Stellaris Mods - FEDERATION! We're Finally Up To Date! (Patreon)

Maybe she was born with it?

Or maybe it's... MAY! And you know what that means, don't you?

*takes a deep breath*

YET ANOTHER INCREDIBLY EXCITING EPISODE OF MONTHLY MOD REPORT!

Will Team Nessassity members stop falling ill one after another?

Will Princess remember how to write in not-code?

Will the long-promised Patreon rework finally get implemented?

WITHOUT FURTHER ADO, LET'S FIND OUT!

Patreon Rework

To start with, I'd like to reconfirm that I'll be implementing the Patreon rework bit-by-bit over the course of this month. It's actually going to be slightly more extensive than originally planned and, on top of abolishing tiers and delivering overdue rewards, will also involve reorganisation of the archives. I want to go over all of the old posts and sort them in a more... SANE way. Something that doesn't look like an unnavigable pile of random stuff. For something that's supposed to be our news platform, it's incredibly hard to find any information that's older than a month. Hopefully, a better indexing system will address that!

MEC: Asari

The Federation update for MEC: Asari, version 7.0.0, was the most ambitious plan we've put to action so far. And I'm so happy to say, it worked beautifully! It was nearly a complete overhaul of the project, with a changelog so long that Steam wouldn't even let us post all of it! But more importantly, it only took 3 weeks from the launch of Stellaris 2.6.0 Verne to complete and release it.

And while, yes, that was still a bit of time to wait, we'd like to believe it was worth it. Whenever a major DLC release accompanies a Stellaris patch, it usually comes with new tools for modders to play with, and we always want to take advantage of them. The period during which our mods are incompatible with the current version of Stellaris and users are forced to disable them gives us a rare opportunity to enact changes that require starting a new game. And this time, the crowning feature we'd been waiting on since it was first mused on by the devs years ago was...

The Origin system! I've gushed about it a... little bit already so I'll spare you another episode of Princess Really Loves Origins this time! Instead, what I'd like to focus on is how thoroughly it changed what an empire is in Stellaris.
Previously, most empires started on (relatively) even footing, with the same techs, the same planet setups, number of pops, jobs, yadda-yadda. It was... something that might seem desirable in a typical strategy game, but the counterweight to balance often ends up being homogeneity. Stellaris is otherwise an infinitely replayable game, ruled by RNGesus with an iron fist and offering something new and surprising every playthrough. Even more so with all the regularly released game updates, some of which overhaul entire aspects of gameplay to the extend one would normally only ever see in sequels.

However, before the advent of Origins, one aspect of Stellaris had been stagnant and not terribly interesting - the starting conditions. As you can probably tell if you've been playing our mods for a while, we never liked that. From the earliest versions, we have been iterating on unique starting conditions, hand-made starting clusters where each and every planet had custom art made specifically for it. When planetary features were added to Stellaris, we of course jumped on them immediately and used them to enhance our starts even further, adding ambient narrative and mechanical uniqueness wherever we could.
With the introduction of asymmetrical origins in Verne, vanilla Stellaris finally embraced the same mentality and provided proper tools to realise it! So when it came to planning our 2.6.0 updates, we made migrating our starts over to the Origin system the focal point of development.

In the case of MEC: Asari, that resulted in two distinct Origins:

• New Age of Thessia, which allows the Asari Republics to start as a mature, decently developed empire which is nevertheless suffering from stagnation born of centuries of peace and prosperity. And of course, the source of that greatness is revealed to the player, and throughout a lengthy research process intertwined with political intrigue, they can make decisions that will shape the future of the Republics, and perhaps the galaxy at large. It's an interactive storyline with three endings, each offering a different reward.
• Future of Illium, on the other hand, is all about exploiting the savage world and industrialising every cubic nanometre of it in a typical space megacorp fashion. The story of Project Architect is told in a very different way, driven by tasks that the player must fulfill in order to progress. It only has one ending that rewards a unique Ecumenopolis with planetary features that retain the original personality of Illium, but the path that takes the player there is very interactive and integrated with gameplay in as seamless a way as we could do it.

Both approaches were a way to experiment with various forms of in-game storytelling after the anomaly-driven stories we tried once before turned out to not really fit in with the rest of MEC: Asari. I'd like to think the way we handled the Origin stories was a marked improvement, so you can expect more where that came from, both within the confines of MEC and our other projects!

Ah, but that wasn't the only shiny thing that came to MEC: Asari in 7.0.0. We also reworked the civics (again), to make them more engaging throughout the game, more thematically appropriate and, most importantly, to set up for future storytelling potential. In this update, they merely allude to the Board and the Ecclessia, but in the future, dealing with those two will be something Asari empires see throughout the game. We'll have a more detailed outline in a future Monthly Mod Report.

And to close out this update overview, the final major feature that made it into 7.0.0 was reworked Biotics. That's actually not something we had originally planned to work on, but one day I just had a random eureka moment and had to follow up on it!
As the result, the implementation of Biotics has gone away from planet-based decisions scaling off the number of pops and... not really offering much except an energy sink and constant micro. Instead, it is now based on empire-wide "edicts" which are powered by a new resource generated by all biotic pops in the empire. The more pops you have, the more often you can enact the edicts and if you end up with any surplus, you can trade it away for extra energy. Unlike the old implementation, this one has no brackets and no upper limits - every biotic pop contributes. Which also means that the trait even has value to other empires who might have acquired biotic pops via migration or enslavement, reflected in the increased value of biotic pops on the slave market. They do eventually pay for themselves n_n

As for what's on the horizon for MEC: Asari, we have big plans to expand on these new systems and will be talking about that in upcoming Mod Reports. In the immediate future, however, the time has come for some new additions to the Asari shipset! We'll be working first on creating a model for the Juggernaut, and then reworking the Habitat! Stay tuned for updates on that front probably within the next couple of weeks!

Elves of Stellaris

This time, Elves took quite a bit longer to update, and while the sheer amount of content and assets that had to be developed for it is some of the reason why, unfortunately what played the bigger part in that was simply a poorly-timed string of health issues that swept the team. None of us, thankfully, caught the ongoing zombie plague (that's just too mainstream for us) but nevertheless, it does mean we couldn't deliver the update to your hands at the peak of the quarantine period. The incident did make us realise that we might need to rethink the way we plan development, and there are actually some steps we've already taken, but more on that further down! For now, let's focus on the EoS update that just went live, and ohhhh sweet rainbow unicorns, there is a lot to cover!

Elves of Stellaris handles Origins a bit differently from MEC. Their storytelling is predominantly ambient rather than driven, and they are quite a lot less restrictive in terms of empires that can enjoy them. And the best part? There's six, count it, SIX of them!

And although some did exist before as combinations of civics, prescripted empire setups and home system initialisers, the Origin system allowed us to consolidate all of those into one place, increasing the freedom of empire creation while fleshing out, expanding and fine-tuning all the relevant aspects. There is no longer any danger that a player will pick the wrong initialiser-civic combination or that a particular initialiser is too out of tune with vanilla balance. As such, even the old starts that have been repurposed have received sweeping changes taking advantage of our newfound freedom, And then there are some that have been reimagined completely, such us the Valshaquellar, as well as a new one!

• Subterranean Inception is what become of the old Valshaquellar initialiser of the Ilythiiri Tulshar. It is, however... rather different than you might remember! For one, it no longer starts the empire ON the Valsh, but rather as a subterranean civilisation on a nearly barren planet, with a destroyed Valshaquellar looming ominously over the system. The artificial world can eventually be restored and doing so will allow building of Arcology Districts, sure to make any empire incredibly strong... if it earns it.
• Prismatic Refuge is the new start for Children of Elistraee. Just a colourful little system with a cute little starting plane and a wormhole just begging to be explored. Oh! And it just so happens that you start with the tech to do exactly that!
  This is a very humble start compared to the others, seemingly offering no immediate benefits, but it does reveal its true potential later in the game... if, as it always is with the Drow, you can earn it.
• Elven Foundations is Serene Kingdom of Senalata's origin, relatively unchanged from the old avari ring initialiser, except that the ring operates at full power from the beginning, allowing to develop the homeworld's infrastructure very quickly. It's the most straightforward of elven origins, offering conditions comparable to a vanilla start for those who just want to start in a pretty system but with no crazy gameplay alterations.
• Arcadian Symbiosis is a completely new origin, unrelated to any old initialisers, and it's used by the new prescripted empire of Aenari Circle that replaces the Sidh and has a much better defined theme as well as mechanics. The Origin itself may seem very similar to Syncretic Evolution in that it starts the empire off with a species of physically strong, servile Treants. However, what makes them unique is that they increase the habitability of any planet they reside on! Every 5 treant pops increases habitability by 5%, which can add up very quickly. Playing this origin is something of a balancing act where one has to find the sweet spot between growing as many treants as possible while making sure that there's enough primary species pops to still fulfil specialist and ruler roles.
• Celestial Throne is the origin of Aurlûnor Velande, our Space Elf China, and is very similar to their old initialiser, still encasing the homeworld in The Great Firewall. What has changed is the surrounding cluster, specifically all the rare resource deposits and anomalies that can be found there. Many of the nearby systems now guarantee anomaly spawns so Lhûren scientists will have their hands full for a long, long time!
• Sunless Realms returns with the Silvermoon Hierocracy, and the Naerelýn have never been more icy! The origin consolidates all of the Moon Elves' features, setting up the homeworld and conveying the necessary habitability trait in a cleaner, more reliable way. As before, this is a very challenge-oriented start that makes it incredibly difficult to propagate the founder species outside of their home system.

Apart from the origins, many other features of EoS have received a facelift. Especially the Arcane Societies civic which now has a lot more staying power past the early game by providing a constant income of Zro as well as increasing the chance of finding Excavation Sites on surveyed planets. The Art Department hasn't been sleeping on the job either (even though she was bedridden for a long time) and has delivered lots of new shiny things to look at, including the Drow Ecumenopolis skin! (note: requires using the Drow or Ilythiiri shipset)

Purrrrrrple!

Originally, we were also planning on making one for Elves this update, but since we fell so far behind, we were forced to cut it out at the last minute. It's almost finished, however, requiring only some colour, specular and glow adjustments to... not melt people's eyes off, so you can expect to see it in the near future! For now, here's an early WIP of it, next to the Drow city-planet for comparison:

And after applying the cloud layer, in case you didn't believe me about that eye-melting thing:

The blue band is supposed to be water but it turned out um... a bit too blue, and perhaps putting white city lights on top of white everything else wasn't the best idea we've ever had XD Anyways, once we've found the right colour balance, we'll add it in an update.

And we're already discussing other things that we'd like to add. Some of the less interesting civics will probably receive some refinements soon because after separating starting conditions from them, what remains may not be too exciting, and there is also the matter of Juggernauts and Habitats which, yes, are the next big priority! And after that, we're going to resume work on the Drow shipset and hopefully finish it before the next big expansion.

Team Nessassity

One more little thing I'd like to touch upon is a major change in our internal organisation, prompted by the troubles we experienced this development cycle, amongst other things. Up to this point, a lot of our coordination has been done very casually, via Discord conversations in which ideas, plans and tasks would often pop up out of nowhere... and then get buried and we'd have to rely on our memory, the occasional pinned message, and Git logs to keep track of who's doing what and how much is left. As you can probably imagine, not the most efficient way to handle all of the enormous projects we're juggling.

As of slightly over a week ago, we've established an issue tracker infrastructure, using the YouTrack engine, very similar to Jira but seemingly optimised for smaller teams.

We've already noted huge leaps in terms of ideas not getting hopelessly lost forever, and logging tasks in this form has also improved our prioritisation flexibility, allowing us to much better judge whether certain tasks are really release-critical or if they can be put off for later. As you can see, we still have some overdue tasks that didn't make it into EoS 4.3.0 because we decided they weren't necessary to launch the update.

We may need some time to adjust and become familiar with it, but going forward, the system will be extended to all of our projects and you should hopefully see the results in the near future!

And on that note, this is it for this month's Mod Report! Now that the Federation launch madness is over, the Monthly Mod Reports should hopefully become, you know, MONTHLY again! And we might finally be able to actually play the game a bit and enjoy the expansion before we're go back to the code mines XD

As always, thank you for your support and interest in our work. We could not have come this far and done this much without you <3 So I hope you will also have some fun playing Stellaris, and stay tuned for more Team Nessassity news soon!