Moon/mars-flavored world?
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For me, one of the biggest draws to Screeps is imagining a von Neumann-esque colonization of another world, in which mankind decides, "hey, we want to colonize this other world" and codes up a self-replicating robot to go prepare the world for later human arrival -- and trying to come up with the code that would be used in such a situation. That's all totally unrelated to the suggestion, but gives some context:
For future shards (or perhaps this is more a task for a private server), I would love to see either some collaboration with e.g. NASA, or just reusing open source photographs/maps to build a shard themed like the moon or Mars (or any other planet). Here's what the surface of Europa (a moon of Jupiter) looks like in Google Maps: https://www.google.com/maps/space/europa/@4.3613113,178.2877691,6308973m/data=!3m1!1e3
Having a topological replica of real, uncharted territory combined with the efficiency and, bluntly, cut-throatness that comes with an AI-based competition, could result in some real benefits in pointing out actual sites that would be most beneficial for humans to explore IRL. Of course, each planet comes with its own challenges (e.g. weather conditions) that may not fit into the current engine (but might make fun feature creep), but even just a topography-based challenge (that to anyone unfamiliar can feel like just another normal shard) would be super cool.