Stellaris Dev Diary #266 - Rise, a Knight!

Greetings squires!
Mr. Cosmogone here, on behalf of the Lord Commander Eladrin who gave me his blessing to tell you more about the mysterious Knights of the Toxic God.

The Origin is content oriented, but it does come with some unique mechanics to support the narrative and put you in charge of an empire dedicated to a quest.
Starting with your Homeworld, which still bears the scars of the passage of the Toxic God in the form of five unique blockers:

As the quest progresses, you might get a chance to upgrade these into powerful assets, but at the beginning of the game, they will be a thorn in your side, reducing the number districts you can build on your homeworld.
Fear not however, for the Order has built you a brand new habitat to serve as your springboard to galactic dominance!
The habitat comes with several unique features, including an imposing building:

Knights are expensive specialists who will provide you with quest progress, and increasingly powerful boons as time goes on, while the Lord Commander is a ruler stratum job which is basically a super knight.
Both of these jobs are supported by Squires, who mainly come from the habitat’s unique districts:

All of this is done in service of the Quest, a unique situation which will slowly progress towards, well towards something.. Well, actually, multiple somethings which will be up to you to discover.
Let’s just say that it’s going to take a while, and cost you a considerable amount of money and alloys.

The Quest, the Knights and the Order will definitely put some stress on your economy in the early game, but having the elite of your nation ready to serve also comes with a few benefits, like the Knightly Duties policy:

And while your start will be rougher than most, should you overcome the challenges thrown your way, you will find that the knights can prove very valuable. That’s all for today, I’ll leave you with a peek at a late game habitat setup that occurred during one of our playtest, with only a little bit of minmaxing involved:

[h2]What's Next?[/h2]
Is it time already? This Thursday we'll have PDX-Loke providing the Patch Notes for the Toxoids Species Pack and the Stellaris 3.5 "Fornax" update!
See you then!
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