Stellaris Mods - In Which Princess Gushes About Big Ships Ad Nauseum (Patreon)

Ah December...

Here at Team Nessassity we associate December with two things: profound existential horror as we are once again reminded that not only does Santa not exist, but that once we have come to terms with that deeply painful fact, it's like two days before the main Shopmas celebration, we still don't have gifts for all the family members we only begrudgingly speak to once a year, and it is up to completely random chance whether the last-minute order will even arrive before two weeks into next year. Oh! And also modapocalypses.

Thankfully, at least one of these things isn't happening this year! The Stellaris team announced that Federations is not coming out until early 2020 so we won't have to worry about another pre-holiday release and all the headaches those have historically caused us n_n

But that's not all we're excited about in the foreseeable future! Recently, more information on the Juggernaut (or Jugs, as we like to call it) came out, along with some inspiring pictures, courtesy of the Stellaris community team! You know us and our love for BIG SHIPS so when we realised just how BIG this ship was and that it COULD MAKE MORE BIG SHIPS BECAUSE THEY KNOW WE LIKE SHIPS SO THEY PUT SHIPS IN OUR SHIPS SO WE CO-*thwack*

Ahem... Sorry! I'm still a bit delirious from my annual Sickmas celebration. That's I guess another fun December tradition, it's just a month FULL of joy!

And yes, Juggernauts and Mega-Shipyards for all our shipsets are on top of our art priority list. We need Federations to actually come out before we can start working on them but we're already coming up with designs and imagining all the possibilities!

BUT let's get back on track! >.< Today's monthly report will be focusing primarily on Elves of Stellaris and the Drow Titan that is finally approaching completion. Last month's post exhausted MEC: Asari and MEC: Omega news for the time being but please keep an eye on my twitter @PrincessitySC2 for ongoing progress over the coming weeks (if the holiday season allows)!

So without further ado!

Elves of Stellaris 

Now... I imagine some of you may have been staring at that render on top and asking yourselves WHAT IN THE WORM'S NAME IS UP WITH ALL THE TENTACLES? And other burning questions along those lines. Well... the answer is actually a bit of a long story.

As you may know, if you've been following the development of the Drow shipset, it currently comes in two variants: one features ominous red glow and icky spider patterns that call back to one of our Space Drow's original inspirations, specifically their D&D portrayal...

...and a slightly less ominous purple-glowing thorny vines that were supposed to serve as the default shipset for the militant Elistraeeans as well as to be used in a generic context by Drow empires not strictly falling into the traditional archetype.

(Please ignore the colour-coding inconsistencies, At the early stage of texturing, we simply use red on white/black to see the patterns more clearly)

So... how did TENTACLES suddenly happen? Well... At first, it was just a random idea that came up while we were trying to figure out how to make the spider legs on the red variant fill more space. While we never had that problem with smaller ships with a more one-piece design, the expansive and two-layered structure of the new Titan wasn't quite working with the same spider shape we've been using up to that point. So, we thought, maybe since titan was so special, we could give it a... different creepy... thing... that didn't necessarily have to conform to our established arachnid feng-shui...

Naturally, the women of culture that we are, our minds immediately went to creepy squiggly tentacles!

O-okay... this looks promising, but maybe a little too busy. Let's try...

...trimming them with a bunch of bat'leths? Wait, what were designing again?

Oh! Okay, this looks more defined and the fatter tentacles will definitely help us market these ships to a wider range of demographics but hmm... now the pattern is taking up so much surface that it might get really obnoxious once we apply the glowmap...

OOOOH! YES! This is it!

But now... aww... it looks so good... just imagine how pretty smaller ships would look if we backported this pattern to them too...

Oh... we still need the spiders because tossing them would start a civil war? Um... O-okay... how about a third shipset variant then? Oh... right, workload and memory footprint... Boo...

Okay, let's do a democratic vote in which we ask our users to decide whether-

*thwack*

So um... eventually we realised the tentacles looked even better in purple so we just decided to replace the existing thorny vines with them!

We do realise that decision might be a bit controversial too, but it will hopefully upset far fewer people! To begin with, the vine variant was created expressly to be NOT spiders but never had an identity of its own. The choice of thorny vines was kinda random.
That said, we are going to keep backups around and we might reuse it in some future shipsets. There's one [REDACTED] idea in particular that thorny vines would be a perfect fit for so maybe... Oh, but I've said too much n_~

In any case, TITAN IS ALMOST DONE! There are only two things left to do before it's playable and we can move on to the rest of the shipset (which we expect will be much easier to design and produce). First of all, we still need to sort out the spider pattern for the Titan and are currently thinking of something along these lines:

And the second and last finishing touch we still need to apply is deciding on the main cannon's details. Currently it's just a one-note shiny metal texture but that doesn't... look quite right, so expect it to acquire a glowy pattern of its own before release!

And that is all for today! As always thank you so much for following Team Nessassity's progress, using our mods and offering your feedback and support! Thank you! <3

Also, a little advance notice regarding the next Monthly Mod Report: it's possible that, depending on how my schedule works out, I may not be around for the first week or two of January so the post may be delayed or skipped completely. BUT I am still hoping to post smaller updates on my twitter @PrincessitySC2 during that time!

Until then, Merry Spacemas and Happy New Frontier to all of you lovely space-friends! Please enjoy your holidays, be happy, be safe and have fun playing Stellaris (and/or patiently waiting for Federations n_~)