Stellaris Mods - It's a Squid! No, It's a Flower! No It's a- AAAH! IT BURNS! IT BUUUEAAARGHAGHELE! (Patreon)

The spooookiest month of the year came and went and while I missed the opportunity to post this as a Halloween Special full of terrifyingly unfinished previews and horrid puns (truly a loss to humanity at large), I hope you will at least enjoy the... dreadfully... awesome? (Okay, I'll stop now!) ongoing progress we've made on our pre-Megacorp milestones! As you can probably surmise from the thumbnail (and the title, and my awful twitter teasers) it's going to be about ships! Everyone loves ships so today we have a shipload to show you!

SO! WITHOUT! FURTHER! Adoooooooooo!

Elves of Stellaris 

To start with, I have some COLOSSAL news (no! please don't leave me! I have redeemable qualities too!) for our Elves of Stellaris players! After a long and eventful design process that took us to the weirdest places before we settled on its final form, the Elven Colossus is finally out of drydock and will soon be ready for its maiden voyage across the stars! And for raining fiery doom upon whosever planet it parks over ^^

And when I say designing it was a challenge, I don't think I'm emphasizing enough how many completely dissimilar iterations it has gone through! At one point, it was a giant starfish that would gently pirouette over a planet and blot out the sky:

Then it would take the next logical evolutionary step and become the most terrifying jellyfish to fly though space (somehow... we never actually managed to find a good spot to insert propulsion before we scrapped it):

As cute as it was, we felt like it was still missing something important... OH! right, we're supposed to be designing a SHIP! Uh-oh... Panic mode! All hands flail wildly and run around screaming!

Nooo... try again! AGAIN!

...

At a complete loss, we went back to the drawing board and decided to look at some of the vanilla colossi for inspiration. We analysed the Fallen Empire one and came up with another genius idea!

...

Okay, okay, nobody is perfect... But we were not deterred! Upon failing for the nth time to make the station-ship hybrid work, we decided that mobile was indeed the future of both entertainment and fiery genocide, so naturally, we cranked it up to eleven. BEHOLD!

Oh hey! This is actually a cool design! For something else! NEXT!

Alright, 20 times the charm, let's maybe go back a few steps and pick a different sea creature for inspiration. How about... a squid! Squids are cute!

Oooh! No squidding, it actually looks good! Yes, I think we've finally struck gold! Hmm... but I can't shake the feeling we're still missing something... what could we add to improve it?

ABORT! ABORT! ABANDON SHIP AND INITIATE SELF-DESTRUCT SEQUENCE! 

YES! THANK YOU! This will do, let's get it mapped before inspiration comes about for another attack!

And this is how the Colossquid <3 came to be!

Phew! That was a... journey. As you can probably see now, a lot of thought goes into design. Ideas can take you places you never thought you'd visit... including the occasional dead end. It's a constant balancing act between form, functionality and visual identity where with each iteration ideas are filtered through the scientific method and the overall picture becomes clearer.

At least that's our excuse for taking as long as we have with the Elven Colossus n_~ But we hope you have enjoyed these insights into its development and are looking forward to trying it out in game soon! It's still not quite ready to go, still pending animations, but we're hoping to finish and release it as soon as possible!

Mass Effect Civilisations: Asari 

Speaking of designs that we've never been happy with, that's been a common thread with the asari civilian vessels. The constructor and science ship have already gone through complete replacements and we're happy with how they turned out, but if you've been with us since the beginning, you might have noticed that we have never reworked the coloniser. As the result, it sticks out like a sore thumb today, next to much higher quality and better thought-out ships in the set.

Ooof... Yes, we basically took the cruiser, inverted it and put a flat texture of Rome's satellite view on top. There used to be glass over the dome but it disappeared when Stellaris updated its shaders, but we decided not to update this model since we were already planning to scrap it months ago.

As... you no doubt have noticed, we've been a bit slow on that front because the old model is still in the live version. Ooops!

Thankfully, the nightmare is soon going to be over. The long-planned but constantly deprioritised and delayed Colony Ship rework is finally coming! And the new design is... well, see for yourselves!

We have taken all the lessons we learned working on Starbases, Megastructures and our new generation ships and applied them all to the new coloniser! From the carrier-based frame that accommodates both large storage capacity and aerodynamic design suited for atmospheric landing, to details such as engine cut-ins (we really love how that turned out, we're definitely going to reuse that in our future ship designs), 3D habitat environment and sleek, curvy shape that identifies it as a civillian ship, in contrast to the much more angular, sharp-edged military vessels.

For comparison, here's the carrier that inspired (or, as the in-game tech progression goes, will be inspired by) the new colony ship template:

I'm so happy with it! I love it <3

But we're not done with our pre-Megacorp milestones for the Asari yet! Next up on our list are the two civillian stations (mining and research) which are slated to lose their uninspired donut design in favour of a complete reimagining that better reflects their function and makes a stronger impression! No pictures yet, but hopefully I'll have something to show soon! ^o^

And last but not least, the Asari Colossus will be the final milestone for the current version of the game. The development of the Elven Colossus has taught us many things we are hoping will make this ride a lot less rocky n_n

And with this, it's all for today! Please look forward to more progress updates, announcements and releases as we come to the end of an era and are getting ready to enter the next one! If you wish to be always up to date on Team Nessassity developments, bloopers, trivia and the occasional spam of anime gifs, be sure to also follow my twitter @PrincessitySC2!

Thank you so, so much for your continued support in following the development and playing our mods! And, as always, have fun playing Stellaris (or longingly waiting for Le Guin n_~)