[@Darkmatter]

No I would start the IC once we get three or four solid NSes. I have a story-arc in mind that I can deploy if that would be useful to prodding the IC along, but otherwise I'm content to let players devise their own paths.

The benefit of this setting is that people can join and we can explain their absence from the story so far as "there's a huge amount of desert between us, so you havent been part of the story yet". I do want to emphasize collaborative world building and having the NSes feel as though they belong in a shared world, however, as well as working together to design the geography and history, etc etc. But hopefully not to the detriment of the IC, which I will be emphasizing more than I have in the past.