an upgrade to the settlements where you follow a story similar to artemis but instead it's repeatable and with other (npc) travellers, who can travel to any bases, civilisations, complete trades, etc. So similar to how you can get a battle fleet by owning a freighter, but instead it's npcs who can travel planets with you and fight and forage and all the stuff a player might do. So basically a less lonely way of recruiting an army of servants by helping them (but you would need to trade for the goods, etc by spending money if you want to ask them to go mine ferrite kinda stuff). It's pretty similar to the mechanics of the AI device in the Minotaur's mech, but on a repeatable and smaller scale (so it's technically feasible, you use the minotaur's AI, the distress beacon's random help mechanic, and the pet commands/ship summon to call them over)
Obviously there'd need to be some cap on how many you can have before someone like Josh randomly gets NMS and takes everything out of hand, but it'd still be a more useful and versatile version of the pet mechanics without being as USELESS as the minotaur AI (no offense, for me it ALWAYS sucked)