Hello everyone, we have a new Dev Diary from grekulf!

As most of you probably know, the next upcoming DLC for Stellaris will be the Ancient Relics Story Pack. Last week I also promised I would show something awesome, by which I meant the headline feature of the story pack – the Relics themselves.

We announced Ancient Relics on Tuesday and we also streamed a lot of stuff that will be coming with Ancient Relics and the free 2.3 update that goes with it. If you haven’t seen the stream yet, you may want to check out the summary on YouTube.

Relic Worlds
A smaller part of Ancient Relics are the Relics Worlds. It is a new planet class that is essentially a planet entirely covered in ruins. If you find a Relic World, it's very likely that you will be the first to get to excavate its archaeological site. An archaeological site found on a Relic World should have many chapters and have a high difficulty.



A Relic World can be restored to an Ecumenopolis, but it will lose its unique deposits and archaeology site if there is one.



The homeworld of the First League precursors have been changed into a Relic World. We felt that this fits way better thematically and we also felt that finding a “free” Ecumenopolis was too strong. You will now have to work a little harder to restore the ancient city planet.

As mentioned before, we haven’t quite had the time to refresh the old precursor content, but this is something we want to do over time, so eventually it's quite likely you’ll be able to find more Relic Worlds and associated archaeological sites.

Relics
The Relics are a really cool new feature to Stellaris. Relics are very powerful artifacts and trophies that you can collect. Every Relics has a passive effect as well as an activation effect. All Relics share the same activation cooldown, so you will have to choose which one you will want to activate. The activation cooldown is 10 years.



Most relics will have an Influence cost for the activation cost, but in some cases this will be different.



The Relics system itself will be included in the base game, and you will be able to find a few Relics from previous content. Each crisis will have a Relic tied to it, and owners of MegaCorp will be able to get The Galatron. Owners of Apocalypse will be able to take the Khan’s Throne and owners of Leviathans will be able to take a trophy by defeating the Ether Drake.



Ancient Relics will feature a whole bunch of new Relics that you can collect. In total you’ll be able to find 20 of these new Relics.

The system is very moddable, and since the Relics system itself is free, mods will be able to use the system without requiring its users to own Ancient Relics. We’re very much looking forward to seeing what cool new Relics the community can conjure up!

Relics Design Intentions
I started as the first UI/UX designer at Paradox Development Studio over 6 years ago now, before switching over to purely doing game design and now eventually taking over as the game director for Stellaris. EU4 was the first game I worked on, and the macro builder is what I see as my first large contribution to our games. I’ve always thought that the UI/UX design and game design need to mesh really well for a solid experience. Although we can’t always get it right (my faults included), it's really fun to do something different here.

With the Relics I wanted us to start experimenting with more visual rewards. I wanted something that would be so cool to find, collect, and look at, that you almost didn't care about what the effects of the thing were. I wanted large icons with a slight animation, kind of like golden Hearthstone cards. Originally we only planned to have passive effects for them, but in order for the player to experience the visual rewards more often, we had to create incentives for them to open the UI and look at them. That is how the active effects came into play. By giving the Relics a really cool activation effect, players will open the UI more often and get those “feel good” moments by looking at their Relics.

From a design perspective, I am very happy with how the Relics turned out. We’ve made a really nice-looking UI with a thematic background that really fits the art style. We’ve also made awesome and animated relic icons that are really rewarding to collect and look at. The activation effects for a lot of the Relics are also really cool.

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Ancient Relics is turning out to be a really cool addition to Stellaris, and it's going to be really great seeing how you guys react to the content once you get a chance to try it out.

That is all we had to share for this week’s dev diary. Next week we will be back with something different, technically speaking.

Greetings Galactic Emperors, Rogue AIs, Humble Hiveminds, and Exalted Starfish,

Today is the 3rd Anniversary of Stellaris, the game that brought all of you together in a galaxy of conflict, friendship, primordial creatures, and everything else in between. To celebrate this and share our celebratory happiness with everyone, we are holding a Free Weekend so that anyone can download the base game of Stellaris and play!

This free weekend starts now on Steam and will be available until Sunday 12th May at 13:00 PDT / 16:00 EDT / 22:00 CEST.

Additionally, the entire Stellaris catalog is on discount now, with MegaCorp on discount for the first time! Check out the Steam store page to find out all the savings!

Finally, we’re going to be giving away the e-book version of Stellaris: Infinite Frontiers to everyone that signs up for the Stellaris newsletter with their Paradox Accounts. To receive this free gift, you can follow these easy steps:

1. Create an account (in Stellaris or https://accounts.paradoxplaza.com/login)
   
2. Sign up for Stellaris newsletter (make sure to tick the box alluding to "receiving news and offers from Paradox Interactive" (if you forget to tick this box, or have an existing account, please make sure you have Stellaris added to your newsletter preferences at https://accounts.paradoxplaza.com/settings)
   
3. Confirm Account via the Confirmation Email
   
4. Get e-book in email next week!
   
5. Enjoy a good read!

We want to express our unending gratitude to you, our community, for joining us on this crazy journey. Happy 3rd birthday to Stellaris, and here's to many many more years ahead! We'll leave you now with our latest trailer for this celebration, featuring hints and references from the past three years of this awesome game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zL0kemiI0yc

THANK YOU!
-The Stellaris Team

Tickets for PDXCON are now available!
Join us for a weekend in Berlin, filled with games, people and all things Paradox and get a ticket now before they sell out!

Read more and get your tickets here: https://pdxint.at/pdxcontickets

Hello everyone!

As promised last week, we’re back to talk about something old that’s new – which, as many of you correctly guessed, is about new precursors. Adding new precursors has been something we’ve been wanting to do for quite a while now, and we’re very happy that we can now finally provide what’s been asked for.

In the next DLC you will be able to explore the fate of two new precursors, namely the Baol and the Zroni. To not spoil too much, I’ll only give a basic description of their respective backgrounds and lore.

The Baol
The Baol Organism was once a sprawling interstellar Hive Mind comprised of trillions of psychically-linked plantoids. With their ability to slowly terraform a planet's ecosystem and atmospheric gases via centuries of sustained photosynthetic processes, the Baol civilization produced a plethora of rich flora and fauna on otherwise unremarkable worlds. The Baol Organism curated lush planetary gardens and arboretums across many systems, forming mutualistic symbiotic relationships with local alien wildlife.



The Zroni
The Zroni were possibly the most powerful psionics to have ever existed, or at least they were the first to discover the dimension which has come to be known as The Shroud. Once the Zroni population reached a certain critical mass it seems that their collective unconscious minds began to make contact with the proto-shroud in dreams, leading to mass lucid dreaming. Soon the phenomenon was studied and the Zroni discovered how to psionically project themselves into the Shroud, where they found that they could manipulate the very fabric of reality with their psionic powers. It wasn't long before the Zroni discovered they could physically enter the Shroud and live like Gods, transforming the dimension to suit their whims.

Precursor changes
One of the more impactful changes we’ve made is that we have now made the precursor spawns randomized so that they will no longer spawn in a specific part of the galaxy.

We have also added some more features and rewards to the old precursors. For example, after having found the Irassian home system, you can now spend minor artifacts to unravel some of the secrets of the Irassians. The new artifact actions aren’t the only new things though, and there’s some more cool things that you will be able to find.





Additional precursor plans
Some of you have been asking about archaeology and adapting some of the old precursor content to use the new system. In regards to that question I will say that it is something that I always planned to do, but due to other things taking priority we can’t promise that it will happen immediately. If those changes don’t make it into the next update, it's very likely they will appear in the next big update after that. Changing that content would of course still be a part of the base game.

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To get involved in the discussions on this Dev Diary with our dev team directly, head over the official Stellaris forum thread here.

That is all we had to share for this week’s dev diary. Next week we’ll be back again, which also happens to be the 3 year anniversary for Stellaris :)

Hello everyone!

Today we’re back with yet another dev diary, which will build upon some of the things we revealed last week. Last week we outlined some information about Minor Relics, and how they can be useful. We didn’t mention specifically how they are usually found, but luckily that is something you’ll learn today!

Archaeology
In the next DLC you will be able to experience some new content related to uncovering and excavating archaeological sites. Sites can be discovered in multiple ways, be it either on survey, generated at game start, or perhaps generated by an event.



Sites that lie inside your borders can be excavated by a Scientist, and will consist of several different chapters. A site can have 1-6 chapters, in addition to an introduction/prologue. Each chapter will have its own narrative and a reward, and has to be unlocked before it becomes visible.


Excavation in progress. Spoiler-blurred text.

A chapter will be unlocked whenever the Scientist excavating the site gets a successful result at the end of an Excavation Phase – mechanically this works very similar to how sieges work in EU4. As the Scientist goes through phases, it will roll a dice and add modifiers to the result. The final result will then either do nothing, add clues, or make a breakthrough to the next chapter.

Game mechanics details:

Result = dice roll + Archaeology Skill + Clues - Difficulty

Result Outcomes:
0-7: Status quo
8-10: +1 clue
11-13: +2 clues
14+: Breakthrough

Chapter completed. Spoiler-blurred text.
A neat feature of this new system is that you can click previous chapters to go back and read what happened.

At the end of each Excavation Phase, it is also possible that the Scientist triggers a random event, which will inject some unpredictability and create opportunities for emergent storytelling.


Everything is fine.

Archaeology chapters commonly reward the player with minor artifacts – but it can also be resources, research points or other more unique rewards.

Design intentions
Archaeology becomes a way for us to express narrative in a more evolving and controlled manner, and every site it also tied to a location on the map. All of these things together should make it more enjoyable to experience the content, since we hope it becomes easier to build a mental model of what is happening where. In general I believe that having narrative tied to things you can see on the map makes for a better experience. It’s not uncommon for me to forget where on the map a previous event occurred, and that is something I’d like to improve over time. I really like archaeology because it lands well between mechanics and narrative.

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We hope you could dig today’s dev diary, and next week we’ll be back with something old that is new.

PDXCON2019 is coming and we couldn’t be more excited to meet our community at the event - which takes place on October 18th - 20th, 2019. Tickets go on sale on May 7th, but we’ve got a secret to tell you…

If you head over to the PDXCON 2019 website at https://pdxcon.paradoxplaza.com/ you can sign up to the mailing list. Anyone that signs up will be given 8 HOURS early access before the public availability of the tickets to buy before everyone else! Sign up now and keep your eyes on the news we’ll be sending out because tickets will sell out.