Team Nessassity Mods - Let's Talk About Literally EVERYTHNIG! (Patreon)

HI! It's August, and that means it's time for the Monthly Mod Re-

Oh, right, it's September now! Anyways, time for-

...

What do you MEAN it's October?! ,>o<,

FINE! It's the Post-Summer Quarterly Mod Report!

So um... this isn't supposed to be a regular thing and hopefully it will be the last time for the foreseeable future, especially now with the changes I've made to Princess.exe (more on that a little later, if you're interested). As you might imagine, there's a monstrous amount of things to talk about in today's Report - we do have over 3 months to cover and even more things we want to do in the future. So...

You know the part that comes next...

The one with the ado...

...

WITHOUT FURTHER!

Princess.exe - Personal Nonsense (skippable)

Soooo I don't talk about my personal life. For that matter, I don't like hearing about the personal lives of people who make my entertainment either - I don't care what they had for dinner, I don't care about their kid's birthday, I don't care about their new house, trip to Disneyland or rapidly deteriorating mental health. I'm here for their public persona and that's it.

I believe that the stuff I do for fun and the stuff I do for a living should be clearly divided as to avoid cross-contamination that would make the fun stuff no longer fun. But... that line got a little blurry a while ago, and it has unfortunately affected my enjoyment and productivity with a lot of things, so that's why I'm making an exception this one time.

So I hope you can forgive me for breaking my own principles and dumping this boring nonsense onto you. If you don't care about it either, feel free to skip this entire section - it's just a bunch of self-indulgent venting not directly relevant to the shiny fun stuff you're here for <3

Still here? Okay, but don't say I didn't warn you!

In the last Monthly Mod Report I talked about the burnout and creative isolation issues that Team Nessassity as a whole was facing, and I'm happy to say that since we've opened up our Discord, we've regained some of our former rhythm! But at the same time, I also needed to address problems on my own end, unrelated to modding, that I did not mention in that post.

To cut right to the point, around the time I posted the last MMR, I had just decided to quit my old job. It wasn't an easy decision to make, given that it was paying really well and offered me stability in an established position with great future prospects... but it was also slowly but surely draining my will to live and eroding my sanity. Despite working from home most days, my schedule was packed and I always had to account for the uncertain possibility that more work could come my way that needed to be done on a tight deadline or I would inconvenience someone else down the chain.
As the result, I felt like I was halfway in work mode even during my off-hours, and my energy levels were at minimum all the time. Most days, even though I often had more than enough time to rest and do fun things (including modding, gaming, or even catching up on my colossal anime backlog), the persistent accumulation of mental exhaustion wouldn't let me enjoy anything that required the slightest bit of brain activity.

So over the past couple of months, I've been working to change that. I eventually left the company and started looking for a more flexible job. Finally, a few weeks ago, I was able to do just that! I now get to work entirely from home and my responsibilities are clearly defined.

That said, I haven't yet fully sorted out my mess of a life - there's still a new schedule to adjust to, a new budget to plan out around a much lower salary than I'm used to, and some training I still need to catch up on, but in the end, I think the change will allow me to find more time to myself and recover the energy I need to be productive outside of work.

So, yes, that should mean I will be more motivated to do my part on Team Nessassity projects. The fact that I've finally been able to gather all my thoughts and write this Monthly Report after so many delays is hopefully an indication that things are heading in the right direction.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. Now, on to the fun stuff!

Veiled Realms

First of all, let me congratulate myself on managing to drag out the development of a mod originally meant to come out in October last year... for an entire year! I'm amazing!

Granted, the original deadline I estimated was completely unrealistic from the outset given even the initial scope of the project, and that did not account for the feature creep- I mean "necessary scope expansion" that eventually followed n_~

Still a year in development is also not ideal. Honestly, the mod should have been finished by now, and probably would have been if I could have mustered enough energy to work on it consistently. But what's done is done (or, not done yet, as the case may be) and hopefully, with the previously mentioned fixes to Princess.exe, I can finally get it back on track.

And to additionally help with that (and post-release development as well), we have put the mysterious "Community Experiment" I promised you a few months ago into action!

So what is it about? If you wish to learn the details, please visit our Discord and check out the #📃・vr-community-writing channel! But here's the short of it:

Veiled Realms has two systems designed to deliver brief narrative events meant to immerse Vampire characters in the minutia of their nightly existence - Feeding (hunting for blood and either succeeding or failing in many different ways) and Menace (maintaining the "masquerade" and dealing with the consequences of supernatural indiscretions).
In order to avoid repetition, we want to create as many original scenarios for those systems as (in)humanly possible, but we can't do it alone. So, by filling out a simple Google Form, you can help us!

Veiled Realms Community Writing is meant to give our infinitely creative players an opportunity to leave their mark on Veiled Realms as well as accelerate its development in an area where I struggle the most - narrative writing.

I can come up with scenarios and script them to happen in the game, but when it comes to evoking the scene in text... it takes me forever to find the right words and even when I'm done I'm never happy with the final result. When it comes to the many events in MEC, Team Nessassity has dedicated and incredibly talented writers like LostInACave who can cover all the narrative needs, but we are currently lacking anyone interested in doing the same for Veiled Realms.

Which... actually brings me to the second purpose of the Community Writing initiative! Aside from giving me a convenient way of handing independent contributions, it will also serve as a means of auditioning potential candidates who might be interested in joining Team Nessassity as associates and working with us more closely in the long term.
Up to this point, we really had no protocols for inducting new members. It sorta just... happened randomly and there was no way for us to evaluate their skills and compatibility with our team unless they were already established modders.

But now, hopefully, we can use Community Writing - and if it works to our satisfaction, similar contribution initiatives in the future - to streamline our recruitment process.

So if you are interested in either contributing individual scenarios with no strings attached or joining Team Nessassity's extended development team on a more permanent basis, we would be delighted to receive your entries <3

MEC: Expanded Galaxy & MEC: Asari 

You know, normally a Stellaris patch day is a bit of a mixed bag for modders. On one hand there's new things to play with and occasionally also new modding tools we're excited to use... and on the other there's the necessary maintenance, testing and adjustments to make sure our mods are compatible with the new version.
(Oh... and one or two users acting surprised that we updated the mod rather than let it stay broken until they were finished with their ongoing playthrough on the old version. Ah... the fun of never being able to please everyone.)

ANYWAYS, this time around, we decided to do something new and let our Discord community partake of the usual madness and panic live in glorious HD as we were scrambling to figure out new features and track down errors. I hope you enjoyed it! In the future we'll probably make it a regular thing. Why suffer in silence when we can pull the whole server into our vortex of misery?

But we managed to sort out all the MEC updates in record time and took note of a few new features of Lem that could turn out very very useful to us in the future. By the by, the Custodians Team did an amazing job and we can't wait to see what else they do in their updates!

One of those incredibly promising new tools is the ability to add selectable Tradition Trees to the game, with no compatibility issues with other mods.

As you might imagine, for mods such as ours that revolve around exploring fun cultures and trying to bring narrative and gameplay into perfect sync, Traditions have been something we've always wanted to utilise but never wanted to deal with the cross-compatibility nightmare that aspect of the game used to constitute. Now, however, the shackles are off!

And we already have some plans. In a future update, MEC: Asari will introduce a set of Traditions inspired by various aspects of Asari culture, beliefs and society.
Under the umbrella of "Eternity", the tree will have two branches - one that focuses on cultivating lasting monuments of civilisation, giving benefits to colonies that stand the test of time, and one that attempts to simulate the unique quirks of asari society through such fun and definitely not double-edged things as Justicars and power bases created around popular leaders.
While the traditions are going to be designed specifically for the two existing asari factions, the tree will most likely be available to any normal or megacorp empire, albeit possibly with slightly modified traditions.

As always, we will try to make these traditions add something new to gameplay, not just provide boosts to some numbers, so stay tuned for more news as our vision develops! And if you have any ideas for what we could do with this tree, don't forget that our Discord has a Suggesions channel created just for that purpose! ^o^

Elves of Stellaris 

Oh dear, Elves continue to be our largest and most robust project, with so many moving parts and developments constantly happening that even I sometimes need a "for dummies" summary before I post a Monthly Report about it.

And with 3 months of developments to cover, I don't even know where to start.

So... let's maybe go over the things that have already happened!
In the EoS 4.6.0 update, we started implementing three big things:

• Elven and Dark Elven Ecumenopoleis at long last have received unique models and textures that should better match their aesthetics. I don't even remember when we originally announced the plans for that, but we are so happy to have that cleared out of our backlog!
• We decided to rebrand the species class formerly known as "Drow" into slightly more creatively convenient "Dark Elves". This is meant to serve a dual purpose - preventing IP confusion and giving us more leeway to interpret said elves in new ways unrestricted by the connotations associated with their old name. And speaking of...
• We repurposed the "purple tentacles" shipset into dark-elven "menacing" ships (accessible as part of Becoming a Crisis) and decided to create a completely new variant in its place. The new sun-themed ship style is designed for an upcoming culture of dark elves who... you will get to know soon enough, so I won't tell you anything about them n_~

And that segways us neatly into the next part: future things!

I originally had a 2000-words-long essay prepared for this section, but just today Nessa sent me 2 pretty pictures that we feel should suffice as an equivalent substitute:

Update: Oh! Some more just dropped in at the last minute! If you're in our Discord, you might want to have a looksie inside #elves-of-stellaris for anything else that might pop up in the coming days!

Yes, Nessa Shipyards is once again working on new ship models and she seems very determined to finish the Dark Elf shipset before the "encouragement" agents they've sent after us break our legs for all the delays we've put their ships through over the years!

And on that note, we should probably get back to work before they realise I've spent whole two days writing this Report! So, as always, thank you for continuing to follow our progress and showing us your support! It truly gives us life <3

Hopefully this will be the last catch-up Report ever and we'll be seeing you again in November!

BUT if you aren't that patient, you can always catch us on our official Discord, and I also sometimes post minor updates and teasers of interesting things on Twitter!

Until then, bye-bye and let's have fun playing Paradox Games (and/or thinking of playing them while waiting for the next DLC, that's valid too) ! （*＾ワ＾*）