Sep 15, 2022

Stellaris - MrFreake_PDX

Hello Stellaris Community!

Today we’re here to talk about the new free features and improvements coming in the 3.5 “Fornax” update, named after the Constellation Fornax, which was initially named le Fourneau Chymique (the Chemical Furnace) in 1756 by French astronomer Nicolas Louis de Lacaille. A very suitable name for the free patch associated with the Toxoids Species Pack.

The free 3.5 “Fornax” Update will release alongside the Toxoids Species Pack on September 20th!

You can also read the full (English Only) patch notes here.

Difficulty Settings

With the improvements that have been made to the AI over the past few updates, we’ve noticed that new players are finding things a bit more challenging and there have been some requests for an easier difficulty setting. As such, we’re adding a Civilian Difficulty Setting, and making Cadet the default difficulty. Civilian difficulty further increases the bonuses that players receive from Cadet difficulty, as well as an additional bonus towards completing First Contact.

We also know that a good many of you reading this may be looking for additional challenges, and for us not to be making the game easier, so we have added new options for Scaling Difficulty. Scaling Difficulty can now be set to Off, Mid-Game or Late-Game. If set to Mid-Game, AI bonuses will scale from zero to the selected difficulty by the Mid-Game Start Year. Late-Game will provide the same behavior as previously enabling Scaling Difficulty.

Difficulty Adjusted AI Modifiers is a new toggle that can dramatically increase the strength of the AI on higher difficulty levels as the game progresses. If enabled, the AI bonuses apply to all other modifiers the AI accumulates. As an example, the Geothermal Fracking technology grants +20% Minerals from Miners. On Grand Admiral difficulty with this setting enabled, this technology would instead grant AI empires a 40% bonus.

The Crisis Type setting will now have an option for All, which will spawn every crisis sequentially, with each subsequent crisis being stronger than the previous. The galaxy is counting on you. No pressure.

New Story Content

The 3.5 “Fornax” Update will also come alongside some new story events and prescription systems. There are 2 Systems with Unique Archaeological Sites, 3 Systems where one might pick up some ship technology, and 3 systems with extra habitable planets. Additionally, there are 2 new Archaeological Sites (Larionessi Refuge and Zevox), as well as the “Singing Planet” anomaly.

Culture Workers

Back in the Unity overhaul in 3.3, a lot of you wanted Culture Workers to remain, for roleplay and flavor reasons. While we didn’t have time during the 3.3 Unity Overhaul to re-add the Culture Worker, we’ve done so over the summer!

Culture workers now have a base output/upkeep, and variable effects based on your governing Ethics (which are doubled for Fanatic Ethics). Culture worker jobs are provided by Monuments in addition to the Ministry of Culture.

Base Output/Upkeep:
- 10% governing ethics attraction.
- 4 Unity Output
- 3 Consumer Goods Upkeep
In addition, Culture Workers have variable outputs depending on your empire ethics. These modifiers are doubled for Fanatic ethics.
- Spiritualist: -2.5% Amenity Usage (Planet)
- Materialist: +2 Amenities (Planet)
- Militarist: +1 Naval Capacity (Empire)
- Pacifist: +2.5% Trade from Living Standards (Planet)
- Xenophobe: +2.5% Citizen Happiness (Planet)
- Xenophile: -2.5% Pop Upkeep (Planet)
- Egalitarian: -2.5% Pop Housing Usage (Planet)
- Authoritarian: +3 Edict Fund (Country)

As Galactic Memorials replace normal Monuments, Death Chroniclers have been changed as well, they are now considered Culture Worker jobs and as such inherits the same ethics-based modifiers given above, with the following base output and upkeep:

4 Unity Output
+2.5% Stability
3 Consumer Goods Upkeep

The gestalt equivalents of Monuments now give Evaluator jobs that produce Unity and Amenities. As expected, Chronicle Drones are now in the Evaluator category and likewise produce Unity, Stability, and Amenities.

New Lithoid Traits for Plantoids owners

Lithoid pops will now gain access to the Radiotropic and Crystallization traits, provided you own the Plantoid Species Pack as well.

Lithoid pops with the Radiotrophic trait exchange 50% of their mineral upkeep for energy, and pops living on Tomb worlds have no energy upkeep. This trait also gives pops +10% Tomb World habitability, and get +10% pop growth speed on Tomb Worlds.

The Crystallization trait is the Lithoid version of the Plantoid Budding trait, each pop working as a slave or better produces 0.02 Organic Pop Assembly, this growth will stack with other sources of Organic Pop Assembly.

Relic Rebalance

In the 3.5 “Fornax” Update, you’ll find a lot of Relics Active and Passive Effects have changed! There were several main objectives for this rebalance:

Crisis Relics were supposed to be your “Victory Lap”, but were relatively balanced overall. Buff the Crisis Relics!
Precursor Relics are hit or miss at best, with many players restarting games until they got a Precursor that they liked. Buff the least popular Relics!
Event Relics used to vary from very powerful to forgettable, here the main goal was to Buff the Forgettable Relics! So they would be useful for a wider variety of playstyles.
Several Relics were extremely overpowered if you got them early, and remained powerful throughout the game. Bring these Relics into line with the current balance of all the other Relics.

Additionally, we know how some of you have struggled with the Reliquary limit to get the Galatron, and its associated - yet elusive - achievement. The Caravansary Caravan Coalition will now reward their most loyal patrons with Golden Tiyanki status. Those who have purchased a sufficient number of Reliquaries will now be granted the honor of being able to purchase as many as they like, directly for credits, with no more cooldowns for their best customers.

UI Improvements

The Stellaris Dev team has been hard at work all summer, adding various UI Improvements to the game for 3.5 “Fornax”. We won’t go through all of them, but we’ll briefly discuss some of the biggest changes:

Megastructures and Megastructure Construction Sites will now show in the Outliner!
Starbases will now indicate they can be upgraded in the outliner
The tooltip and description for Commercial Pacts will now give info on the best locations for new Branch Offices in their empire if you are a Megacorp and have sufficient intel
Tooltip for cannot afford fleet reinforcement now says what resources you are lacking
Added an icon to the situation progress elements that more clearly shows if situation progress has halted
Situation tooltips will now display time until the next stage as well as time until the situation is completed
Added planetary designation icon to the species modification UI

AI Improvements

Improving the AI is something that we are constantly iterating on, and trying to get right. While we could just make an AI that plays the meta, and wins every time, it wouldn’t feel very good to players if that’s the way the game played out every time -- there are mods that do this already and to great effect. Our goal is to make the AI competitive, but also make it believable from the perspective of the empires you’re interacting with inside Stellaris.

Added a 10-year cooldown before AI can propose a Diplomatic Action which was previously timed out by the player.
AI will now try to assign otherwise idle fleets to the nearest fleet group as auxiliaries during war, which will make them follow other fleets with current military objectives, effectively reducing the amount of AI fleets idling during wars
AI will now actively attempt to increase its fleet capacity via buildings such as strongholds when they have researched a repeatable technology in the end game
AI will now downgrade Bastion-type Starbases which are no longer close enough to a valid threat in order to free up their Starbase capacity.
AI will now have a higher acceptance of Status Quo Peace if they are in an unreachable war for an extended period, fixing issues where AI empires need to wait for war exhaustion to reach 100% before setting a status quo
Fixed AI not being able to use defense platforms and made it focus on building those in the capital system and on Bastion starbases
Fixes an issue where AI would rather downgrade an existing starbase rather than cancel the construction of a new one when over the starbase cap
Hive mind AI will no longer build solar panels on their anchorage starbases
Improved AI's budgeting and rationale for building orbital ring modules and buildings, so it will now build the most useful ones more consistently
Improvements to AI logic for building megastructures. It will no longer cease building any other megastructures because it is currently making a hyper relay, and it will now build habitats and hyper relays even if it is capped by the megastructure build limits.
Made the AI more likely to build defensive platforms if it is near but not at the naval cap
Made the AI more likely to try and upgrade orbital rings (and less likely to attempt to downgrade them, which was meant to be impossible)
Necroid Empires will now force grow their subservient species on their planets
Necrophage empires will now correctly use their special Necroid purge type on all species that are not their subspecies
Pacifists now have an increased desire to build bastion starbases, changed from Militarists
Removed AI directive to delete all its upgraded buildings using a special resource if it fell into a deficit in that resource. Going bankrupt will downgrade all those buildings anyway, and downgrading is less disruptive than deleting

These are not all the AI improvements coming in 3.5 “Fornax”, you can read the full patch notes here (in English only).

Performance Improvements

Performance is one of the big three issues that we are constantly iterating on and trying to improve in Stellaris. In 3.5 “Fornax”, we have made some progress in this area, which will hopefully improve the late-game performance for at least some of our Community.

Parallelised batch modifier updates (large reduction of lag spike potential in the late game), Situations progress, strike craft movement, country migration, spynetworks' daily updates, ship jump drive and experience calculations, checks of policies' validity, country opinion caching and some parts of planets' handling of monthly pop growth
Multithreaded working out trade value and resources for systems' map icon displays on the galaxy map
Added Caching of colonies in system, starbase types, and wars, things that were previously calculated “on the fly”
Optimized AI decision-making for where to build Megastructures and Branch Offices
Optimized checking whether a country can use a certain hyper relay or gateway
Improved performance of the game checking if a planet is a colony, slightly (it does this a lot, so this speeds up e.g. intel updating non-negligibly)
Optimized a few events frequently called via on_planet_surveyed (since planets can be surveyed and unsurveyed via the intel system)
Reduced the performance cost of auto migration on the monthly tick (by about half)

We hope to hear your feedback on how much this has helped when 3.5 “Fornax” releases on September 20th!

More Achievements!

Our Art Department had so much fun making art for the new achievements in Overlord that they have demanded that we add even more achievements. We have added a total of 19 new achievements, 3 for each Species Pack (including Toxoids), as well as 1 for Synthetic Dawn.. because.. Well, why not?

We didn’t design the achievements based on puns. We swear.

Accessibility Improvements

Accessibility is something we always try to be conscious of when designing new systems for Stellaris, and while there is more in our development pipeline for Accessibility Improvements, with 3.5 “Fornax” we have added:

Mouse Side Button Mode

Maps Mouse 4 and Mouse 5 to toggle pause state and galactic/system views
Options are Normal, Inverted, or Off

Keyed Zoom Level

Page Up and Page Down will now also change the Camera Zoom Level

Keep in mind this is not all of the Accessibility Improvements that we have planned, this is just what we were able to fit in for this patch and if you have an Accessibility issue, we want to hear from you!

When can I play it?

The 3.5 “Fornax” update will release alongside the Toxoid Species Pack (which you can Preorder Now!) on September 20th!

You can also read the full (English Only) patch notes here.

Thanks for reading, and we hope you enjoy these latest additions to Stellaris!

Sep 13, 2022

Stellaris Dev Diary #266 - Rise, a Knight!

Stellaris - MrFreake_PDX

written by Mr. Cosmogone

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.

“Pledge thy Life to Realm and Quest”

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:

I hope you brought your swimsuit!

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:

“No fearsome Foe nor Vastness black, No moat or wild shall hold thee back.”

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:

“Let Faith and Honor be thy Guide, To Chivalry and Oath abide.”

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.

1819 months is about 150 years, but there are ways to speed up the quest.

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:

“Now raise thy Sword, take up the Fight”

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:

“Swear thy Vow, and Rise a Knight!”

What's Next?

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!

Sep 8, 2022

Stellaris Dev Diary #265 - The Art of Toxoid Clothing

Stellaris - MrFreake_PDX

written by Alec Beals

Hey all!

My name is Alec Beals, one of the several concept artists who worked on the Toxoids Species Pack. Today I’ll be taking you on a very fashionable walk through the seriously expanded clothing component of this pack. In a later dev diary we will go into more detail examining the design process of a species, so this will be an informally focused look at our experiences creating the clothing of Toxoids.

A Quick History of Toxoids

At the end of our visual development process we found ourselves with a diverse array of species for the Toxoid pack. Our intention was to give around a third of them something to wear. By and large, we don’t specify which species will or won’t be clothed at the start of this process. Most artists generate concepts for creatures designed to wear nothing at all, as well as many with clothing designed specifically for that species in mind.

Once we are sufficiently satisfied with how much we’ve explored what is and is not a ‘Toxoid,’ the actual process of deciding the characteristics of our species begins. This is a fairly quick process where we assign common traits (scholar, brute, aggressive, needs pants, etc.) To everyone, after that’s done it’s time to start the clothing process!

Inspiration

Toxoids represented a great opportunity for us to try out some aesthetic choices that had either been missing or only slightly touched on before in Stellaris. It also represented a recurring challenge: “How do we create a series of space-faring civilizations that maybe aren’t so neat and tidy without making them look like a bunch of post-apocalyptic hitchhikers?” In the end, we vaguely defined three broad areas of inspiration: High Tech Survivalism, Wasteland Toxpunk, and Protective Fashion. While we drew from each, we decided to avoid the wasteland aesthetic since it clashed the most with our sci-fi setting.

Finding style

After this, we are at the point where we feel comfortable with both having a unique style while also ensuring that it fits well into the grander scheme of Stellaris.

For this pack, we especially wanted to reference some of the great work done on the ships in the clothing we designed. Another decision made early on was in keeping with the visual and narrative theme that roles like Scientist and General should have a decidedly more roughed-up appearance. After all, Toxoids aren’t afraid to get their numerous hands dirty.

Initially we do not focus too much on what roles each outfit will end up as and more with what makes interesting design. Here are some rough sketches I did using a basic human to explore quite a few styles.

Making it Unique

“What’s so special about all this!” You say, between rounds of Caravan Slots. For all prior Species Packs, clothing has been a relatively straightforward process of creating a single outfit per role, and giving it several different sizes. These have always done a great job but they come with drawbacks; they mask the creature from the neck down and generally come with more limited animation opportunities.

A comparison of a role outfit amongst multiple species from earlier Stellaris and Toxoids.

With the new camera settings requiring clothing designs far beyond the original scope as well as our diverse cast of candidates, we felt that in order to do these designs justice we were going to need to create outfits more specific to each species:

Some early stages of concept and refinement. Some designs such as the Ruler seen here lasted for quite a while before being changed.

We also decided that robots shouldn’t be left out of the fun, so Toxoids is introducing the first ever clothed machine! With support of our fantastic animators, we even discussed the idea of introducing masks, backpacks, and more as ways of adding variety. Eventually it was decided that each species would get more or less a tailor-made outfit.

A continuation from the above image, this time with color and material passes, as well as figuring out how to apply each design uniquely to each of our clothed species.

An example of how assets are re-used and modified and also how small details can make noticeable differences between species.

Achieving this would require re-using as many assets as possible while still making enough changes, new details, and species-conforming components that each one felt as if it was designed for the individual wearer.

An example of ways we were looking to expand the clothing even more, also look how many artists are on this single page!

As previously mentioned, we wanted to explore add-ons such as masks, backpacks and more. Some of these concepts were not new to Stellaris, but we still felt like they could be expanded.

For the most part, during our initial development phase these proved to be costly in terms of time (complicated with the layering of species, gender, role and color variant) or in terms of the in-engine animation budget. This is the nature of the job, and it’s important to know when to push towards a solution and when to recognize something isn’t feasible.

Robots with Skirts

As mentioned above, we have a robot with clothes! This was an aspiration I specifically wanted to see as a long time Stellaris player. After all, even a cold and calculating near-immortal machine might want to try on an outfit or two for a change.

Initially, I had hoped we could have both different heads and unique back components for each role, as well as animated sub-components. However, as with some of the other designs for non-machine clothing, these added up substantially, and quickly exceeded what can be done in-engine. Eventually it was settled on using different heads as well as a specific back component for the Ruler.

Personally I think this adds a nice variety to our machine species, and I hope you agree because I would love to draw robots with pants next.

Bringing it to life

Once the designs and rendering are done, the next step is to separate and export files for animation. Breaking out and cleaning up each separate layer can take a while. Across all our species there’s around 150-200 total assets just for the clothing. Separating these for animation can also be a finicky process. Depending on the complexity of the costume, the method used requires all assets to line up with one another, since they will have to be layered over the original character.

Any additional components (such as the cape for a governor) need to also fit in a space unfilled by anything else. Below is a .gif showcasing how this works across an entire set:

Not shown: the dozens of stray pixels I had to hunt down during cleanup

The next step is animation, which deserves its own Dev Diary for all the effort and complexity it entails, but for now I would like to shout out our amazing animators Hannah and Mota for all the work they’ve done on this and everything else for Toxoids.

For the clothing, assets just shown being broken apart are reconstructed and layed in a 3D program (by Maya in our case). Here’s an example of what that looks like outside of the normal in-game Stellaris view:

Here you can see the robot being re-constructed in Maya

Extensive work is then done rigging and preparing the 2d images to actually be able to warp and bend in a way to help stimulate more fluid animation. This can take a variety of forms, such as creating nodes where fabric and banners can bend to areas where the 2d art will stretch and pull during animation. This is also where the animation budget I mentioned before rears its ugly, if not sensible head. All the points of articulation you see add up quite fast when you also include the character beneath the clothes.

The art can take quite a beating in the process of being rigged for animation

You’ve heard of T-pose, and A-pose, but have you ever heard of the ‘You want HOW MUCH for alloys!?’ pose?

Further complicating everything is the need for the clothing to work with some pretty dynamic animations for characters. Luckily, our animation team is amazing and was able to pinpoint any clothing that may have needed to be removed before this part of the process began. Originally there were way more hanging banners than we see now.

Coming together, final thoughts

Finally it’s all pieced together, beautifully animated, and in game! After the requisite amount of corrosive sludge, sweat and tears, we’ve got some finely attired Toxoids. Minor tweaks aside, at this point the work is done:

This individual has never once considered if there’s more to life than being really, really, ridiculously well dressed.

Believe it or not, there are even more steps and miscellaneous details that I’ve completely passed over as to not turn this into a novel. To my knowledge, this was the most intensive and experimental clothing development cycle of any pack so far. For a variety of reasons, quite a bit of what was attempted wasn’t able to make it into the final build. However, I still feel like everything done for Toxoids can push Stellaris even further going forward.

Thanks for reading. I hope you learned something and best of luck in your future space endeavors!

Next Week

Next Tuesday we'll be back with The Tale of the Questing Knights.

See you then! Also, Pre-Order Toxoids Now!

Sep 6, 2022

Stellaris Dev Diary #264 - Damn the Consequences

Stellaris - MrFreake_PDX

written by Eladrin and Gruntsatwork

‘Sup, trash bangers?

Today we’ll be taking a look at some of the features coming in the Toxoids Species Pack. As we’re on an accelerated dev diary schedule, there’s no time to lose! Let’s jump straight into this and turn it over to Gruntsatwork.

Overtuned

One of our two new Origins for Toxoids, Overtuned is the grim but exalting reminder that a brief life burns the brightest. Through invasive surgery and by modifying biochemical pathways you can impart your pops with 13 new overtuned traits. Each of these traits is a mirror to an already existing, far more survivable trait.

As you can see, the overtuned traits can even be picked with their “natural” opposing traits, or stacked with their mirrors for all your double-dipping needs. There are next to no restrictions on mixing them with other traits, so feel free to create whatever biological monstrosities you can imagine.

In practice, the overtuned traits are all about as strong or slightly weaker than their mirror traits, usually cheaper in trait point cost and reduce your leader lifespan depending on their point cost.

In addition to their normal effects, the origin will also grant you access to a new edict called “Damn the Consequences”.

This edict doubles the positive effect of all overtuned traits, but also doubles the upkeep of those pops. Its unity cost is a percentage of your own unity income, so you will always be able to damn the consequences. Furthermore, the edict has a lock-in period of 5 years, which means you will not be able to cancel the edict until it has been active for those 5 years.

New Traits

With Toxoids, we are adding 4 new traits to the game, available to all portraits and 3 of these traits will be available at gamestart.

Incubators

Incubator pops will enjoy only a modest bonus on their capital worlds given their starting number of pops but fresh colonies will quickly reveal its full power.

Inorganic Breath

A small but flavorful addition to our trait roster, to better support your exotic needs.

Noxious

Noxious pops will decrease the happiness of all non-noxious pops on the same planet, while in turn receiving a happiness bonus for every non-noxious and therefore unhappy pop. Talk about toxic neighbors.

Exotic Metabolism

Exotic Metabolism however, is an advanced Trait and will thus require fully finished Genetic Ascension, as it requires a robust economy to support their exotic upkeep.

Its benefits are strong, its upkeep severe and it requires a deep investment into biological enhancements, we hope to see some interesting builds with this.

Civics

Toxoids will also bring 3 new civics with it, to give you more of that slimy but satisfying feeling.

Mutagenic Spas

Our first civic that does not start you out with its special building, Mutagenic Spas, and all of its alternate versions, give you the option of boosting your pop growth on highly industrialized worlds, as your pops enjoy the fruits of your pollution.

Relentless Industrialists

Relentless Industrialists will have to deal with an ongoing situation about the environmental effects of their increased efficiency in alloy and consumer goods production. Of course, should you be cold-hearted and profit-oriented enough, it becomes a self-solving problem, if you can afford to work in such a hostile environment.

Scavengers

Arriving hand in hand with one of our changes for the free patch, namely the ability to choose what you wish to gain from debris, alloys or research, the new Scavenger civic will allow an empire to gain both benefits as well as salvage some actual ships from the debris.

Megacorps have access to all three civics.

Detox Ascension Perk

Even the toughest species can’t quite survive in a world that is entirely poisonous.

50% poisonous however is another beast altogether.

With the Detox ascension perk, empires will be able to turn those giant balls of death into giant balls of not-quite-death.

Given how perilous toxic worlds are, this act of terraforming will be a bit more involved than normal, since even after the initial phase makes them colonizable, there will be remnants of their toxic pasts interfering with their prosperity.

Next Dev Diary

This Thursday we’ll have a dev diary from the Artists, including some interesting things about the character’s outfits and what we’ve done differently there.

See you then! Don't forget you can Pre-Order Toxoids Now!

Sep 1, 2022

Announcing the Toxoids Species Pack!

Stellaris - PDX_MordredViking

Hello everyone!

Today we’re announcing our next Species Pack that will be released alongside the 3.5 “Fornax” update, the Toxoids!

Whether you burn the future for the benefit of today or scavenge the past, Toxoids are survivors. Toxoids gives you the chance to gamble the future of your planets for immediate gains, and make the tough sacrifices necessary to survive a hostile galaxy.

Pre-Order the Toxoids Species Pack today!

The Toxoids Species Pack will be bubbling over with things such as:

New Origins:

Knights of the Toxic God:

In the depths of your homeworld, rumors rumble of a true power buried under the toxic sludge. Do you dare to dredge up the secrets of your past - and potentially unleash them upon the galaxy?

Overtuned:

The candle that burns the brightest, burns itself into the galaxy’s memory! Play as a species that can gain more and more traits at the cost of its own lifespan, and live for today without worrying about sticking around for tomorrow!

New Civics:

Toxic Baths:

Grow your population fast with a fresh infusion of mutagenic sludge - so long as you’re willing to tolerate the costs to your planet and your people!

Scavengers:

One empire’s trash is your empire’s treasure! Don’t be too proud to harvest debris and destruction for quick construction projects of your own.

Relentless Industrialists:

If you’re going to keep up with demand, you’re going to have to learn to ignore all of those petty regulations and negative opinions. The surviving population will thank you for all of the resources you gain!

New Traits:

Incubator:

Repopulate quickly when your planet is empty, but those growth facilities can fill up fast!

Inorganic Breath:

Your own people are a source of valuable exotic gasses! It’s a shame the respirators are so expensive.

Noxious:

Other species can’t stand being around you, and it seems like your mere existence is making your planets awful places to live. On the other hand, other empires have a very difficult time wanting to fight or subjugate you, and it’s hilarious to see the look on their faces when you’re in the room!

Exotic Metabolism:

You’ve adapted to ask “are you going to eat that?” where other species would be calling the hazmat team. Eat faster, live longer, and enjoy a terrifying rainbow of flavors!

New Cosmetics:

Species portraits, ship models, and cityscapes that only a mother could love.

New Advisor:

Grow your empire alongside a relentless source of noxious sarcasm!

The Toxoids Species Pack and the Stellaris 3.5 “Fornax” update will be released on September 20, 2022, and will be playable at PDXCon this Friday and Saturday at Münchenbryggeriet here in Stockholm.

We’ll be moving to a rapid dev diary release schedule for the next few weeks as we attempt to cover everything that’s in the Toxoids Species Pack. We’ll see you next Tuesday with the next Stellaris Dev Diary.

Pre-Order the Toxoids Species Pack today!

Aug 25, 2022

Stellaris Dev Diary #262 - Ringworlds, Reliquaries, Relics, and More

Stellaris - MrFreake_PDX

written by Eladrin

Hello again!

This week we’re going to look at some more things that are going into the upcoming Stellaris 3.5 “Fornax” release.

Megastructures in the Outliner

One of the things going into Fornax is something we’ve wanted for a very long time on PC - a Megastructure section in the Outliner.

As shown here, the Megastructures section will list all megastructures within your territory, including ruined ones as well as Gateway Sites (but not completed gateways, as that would be too much clutter).

Never again will you lose track of where you left that Gateway Site or Ruined Sentry Array!

Accessibility Improvements

We talked about some accessibility improvement goals before the summer, and some of them are going into Fornax.

When enabled, Mouse Side Button Mode allows Mouse 4 and Mouse 5 to toggle pause state and galactic/system views.

Page Up and Page Down will also now adjust the camera zoom level.

Other accessibility improvement projects are ongoing for future updates. I hope to have text to speech available in an Open Beta later on in the year for the 3.6 “Orion” update.

Golden Tiyanki Status

The Caravansary Caravan Coalition will now reward their most loyal patrons with Golden Tiyanki status. Those who have purchased a sufficient number of Reliquaries will now be granted the honor of being able to purchase as many as they like, directly for credits, with no more cooldowns for their best customers.

Good luck, the Galatron is waiting!

(This should make a couple of related achievements significantly less painful to acquire. They do eventually get pretty expensive, however.)

More Achievements

Continuing from last week, here are the rest of the new Species Pack achievements we're planning for Fornax.

Aquatics:

Holy Water - Drench a Fallen Empire’s holy world.

There Be Dragons - Have at least 13 dragons you own in your capital system.

Necroids:

With Great Power - As a Necrophage, do not invade any pre-ftl civilisations until you defeat the crisis OR have at least 10 observation stations around pre-ftl worlds.

Recent History - As a Memorialist empire, have Galactic Memorials on five tomb worlds that did not start the game as tomb worlds.

Lithoids:

Room for Desert - Consume another empire’s desert homeworld.

Can You Smell What the Lithoids are Cooking? - As a Lithoid empire, keep another Lithoid pop as Livestock or Process them.

Plantoids:

Growing Like Weeds - As a budding species that does not have the Clone Army origin, achieve a base organic pop assembly of at least 10/month on your capital.

Tend the Garden - Become the custodian of Wenkwort Artem, designating it a resort world with a Ranger Lodge and all original blockers present.

Humanoids:

Directive 67 - As a Clone Soldier empire, denounce a Spiritualist fallen empire as a crisis in the Galactic Community then destroy them, without blowing up their final planet.
(We're so mean to the Spiritualist Fallen Empire!)

Destroy the People of Earth! - As the Commonwealth of Man, destroy the United Nations of Earth with your ruler being a human with a symbiotic brainslug, without blowing up their final planet.

We also have one more being added to Synthetic Dawn:

Machine Supremacy - Win the game as a machine uprising.

Now I’ll turn it over to Iggy for an update on Relics.

Relic Updates

Hello everyone! I am Iggy and I am back to show you the fruit of our collaboration from back earlier in the summer. Firstly we reviewed some of the feedback about the untouched relics so please enjoy even more relics with enhanced flavor and fewer pain points.

The Khan’s Throne now grants you access to the Satrapy Subject Preset letting you extort fleet capacity from your subject.

Also the Defragmentor will now have a usage for non-robot empires granting 10% energy upkeep reduction to all jobs buildings and districts.

And finally the Head of Zarqlan now has the spiritualist ethics attraction locked to the active, and the size of the fleet increases with activation, up to a max after 5 uses. Also due to popular demand the head will now spawn for the AI instead of the player 25% of the time and the AI will colonize holy worlds when they possess the relic.

Further Changes to Already Balanced Relics:

The Psionic Archive now allows Gestalt Empires to find Psionic Theory which in turn will grant them access to Zro Mining.
The Brood Queen will now grant a stacking empire modifier to swarm type weapons (Missiles and Strike Craft) for each use and will also spawn the Carrier variant on use.
The Pox Sample will increase the likelihood that you find Biological Technologies
The Omnicodex now gives +25 relation with non robot empires if you are a robot one.
The Reality Perforator active modifiers now last 2-5 years instead of 1-5 years

For the rest of the changes please see Dev Diary #259.

Next Week and PDXCon

Next week is PDXCon at Münchenbryggeriet here in Stockholm, but we’ll still have a dev diary taking a peek at some of the content coming out with Fornax. If you come visit us at the convention, we’ll have Fornax up and running, a Stellaris Q&A Panel where we'll be taking questions from the audience, and I’m planning on holding a small workshop where we’ll reveal how our summer experiments have gone.

There are still a few tickets left if you're in the area.

See you next week!