Who’s still playing Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion [official site]? It’s been about a year since I last dabbled with Ironclad’s lovely space RTS, but I’ll admit that I think I’d quite like to play it right now rather than writing about it.

But no, dear reader, no. First I must tell you about a few Rebellion mods, as several projects smooshing in other sci-fi series like Mass Effect and Star Wars have recently issued updates.

First up is Sins of the Prophets, a total conversion which “aims to capture the fast paced intensity of the Halo series” and bring it to Sins. They recently released an update tweaking the Sins map editor to use their custom assets. Prophets has been knocking around since the original Sins game was released in 2008 and a lot of the Prophets code still relates to that version of the game. The mod’s team have elected to go through everything and ensure greater compatibility with Rebellion all round. The Forge update is a small offering to their followers and an opportunity to provide an update on the overhaul, which is apparently halfway done. Good luck to them!

Next up is Thrawn’s Revenge II: Ascendancy, which is of course a Star Wars mod. Hey, I remember Thrawn! I read a couple of Zahn’s books as a teenager. It looks like Thrawn’s experienced some success since then. Always nice to see a local Mitth boy done good.

The 0.9 beta release of this mod was launched earlier this month with quite a significant bevy of updates. It sounds like quite a few features function differently to vanilla Rebellion, to the extent that the mod team recommend doing a bit of reading before you play. Or you could just dive in and build some Corellian Corvettes; whatever floats your spaceboat.

Finally, we’ve got one that Mass Effect mod Alec teased back in 2012, before it was even available. It is, happily, available now. The mod’s most recent release update was last August, but the team have been showing off some of their recent work, having made good progress over the past few weeks, and mentioning three mods seems better than mentioning two, yes?

I’ve barely scratched the surface of the Sins modding community here, which if I’m honest is because I’m as new to it as many of you reading this probably are. Still, hopefully I’ve inspired a few of you to join me in reinstalling Rebellion and trying out some of these – or other – conversions and mods for Sins.

(Not modded Sins before? Hopefully some elder hands will pop up in the comments to offer further advice, but in the meantime this Wikia should help, as should the Sins NexusMod site.)