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Stellaris Dev Diary #262 - Ringworlds, Reliquaries, Relics, and More

Hello again!

This week we’re going to look at some more things that are going into the upcoming Stellaris 3.5 “Fornax” release.

Megastructures in the Outliner​

One of the things going into Fornax is something we’ve wanted for a very long time on PC - a Megastructure section in the Outliner.

Megastructures in the Outliner


As shown here, the Megastructures section will list all megastructures within your territory, including ruined ones as well as Gateway Sites (but not completed gateways, as that would be too much clutter).

Never again will you lose track of where you left that Gateway Site or Ruined Sentry Array!

Accessibility Improvements​

We talked about some accessibility improvement goals before the summer, and some of them are going into Fornax.

Accessibility Settings


When enabled, Mouse Side Button Mode allows Mouse 4 and Mouse 5 to toggle pause state and galactic/system views.

Page Up and Page Down will also now adjust the camera zoom level.

Other accessibility improvement projects are ongoing for future updates. I hope to have text to speech available in an Open Beta later on in the year for the 3.6 “Orion” update.

Golden Tiyanki Status​

The Caravansary Caravan Coalition will now reward their most loyal patrons with Golden Tiyanki status. Those who have purchased a sufficient number of Reliquaries will now be granted the honor of being able to purchase as many as they like, directly for credits, with no more cooldowns for their best customers.

Golden Tiyanki Status with the Caravaneers


Good luck, the Galatron is waiting!

(This should make a couple of related achievements significantly less painful to acquire. They do eventually get pretty expensive, however.)

More Achievements​

Continuing from last week, here are the rest of the new Species Pack achievements we're planning for Fornax.

Aquatics:
Holy Water

Holy Water - Drench a Fallen Empire’s holy world.

There Be Dragons

There Be Dragons - Have at least 13 dragons you own in your capital system.

Necroids:
With Great Power

With Great Power - As a Necrophage, do not invade any pre-ftl civilisations until you defeat the crisis OR have at least 10 observation stations around pre-ftl worlds.

Recent History

Recent History - As a Memorialist empire, have Galactic Memorials on five tomb worlds that did not start the game as tomb worlds.

Lithoids:
Room for Desert

Room for Desert - Consume another empire’s desert homeworld.

Can you Smell What the Lithoids are Cooking?

Can You Smell What the Lithoids are Cooking? - As a Lithoid empire, keep another Lithoid pop as Livestock or Process them.

Plantoids:
 Growing Like Weeds

Growing Like Weeds
- As a budding species that does not have the Clone Army origin, achieve a base organic pop assembly of at least 10/month on your capital.

Tend the Garden

Tend the Garden - Become the custodian of Wenkwort Artem, designating it a resort world with a Ranger Lodge and all original blockers present.

Humanoids:
Directive 67

Directive 67 - As a Clone Soldier empire, denounce a Spiritualist fallen empire as a crisis in the Galactic Community then destroy them, without blowing up their final planet.
(We're so mean to the Spiritualist Fallen Empire!)

Destroy the People of Earth!

Destroy the People of Earth! - As the Commonwealth of Man, destroy the United Nations of Earth with your ruler being a human with a symbiotic brainslug, without blowing up their final planet.

We also have one more being added to Synthetic Dawn:
Machine Supremacy

Machine Supremacy - Win the game as a machine uprising.

Now I’ll turn it over to Iggy for an update on Relics.

Relic Updates​

Hello everyone! I am Iggy and I am back to show you the fruit of our collaboration from back earlier in the summer. Firstly we reviewed some of the feedback about the untouched relics so please enjoy even more relics with enhanced flavor and fewer pain points.

Khan's Throne


The Khan’s Throne now grants you access to the Satrapy Subject Preset letting you extort fleet capacity from your subject.

Also the Defragmentor will now have a usage for non-robot empires granting 10% energy upkeep reduction to all jobs buildings and districts.

Head of Zarqlaan


And finally the Head of Zarqlan now has the spiritualist ethics attraction locked to the active, and the size of the fleet increases with activation, up to a max after 5 uses. Also due to popular demand the head will now spawn for the AI instead of the player 25% of the time and the AI will colonize holy worlds when they possess the relic.

Further Changes to Already Balanced Relics:
  • The Psionic Archive now allows Gestalt Empires to find Psionic Theory which in turn will grant them access to Zro Mining.
  • The Brood Queen will now grant a stacking empire modifier to swarm type weapons (Missiles and Strike Craft) for each use and will also spawn the Carrier variant on use.
  • The Pox Sample will increase the likelihood that you find Biological Technologies
  • The Omnicodex now gives +25 relation with non robot empires if you are a robot one.
  • The Reality Perforator active modifiers now last 2-5 years instead of 1-5 years

For the rest of the changes please see Dev Diary #259.

Next Week and PDXCon​

Next week is PDXCon at Münchenbryggeriet here in Stockholm, but we’ll still have a dev diary taking a peek at some of the content coming out with Fornax. If you come visit us at the convention, we’ll have Fornax up and running, a Stellaris Q&A Panel where we'll be taking questions from the audience, and I’m planning on holding a small workshop where we’ll reveal how our summer experiments have gone.

There are still a few tickets left if you're in the area.

See you next week!
 
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MVP ("minimal viable product") helps you clarify what you actually need to get the project working at all.
It's not worth making MVPs in our UI system. It's too old and clunky to prototype in.
Our UX designers have good tools for doing mockups and that's way more efficient time use.


In terms of UI, could you perhaps look into some of the recent UI changes which have only partial programming support?
Yeah, but I would like to do all of it as a collected effort. Less context switching and more focus makes things go faster => I can get more done overall.
 
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It's not worth making MVPs in our UI system. It's too old and clunky to prototype in.
Our UX designers have good tools for doing mockups and that's way more efficient time use.



Yeah, but I would like to do all of it as a collected effort. Less context switching and more focus makes things go faster => I can get more done overall.
Maybe the next big project could be updating the UI system :)
 
There are a bunch of people that would like achievements to be an exclusive club with very high requirements, but the majority thinks that keeping up this club at the cost of locking out everyone who uses balanced content mods or UI addons is not worth it. (I'm in the latter camp, as you might guess)

I think they should still be locked behind Iron Man to make sure people are getting them legit, since what's the point of them existing if you can just download a "Unlock all achievement mod" that runs through the entire list in 20 seconds after you load in. Achievements don't do anything besides exist as bragging rights, so making them worth actually bragging about is literally the only point of them

I think they do need to relax the requirements for some stuff though like name lists and purely cosmetic things
 
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I think they should still be locked behind Iron Man to make sure people are getting them legit, since what's the point of them existing if you can just download a "Unlock all achievement mod" that runs through the entire list in 20 seconds after you load in. Achievements don't do anything besides exist as bragging rights, so making them worth actually bragging about is literally the only point of them

Iron Man doesn't really do that though. There are still vanilla settings which make the game much easier (or harder). Also, you can edit ironman saves if you really want to cheat.

What achievements do is make the player briefly feel good about some arbitrary thing.


IMHO an AAR is different from bragging, and achievement seem more like AAR bait to me.

Nobody has ever bragged to me about their achievements IRL -- all I see are people mentioning the rare ones in AARs here on the forums, where it's less bragging rights and more "hey I finally got this rare thing, while doing this RP, and it was cool".
 
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Wait, Ranger Lodge? Does that mean we have to be a vassal of an Environmentalist empire, and we need to count on the Environmentalist empire building a Ranger Lodge?
I'm more concerned with the achievement that requires the player to find brain slugs, while playing a specific empire. I don't particularly like the idea of playing a whole bunch of games in a row as the CoM and just hoping the RNG will give me brain slugs considering how rare they are.
The mouse additions are for enabling more of the game using only the mouse, so if you're also using the keyboard, you're not the target demographic of those changes.

We can't do fully dynamic rebinding this late in development. That's something you need architecture for, so it goes in way before the first release.

I know a colleague looked into reshuffling the sidebar to make the more used ones easier to access.
Feel free to suggest places where we could improve the existing hotkeys :)

What do you refer to when you say "function keys"?
Do you mean modifier keys like ctrl, alt etc?
If I could have any one hotkey be added, it would be re-adding the technology hotkey. Personally, I think the technology hotkey being removed (in 2.2 I think?) was a low point for the game. I would constantly use the tech hotkey to check how close I was to researching a new tech, and having to go click the topbar when I want to check tech progress is much more time consuming, relative to quickly pressing a hotkey without having to move the mouse.
 
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what's the point of them existing if you can just download a "Unlock all achievement mod"
Steam Achievement Manager is a thing that exists, so this argument is weaker than you'd like.

Also, look at the example of other strategy games which don't block achievements based on Ironman And No Mods: if anyone is cheating to get the hard achievements, they're a pretty tiny slice of the player base.
 
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Maybe the next big project could be updating the UI system :)
We have a good UI system in the new version of the engine that's used for CK3 and Vicky 3. It can't be backported as it's completely different engine versions, so Stellaris will sit with the old system until the crisis comes for it. We can (and do!) however make improvements to it. I have some things on my own personal backlog for making scrolling nicer and making testing and debugging easier.

If I could have any one hotkey be added, it would be re-adding the technology hotkey. Personally,
Same! I would like to reorder the buttons on the left hand side in accordance with how often they are accessed. I've been meaning to write telemetry code to gather data on their use for some time, but unfortunately haven't gotten to it yet.
 
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Same! I would like to reorder the buttons on the left hand side in accordance with how often they are accessed. I've been meaning to write telemetry code to gather data on their use for some time, but unfortunately haven't gotten to it yet.
I'm kind of used to the order already... reordering would throw me off. 1000+ hours of muscle memory.
 
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I'm kind of used to the order already... reordering would throw me off. 1000+ hours of muscle memory.
Well, i bet you'll manage to retrain your muscle memory within the next 1000 hours :p
 
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so Stellaris will sit with the old system until the crisis comes for it.

Crisis = the DLC team right?

(Just kidding.)

We can (and do!) however make improvements to it. I have some things on my own personal backlog for making scrolling nicer and making testing and debugging easier.

Yeah scrolling really needs to be faster, or at least configurable. I used to work around the scrolling pain by clicking the scrollbar but that got removed -- now you have to grab the scrollbar and drag it, which is worse than previous for me.

Sometimes it feels like someone is taking away all the tools I use to make the game playable.

Same! I would like to reorder the buttons on the left hand side in accordance with how often they are accessed. I've been meaning to write telemetry code to gather data on their use for some time, but unfortunately haven't gotten to it yet.

Good thinking.

A single layout of buttons might not fit every playstyle though.

One pattern I've seen work is:

- Put all the features in a hierarchical menu. Allow expansion to these menus via DLC and mods.
- Let the user configure a "hot bar" with most-used or most-useful items. This could be pre-set based on generic telemetry but the user can configure any set of buttons as desired. These could be vanilla buttons, DLC buttons, or mod buttons as desired.

The left-bar becomes this user-configured "hot bar", and keymaps apply to the items put into the "hot bar". All items are also found in a hierarchical menu, so even if the hotbar is misconfigured, all functionality remains available.
 
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I'm kind of used to the order already... reordering would throw me off. 1000+ hours of muscle memory.
Yeah, that's why I want to gather data and make sure we only need to change it once. Everytime we change core elements, it's quite painful.

...wait, does this mean "never going to happen" or "that's the crisis team's problem" this-forum-doesn't-have-a-thinking-smiley
Haha, I basically meant "until whenever Paradox is done developing this game", which I have no idea when it is. Hopefully before year 2450 :p

@HFY I doubt we will do anything but rearrange the order. That alone is enough to bring on some serious change fatigue, which is something Stellaris already struggles with, so I don't think we want to make it work differently at the same time as well.
 
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@HFY I doubt we will do anything but rearrange the order. That alone is enough to bring on some serious change fatigue, which is something Stellaris already struggles with, so I don't think we want to make it work differently at the same time as well.

IMHO change is worthwhile when you increase functionality.

If you're just moving things around, that's all the pain but no extra functionality -- not sure it's going to be worth your time, nor worth the difficulty it inflicts on the player base.

But when you can bring us improved functionality, that can be very much worth the pain.

Anyway, looking forward to good new stuff. :)
 
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I gotta say, a lot of suggestions I see here are on the crazier side and that goes for this one as well. Crazy in the sense that "Why haven't we done this already?".
I had to move the occupation icon, but otherwise I think it can work pretty well!

Disclaimer: I can guarantee NONE of the following:
1. This will ever actually be put in the game.
2. This will be the default option (If I get to choose, I think I want to support all three variants and default to planet only for reduced visual noise for new players)
3. The other devs (UI design in particular) will actually agree with me.
4. @Offe is a human.

1661461046346.png
I love this! Not sure about the purple circle, but this would definitely be so much better!

By the way, would you also consider adding planet designations and planet designation icons to the Resettlement and Empire View menus too? It would really help out in navigating those.
 
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I love this! Not sure about the purple circle, but this would definitely be so much better!
If you open a color picker, you can find this one under the name "SCREAMING_PLACEHOLDER_MAGENTA" ;)
Jokes aside; It's our universal color for placeholder art, so it's not meant to represent the aesthetics. It's meant to stand out in order to make it hard to accidentally ship with placeholder art.

By the way, would you also consider adding planet designations and planet designation icons to the Resettlement and Empire View menus too? It would really help out in navigating those.
As I mentioned, this is just a prototype I made because I liked the idea. It's mostly up to UX design if it's something we actually want to do.
We could see about adding it to other views if it's successful here or elsewhere.
 
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