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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!

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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 ;)

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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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Don’t be surprised if purifier and swarm are treated differently. Right now swarm is forever, but purifier CAN be removed. Just switch empire ethics so that it isn’t valid.
That's not really 'removing' it, though. It's still there, doing nothing, waiting for you to return to the dark side.
 
I wonder if origins will affect anything other than start location and bonus/malus multipliers.

It would be cool if they featured in anomalies and archaeology sites to fill in the narrative.

So a tomb world species may find an advanced nation of their species which abandoned the doomed planet on a generation ship for example.
 
I've been looking forward to this. This change should add a lot more flavours to the game. Anyway, and I think this has been requested a lot, will there be a "Lost Colony" origin? If your empire has this civic, then it should spawn another empire with the same species as yours, and there would be unique interactions between the two. For example, the Commonwealth of Man should have this civic, and it should spawn the United Nations of Earth if the CoM exists.
 
Yay! I’ve been wanting this since civics were introduced, in very happy it’s finally here! :D
 
Are origins going to be apart of the upcoming expansion or in the free update?
I imagine it'll be a free update, given that Mechanist and Life-Seeded are all from other expansions.
 
It would be cool if there was some event line that would allow you to properly remove FP. Perhaps an empire-spanning civil war or something like that.
Or a way for Exterminators to get therapy, or for Swarms to get genetic engineering.

I've had dreams of a story where a Devouring Swarm gets vassalized, their overlords force gene modification on them to cure their hunger, and they become an eternally loyal Former Swarm.
 
Great news!
Please don't hesitate to add some more "generic" origins too, that won't change gameplay much but still add some nice stuff to each empire. Like the ones we can currently read when we start a game (like militarist empires united through conquest, spiritualistic ones united by a common faith etc). Maybe add some extra combos too.
 
Because individually sapient robots are an advanced technology well beyond the capabilities of starting empires. Asking for this is like asking to start with battleships instead of corvettes.
I mean, autonomous machine intelligences are beyond the capability of starting empires as well, and yet there they are.
 
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I mean, autonomous machine intelligences are beyond the capability of starting empires as well, and yet there they are.
They went even more Mechanist than Mechanists, is why.
 
Why is everyone assuming that FP/DE/etc are going to be origins? I doubt they will be. Those are ethics-based.

If they were going to be, at LEAST one of them would have been on that preview screen.