Stellaris Mods - Progress, Post-Distant Stars Direction, Space Elf China News! (Patreon)

Don't mind me, just trying to see if titles have a length limit n_n

But aside from that, it's that time of the month again! That time when I mercilessly tease things we're working on, apologise for delays and derails and promise things to come Soon™ and then realise how bad I am at planning and time management!

Not today tho! Today, I want to write a more substantial update that goes a bit more into the technical details of our current focus: Lhûren and also the recently released Stellaris DLC Distant Stars and what it means to future development now that we've had enough time to become familiar with it.

Distant Stars - What it means for modding!

The release of Distant Stars caught us a little by surprise. It's not every day that Paradox announces the release date for their DLC a day before it's scheduled to go live! It was a pleasant surprise but also wreaked total havoc on our short-term plans. We had to temporarily put Colossi and other shipset development on hold in order to investigate and adapt the new galaxy and system generation mechanics.

But while it may sound like a derailment, we were actually super excited to do that! A lot of galaxy-gen functions had for the longest time been hardcoded and unavailable for use in scripts, forcing us to rely on RNG (and you know how reliable that is) and unable to control important aspects of space geography like hyperlane connectivity between specific systems or their relative position to the galactic core.

Thanks to the new functions, we have more control than ever before and that prompted us to look back at the system initialisers in our mods, polish them and get them up to par with what we have planned for our future projects. The Asari were updated with unique planet textures for every single planet that had lore fluff in ME games and Elves, which Nessa and Teneb always liked experimenting with, were enhanced by multi-star systems becoming officially supported by the game.

But the benefits of Distant Stars go beyond enhancing what we already had! In addition to galaxy gen stuff, there is also a lot of potential in the new anomaly system, addition of scriptable bypasses and more! All of which our ongoing and future projects have already started to benefit from.

And speaking of which, how about some news on that front?

Elves of Stellaris - The  Lhûren

We officially announced the Lhûren Project (internally codenamed "Space Elf China" before they had a name) earlier this year. Since then, we've been a bit quiet on their progress.

Nessa did a lot of work on portraits, hairstyles and outfits at an early stage of development which gave us a solid foundation to work on, providing conceptual integrity for the related design processes and a strong motivation to see it through. However, shortly after the announcement, the Apocalypse arrived and we had to put most unreleased WIPs on hold in order to update Elves, Asari and SCX.

Now, however, it's almost done. While one last Big Thing remains (the Colossus models for Elves and Asari), it's not urgent enough to halt the development of everything else. So we've been slowly beginning to multitask again, tackling multiple projects at once to regain stable footing.

This means the active development of the Lhûren has resumed! Currently, the focus is on their system initialisers, which over the last couple of weeks Nessa and Teneb have been experimenting with, taking advantage of 2.0 and 2.1 functionality to craft a set of unique systems our Elves are so known for. Of course, it goes without saying that we will settle for nothing short of breathtaking ~_n

The systems are still very work-in-progress but I hope you can see where we're going with them. The Lhûren start is designed as a triad of star clusters. Each "system" contains multiple stars, each with its own little orbit. Those systems will contain a lot of resources but lack habitable planets and require a lot of resource investment to capture their entire wealth. It will require some balancing and playtesting before we're happy with it but the idea behind it is a start suitable for a tall empire that relies on space resources rather than colonisation to keep it afloat for the first years of the game. It requires constant investment into space construction but offers long-term stability in return.

We also have... special plans for the Lhûren homeworld...
but I won't spoil it for you just yet ┐(￣ヮ￣)┌

Of course, even the prettiest systems would mean nothing without pretty elves to occupy them so naturally the Lhûren themselves are getting a lot of special attention! The sci-fantasy-China theme that pervades Lhûren aesthetics is a gift that keeps on giving and we constantly come up with ideas for new clothes, hairstyles and portraits. Today, I'll show you just a few of the possible combinations!

As you can see, even the males are getting some love this time. Right now mostly in the outfit department but we're planning on giving the Lhûren all kinds of beautiful hairstyles and hats as well. Hats are essential! No hat, no Dragon Emperor!

Also please keep in mind that everything previewed here is still work in progress. We're aware of various issues and rough edges and we definitely won't let them release unfixed! n_n

And on that note, this is all for today!

You may be wondering why I only talked about Elves this time, but don't worry, that doesn't mean it's the only progress we've made! Later this month I want to write a post completely dedicated to Omega and go over what's done and what needs to be done in the form of a roadmap. I want to go into it in depth and without distractions so expect either a big mess or a giant wall of text ^▽^

Either way, see you again then, thank you for your continued support and have fun playing Stellaris! I love you all! <3