Voyager - End Expeditions for MineColonies

0.3.0 - 2026-09-10 - the Observatory and the Photo Booth (beta)

Two new professions built around Exposure and its Space and Expanded add-ons. Both are optional buildings: without Exposure the Departure Point works exactly as in 0.2.0.

The Observatory - the Astronomer

• A night worker who lives at the building: out to the instrument at dusk, home at dawn with a plate; clouded out by rain. Five looks (Observatory, Stargazer's Keep, Sand Court, Skyward Station, Aperture Array), five levels each, every level of a look inside the same outline.
• The sky is Exposure: Space's 256 cosmic objects (or any datapack's), read as data - the mod links none of Exposure: Space's code. The building's lens tier grows with its level and its own research; what a night catches is weighted by the objects' own appearance chance, gated by the lens, and raised by tonight's sky event, which alone opens its exclusive objects. Rain clouds the watch out.
• The darkroom develops plates into prints: a first sighting or a composite becomes a genuine Exposure photograph of the night sky - stars, haze, the object large in the middle, the hills and the Observatory's own dome - that hangs in the study, files in albums and projects like any other. The colony is paid the objects' own rewards and keeps a sky book of everything it has recorded.
• Eleven studies (almanac, watch, optics, darkroom branches) paid for in nights of watching, some of which reach the Voyager's expeditions.
• The lookout: when the land within forty blocks offers a hill with a clear sky, the astronomer keeps the watch from there with the colony's camera and brings back a real photograph of the night sky with tonight's object in it; a setting sends one or two guards along as an escort.
• Star parties on event nights: the colony stays up, nobody is punished for the lost sleep.

The Photo Booth - the Photographer

• Crafts everything Exposure makes (film, cameras, stands, frames, albums, flashes) and, when the bench is quiet, photographs the colony: rendered on the server out of the world's own map colours, colonists in the picture, through whatever film, lens, filter and flash the colony fitted to its camera. The photographer lives at the studio.
• The colony chronicle: every building the builder finishes (and every build halfway up) is photographed for an album on the shelf, signed as a volume when it is full.
• From level 2 visitors come in for a portrait and, with Trade Post for MineColonies installed, pay for it in coins. Five looks, five levels, a gallery wall, a camera stand and a darkroom wing.
• The photographer says so, once a day, when there is no camera on the shelf.

Both

• Pictures go on the walls: every hut has photograph frames, and a finished picture goes into an empty one, or over the oldest, whose print goes to the shelf.
• Status lines and building descriptions for Colonist Errands 2.2.0, so the two can talk about their work with Talking Colonists.
• All fifty blueprints are audited for reachability (every worked block, every bed, every door, the darkroom's light) and were pasted through Structurize on a test server; both professions were run end to end on a headless colony before release.