Stellaris News

by MrFreake, chirumirushiroz​, rodahtnov​, gordon_cmb​, and idm7449​

Hello Stellaris Community, and chad-mod-enjoyers the world over!

Today we’re here to highlight some overhaul mods. From technologies, to government types, the galactic imperium, and traditions, this collection of mods might just have something that speaks to your inner swolefin!

Too much reading for a Monday? We’re also proud to feature Michael~ for the first time on Stellaris Official on YouTube, with a video highlighting these four mods:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Like this content? Subscribe to Michael~ on YouTube!

Without further ado, this first mod needs no introduction to just over 140 thousand of you, but in order to stop the ACOT fans yelling at us, we’re proud to present:

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[h3]Ancient Cache of Technologies by chirumirushiroz​[/h3]



Features:

• New Technology Tiers
  
• New Ship Types Based on Fallen Empires
  
• New Planet Types
  
• New Neutral Faction that doubles as mini-crisis
  
• New Megastructures
  
• New Origins
  
• Reworked Armies
  
• New stories and lore
  

Summary:
Ancient Cache of Technology explores the stories of the ancient enigmatic precursors, including the Curators, the Fallen Empires and those that came before them. Behind their history lies many great secrets yet to be rediscovered.

The Fallen Empires thought they mastered the Enigmatic Power, their dark matter and energy weapons supreme. But for how long? What if an empire manages to rise and learn their secrets, what if they surpass the known knowledge of the past, and forge a new future thought impossible?

This mod introduces a large variety of new technologies based on the enigmatic powers. From ship weapons, to buildings, to armies or planetary decisions. Technologies are categorized into tiers, and there are event chains that each empire has to go through to acquire them...or steal them from the others.

Due to vanilla's lacking army contents, this mod also expands upon armies as well. Most importantly, the Hive Mind gets to have their own armies now (No more zerglings running home due to low morale)

Furthermore, the mod buffs the existing Fallen Empire worlds to be much harder to invade, with their home citadels now fully protected, their outlying planets now have proper FE-tier buildings and their armies now much harder to beat.

It also buffs and expands upon the Curator Order a lot, as well as adding an entirely new neutral leviathan-like faction who holds a massive starbase, waiting for someone to challenge them." I always liked how the Fallen Empire ships looked and the mystery behind them, but the base content and story of the Fallen Empires in the vanilla game left much to be desired, so I started by giving them more unique building looks, unique armies, then the mod gets larger until it reaches the current version.









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This next mod adds a little bit of everything, new authorities, civics, ascension perks, megastructures, all while going for the vanilla-like feel and balance:

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[h3]Stellaris Evolved by rodahtnov​[/h3]



Features:

• 6 new authorities, with 3 more on the works
  
• More than 100+ new civics, including all playstyles and new types of civics (Origin civics, origin exclusive civics tied to your origin!)
  
• Expanded and customizable ethics for normal and gestalt empires
  
• Several new traits for al type of species archetypes
  
• Several reworks and adjustments to base features keeping the original appeal (reworked Arcologies, Habitats, Branch offices, Naval capacity, etc)
  
• Several additions to DLCs, filling the missing fantasy gaps (example: aquatic trait/civic for machines)
  
• New and expanded features in line with the original appeal and experience (Ai authorities processing capacity, hivemind rework, machine rework, etc)
  
• 6 new Tradition paths, built as an upgrade of some of the base game paths.
  
• Some new ascension perks expanding generally lackluster features (example: A starbase path to make starbases more feasible economically or as defense!)
  
• 8 new expanded ascension paths, including advanced versions of normal paths, mixed paths and more, with subpaths inside each path and unique mechanics, traits and lore for each one.
  
• New mid game megastructures and planet types.
  
• A lot of custom art in all features in line with the base game.
  
• And more coming soon!
  

Summary:

With Stellaris Evolved we intended to create a new set of tools to fill the gaps in the fantasy-creation agency process of players; a big emphasis has been put on empire creation and early game, and we are slowly expanding our horizon towards mid and late game.

• Readability and accessibility: We enhance features visually so they are easier to understand/read and there is no need to relearn the game; all is done in line with vanilla design.
  
• Diversity and variety: We try to provide all the tools possible to create diverse fantasies outside the stellaris reach, and we are constantly asking people, searching media, etc to enrich and expand! But always taking in mind player agency is priority, so we avoid bee-lining a fantasy!
  
• Compatibility: As a soft-overhaul we try to allow the maximum compatibility possible, and as such we design evolved as a foundation mod, adding some external code internally for compatibility and openly collaborating with other modders for it!
  
• Fun and accomplishment: This is a game and as such, having fun is a priority! We try to make all players feel satisfied and accomplished after a game, with also some balance in mind, so all type of sessions are enjoyable"
  

Inspiration
Originally this mod was gonna be a "gestalt only" mod; I love stellaris and my initial experience was playing gestalts, specially hives, and after some time detected they were a bit stale, so decided to start modding! And, with a non coding background, the start was pretty rough, but over time knowledge was gained, new techniques and wisdom were discovered and overall, a good experience was generated with the joy of creating people's love.

Has been a lot since then, more than two years, and features got expanded, things got reestructured and all goals needed to organise, but now we are a team of two (MrRoAdd, you are amazing!) and we are doing a lot of amazing things you will see now, and in the future!

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Ever just.. See an idea and go: “Wow, that is really cool.” Well, this next mod did that to me, and I suspect you might just have the same reaction, because it’s just that cool.

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[h3]Superstates by gordon_cmb​[/h3]



Features

• Ability to form Superstates:
  
• The Galactic Republic
  
• Union of Socialist Stars
  
• Galactic Processing Unit
  
• Everlasting Hive
  
• GalactiCORP
  
• Universal Union
  
• Several new civics, events and unique flags for each
  

Summary
The Superstates are your go-to alternatives for the Galactic Imperium. If you want to expand your reach even further, but want to remain the Galactic Custodian, you can instead form a Superstate. Each one has its own set of civics, unique flags, events and even a set of resolutions will be available in future updates! The primary goal of this mod is to bring more variety and roleplaying potential to the game. Not every Custodian will want to proclaim an authoritarian Imperium, some will want to remain democratic, or strengthen their grip on the Galaxy further. The mod doesn't tell the entire story behind the formation of a Superstate or its possible dissolution later down the road, it leaves those details to the player's interpretation, making games more fun and enjoyable to play if you love democracy! On topic of loving democracy, you will still be able to form the Imperium, provided you want to and your Superstate is not as despotic (eg. The Universal Union). There can't be two or more Superstates at the same time, since a Superstate is a Galactic Hegemon. This empire is a diplomatic mastermind that brings the Galaxy ever so slightly towards total unification.

Inspiration
The inspiration behind this mod was the Imperium itself, or rather, how limited it was. Even if you play as a xenophilic democratic guardian of the galaxy - you MUST leave these values behind and become a dictatorial militarist if you want to lead the Galaxy. The game needs more variety on all fronts, and that's when the modders can help. That's why I create those mods, to promote variety, to promote roleplay and replay value.

This game is not merely a 4X strategy, it's a story generator, and a good story needs good tools to be made. Stellaris in itself is a great game already, it serves as a perfect platform for modding, and I'm extremely glad the developers are as kind as they are, they give us tools, they give us easy to understand code, and they constantly support not just the playerbase, but the modders as well.

Overall, I think, since the modding potential is so great, we need to take matters into our own hands and create the best roleplaying experience out of this game. This is exactly what I'm trying to achieve, this mod and Resolutions Expanded are basically a cross-compatible series of mods to improve on the Galactic Community, and I hope to see more mods like this in the future.
To all newcoming modders: Be yourself, and be the change you want to see!



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Our final mod for this month’s mod highlights takes a different approach to traditions, splitting the vanilla traditions up into sections, and allowing you to choose part or all of traditions, and combine them to best fit your playstyle:

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[h3]Forerunner - A Traditions Overhaul by idm7449​[/h3]



Features:

• Forerunner overhauls all Traditions in the game with more compelling perks and choices, supporting unique bonuses for standard empires, machine empires, hive empires, Lithoids, Necrophages, and much more. Adding in total 11 Tradition categories, 60 Paths, and 198 new Traditions!
  
• A new way to gain Ascension Perks. Instead of gaining Ascension Perks from finishing a Tradition, gain them by pairing Paths. Choose the bonuses that are relevant to you and your playstyle!
  
• Redesigned layout and icons for each Tradition category, featuring the beautiful artwork found in Stellaris!
  
• Lightweight and compatibility friendly. Forerunner was designed with compatibility in mind.
  
• Clean implementation. No game errors.
  

Summary
Forerunner - A Traditions Overhaul is a complete overhaul of the game’s tradition system, designed to mirror the balance of the base game while introducing new gameplay options. It reworks existing Tradition trees with more compelling perks and choices in order to reinforce existing playstyles or create entirely new ones. Forerunner attempts to make every choice as meaningful as possible by focusing on a smaller selection of Tradition categories as opposed to a larger number with a varying degree of game balancing.

The new Path mechanic gives players increased freedom when it comes to pursuing Ascension Perks, by allowing Paths to be paired within a Tradition category or in between Tradition categories, letting the player define how their Ascension Perks should be obtained.

Will you remember your Heritage or will you Ascend? Forerunner introduces a brand new tradition called Heritage that serves as an alternative to Ascension Paths centered around remaining true to the empire’s identity (Ethics, Civics) instead of forging a new one.









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That’s it for this month’s mod highlights! I hope you’ve found something that will add some spice to your next playthrough, and thanks to Michael~ (subscribe to him on YouTube!) for doing the feature video this month.

Are you a modder who wants your mod featured in a future mod highlight? Fill out the signup sheet here!

by Eladrin

Hi everyone, long thyme no see.

This week we’re continuing our exploration of the improvements the Custodian Team is making to Species Packs in the upcoming Stellaris 3.9 ‘Caelum’ Update, as well as some of the other stuff we’ve been up to.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Too much reading for a Thursday? Watch the video Dev Diary instead!

First up are some improvements to the Environmentalists civic.
[h3]Environmentalists​[/h3]
Although the initial version of the Ranger Lodge and the Ranger jobs for the Environment civic were good, we felt that they could be improved upon.

Changes this civic has seen are:

• The number of Ranger jobs provided by the Lodge now scales with the number of Natural Blockers on the planet.
  
• Environmentalist empires can now choose to expand their Nature Preserves, increasing the number of Blockers (and thus Ranger jobs) on the planet.

You should give the Nature Preserves as mushroom as possible.​

• In addition to producing Unity for Environmentalists, each Natural Blocker on the planet (with the exception of Nature Preserves), now gives Ranger jobs a small amount of production of basic resources

[h3]Invasive Species Trait​[/h3]
Gardeners everywhere know the threat of invasive species.

Now you too can have a Plantoid or Fungoid species that grows like weeds.

The root of the problem.​

Invasive species get +5% habitability and + 5% pop growth speed for each negative trait they possess, and can only select negative or botanical traits.

Will you use them to propagate yourselves across the galaxy, or make that xenophile regret signing that migration pact?

Or perhaps they can hitch a ride to nearby planets using the…

[h3]Fruitful Partnership Origin​[/h3]
Many plants spread their seeds far and wide through animal dispersal.

Plantoid and Fungoid civilizations now have that option as well.



This origin is so wholesome it’s a little sappy.​

Empires with the Fruitful Partnership origin will begin the game in contact with the Tiyanki, and Starseed Gardens already built on their home Orchard Station.



Space fauna that visit the system are lured to the station, where they partake in the provided fruits, and carry your seed pods with them as they travel the galaxy.

Where are they going to take them…?​

When passing near a habitable world, the seed pods can find a home…

…All clover the galaxy!



And by completing a special project, new life can bloom - wherever it is they brought the seeds.



It was mint to be.



Having your seeds carried away by space fauna can allow colonization of planets far from your home system, but you can also be a little more direct about seeding an enemy planet.

Dropping some sick beets.​

While these seed blockers are primarily just a nuisance to your opponent, if you end up taking the planet and clearing them yourself, you’ll be able to turn them into pops, similar to how Lithoid blockers work.

[h3]Human Plantoids​[/h3]
The Lithoid Theians from last week came from a close encounter with Earth eons ago, our new Plantoids actually start on Earth and explore the possibility of “what if humans were plants”. Naturally, empires that branched out from Earth like the Commonwealth of Man will share your leafy heritage. (Their reputation pre-seeds them.)

Say aloe to my little friend.

SPOILER: FIRST TIME EVER?
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Now, on to some other things coming in 3.9, and no more terrible plant jokes.

[h3]Enclave Leaders​[/h3]
During the development of Galactic Paragons and First Contact, we wanted to revisit some of the older interactions with the various Enclaves scattered around the Galaxy, but never found the time, namely:

• Hiring a Scientist from the Curators
  
• Hiring a Governor from the Trader Enclaves
  
• Hiring a Teacher from the Shroudwalkers
  
• Hiring a Salvage Overseer from the Salvagers
  

As the development of the 3.8 hotfix patches wound down, we were able to get some additional code support for Empire Councilors and got to work.

Coming in the 3.9 update, each of these decisions will grant recruitment of a Level 5 Scientist or Governor, each with their own unique trait (and for owners of Galactic Paragons, a unique Council Position that only they can be appointed to).

This leader recruitment replaces the existing Shroudwalker Teacher planetary modifier and Salvage Overseer empire modifier and improves upon the leaders recruited from the Curators and Trader Enclaves.

The Governors from the other Trader Enclaves provide bonuses to Rare Crystals or Volatile Motes instead.​

However, just because you’ve recruited these Renowned Leaders from Enclaves, don’t expect them to sit by idly if you attack their former home.



[h3]UI Modding Change​[/h3]

The main change that we want to highlight here is:

• NInterface has been moved from commom/defines/00_defines.txt to unchecked_defines/interface.txt. This means that any mods that alter defines listed under NInterface will no longer block achievements or Ironman.
  

[h3]Interim Leader XP Updates​[/h3]
As mentioned in Dev Diary #307, we were looking at some adjustments to the over-cap formulas to reduce their negative effects until the greater rework is ready.

Rather than a linear progression that abruptly hits -100% XP, we’ve replaced the current XP scaling for leaders with a formula that follows a curve.

XP curves for being over capacity (at the base of 6 leaders)​

[h3]Next Week​[/h3]
Humanoids and Necroids will be next week’s primary topic. Alfray will give an update on how Habitats have been going, and what’s this I hear about an Open Beta?

See you then!

SPOILER: PROGRESS
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Sorry about all of the puns in this one.

by Eladrin

Welcome back!

In this week’s dev diary, we’re going to explore some improvements the Custodian Team is making to the Lithoids Species Pack in the upcoming Stellaris 3.9 ‘Caelum’ Update, and then a few other new features.

Before that, I have an announcement to make regarding Species Pack Pricing.

[h3]Announcement Regarding Species Pack Pricing​[/h3]
Stellaris Species Packs started as purely cosmetic add-ons, consisting of portraits, ship sets, city sets, and advisor voices. They’ve come a long way since them, now including a much greater variety of content. While the exact spread of features varies by pack, they now all include things such as origins, civics, traits, events, and new mechanics.

As Game Director, I’m especially pleased with how the Custodian Team has improved the quality of the older packs. They’ve added new playstyles and enabled many more sci-fi tropes to be explored during your games.



With the changes coming in 3.9 ‘Caelum’, we believe that the older Species Packs will be on par with the newer ones, and we’re planning an increase in the base price of the Plantoids, Humanoids, Lithoids, and Necroids Species Packs from $7.99 to match the $9.99 base price of the more recent Aquatics and Toxoids Species Packs.

Per the promise made by Fredrik Wester several years ago, we are announcing this change ahead of time so anyone that wishes to purchase them at the current base prices will have an opportunity to do so. They will be available with the current base price for at least 30 days, and will be changing alongside the release of 3.9 ‘Caelum’.

Stellaris will be taking part in the Steam Strategy Fest. This will give you a chance to get the affected Species Packs at a discounted price before the price change goes into effect.

I’ll now detail the improvements made to the Lithoids Species Pack. Improvements to the other Species Packs will be a major focus of dev diaries over the next few weeks.

[h3]Things That Rock​[/h3]
My very first Stellaris Dev Diary was #157 - Things That Rock.

The Lithoids Species Pack was the first one that wasn’t exclusively an art pack. The Lithoid trait added interesting game mechanics to the phenotype, we had a few Lithoid specific traits, some event changes, and the Terravore variant of the Devouring Swarm.

The purely cosmetic Species Packs were updated in subsequent releases, but while it did get an Origin in Federations and more traits in 3.5 ‘Fornax’, Lithoids hadn’t gotten quite as much of an update from the Custodian Team as the packs. Of quartz I thought that we should dig up some improvements.

I’ll turn things over to Iggy now to talk about some of the changes.

—

Greetings all, Iggy here!

Since the release of Galactic Paragons, the Custodian Team has been working on improving the value and quality of older DLC’s. Today I will be talking about what we have done for the Lithoid Species Pack.

[h3]Buffing the Old​[/h3]

As previously shown in DD #305 we returned to Calamitous Birth to give it some love. This includes removing the habitability loss from Lithoid Craters for Lithoid pops as well as increasing the effectiveness of lithoid exclusive traits such as Gaseous Byproducts on the Massive Crater world.







We also talked about how terravores have gotten a glow up. No longer will you need to sit and click a decision every 6 months as you consume your world! Now it’s all handled in a handy compact situation. The output should still be exactly the same as before thanks to clever script math so don’t worry about this being a nerf to acquired pops or resources.

Crunch crunch!

[h3]In With the New!​[/h3]

Not satisfied with only buffing these two old pieces of content we also felt like the species pack could do with a bit of a polish to stack up to current species packs.

First up: Void Hive

I love this icon so much

As you can see it’s a Hive Civic with quite a unique effect and if the habitat changes discussed in DD #306 go through it would be a powerful addition to your Void Dweller Hiveminds.

Iggy making potentially game breaking hive content? SHOCKER!

This civic plays around with the flavor of a Hive Mind that is capable of surviving out in space and the dangers of vacuum. While you still can build gathering stations it goes against your nature to instruct specific drones to do so and will cost you some Unity. They also excel at creating structures in space, whether they be habitats, dyson spheres, or hyper relays, so get out into the dark void already!

The other new civic added to the Lithoid Species Pack is Selective Kinship.

This civic is not for the xenophiles so please, avert your ocular organs.

Meat. They’re made out of meat!

This civic also comes with the lithoid species pack and lets you create an empire consisting only of your primary phenotype such as Lithoids, Aquatic, Mammalian, etc. Though don’t think it will be smooth sailing because you won’t like anyone not conforming to your standards and they will really not like your bigoted thinking. However if you really want to have some friends the Hegemon and Common Ground origin will ensure that your member nations are your phenotype if you choose to start with this civic.

[h3]Shine Bright!​[/h3]

Thanks, Iggy.

We’ve been having a lot of questionnaires and feedback sessions with players, and one of the things that is often requested is some more relatable characters in the various phenotypes. While we’ll of course continue creating horrific alien monstrosities, the art team took this opportunity to add a few new portraits to Lithoids, Plantoids, and Humanoids.



For Lithoids, the Federated Theian Preserves will be a new prescripted empire that begins on the Desert World of Theia, in the Titawin system.

Billions of years ago, two planets formed from the primordial material in orbit of Sol - ancient Earth, and Theia.

Rudimentary life evolved on both worlds, biological in the case of Earth, and lithoid on Theia. For eons, these sister planets maintained a peaceful revolution around their star. Then came the cataclysm.

The planets collided, and in the moment of impact, microbial life was exchanged. Earth survived, and Luna was formed. What remained of Theia was jettisoned from the system.

On this rocky colony ship, life from ancient Theia traversed the void before it was caught in the gravity well of the star Titawin. Crashing into one of the system's worlds, a new species was introduced to the local biosphere. A few short millennia later, the Theians took to the stars, seeking to understand the universe as well as their own heritage.

Work is still being done on the lava shader.

May they find their way home!

On to some other 3.9 changes…

[h3]Ascension Path Agendas​[/h3]
Some players have commented that they often find themselves saving an Ascension Perk slot for an indeterminate amount of time, waiting for the required research for their desired Ascension Path to appear.

The Ascension Perks that unlock the four Ascension Paths have had their requirements changed so that they now be taken as your third AP at the earliest instead of as your second AP. We have removed the Technology requirements and moved those to progressing down the Tradition Tree associated with that Ascension Path.





Each Ascension Path now has an Agenda that grants 25% progress in technologies associated with that Ascension Path, which should ensure that you are no longer reliant on random chance to acquire these technologies. These Agendas have a reduced cost and cooldown compared to normal Agendas, though some have modifiers based on Empire Ethics compatibility with the Ascension Path.





These agendas advance to the next relevant technology if you finish some research while the agenda is ongoing.

[h3]rm -rf /nodes/regulatory​[/h3]

One of the complaints we’ve had with Gestalt Councils is that Nodes cannot be replaced unlike the Councilors for regular empires. This means that you are no longer locked forever to traits that might be useful for your Nodes in the early-game but fall off in the mid- to late-game.

To solve this, we’ve added three new Society technologies to Machine Intelligences (and Hive Minds) which unlock a set of new Council Agendas that replace the existing Nodes, after a bit of reformatting (or vivisection).

TODO: Icons



The first technology will unlock the Agendas themselves, while the following technologies will unlock modifiers that improve both the Agendas and your Council.

The newly created Nodes will initially start at level 1, though this can be improved to a maximum starting level equal to the level of the reformatted/culled Node depending on Technologies, Traditions and Civics.

[h3]Next Week​[/h3]
Next week we’ll be going over improvements to the Plantoids Species Pack and some more other changes coming in 3.9 ‘Caelum’. Humanoids and Necroids will be the following week.

These are not plantoids. But you’ll get to meet them in the plantoids dev diary.

Spoiler: Updated Progress Image
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by Eladrin

Happy Thursday!

This week we’re looking at another of our Summer Experiments, though this one unfortunately didn’t work out as well as we had hoped.

Class-based leader limits.​

[h3]Why are you looking at this?​[/h3]
Galactic Paragons reintroduced a limit to the number of leaders you could recruit at one time, and while it was a soft cap that you could exceed, experience gains were reduced and once you hit twice the cap, all leader experience gain stopped. In subsequent patches, we relaxed some of the numbers and added more ways to increase the cap, but it’s still a rather unpopular system that could use some work.

Currently, the presence of a less valuable leader (like a General) takes up the same “space” as something like a Scientist or Admiral, which leads to some unsatisfying gameplay decisions.

I mentioned a few things we were planning on looking at back in Dev Diary #302, along with some of the issues we expected to run into.

[h3]So what did you try?​[/h3]
During our experiments we added the ability to have individual leader caps by class, so that General mentioned above would use up General capacity, but Scientists would be governed by their own limit. “Over cap” effects would likewise be per-class, so if you had too many Admirals, their progression would slow, but other leader classes would be unaffected.

We also experimented with retaining “wild-card” capacity, so you could always get a few over before starting to run into penalties.

[h3]Why didn’t it work?​[/h3]
This experiment largely failed due to UX issues. Stellaris isn’t always the easiest game to parse information from, but this turned out diabolically bad and difficult to fix.

The information transfer is made even harder by Envoys acting as their own “special version” that have their own capacity but behave entirely differently from all of the other leaders.

It says we have 1 leader out of 3, but we actually have 4 out of 5-8. Oh no.

1/1 Admirals, 0/1 Generals, 1/2 Scientists, 2/1 Governors, 0/3 Envoys (but actually 3 Envoys, 0 of which are being used), plus the Wildcards. This could possibly have been shown as something like 1/0/1/2 (+2) | (3), but that’s very confusing.​

Five different leader types plus the wildcard was too difficult to explain clearly in the top bar (where the limited space is a major issue) and even in the expanded space available in tooltips.

After several variants and some UX design time, we deemed this variant a failure. We could have continued spending time refining this - but decided that we’d rather pursue a greater rework that we’re hoping to release alongside the 3.10 update. (Custodian initiatives do not generally have hard release dates - if it’s not ready by 3.10 freeze, it’ll move out to 3.11.)

I’ll go into full details after Caelum is released, but the quick summary involves consolidating the five leader classes down to three (Commanders, Diplomats, and Scientists) and reworking how Envoys are used. (As they would be merged into the Diplomat class.)

Yes, we've had one, yes, but what about second leader rework?​

Until then, we’re planning on making some adjustments to the over-cap formulas to reduce their negative effects until the greater rework is ready.

[h3]Tell us about Caelum then!​[/h3]
Like the Stellaris 3.1 ‘Lem’ update, 3.9 ‘Caelum’ has a lot of general improvements scattered across a great number of game systems.

Common Ground and Hegemony are getting some improvements:

• Your starting federation members no longer own your immediately neighboring systems, allowing both you and them some room for early expansion.
  
• The Federation now starts with 0 Cohesion (instead of -100) and halfway to Level 2 (600 XP instead of 0 XP).
  
• The requirements for the Origins have been relaxed to allow non-genocidal Hive-Minds and Machine Intelligences to take them. This also allows your AI federation members to occasionally spawn as Hive-Minds or Machine Intelligences.
  

We also have some balance changes done for Archaeotechs:

• Halved the energy upkeep of the Facility of Archaeostudies.
  
• Added the Archaeotech Focus admiral trait, which grants increased damage and fire rate with Archaeotech weapons.
  
• Decreased the research speed and draw weight for Archaeotech from the Expertise trait, but made it reduce the Minor Artifact cost for ship components.
  
• The starting head of research for Remnants empires now has the Expertise: Archaeostudies trait.
  
• The Archaeoengineers AP now reduces Minor Artifact cost for ship components by 10%
  
• Increased the range of Macro Batteries by 50%.
  

[h3]Next week…​[/h3]
Here are some things that we’ll be talking about in the next few weeks:

Pixelated collage of lots of tooltips that I figure you'll have deciphered by the end of the day. We’ll reveal all of these, and more.​

We’ll be starting with all the improvements to the Lithoids Species Pack, that are intended on bringing it up to the level of the others..

See you then!

by Eladrin

Hi everyone!

I hope your summers have been going well! I got a bit sunburnt, but today we’re back and ready to talk about some of the promising experimentation we’ve been doing with the Habitat system.

We’ll be going through the entire development process in this dev diary, so there’s going to be a lot of ideas that were interesting but were subsequently discarded for various reasons.

[h3]Why Are You Looking at Habitats Again?​[/h3]
The Stellaris Custodian team looks to three primary categories when deciding what to pursue:

• Directives: Things dictated by me, the Game Director, usually for long term strategic reasons.
  
• Community: Things you ask for. Pain points, quality of life improvements, bug fixing, and other good ideas from the community.
  
• Passion: Things the individual developers really want to do.
  

Conveniently, a lot of times all of these align quite nicely.

Let’s start by looking at the history of Habitats in Stellaris.

Habitats were introduced way back in the 1.5 ‘Banks’ update in Utopia.

In 2.3 ‘Wolfe’, alongside Ancient Relics, we removed the Voidborne requirement to build Habitats, adjusted their habitability a little bit, and gave them varying districts based on what they were built over.

The 2.7 ‘Wells’ patch made the next major change to Habitats, adjusting their costs, requirements, and adding multiple tiers.

Since then, we’ve added a couple of special Habitat variants, and various other reworks have shifted their fortunes up and down in the overall balance of the game. Recently, there have been many requests from the community to review the tendency of AI empires building dozens of Habitats when they’re otherwise unable to expand.

Due to how production and population work in Stellaris, this led to an interesting quandary - it is theoretically “correct” for the AI to create many Habitats if it was blocked in, but it was tedious as a player to deal with invading up to a dozen Habitats per system. (The current interactions with population growth have also always been troublesome on the game balance side.)

Habitats were feeling far too common, were too good at certain things, and weren’t capturing the base fantasy that we were looking for. They’re the central pillar of a very popular playstyle that we wanted to preserve, though, so this made them a perfect target for “summer experimentation”.

Everything in this dev diary is considered experimental, and may or may not make it live. All numbers are placeholders for prototyping purposes only. There is no set release date for any of these changes at this time, but we welcome community feedback.

[h3]Different Takes[/h3]
One of the most common requests from the Community was to add a Galaxy slider to restrict the use of Habitats. Options could have ranged from banning Habitats entirely, to “Nobody (except Void Dwellers) can create Habitats”, requiring the Ascension Perk to build them again, restricting only the AI, or placing (hard or soft) limits to the number of Habitats that could be built.

We also discussed “what if Habitats cost fractional Starbase Capacity to build” - with Void Dwellers and the Voidborne AP granting discounts to this value. This was more appealing, since the soft cap would control AI use of Habitats nicely without significantly hindering players that wanted to go all-in on them.

These discussions led to some questioning about whether Stellaris Habitats were satisfying the general fantasy well enough, and whether Habitats should be more “hard sci-fi”, with lower habitability bases or even ceilings for those accustomed to planetbound life, and whether we could make changes that would address balance challenges like Hive Void Dwellers.

[h3]A More Complex Take​[/h3]
We made a list of some of the current challenges caused by the existing Habitat system, and this led to the idea of “what if all the Habitats in a system were linked?” We could retain the interesting expansion of Habitats across a system while reducing the burden when seizing the system, and potentially address some of the other problems introduced by an excess number of Habitats in the galaxy.

Alfray threw together an incredibly hacky and utterly unshippable version of this, and continued iterating on it during the Summer.

Under this variant, the first Habitat built within a system is the Central Habitat Complex. Additional Habitats are Support Habitats that add additional space and versatility to the Central Complex. A reminder, many values are grossly unbalanced placeholders in the following screenshots.

At this point I went on vacation, so I’ll turn this over to Alfray to talk about his investigations.

[h3]Once More Into the Alfray​[/h3]
Keep in mind that the numbers shown in the below screenshots are never intended to be the final values, but were used purely for testing purposes of how the systems felt to use and play with.

Firstly, to counteract the expected changes that with minimal Support Habitats, the Central Complex would be small, cramped and overall not great to live on, I gave Void Dwellers extra districts and building slots as a unique modifier (This saw further refinement in a later prototype).



Support Habitats as Megastructures:​
The first iteration of these prototypes made use of Support Habitats as additional megastructures.









In this prototype, we had the maximum amount of each type of resource collection district (Energy, Minerals, Research) limited by the size of the deposits the habitats were constructed over, similar to how buildings for Strategic Resources are limited.

Support Habitats provided additional Districts, Building Slots, and Housing to the Habitat Central Complex, while reducing the Habitability (to reflect the civilian traffic between habitats) as they are upgraded. The final tier also allowed the Habitat Complex to use deposits on moons of their orbited planet.

On the surface, this prototype seems to satisfy our initial requirements and more:

• Conquering systems with Habitat-spam was easier due to there only being one functional “planet” per system.
  
• Constructing multiple Habitats per system felt rewarding as it upgraded your existing colony.
  
• The removal of multiple starting colonies removed one of our main concerns for allowing Hive-Minds to have access to the Void Dweller origin - their high pop growth rate due to excessive numbers of spawning pools in the early game. (Iggy had some thoughts on this that he’ll be mentioning in a future Dev Diary).
  

A Void Dweller Habitat Complex.

The rather cluttered system said Habitat Complex is in.​

However, the Support Habitats couldn’t be interacted with outside being upgraded, which felt like a major downside. Enemy ships would happily fly past and ignore the Support Habitats, they couldn’t be specialised or downgraded.

All things considered, this prototype showed that making habitats into a single logical planet spread across many entities in a solar system felt good, but megastructures were not the path forward.

Support Habitats as “Starbases”:​

Keep in mind that the numbers shown in the below screenshots are never intended to be the final values, but were used purely for testing purposes of how the systems felt to use and play with.

The below screenshots feature placeholder art and the default art for starbases, their buildings and modules.

The second iteration of this prototype investigated treating Support Habitats as special Starbases (much like Orbital Rings).

In this prototype, the districts available to Habitat Central Complexes depend on the configuration of any Support Habitats in the same system. Thus construction of a Habitat Central Complex would automatically build a neighbouring Support Habitat in orbit of the same planet.

When built, a Support Habitat would start with a module that matches any deposits on the planet it orbits. Each Module on a Support Habitat, gives +3 Max Districts of that type to the Habitat Central Complex.

Upgrading the Support Habitats, still provides the same modifiers as shown in Megastructure Prototype. Additionally each tier of the Support Habitat allows construction of an additional Support Habitat module and the second and third tiers allow construction of a Support Habitat building.

Expanded Support Complex v2 -- The starting Habitat Central Complex and its neighbouring Support Habitat for a Void Dweller empire.

New Habitat Complex v2 -- A newly constructed Habitat Central Complex, completely unspecialised.​

Allowing the choice of which districts the Habitat Central Complex has access to via specialisation of the Support Habitats brings some interesting changes to how Habitat-dependent empires play.

Due to the nature of the prototype, the buildings for Support Habitats haven’t seen much investigation yet, but would likely include buildings much like those on an Orbital Ring, the lunar extraction support that Advanced Support Habitats experimented with in the Megastructure Prototype above and other such buildings.

Research Habitat Complex, v3 or so? A Research Habitat Complex, using some of the district capacity to provide hydroponic districts.​

Due to the nature of summer experiments, we can’t say if or when this prototype might make it into the live version of the game, but it’s something that we’re interested in exploring further.

[h3]…But the fourth one stayed up!​[/h3]
Thanks, Alfray.

That variant listed achieved a lot of the goals we were looking for, but was cobbled together out of the scripting equivalent of sticks and twine as a quick and dirty implementation. It also required a lot of back and forth clicking that we really weren’t too fond of. So after that one burned down, fell over, and sank into the swamp, we came up with another iteration.

My feedback: Simplify things.

The latest variant we’ve been playing with has been especially promising. In this one, we turned the “Starbase” style Support Habitats into single tiered “pre-specialized” units (renamed to “Orbitals” for UX purposes) rather than requiring Modules to be built on them - so you could build a Mining Orbital, Research Orbital, and so on.

This dramatically simplified the flow of building out Habitats while simultaneously improving the implementation.

Pre-Specialized Research Orbital.

Habitat Transit Hub. Hey wait, Maintenance DRONES? Unique buildings on the primary habitat complex can increase the effects of the orbitals.

Upgraded Habitat Transit building.

We’re still doing some experimentation with this model, but so far we’re liking what we’re seeing. Technologies can add special Orbital types or buildings that can modify the primary Habitat Complex, and it’s very easy for us (or modders) to add new types.

We've been looking at jobs per districts too - the Complexes have different challenges from the older Habitat system, and further updated the Voidborne Ascension Perk. Void Dwellers will start with its effects (similar to how Teachers of the Shroud empires effectively start with Mind over Matter).



Void Dwellers get Habitat Build Cost reductions in Traditions.​
[h3]What’s Next?​[/h3]

For now, I’d like to get some of your thoughts on what you’ve seen today, which we’ll bring into our internal design discussions. It would also be great to get feedback on whether you like this sort of diary, where we go through the overall process (including the failures).

Next week I'd like to talk about a Summer Experiment relating to leaders that didn’t pan out quite so well, and our plans on how to proceed with that.

See you then!