Stellaris Mods - Progress Updates! + Post-Apocalypse Plans (Patreon)

Hai! And welcome to the monthly progress report where at the beginning... of each... month... we... go over...

Umm... So... how are you today? Having fun? The weather is so... lovely... isn't it? >.< Ahem...

I'm terribly sorry! As you've probably noticed, it took us a while to get all our mods up to date with Cherryh. Which is also the reason this report is late. Upon the release of Stellaris 2.0, we went over all the changes and immediately realised it would take a lot focused work, thorough testing and strict triage.

As a consequence, our communication with users and patrons ended up dropping down the priority list in favour of getting our mods to a playable state. I'm sorry we've been a little quiet throughout the process but it's finally over! And I hope we can now slow down and get back into the usual, less insane, rhythm ^-^

But enough about that, let's get to the interesting part! Stellaris 2.0 has introduced us to a whole new world, practically a new game! So we took it as an opportunity to reinvent our mods as well!

Mass Effect Civilisations - Asari

The first and biggest change is that the mod formerly known as just "The Asari Civilisation" is now officially part of a larger series, now spanning two mods (more on that below) and in the future going to encompass Omega as well and... whatever comes next n_n

Mass Effect Civilisations is NOT a "total conversion" project, at least not at this point. I actually started writing a little rant about total conversions but I think I might get back to it another day. For now, I just want to reaffirm that what we try to do with our mods is to deliver self-contained, high quality packages, each with a clear scope and focus, and each one released in a playable and realistically complete state.

That won't change. Asari Civ, as part of Mass Effect Civilisations, will be interconnected with the rest of the series but even when used on its own, it's designed to be a functional experience that non-invasively coexists with vanilla Stellaris.

And maybe in time we'll have enough of those standalone-but-interconnected modules to create... a larger whole. Will it turn into a total conversion at that point? Nobody knows. But perhaps the process leading up to it can be called a "gradual conversion"? I suppose it can be seen that way.

But! Enough about that, I have WAY too many things to talk about and haven't even started! I'm terrible at this...

The new Destiny Ascension model is finally here and available in the latest asari update as the one and only Titan! Owners of the Apocalypse expansion will be able to build one of these pretty things consisting of roughly 22k polygons of shiny!

The old DA-inspired model you may be used to was the first ship Nessa made for asari, over a year and a half ago. The new one represents the culmination of everything we've learned since then. Just as Stellaris 2.0 was born again a new game, we have created Destiny Ascension 2.0 as a symbol of our journey towards the future.

With manually modelled armour plating, smooth curves, little details and very deliberate design of every element, this was the most complex ship model we have implemented so far! But as the biggest vessel around that players will no doubt want to zoom in on and lovingly stare at for hours and wrap themselves around and roll into satin sheets covered in fragrant rose petals and... oh... ju-just me? (⁎˃ᆺ˂)

Umm... IN ANY CASE... the Titan deserved nothing less and... it was also partly to blame for the delayed 2.0 update. By the time we'd finished updating Elves and SCX and gotten around to Asari, it was already half-done so rather than releasing it in the same post-compatibility update as the Colossus, Starbase and other new assets, we decided to include it in the inaugural 2.0 release.

And speaking of which! The Colossus, Starbase and Ion Cannon are next up on our list and we're working on designing fitting asari versions right now. Past that, we also want to completely rework civilian stations as well as the colony ship. Then I think we may finally get to the point where we can consider the shipset complete!

But the Titan wasn't the only class that received attention. In fact, we've gone over ALL our ships. As I teased a few months ago, all of them have had thrusters incorporated into their design, all received a mipmap pass to make their details stand out more from farther away and some even have been reworked to look less blocky and fix a few oddities. You should see higher quality across the board!

"But wait! That's not all!" (imagine I said it in my best telemarketer voice)

While Nessa was hard at work modelling the ships, I was working on something I'd been wanting to do for months: bringing life to the prescripted Asari Republics and Asari Corporate Interests factions.

As of the current version, if played by the AI, they will have their own unique AI personalities and diplomatic dialogues (most of the fun lines are unfriendly but in the future they may have more nice things to say n_n)

But that is only the first step in a much bigger plan I have for this aspect of the mod. Further down the road, I want them to recognise a wide variety of specific things and change their responses according to the situation and who they're talking to. Especially, I want to make them acknowledge... each other. When both Thessia and Illium spawn, I want them to actually start with pre-existing diplomatic ties and awareness of each other's existence.  And if one of them is played by a player, I want to enhance the immersion even further by having diplomatic lines that reflect that.

Unfortunately, the full implementation wasn't ready in time for the 2.0 compatibility release and we couldn't afford to delay it any further so for now, only the basic AI personalities have made it in. The rest, hopefully, will follow soon n_n

Mass Effect Civilisations - Mass Relays

Mass Relays are such a deeply iconic part of the Mass Effect universe that it's difficult to imagine any attempt to create a Mass Effectesque atmosphere, let alone anything resembling a conversion, without them.

And I suspect it was obvious since the moment Gateways and Wormholes were first announced coming to Stellaris, that we knew exactly what we wanted to do with them n_n

You might remember this Mass Relay that used to serve as the Asari shipset's version of Wormhole Generators, back when they were the closest thing we had to relays:

Initially we wanted to reuse it as a replacer for Gateways when the time came. But... you know how insufferably perfectionist we are so we ended up doing the same thing we always do to annoy everyone and delay the release of things: we made a new, better relay from scratch! >o<

Currently, it only replaces Gateways (both the abandoned ones found throughout the galaxy and those buildable by regular empires) but very soon I'm planning to update the mod to encompass Wormholes as well and that way both the "primary" and "secondary" types of relays will be covered. The mod is at this time purely cosmetic. It does not change the functionality of the vanilla bypasses, only their visuals and related text. One day, who knows, we may decide to take it a step further ^-^

Elves of Stellaris

Surprisingly for our biggest mod, Elves actually turned out to be the easiest to update to 2.0 so our triage gave it priority. And then right after the update it vanished from Steam and we were very confused but thankfully that turned out to be just an accident and we got it back up soon after. All's well that narrowly misses a heart attack n_n

The Elven update mostly involved adapting existing content for compatibility with Cherryh, but there is one new thing we're experimenting with a little: system hazards!

For now, some of the Elven home systems are lighter versions of the vanilla ones but in the future we see a lot of potential in this feature and we definitely want to try and create more systems that have special effects on ships and planets, in Elves of Stellaris as well as our other projects.

As with Asari, Elves are currently using placeholders for their Colossus, Starbase and Ion Cannon. Those are coming soon as well! You've already seen the Ion Cannon but personally I can't get enough of it so here's another shot n_n

The Lhuren are also almost complete. They've been temporarily demoted to lower priority while Nessa is working on the new models required by Cherryh/Apocalypse but Space Elf China will be back in full force soon!

Space Combat Expanded 

Or, as it used to be called, Ship Classes Extended, started as our proprietary ship classes mod designed to serve the needs of our own shipsets and completely under our control. The intention was for it to grant us independence of NSC, RS, ISB and other third party fleet doctrine extensions.

However, the one thing we always wanted but could never reliably achieve was creating a one-of-a-kind supercapital ship that could serve as a playable equivalent to Fallen Empire Titans. Our attempt in the form of Superdreadnoughts was... imperfect. Some mechanics simply didn't exist in the game and due to certain bugs and limitations of the AI and ship designer, we couldn't implement it in a way that the AI could handle.

But thankfully it turned out that Paradox wanted the same thing and the Apocalypse expansion introduced playable Titans - properly implemented ones!

More than happy to let vanilla handle supercapitals, we reduced the scope of SCX to only the Carriers. At least that was the plan, but further discussion led to a last-minute decision to keep Dreadnoughts around as well. We couldn't agree exactly on how to handle it until we finally came up with an idea that allowed us to reinvent SCX upon a completely new framework that opened up countless possibilities for the future.

Having lost its focus on ship classes and gained modularity, Ship Classes Extended became Space Combat Expanded, foretelling our intentions eventually to expand it beyond the original scope.

As of right now, it has four modules that can be mixed and matched to your liking (Carriers, Dreadnoughts, Ship Spacing and Mass Effect Classes) and the central SCX Core which serves as a shared resource depository and provides interconnectivity between the modules.

Going forward, we may end up adding more modules, encompassing more areas of space combat. And, of course, SCX will always be guaranteed to be compatible with our shipsets and other mods by Team Nessassity.

And on that note, this is all for today! (^ _ ^)/

Once again, I'm sorry that this came so late but considering that the highlight of the past several weeks has been trying to catch up to Stellaris 2.0, I realised that a typical progress report wouldn't have had much to say, so I hope the post-Apocalyptic after-action report was at least an acceptable substitute.

Now that the mad rush is over, I can't wait to get back to our regularly scheduled programming n_n

Until next time, have fun playing Stellaris 2.0! <3