This is what I've been up to since the last update:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3499628790
My goal is to make each Nicemice ship look like some kind of weird mechanical space rodent - and it feels like I'm accomplishing this so far.

I'm currently using the color palette from the Apex cruisers, but that's probably going to change as things get closer to completion. With that said, the black and white color theming is growing on me, so we'll see what happens with that.

I haven't set up the thrusters for the ship yet. I'm hoping that they don't fight with me too much. I think that I can finesse the FG and BG overlays a little bit to layer some of the plating on top of the thruster wash when the ship is moving, which I feel will be a little detail that players will appreciate.

There's a distinct lack of big cannons anywhere on the little ship so far. Part of me wants to cover the hull in turrets, but I know that those should be saved for higher ship tiers, and I might even make some interactive turrets as placeable objects instead for the T8 ship to automatically blast things.
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3499653757
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3499653544
I guess that'd require something to blast, though. I'm not sure. Lots of cool ideas floating around - maybe I should be shooting those so I can focus on just getting the art done.

I've received a handful of questions from people asking about Nicemice villages. It makes sense to me to make these a space station encounter of some kind, rather than a terrestrial encounter - partially because in a modded playthrough, the vanilla planets are covered in random stuff (good luck finding the village you want even with tools like MPI), and there's also a sense of snooty, condescending, hoity-toity-ness that comes with the idea of Nicemice looking down on all the little peasants from orbit, squabbling over food on the surface while they dine in luxury above, which just fits their culture a little bit better.

I like the idea of Nicemice drop pods occasionally being encountered by the player while planetside- however, mods like Betabound, Elithian Races, and etc use similar scripted events to spawn all sorts of random encounters dynamically near the player. After awhile, the drop pods get old and annoying, and they have a funny tendency to all land at about the same time which turns an already stale mechanic into a multi-layered time waster.

Something I am considering is having the Nicemice drop pods only show up near certain areas such as landing pad microdungeons. This would allow for periodic reinforcements and would fit the paramilitary style of Nicemice culture a lot better, too.

I'm also interested in being able to call down support npcs via some kind of drop pod targeting remote. This would probably work once per planet per 24 real world hours or something.

For tonight, I've got some other stuff to finish up, but the ships are in progress and hopefully all of them up to T8 will be ready for version 0.4 soon. I'd like to give a timeframe estimate but just doing the current starter ship's details took me several days and all the ships that come after are bigger.

I don't play with Frackin' Universe and never have, so I'm not familiar with a lot of the features it adds to the game.

I am beginning to accumulate a list of hiccups that many people would consider incompatibilities, though - so I'll be updating the mod's main page tonight with a list of known FU compatibility issues. I don't have plans to fix these things at this time, though - I have other stuff to work on first.

Initially I set the content tags on the Nicemice mod to 'some suggestive content' because I expected the bouncing chest on the female sprites to attract some attention, and the Nicemice are, like several other modded species in Starbound, naked when you strip them down, instead of having an underwear layer. Although nipples or other features are not visible on naked Nicemice players, the shading suggests their presence. Whatever.

Some race mods like Neki or Canera have visible features when naked. This isn't a big deal for the overwhelming majority of players, and most of the time, it doesn't matter because players will be wearing armor to survive on the more interesting or mechanically-involved planets anyway.

What these mods don't provide, however, are higher resolution decorative objects that also display the same kind of character or species details. The update I'm working on for Nicemice has pinup posters for decoration, with the largest one currently sitting at a resolution of about 144x72 pixels. To put that in perspective - most races use a single pixel to display nipples on naked characters, and a pinup at this resolution dedicates a 7x7 area to those instead. That's nearly a 5000% increase in pixels per pixel! (The pinup in question only has 33 pixels that are actually visible for nipple detail, though, so the final increase of 3300% is less impressive, but still a significant improvement.)

There are a few different ways to potentially handle and organize this kind of content. I could split the mod into multiple separate mods - Neki does this for lots of things - but I have a strong dislike for that kind of fragmentation and don't want players to have to hunt down multiple side-mods just to experience all the Nicemice content.

To my knowledge, default user settings for the Steam Workshop prevent users from seeing mods marked as suggestive (or any higher content rating, such as adult only). Since the default settings already hide Nicemice from being visible to players, there isn't really a "downside" to just bumping the content rating all the way up to the maximum, because anyone who can already see the mod is probably already maxed out on which content ratings they want to see on Steam.

However, there's also no point in maxing out the content rating just to accommodate for the future possibility of adding stuff that doesn't exist yet. Doing that would be just as incorrect as not setting the content ratings at all and trying to fly under the radar- which is a thing certain race mods try to do anyway.

What's more important to me is that I've met lots of players who are adults that also have no interest in seeing suggestive or adult content in Starbound, and several of them are subscribed to the mods that I've made.

This creates a weird situation. I don't want to fragment the mod, I want to include suggestive content, I want players who are uninterested in that content to not have to look at it, and I want players who are interested in that content to be able to find and experience it on a normal playthrough without having to jump through hoops to get it. Several of these things are mutually exclusive, and picking-and-choosing which of them I want to be responsible for is awkward.

My current plan on how I'm going to handle this is to leverage the dynamic spawner systems I've built. If a universe flag for nsfw content is set to false, then it will spawn sfw versions instead. Doing it this way allows me to do whatever artistic stuff I want while also giving server admins the ability to hide or disable nsfw stuff by simply running a single console command. This will also scale better in the future if a situation arises where admins want "some of it but not all of it", which is pretty common for Starbound modded servers in general.

ANYWAY TL;DR THE MAMMALS HAVE MAMMARIES

There has been a kind of anxious, buzzing chatter along the edges of all of the Nicemice discussion spaces, whether it's the Discord server, the Steam comments, or the messages people send me- and that chatter revolves around topics like "Okay, but what if you made Goblins instead? What if you made Kobolds instead?"

I think it would be good to include these shortstack race options. It would probably be a ton of extra work, but I don't mind the idea of putting these other race variations on the roadmap for the Nicemice mod.

The roadmap has expanded to include the following content:

• Goblins
  
• Gremlins
  
• Kobolds
  
• Midna
  
• Mimiga
  
• Moogles
  
• Narehate
  
• Palicoes
  
• Telemonster

If you're interested in helping to create content for any of these, let me know! I think lots of players would be very excited to see these kinds of things for Starbound, and using Nicemice as a starting point for character size, shape, configuration, clothing, etc will give a consistent base for clothing and armor to be re-used across species with the same proportions.

For now, my priorities for Nicemice are focused mainly on finishing and fleshing-out the Nicemice themselves, but if there were multiple people contributing to the mod, adding extra content like Goblin waifus would go faster.

...You do want shortstack goblin waifus, right?

A large portion of my summer was spent away from home this year. Now that I'm home again, I've picked up where I left off with Nicemice, and the upper-tier ships are steadily making progress.
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3563765039
I've also adjusted the sit position to be higher up so Nicemice players aren't sinking into their chairs. We're already short enough without the chair offset being wrong.

Something I noticed while messing with the sit offsets is that objects which explicitly use the 'laying' animation offset the user's pants/tail incorrectly(?) by one pixel on the x axis. The species-level laying animation offset parameters only allow me to adjust this vertically, and not horizontally, so unfortunately I'm not able to fix this particular issue.

Most beds hide the player's legs while resting, and even if the player has their legs exposed, most people probably won't notice the off-by-one error while resting anyway, so it's probably fine. I noticed, though, so, y'know, whatever