Find me X item that is found generally in Y's race settlements normally found on Z type of worlds". It might require an update to the galactic map UI, by giving it the equivalent of quests markers and compass(possibly with a distance indicators).... but it would likely add interesting layers of gameplay by implementing mechanics encouraging you to visits -specific- worlds on the galactic map rather than just the aimless wandering we are accustomed to that ultimately guide travel generally on a "what ressource do I need?" basis than anything else. It could be a good way to get players to visit planets and locales they otherwise would not have ever visited when purely thinking about what ore or ressource they need to get next. Centering them around objectives like "siege X castle to put down it's tyranic king" also see the player perform objectives(assaulting a "settlement") they might not otherwise have had. It could even tie into something like guards being auto-hostile on arrival.... but some villagers actually picking up arms and joining the player in the battle themselves.
