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Stellaris Dev Diary #155 - Origins

Hello everyone!

I have just returned from a belated vacation in Japan, and although I had a great time there it is also fun to be back to work. Today I want to talk about some of the cool things happening with Stellaris this year. As many of you have probably guessed, Stellaris will announce a new expansion at PDXCon this year. This expansion will feature a lot of cool new things, most of which will be revealed at PDXCon. But I do also have something really neat that I want to share with you now!

upload_2019-9-26_13-21-43.png

Good ol’ civics. Gotta love ‘em.

Back in Utopia we introduced a lot of cool new features to improve how you could customize and specialize your empire. Civics were a great addition to the game (in fact I consider them to be one of the best), but they are also awkwardly split between “backgrounds” like Syncretic Evolution and “institutions” like Distinguished Admiralty or Imperial Cult. Civics have added a lot of really cool options to how you can play the game, and that is something I want to expand upon – this is where the Origins come in.

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Materialistic, mechanist, mushroom madness?
Origins is a new feature that is very similar to Civics, and will now represent your empire’s background. An empire can only select one Origin, and an Origin cannot be changed. We will be adding a bunch of new Origins (some of them are really cool!) and we will also be changing some Civics into being Origins instead. Examples of Civics that will be converted into Origins are Mechanists, Post-Apocalyptic, Life-Seeded and Syncretic Evolution.

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Life-Seeded Origin, now open to hive minds.

Certain types of empires were previously unable to access some of these backgrounds since they have their own set of Civics (Gestalts and Megacorps for example). Because some of those Civics have been turned into Origins, those backgrounds will now be available to more types of empires. This means that it should now be possible to have a hive mind with the Life-Seeded origin or a Megacorp with the Mechanists origin. We know this is something people have been asking for for a long time now, and it’s really great to be able to add Origins to the game.

Like I mentioned earlier, we will also be adding a whole lot of new Origins that will add interesting starting positions for your empire. Right now we have 16 in the current version of the game, and we will probably see a few more until it's finished. I think Origins will be a great addition to the game that will surely help to facilitate a lot more player stories and player fantasies.

We won’t be showing all of these yet, but it will probably be immensely hard for us to not tease a few every now and then ;)

upload_2019-9-26_13-24-19.png

Who isn’t curious about Remnants and Scions?

PDXCon is rapidly approaching and Stellaris fans will have a lot of cool things to look forward to! In two weeks we will be back again with another dev diary, where we’ll talk a bit more about PDXCon.
 
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"Terrorform"

Yes! Now, if only there was a tech available to empires that had Fanatic Purifier, Post-Apocalyptic, and Colossi that let you have a Colossus weapon that, when fired, destroyed all pops/buildings/districts on a planet and changed it into a Tomb World. You could then name the Colossus the "Terrorformer."
 
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I love the civics system, and I love this origins addition. But can we please have more tech available that expands the number of civics? 2 to start wouldn't feel so limiting if you could add on new civics as you expanded, and particularly for fanatic egalitarians it feels quite limiting not to pick some civics that make sense with each other. Like, I did not know that communal housing is restricted to shared burdens and that seriously hampered my last fanatic egalitarian playthrough cause I skipped it cause I use utopian abundance living standards. I currently heavily mod the game to add more civics.
 
Not being able to select Post-apoc and Machine Intelligence totally ruins my Skynet/Matrix dreams.
Well I mean, Exterminators start on a tomb world anyway.
 
Hello everyone!

I have just returned from a belated vacation in Japan, and although I had a great time there it is also fun to be back to work. Today I want to talk about some of the cool things happening with Stellaris this year. As many of you have probably guessed, Stellaris will announce a new expansion at PDXCon this year. This expansion will feature a lot of cool new things, most of which will be revealed at PDXCon. But I do also have something really neat that I want to share with you now!

View attachment 514927
Good ol’ civics. Gotta love ‘em.

Back in Utopia we introduced a lot of cool new features to improve how you could customize and specialize your empire. Civics were a great addition to the game (in fact I consider them to be one of the best), but they are also awkwardly split between “backgrounds” like Syncretic Evolution and “institutions” like Distinguished Admiralty or Imperial Cult. Civics have added a lot of really cool options to how you can play the game, and that is something I want to expand upon – this is where the Origins come in.

View attachment 514926
Materialistic, mechanist, mushroom madness?
Origins is a new feature that is very similar to Civics, and will now represent your empire’s background. An empire can only select one Origin, and an Origin cannot be changed. We will be adding a bunch of new Origins (some of them are really cool!) and we will also be changing some Civics into being Origins instead. Examples of Civics that will be converted into Origins are Mechanists, Post-Apocalyptic, Life-Seeded and Syncretic Evolution.

View attachment 514928
Life-Seeded Origin, now open to hive minds.

Certain types of empires were previously unable to access some of these backgrounds since they have their own set of Civics (Gestalts and Megacorps for example). Because some of those Civics have been turned into Origins, those backgrounds will now be available to more types of empires. This means that it should now be possible to have a hive mind with the Life-Seeded origin or a Megacorp with the Mechanists origin. We know this is something people have been asking for for a long time now, and it’s really great to be able to add Origins to the game.

Like I mentioned earlier, we will also be adding a whole lot of new Origins that will add interesting starting positions for your empire. Right now we have 16 in the current version of the game, and we will probably see a few more until it's finished. I think Origins will be a great addition to the game that will surely help to facilitate a lot more player stories and player fantasies.

We won’t be showing all of these yet, but it will probably be immensely hard for us to not tease a few every now and then ;)

View attachment 514929
Who isn’t curious about Remnants and Scions?

PDXCon is rapidly approaching and Stellaris fans will have a lot of cool things to look forward to! In two weeks we will be back again with another dev diary, where we’ll talk a bit more about PDXCon.
Does this mean we can have a Ulysses project origin for humans? Or lost colony origin.

there’s also should be a origin for machine empires that are out to avenge their creators against a unknown alien threat that wiped them out. There’s a number of sci fi stories with that background.
 
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I hope the system is at least modifiable in the way that allows you to pick more than one. Like civics.
Theres really no reason why one couldnt be life seeded with secretic evolution and robots at the start and with those things as civics its possible to at least mod out their requirements.
If this system winds up being just pick one and done then if you wanted one of those hybrids youd have to make an origin for each of the combinations.

Please and thank you :3
 
Do we know when the Origins update will be released? Very excited to play as the last of a once great empire rise once more from the ashes to enslave the galaxy.
 
Can we get a Hive mind or normal origin(both would be great) that turns you into a hive like social insect colony, that have polymorphism. Where the leader/breading class are intelligent, and the soldiers and drones are specialized variants with little cognition. Sorta like the bugs from starship troopers or social insects on earth.

I would also like a dark planet start for robots who became sentient after their star went super nova and collapsed into a black hole, neutron star, etc. The creator species dies or leaves but the the robots continued building etc until they gained sentience.

A parasite hive-mind start would also be cool, be like the assimilation robot civic.

More robot and hive mind starts would be nice, a lost colony start would be cool to considering you could spawn a more advanced version in the galaxy giving them there own story, though randomly they could also be destroyed or enslaved.

I do have concerns that this will restrict certain things like tomb world fanatical purifiers etc, unless of course you keep certain ones in civics or put it in the ethic system. So you instead of pick machine intelligence it is default then you choose the different machine ethic sub-types like other species get government types after picking ethics. This would also allow the choose of not being a full machine hive mind and maybe the machines aren't networked together and individually make chooses.
 
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Do we know when the Origins update will be released? Very excited to play as the last of a once great empire rise once more from the ashes to enslave the galaxy.

Megacorp was rushed before Christmas last year. That didnt really worked that well. I hope their schedule has enough bugfixing time after the release. Or they maybe try not to break the whole game again...
 
May I request that being robots should limit your selection of origins but not your selection of civics? There's no reason a society of robots shouldn't be a bunch of xenophilic peace-loving democratic communists.
 
May I request that being robots should limit your selection of origins but not your selection of civics? There's no reason a society of robots shouldn't be a bunch of xenophilic peace-loving democratic communists.
All the current robot empires we have are Gestalt Consciousness. It actually doesn't make sense with that in mind.
 
All the current robot empires we have are Gestalt Consciousness. It actually doesn't make sense with that in mind.
Actually it does. The hive mind isnt just hive mind. Its whatever is in charge of the hive mind is. No reason it cannot think one way or another. A hive mind could very well feel like it knows best for non hiveminds and do the servitor bot thing. Or it could have hiveminded pops work on planets not owned by the hive. The only reason none of that happens in game is because its simpler to just say hive mind is just hive mind.
 
FINALLY

An interesting idea, but I'm really uneasy about the idea of how this locks out stuff like Life-Seeded Mechanist.

Yes certain combos are no longer possible unfortunately. But I'd be less upset by this one specifically if they expanded genetic traits to have very weak and very strong variants not just some having a slight negative or positive. So I could still have extremely unadaptive species that sticks to their homeworld.
 
Gods damnit Paradox! You again announce a massive game changing update with no clear date of release, feeding us breadcrumbs until you finally quit messing around and tell us the juicy details. Updates like this change the game so much that your loyal fans(like myself) are unwilling to play stellaris until the new DLC and update drop. Excuse me while i go stare at the wall, drooling while i imagine the new update and what it glory it may hold and feverently hoping you don't butcher this like you did with megacorp, And for Hellheim's sake fix the damn endgame.