I run a space opera game. My players complained that all of the settings are planets, space stations, or space ships...

Are you, or them, looking for something more specific?

Your players are stupid.
Ask them for a moment to think of what places they could go that is not a dangerous prospect like the void.
Then ignore what they say.

Reality Storms from City at the End of Time.

Really, your players are jaded retardos.

Just a place humans could have built a city other than a space station or a planet.

Well the minute you build something out in space it's a space station.

Either way, try these

>derilect giant space ship
>dyson sphere or ring world (technically a space station but whatever)
>other dimensions
>back in time

Yep. The band of Venus' atmosphere that oxygen floats at happens to also be the same band that Venusian temperatures are livable. It's perfect. Cloud City when?

Star Citizen has a base built into some asteroids.

You could go with the Macross/Star Wars angle and put in Giant Insects and Space Whales.

Seriously, it's fucking space opera. What the fuck are they expecting, a fucking castle?

Give them extranet/VR/mesh or underwater colonies. If they still bitch, ditch them for being stupid.

Thats not very specific...

Look, under human perspectives everything is a planet because it will have; atmosphere, light food and gravity if you were to put a garden in a O'neill cylinder could you ever tell the difference from being in a planet?

If you are looking for a place that is just weird and were weird shit happens all the time then you have to think about going to extremes like planets around a blackhole that is sucking a star, spacestations that are carrying something like the matrix or rare asteroids that are pure nickel-iron(this asteroid is actually real) .

And by definition, anything that has a huge acumulation of humans in it is a city, no city will be in a place with no food, no light, no atmosphere or no gravity(unless you create humans that are specifically created for zero-g you need to at the very least spin to create centrifugal forces, otherwise they will die from a hearthattack)

Don't make planets with a single biodome.

This.

I hate this constant trope that planets are just one region, with one country for the whole planet.

Check out Issac Arthur on youtube. He does tons of this stuff. From Earth based megastructures, rotating habits to solar system spanning superstructures.

He works out what's possible and scientifically plausible.

Ecumenopolises was by far my favourite.

youtube.com/watch?v=XAJeYe-abUA

Give them what they want, and send them to a surface of a star. Or a black hole. Or leave them floating in a nebula or asteroid field, but without a space ship or station. If they have space suits, they'll have just enough time to reflect upon the intricate stupidity of their complaints before hypoxia sets in.

Of course, the actual problem might just be that your planets, space ships, and stations are all too samey. In which case, shake it up; Send them to a massive, maze-like space station built by really weird aliens where they can't ask for directions without the risk of accidentally marrying a local, or strand them on a planet out in the space boonies with only a few scattered outposts of higher technology to repair their ship, and several thousand kilometers of passive-aggressive space amish and fugitives from galactic law separating them.

>"hey guys, I got a new environment for you to experience!"
>and then you kill them

Seriously, your players sound like fedora wearing hipsters.

>>My players complained that all of the settings are planets, space stations, or space ships.
Well that is pretty vague. Where the fuck else do they want to be? Outside of spaceship in open space?

>Floating cities in gas giants (Bespin from Star Wars episode 5)

>Aquatic substations with platforms for spacecraft docking (Manaan from Star Wars: KotOR)

While both are still planetary celestial bodies, they're not terrestrial like earth, mars, Tatooine, Scarif, or any other example. Hopefully your players can enjoy those because with as broadly as you've painted their disinterest, you're shit out of luck and either need a new campaign or better players, or a combination of the two

Remove planets from your game, that should satisfy them

>Hopefully your players can enjoy those because with as broadly as you've painted their disinterest, you're shit out of luck

This is what's really bugging me. I want OP to elaborate more on what exactly the players are saying. Because with what we have so far, it just sounds like they're completely unimaginative, hate science fiction, or both.

Even changing weather might help. If a planet was missing a sizable piece of itself down to its core, how would that effect the weather?

> I want OP to elaborate more on what exactly the players are saying

Me too...

The factors contributing to a planet with that kind of geography are so numerous and intense "what kind of weather would it have" is pretty damn low on list of questions to answer.

Check out this variant of a Ringworld (also from Larry Niven).

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Integral_Trees

Would love to play a game in "his" universe.

Long watch but worth it.

>you arrive at the jungle planet, densely covered in fog, with unpredictable rainstorms of such ferocity that even a single drop bruises those unfortunate and stupid enough to forego shelter. The native Fauna are accustomed to such, so many have developed tough hides centimeters thick, or plated growths of bone strong enough to withstand the blast of even the most powerful of shoulder fired missiles. The predators are of course just as resiliently adapted to combat these protections, and are best avoided by all non native inhabitants. You-

>immediately take off the planet because it's just more stupid bullshit. Seriously, mike. Are you even trying? We're sick of planets, ships, and stations; what else do you got?

>well first off, fuck you Justin, I put a lot of time into this, so quit your bitchin'

Now granted I'm not OP, but if my guess into the situation is spot on, it's just time to get a new group. Especially if they bitch about the two examples of other planets like bespin and manaan

Like what? A list of them might give OP help

Some sort of massive creature that lives in space that humans live in like parasites? Like a space whale that humans live in and feed off it's blood and fat deposits and build under-skin cities.

A giant dead space God thingien?

For starters, how did this happen? There's something like 3200 miles between the surface of the Earth and its core. Even a smaller planet has a giant amount of rocky material to get through before hitting the core, so whatever caused this had to be something big. Planets don't just form with giant fissures like that.

Honestly, something big enough to do that kind of damage probably wouldn't just blast a chunk out. It'd probably be like what some scientists believe happened when the Moon was formed. Two bodies colliding and coalescing into each other, with a smaller chunk falling into an orbit.

Maybe a giant alien mining laser did it? If that happened, the heat was probably so intense it burned away the atmosphere itself.

Asteroid cluster full of mega casinos and shady mob run cities.

Okay, what about such fierce orbital bombardment that the damage was nearly to the core, like Concord Dawn?

Or could a planet be missing a part of its outer core, so long as it doesn't reach the inner core?

>Okay, what about such fierce orbital bombardment that the damage was nearly to the core

I don't think you quite understand just how much matter is between a planet's surface and its core. The sheer amount of objects you'd need to hurl at a planet to get to its core is insane.

The most likely scenario of penetrating to the core would be accelerating a large object to a relativistic speed and slamming it into the planet. This very well could blast a sizable chunk out.

>Or could a planet be missing a part of its outer core, so long as it doesn't reach the inner core?

Again, this is still really far down. To again use the Earth, the crust alone is 21 miles thick. For perspective, Earth's atmosphere only extends about eight miles "up".

The amount of power you'd need to penetrate all the way to even the outer core is so intense there's no way the planet could exist as it was but with just a big hole.

underrated post

Why do you not add in ringworlds. Or orbitals, for that matter.

Problem is a ringworld is just a large space station which looks like a planet. Two things OP's players apparently hate.

Set it in a simulated universe.

>players bitch about simulated planets, space stations, and cities

inside a huge alien thing
inside a ball of water flying through space

Get new players... it'll be easier.

Wow imagine building a world with his scale video.

So either they're idiots who are sick of being places in space, or not in space, or, more generously, all those locations are feeling samey.

I'm guessing that a lot of these places have a ground, gravity, and air, so switch that up.

Do stuff in EVA, dealing with the problems of soundlessness and microgravity. Have microgravity stations and ships.

Put them in a city built into an under-ice ocean like Europa is supposed to have.

Make the planets very different from earth. Have them move across the semi-molten ever changing surface of a Venusian world where you can't see very far because the air pressure is enough to distort your view of the horizon.

Set something in a tall city on a planet or moon like Titan, with low gravity but a lot of atmosphere (which will likely be *very* cold). Remind them that this means terminal velocity is easily reduced to 10-15 mph, so there's no real fall damage.

Aerostats on gas giants in a storm stand out as another weird one. Storms, sky pirates, and a world with no ground stand out.

Basically, stop making all your places in space earthlike.

sounds like your players need some biotechnoogy thrown at them. space whales with cities inside them, gargantuan space trees floating between star systems, etc.

>Complaining that the setting is a planet

I think the problem here is that your planets, moons, and space stations all feel too similar. If you don't try to differentiate cultures, hazards, governments you're just gonna end up with the same problem in the shantytown set up in the bowels of a spacewhale.