Stellaris, much like space itself, is always expanding. While the larger Federations expansion isn't due out later this year and set to overhaul the diplomatic side of the sprawling 4X strategy sandbox, Paradox Interactive rolled out an extra slab of optional DLC yesterday for players eager to expand their universe. The Lithoids Species Pack allows players to control an empire of planet-devouring mineral-based creatures. It's life, Jim, but not as we know it.

The Lithoids do sound like an interesting faction to play as. Slow off the starting line, but hard to stop once that boulder starts rolling. Being made of rock, they're largely unaffected by hostile environments, allowing them to settle down on any planet they encounter and devour it for resources; the crunchier the better. Whether you (or the AI) play them as a more intelligent and discerning pile of rocks or an all-consuming landslide is up to you.

They're also surprisingly easy on the eye. Take a look at their hippie-pleasing asymmetrical crystalline ships below, in a trailer cheekily accompanied by the percussion (but not melody, because lawyers) from Queen's We Will Rock You.

Owning this DLC not only lets you play as pre-baked Lithoid races, but also carve out your own custom variants, with 15 types of Lithoid portrait to work with, and one unusual Lithoid/Robot hybrid look, giving new meaning to the concept of silicon-based life. There's also a new Lithoid voice pack which I've not heard yet, but I'm assuming sounds a bit gravelly.

The Lithoids Species Pack DLC is out now on Steam, GOG and Paradox Plaza for £5.79/€7.99/$7.99.

Federations, the next DLC for Stellaris, was announced today at PDXCon, Parardox Interactive’s annual fan convention. The focus this time is on diplomacy, after previous expansions have fleshed out the military, economy, and internal politics of the sprawling space 4X. 

Federations have been a part of Stellaris from the beginning, building bridges of cooperation between sovereign empires. In this expansion though, they're getting a huge face-lift. The old school, vanilla, Star Trek sort (now called a Galactic Union) will still be around, but Paradox is adding several new, more specialized types of federations such as Research Co-Ops for science-minded factions and Trade Leagues for economically focused partnerships. Gaining more federation members and maintaining Cohesion (basically, keeping everyone on the same page policy-wise) will allow Federations to level up and gain mechanical perks, like increased federation fleet size.

The other major feature is the Galactic Community, a kind of "Space UN" that can be founded once you've met most of your star neighbors and the galaxy starts to become more interconnected. No empire is obligated to join, but those that opt-out will receive a colder welcome than those on the inside. Those that choose to leave after having joined will be especially reviled.

Members of the Galactic Community can propose resolutions that each of the other members will be able to vote on. Focusing on a new resource called Diplomatic Weight will give your votes more power and your resolutions higher priority, but building it will come at the expense of other areas like your military and economy. Resolutions that pass, such as banning sentient AI or establishing minimum rights for workers, will be binding for all members of the Galactic Community. The only way around these resolutions is to leave and incur the massive diplomatic penalty that comes with that act.

Also on the way is the Lithoids species pack, which will introduce several new portraits for species based on rocks, crystals, and other inorganic matter. They are unique not only in appearance, but in that they consume minerals instead of food, giving them a very different economy to manage.

The Lithoids species pack will be out on October 24 and Federations is set to launch later in the year. 

Yesterday's announcement of the sci-fi strategy MMO Stellaris: Galaxy Command was interesting because it marked what appeared to be a pretty big move into mobile gaming by Paradox, a publisher whose games generally aren't what you'd call mobile-friendly. But things took an unexpected twist when, shortly after our post went live, Paradox took down the beta, which had been soft-launched in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Sweden.

The problem, Paradox said in a tweet, was that at least one piece of artwork in the game "was taken from another source." It didn't say who, but it was quickly determined to have come from Halo—the original image can be seen on the ArtStation page of Kenny Magnusson, the technical art director at Halo studio 343 Industries. Paradox—which is publishing but not developing the game, Stellaris: Galaxy Command is being made by mobile studio GameBear—apologized and took the game offline "to perform a full content sweep and ensure this issue is resolved."

While only one image immediately jumped out as stolen, it's possible that Paradox is now discovering more deeply-rooted problems. In an update posted earlier today, it said that the "initial analysis" of art assets has been completed, "however we feel this situation requires more scrutiny."

"We have taken the decision to continue the hiatus. The game's servers will remain offline and its availability will be limited while a full investigation is run," Paradox said. "The whole process will take place shortly and, as soon as we're able, we'll update you again on when the game will be possible to play."

In a reply tweet, Paradox also addressed complaints that Stellaris: Galaxy Command is simply a reskin of GameBear's mobile strategy game Nova Empire, a complaint that arose when an error message shown to users who declined to grant the game required permissions referred to it as Nova Empire. "No denying that this is embarassing but it's actually a placeholder text that was copied into our game during the early stage of development, before we had a name," Paradox explained.

Paradox's move into mobile gaming hasn't exactly been greeted with universal applause from its existing fan base—no surprise there, really—and this obviously doesn't help with initial impressions. But Paradox appears to be handling it as well as can be expected, with a quick takedown, unequivocal apology, and what appears to be an in-depth examination of the rest of the game. And while free-to-play mobile games are sometimes burdened with egregious monetization options, I still think the promise of an EVE Online-style game that doesn't require EVE Online-style dedication and focus might be enough to change some minds, if the developers can pull it off.

The Halo 4 concept art used in Stellaris: Galaxy Command can be seen below; directly below is its appearance in the game. I've reached out to Paradox for more information and will update if I receive a reply.

The sci-fi strategy game Stellaris has progressed considerably since it released in 2016, and now occupies positions on our lists of the best space games and best strategy games. It's no surprise, then, that Paradox is making another one, called Stellaris: Galaxy Command. What is surprising is that it's not coming to PC.

From how it's described, Stellaris: Galaxy Command seems to be a free-to-play mobile MMO. You're put in control of a space station in a "persistent, player-driven world" that's been devastated by an alien invasion from another dimension. The attack was ultimately defeated, but "the war was not won alone" and apparently the recovery process won't be a solo endeavor either: "It will be up to the players to make alliances, negotiate and directly impact each others’ recoveries in this unique Stellaris adventure," Paradox says.

Beyond that you'll also need to rebuild and expand your empire, impose taxes and negotiate trade alliances, and reconstruct and rearm your military forces. Your actions will have "real consequences" for other players, as will the ethical underpinnings of your resurgent empire, which will be determined by the choices and actions you make as you retake your place of glory among the stars.

Paradox says that Stellaris: Galaxy Command is "an authentic Stellaris experience," though one that's designed to be played in short sessions rather than 17 hours at a time, like most Paradox games. "You can check on your station, fleet, and alliance throughout the day," it said. "Make sure your station is constantly researching and expanding and your fleet is building up and rearming to deal with new threats."

The Google Play listing goes into a little more depth on what it's all about, and it certainly sounds ambitious, with gameplay built around trading systems, ethics, and political systems. Players will be able to form or join alliances and Trade Networks, recruit elite admirals to head their fleets, customize and upgrade their ships, and take part in deep-space battles that will unfold in real time.

It isn't clear exactly how many players will be lumped together in the same universe, but at least "thousands of players play in a single galaxy with nearly a thousands star systems to explore," the listing says. "Declare 'cold' or conventional war and claim victory through economic strength or brute military force. Convene with allies to form an attack strategy, then wage war on other players across the universe."

It almost sounds like a free-to-play mobile take on EVE Online. Unfortunately, the game is currently offline (such is the way with soft-launched betas), but I sat through the long intro sequence before getting the "offline" message, and it at least looked impressive. Unfortunately, the game may remain offline for awhile, as Paradox explained that it was taken down due to the presence of artwork that was used without permission.

It's interesting to see a company that built its reputation on complex, desktop strategy games like Crusader Kings and Hearts of Iron moving into the mobile realm, where playtimes are typically measured in minutes rather than hours. It's a big step, but I wouldn't be at all surprised to see other Paradox games making the same transition if this one is successful.

The Stellaris: Galaxy Command beta is available now on Android and iOS devices, but for the time being only to players in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Sweden. Registration links and other details are available at galaxycommand.stellaris.com.

In 2017 Stellaris' Synthetic Dawn DLC added Machine Empires to Paradox's ever-expanding 4X space game. Instead of simply using robots for planetary labor, you could play an entire campaign as a robotic civilization, exploring and/or exploiting the stars as synthetic beings. The DLC added new civilization traits and government types to Stellaris' species customization pool, from which any player could construct their very own Skynet, Borg, or Dalek equivalent.

Now, more than a year after Synthetic Dawn's release, a first-time modder has created the ultimate robot race: the household printer.

"Play as the HP DeskJet 2630 Wireless All-in-One Printer after they became sentient and conquered their humanoid makers," writes creator Tom on the mod's Steam Workshop page.

Indeed, the DeskJet 2630 is a Determined Exterminator, which from the get-go are built for combat, conquering, and genocide with +25% weapons damage, −15% ship cost, and +33% fleet capacity. "Born in fire, the Machine Intelligence's first move was to annihilate its organic creators in self-defense," reads Stellaris' general description of this single-minded empire type.

Their home planet, Printer Prime, is a Tomb World, meaning that in lore of this mod, printers nuked us to smithereens and left the planet in a nuclear winter. Sounds about right.

The DeskJet 2630 has these additional traits:

• Rapid Replicator (+20% Pop Assembly speed)
• Logic Engines (+10% Research Output)
• Mass-Produced (+15% Pop Assembly Speed)
• High Maintenance (+10% Robot Upkeep)
• Repurposed Hardware (–25% Leader Experience Gain)

High Maintenance is an appropriate pick—the flavor text reads: "These machines were designed with a complete disregard for longevity and are prone to malfunction. They will require frequent maintenance." Personally I'd love to see the "Bulky" trait added as a reflection of how cumbersome printers are.

As a reluctant user of printers, this mod taps into a lifelong rivalry I've cultivated with this peripheral. Troubleshooting internet issues with your ISP probably tops it for outright inconvenience, but nothing surpasses the mechanical evil of the printer: the way it reliably malfunctions the moment you absolutely need it; the inscrutable language ("PC LOAD LETTER"); its unending thirst for proprietary, overpriced blood.

Posted three days ago in Steam Workshop, this insidious add-on is already one of the most popular mods for Stellaris over the past week. Its creator says he's hoping to add an animated portrait in the future.

The Stellaris: Megacorp expansion came out a week ago and Fraser seemed to like it quite a bit, if you can call being appalled by the bottomless depths of your own rapacious corporate excesses "liking it," and I guess he does. Anyway, it turns out that it will be game director Martin Anward's last bit of work on the game, as he announced yesterday that he's moving on to something else.

The good news is that he's leaving Stellaris, but not Paradox. "This move has been planned since a long time back, and I am still very much staying at Paradox Development Studio as a Game Director, I am just moving over to another, secret project," he wrote on Twitter. "I will continue to host the Stellaris dev-clash streams until at least the end of the current season, and I'm sure you'll continue seeing more from me on other streams and Paradox events." 

Anward gave no hint as to what he's moving on to (unless it's something so cryptic and deeply buried that only the most hardcore of Paradox fans might pick on up it), nor did Paradox itself, although responses to this tweet indicate that quite a few fans are hoping for a Victoria 3 announcement.  

Stellaris has let me play a lot of ethically questionable empires. There was the time I tried to consume the galaxy as a hive of monstrous insectoids, and then there was my playthrough as a robotic legion with a penchant for enslaving every fleshy lifeform it found. None of them gave me as much pause as playing a capitalist corporate empire in the latest expansion, MegaCorp. 

With MegaCorp, Paradox is digging into another science-fiction mainstay: giant corporations and organised crime syndicates like Alien’s Weyland-Yutani, the Hutts of Star Wars and Star Trek’s Ferengi. They like money and, for the most part, don’t mind how they go about getting it. The less pleasant the methods, the greater the profits. 

I’m at the mid-game of my own MegaCorp experiment, modelled on the aforementioned Weyland-Yutani. Corporate governments have their own set of civics, like hives and AIs, separate from the regular list, including one obviously inspired by the company’s motto, “Building Better Worlds”, netting you private colony ships to better expand your reach. Another lets you foster greater unity through propaganda and PR—a media empire. You can even create evangelical mega-churches that don’t so much blur the line between religion and commerce as completely smash it. 

Ultimately, these corporations still broadly function like empires, warring, and exploring just like their neighbours. There’s a lot of flavour, good flavour, but the moment-to-moment experience is familiar. What MegaCorp does is give you a lot more (and a lot more interesting) options when it comes to making money and fiddling with your economy. Along with the civics, there are special actions corporations can take, such as creating branch offices on worlds within empires that they have a trade deal with. These offices let you actually build on alien worlds, though in a limited capacity, which is why the harmonious collective of friendly space jellyfish that live next door to me now have horrible fast-food chains and entertainment megaplexes. 

Branch offices might be too great a source of wealth. I didn’t build any in the early part of my game, so I was still occasionally low on cash even when I was enslaving aliens, experimenting on aliens and generally just being a dick to aliens. Once I remembered to start taking advantage of my trading partners, however, I quickly became one of the uber-wealthy. The risk is that these trade deals could end for any number of reasons, quickly reducing my income. 

New deal

There are other ways to make cash when those sources dry up, though. There’s a new economic resource that comes with the Le Guin update, whether you have MegaCorp or not, called trade value. It represents the economic output of your empire and can be affected by jobs, resources mined across the galaxy, starbases with trade modules and lots of other things. Trade value can be sent to your capital world from other places, like starbases, via trade routes, but these can be preyed on by pirates, making these space-faring menaces this persistent threat to your economy, not just a military concern. 

Planetary management is another big change that comes with the free Le Guin update. That probably undersells it. Planetary management is one of Stellaris’ biggest ever overhauls. The new planetary screen is pretty hard to parse, unfortunately, and it takes a bit of getting used to, but I’ve definitely been converted to the system itself. Stellaris has always made pops central to the game, and their traits, which you can eventually tweak through genetic and synthetic manipulation, have a significant impact on your empire. Le Guin places another layer on top of that: their role on the worlds they inhabit. 

Every pop has a job (unless they’re unemployed) ranging from miners to merchants. The type of jobs available and buildings they can work in depends on everything from species traits to the laws of your empire. A new species you’ve just welcomed into your empire might be physically incapable of mining, while slavery laws might mean certain jobs would automatically be outlawed. 

Jobs are fundamental to resource production, with each level of society—workers, specialists and rulers—providing a different kind of resource. As you fill your worlds with new workers, you have considerably more freedom to specialise and tweak than you did with the basic ‘plonk down a building and move a random pop on top of it’ method of planetary management Stellaris had before. You’re no longer limited by a small set of tiles, and a planet’s output is much more dependent on who is living on it.   

As well as building regular structures, you’ll also develop specialised districts, allowing you to host a larger population, grow more food or mine more minerals. Districts are the foundations of your worlds, giving you the basic building blocks of an empire and offering clear solutions to a lot of problems. Got a food deficit? Create another agricultural district. Need to churn out more ships? Focus on industrial districts. Specific buildings then allow you to further enhance the world, as well as creating new jobs for your citizens. 

It's getting crowded in here

The changes to planet management also introduce new wrinkles. Instead of the number of pops on your world being limited to the number of free building tiles, there’s a soft cap based on how many housing districts you’ve constructed. And even if you don’t have enough housing districts, new pops can still appear, causing overpopulation. If you’ve already built up all your districts, you might have to take the hit, force them to move to another world or tear down one of your industrial or agricultural districts. Pops will take jobs and find homes automatically, so the micromanagement isn’t intensive, but when problems appear, you do need to roll up your sleeves.

These districts are limited by how big the world is and how many hazards remain, but the number can also be dramatically expanded, allowing to you maintain a vast population by turning the world into a giant city planet. You’ll need MegaCorp if you want to create an Ecumenopolis, and it’s something I’m still working towards. It’s a big endeavour and requires you to completely max out the number of city districts you can build, which also means you have to remove all other kinds of districts. But one day soon, I’ll have my very own Nar Shaadaa.

While it’s far from the expansion’s most essential feature, the Ecumenopolis is a great example of Paradox using a sci-fi trope to make a novel system. Like many of the city-worlds conjured up in literature and film, Stellaris’ have sacrificed resources for population. They’re not sustainable alone, and while they might technically support these untold numbers of citizens, they’re really reliant on the rest of the empire. They’re monuments to technological advancement, but they’re also monuments to arrogance, destroying the world to cater to more and more people.

Being able to get into the nitty-gritty of the economic side of things brings Stellaris closer to Victoria II, Paradox’s unsung Industrial Age grand strategy outing, which is pretty unexpected given that, until now, it was one of Stellaris’ weaker elements. I just hope I can encounter something that can stop me and my fat wallet from steam-rolling the galaxy. There’s a nasty band of reavers nearby that I’ve been trying to get tough enough to square up to, and I think it’s time I knocked on their door. 

MegaCorp is out now. 

Paradox has released a video detailing everything that Stellaris players can expect from next week's Megacorp expansion, including a new world type and a set of "interstellar door-to-door" salesmen called Caravaneers. 

In the expansion, due on December 6 (Thursday), you'll be able to control a megacorporation, and get access to new civics. You'll be able to build branch offices on another empire's planet, and then expand those offices with other buildings that will benefit both you and the empire whose planet you're building on, Paradox explains in the video (above).

The new Caravaneers are what most appeal to me: they're three new fleets of traders that will roam around the world wheeling and dealing. Some of the deals they'll offer you as they float past will be randomised, some will be preset. You'll also be able to visit a new home base of the traders where you can spend energy credits gambling for powerful items in "games of chance" or loot boxes. 

Megacorp also adds a new planet type called an Ecumenopolis, described as "city planets" that can support huge populations. It will also add new mining, military and art megastructures as well as a galactic slave market that lets you buy human labour from slaver empires. You can set those slaves free and integrate them into your society, if you want. 

The expansion will release alongside the free Le Guin update, which overhauls the way the game's economy works, adjusts trade routes and reworks the pirate system so that you'll have to better protect trading corridors. A new galactic market will let you buy and sell resources, with prices responding to supply and demand, and the planetary tile system will vanish, to be replace by a system of districts, buildings and jobs. Creating districts and buildings will create jobs, and they'll in turn generate resources. 

You can find out more about all the features in the video at the top of this post. Megacorp will cost $20/£15.50, and the Steam page is here.

You've befriended the stratosphere's gentle giants, and have made peace with your space angry neighbours—what's left to conquer on your Stellaris journey? The financial market, reckons Paradox. 

Stellaris has unveiled its "economy-focused" MegaCorp expansion, a "revolutionary new way to conduct business on a galactic scale by seamlessly synergizing new markets and city planets with state-of-the-art citizen solutions and more marketable human capital."   

And if that reads like the Financial Times, know that in practice MegaCorp tasks players with establishing interplanetary economies. You'll erect trade buildings, head companies as CEO, secure trade agreements, and strive to build your planet and ever-growing financial network's value. 

Here's a teaser which doesn't really talk about any of that:

No release date as yet, but Paradox says the MegaCorp Expansion will cost £15.49/$19.99. It'll also launch alongside a free but comprehensive update for the Stellaris base game. 

The contents of this article are not safe for work.

I totally get why people jerk off to Skyrim. I'm not trying to be facetious here. From an objective, ontological perspective, I get it. If you're going to spend half a decade playing the same game—furnishing living spaces, brewing potions, brokering peace between the Nords and the Imperium—it makes sense you might also want your character to fuck. 

This is an emphatically, painstakingly immersive role-playing game with real characters and real emotions. If Bethesda wasn't focused on selling their wares to as broad an audience as possible, there could even be some romantic, Hot Coffee-lite functionality built into Tamriel. Regardless, a truly prolific community of libidinous modders inevitably picked up the slack, constructing mods like "big naturals bodyslide preset" and "Whiterun Brothel Revamped," which empower the exact sort of fantasies you'd expect. It's a tale as old as time; where there are videogame communities, there are probably sexy mods for those communities.

All that being said, the existence of pornographic Hearthstone mods threw me for a loop.

Hearthstone is a wonderful game. It's also about the least sexy thing Blizzard has ever made. Yes, there's a small amount of world-building—something about a magical tavern where Warcraft characters play a CCG—but design-wise, it's about as removed as you can possibly get from the complex pageant that makes Bethesda RPGs so ripe for horniness. And yet, the world's thirstiest modders were undeterred. One of the top upvoted posts on the r/LewdGames subreddit (which is the primary bazaar for stuff like this) is called "An In Depth Guide to Lewd Mods For Hearthstone."

It's essentially a directory, written by Reddit user Whiskey_And_Cigars, that points us in the direction of Whorestone, which replaces the card-art in base Hearthstone with a set of nude portraits for Jaina, Tyrande, Scarlet Crusader, Nemsy, and pretty much every other female presence in the game. There's also Monster Hunt Additions, which does the same thing for the single-player content added with The Witchwood expansion, and Boards, which simply projects pervy images across the game's battlefield. It’s as if you were playing Hearthstone directly onto a Playboy pinup.

Keen to understand why a largely cartoonish card battler would provoke such feelings of desire in, well, anyone, I decided to speak with the modder in question. Whiskey_And_Cigars said he understood my confusion. He totally recognized why Skyrim, or Fallout, or The Witcher represented more traditional conduits for gamer lust—considering those are all games where you encounter other humanoid beings, instead of digitally rendered hunks of cardboard.

As it turned out, there was a simplicity to Whiskey_And_Cigars' doctrine that I couldn't help but appreciate: "While I do play Skyrim with [porn] mods, I just really like playing Hearthstone," he explained. "I see that other people enjoy an immersive experience… but I'm not about that life, I'd rather just look at some boobs."

"I'd rather just look at some boobs" is the defining aesthetic treatise of the lewd mod revolution—fundamental proof that such a basic desire can apply to just about anything, even the proverbial children's card game. Inevitably, this creative drive for constant titillation is not limited to Hearthstone. Shadowverse, one of the many other digital CCGs bobbing around the Steam marketplace, has attracted its own community of randy reskinners, who convert the already buxom anime girls in the card art into images that leave even less to the imagination. The person responsible for the Uncensored Shadowverse mod tells me he thinks most people use his work for "pinup" purposes. Meaning: they aren't actively whacking it in the middle of a tense match. "I try to keep the art I use in my mods as decent as possible," he says. 

A whole galaxy of sex mods

I suppose there is some tradition here, when you consider the long history of murky backroom poker games and pool halls, with the walls paneled with torn-out centerfolds, and the cardbacks replaced with a calendar's worth of Playmates of the Month. Still, as I investigated further, the unlikely nude mod scene continued to subvert my expectations. I stumbled across a website called LoversLab, which Steven Messner wrote about in relation to Skyrim previously, and positions itself as a paradise for all sorts of niche porn mods. 

Someone created an API for Starbound, the spacefaring pixel art building sim, called—of course—Sexbound. It "aims to enable creators to quickly and easily create prefab and custom sex interactions in Starbound." Here's a just a snippet of its description:

Please, note that the NPCs have been enabled to automatically climax.  If your actors use the pregnant plugin, then you can expect a village's population to grow steadily over time. Remember, you can increase the "trimesterLength" in the core pregnant plugin to slow down population growth since it will take longer for an NPC to give birth.

If pixel art doesn't suit your fancy, there are other head scratchers, like a lesbian-oriented rework of Crusader Kings. 

The most thrilling and beguiling discovery I found on the site was the shockingly active scene surrounding Paradox's Stellaris. For the uninitiated, Stellaris is a fairly buttoned-up grand strategy game set in the deep recesses of space—you colonize planets, you work your way through serpentine tech trees, you build a Dyson Sphere around a white dwarf and watch as the surrounding solar system dies a silent, frozen death. Safe to say, I have never gotten a boner while playing Stellaris. Which also holds true for Hearthstone, but at least Hearthstone is colorful and playful and doesn't force you to stare at line graphs.

Clearly, dear reader, I was not imaginative enough. I made contact with a mad scientist named TheMan221, who has constructed a mod called "Sexual Gameplay" (seriously), which literally morphs the mechanics of Stellaris into a game of carnal conquest.

In his universe, each of Stellaris' space-faring races are bundled with a few "sexually-themed" traits, which can lead to a number of "interbreeding" events. For example, one trait enables you to lay eggs in the members of an unsuspecting rival clan, thus dropping their population rate. A perfect symbiosis of bizarre teratophiliac fantasy, and tactical gamesmanship. Finally, you can live out your oily intergalactic fantasies in grand strategy form.

"I still think a game like Stellaris is immersive, but on a different level. Making lewd mods for it fulfills certain niches that a game like Skyrim cannot, like commanding a civilization of nudists bent on conquering the galaxy (people like me have weird taste,)" said TheMan221, when I asked him why he's captivated by the titillating promise of an empire building sim. "I just like the combination of sci-fi and porn, as well as the larger scale that things are happening [on]."

I'd guess that Blizzard and Paradox aren't stoked that some of their beloved creations have become fuel for the latent libido that courses through the games community, but there's little those publishers can do, as these mods are unsanctioned and stay on the client machine—your Hearthstone opponent will never know you're looking at far more lascivious card art than they are. 

There's a depressing but wholly unsurprising dude-ishness in wanting to play Hearthstone with naked ladies, and the mod scene is most definitely a boys' club—as evidenced by the telling lack of male nudity. But it's hard not to laugh at the absurdity of it all, and how brazen their compulsion to see smut at all times appears to be. You have to blow through so many red lights, so many well-intentioned warnings and concerns, to arrive at a Stellaris porn mod. That's a wicked dedication to horniness I can't help but grudgingly respect.

Blaze your own oversexed path. Colonize a planet if you must. Just be sure to clean up afterwards.