Niven & Distant Stars Thoughts + Omega (Patreon)

First things first, you may remember me promising an avalanche of posts on various subjects this month. And you may also have realised by now that... it was an invisible avalanche that you could only see if you really, really believed in faries!

But don't worry, for the rest of you, I'm hoping to try again next month.

So, what happened? What derailed my plans this time?

For once, it's a bit of good news! ⊙ヮ⊙

Over the last couple of weeks, Paradox has been teasing us with screenshots and information revolving around improvements to galaxy generation and exploration. And a few days ago, finally, they announced that a new Story Pack was in the works - Distant Stars!

And the timing could not possibly be better because some of the announced/teased features are VERY relevant to what I'm working on right now in...

Mass Effect Civilisations - Omega!

From the beginning, our plans for Omega included the Omega 4 relay. At first, the plan was just to have it as a decorative fixture in the Sahrabarik system, with maybe a special anomaly and some science deposit sprinkled on top to make it more interesting.
But as the scope and depth of the Omega project grew, so did our ambitions regarding the mysterious red relay. We started thinking of developing a primitive wormhole travel event using the limited toolset at our disposal, with the objective of implementing the unnamed "Collector System" and its inhabitants in a tangible way. Sadly, for the longest time, the difficulty and lack of code support for that kind of idea held it back as a low priority feature most likely relegated to a post-release update.
However, then came Cherryh and its massive improvements to the mechanics behind interstellar travel and the introduction of Wormholes and Gateways, as well as the ability to disconnect systems from the hyperlane network! As you might imagine, the "Collector System" was immediately catapulted to the forefront of our attention, changing its status from "nearly impossible, requiring hacky workarounds and unlikely to work exactly right" to "so easy the game is practically begging for it" n_n

But... as we recently discovered, only half our problems went away in 2.0. While the deeply moddable wormhole mechanics allowed us to implement the Omega 4 relay, we ended up running into a roadblock when it came to setting up the "Collector System". Namely... no way to control its placement in the galaxy!
I spent days trying different ideas and even attempting to deliberately cause errors to make the game cooperate despite itself, but I got no closer to spawning the "Collector System" where it belonged - within the galactic core.

I was ready to give up, settle for spawning it in a random nebula and moving on to something else when, once again, Paradox devs themselves came to the rescue! <3

About a week ago, Wiz tweeted a teaser of reworked galaxy generation algorithm in the upcoming Niven update. Seeing as the Stellaris team was working on map-related aspects already, I asked if they could consider providing modders with more control over event-spawned system initialisers.

And then I died. Of shock. And joy! Because it turned out they were already working on it! As of 2.1 "Niven", modders will have many new tools at our disposal that will make spawning special systems a lot easier and more controllable than ever! Squeeeee! <3

Which means that work on the "Collector System" will resume once Distant Stars is out! In the meantime, I'm going to switch my attention to another feature of Omega I'm very excited about - the upgrade process! But more on that another time! Today, let's stick to Collectors for a moment longer ^^

Beyond Omega 4 - The Collectors

As I mentioned earlier, Omega 4 and what lies beyond have always been part of the plan. We consider the Collectors an integral part of the Omega experience and we very much want the player who controls Omega to interact with them in various ways. From vague rumours to choice-driven events and interactions, Omega's mysterious neigbours will be a recurring menace with a nebulous presence hanging in the void, relevant yet ever so slightly out of reach...

At least... until you choose to interact with them more directly. We could have the Omega 4 relay be a one-way-recurring-event-generator forever, giving you millions of multiple-choice popups with evocative descriptions of all kinds of fun events happening off-screen. But...

But what if that's not the kind of game you want to play? While the Mass Effect games are all about linear storytelling and unfolding mysteries, we cannot forget that despite trying to bring some of that into our Omega mod, at the end of the day, we are still making it for Stellaris and Stellaris is a sandbox game that runs not on neatly written up plots but on emergent storytelling driven by the actions of players and AIs.

So... who are we to tell you you can't just fly your fleet into the "Collector System", crush their defences and take over that giant station full of alien tech to use in your future conquests? That sounds like fun! You should totally be able to do that if you choose to!

Of course, there's still that little problem of ships that go beyond the Omega 4 relay never returning... and nobody really having an idea where that relay even leads... or what exactly is on the other side.

But we'll leave those little quandaries up to you to sort out when the time comes n_n

All I'll say that as a Stellaris player, you may find the Collectors to be more than just your average Leviathan... and even if you've seen them in Mass Effect, their Stellaris incarnation may still... surprise you ┐(￣ヮ￣)┌

And on that note, this is all for today! You can expect a lot more Omega news going forward as development accelerates to lightspeed! Until then, have fun playing and look forward to the monthly progress report coming up next! <3