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Stellaris Dev Diary #264 - Damn the Consequences

‘Sup, trash bangers?

Today we’ll be taking a look at some of the features coming in the Toxoids Species Pack. As we’re on an accelerated dev diary schedule, there’s no time to lose! Let’s jump straight into this and turn it over to @Gruntsatwork .

Overtuned​


One of our two new Origins for Toxoids, Overtuned is the grim but exalting reminder that a brief life burns the brightest. Through invasive surgery and by modifying biochemical pathways you can impart your pops with 13 new overtuned traits. Each of these traits is a mirror to an already existing, far more survivable trait.

An Overtuned Empire being made


As you can see, the overtuned traits can even be picked with their “natural” opposing traits, or stacked with their mirrors for all your double-dipping needs. There are next to no restrictions on mixing them with other traits, so feel free to create whatever biological monstrosities you can imagine.

In practice, the overtuned traits are all about as strong or slightly weaker than their mirror traits, usually cheaper in trait point cost and reduce your leader lifespan depending on their point cost.

In addition to their normal effects, the origin will also grant you access to a new edict called “Damn the Consequences”.

This edict doubles the positive effect of all overtuned traits, but also doubles the upkeep of those pops. Its unity cost is a percentage of your own unity income, so you will always be able to damn the consequences. Furthermore, the edict has a lock-in period of 5 years, which means you will not be able to cancel the edict until it has been active for those 5 years.

New Traits​


With Toxoids, we are adding 4 new traits to the game, available to all portraits and 3 of these traits will be available at gamestart.

Incubators
Incubators

Incubator pops will enjoy only a modest bonus on their capital worlds given their starting number of pops but fresh colonies will quickly reveal its full power.

Inorganic Breath
Inorganic Breath

A small but flavorful addition to our trait roster, to better support your exotic needs.

Noxious
Noxious

Noxious pops will decrease the happiness of all non-noxious pops on the same planet, while in turn receiving a happiness bonus for every non-noxious and therefore unhappy pop. Talk about toxic neighbors.

Exotic Metabolism however, is an advanced Trait and will thus require fully finished Genetic Ascension, as it requires a robust economy to support their exotic upkeep.
Exotic Metabolism

Its benefits are strong, its upkeep severe and it requires a deep investment into biological enhancements, we hope to see some interesting builds with this.

Civics​


Toxoids will also bring 3 new civics with it, to give you more of that slimy but satisfying feeling.

Mutagenic Spas
Mutagenic Spas and Gestalt variants

Our first civic that does not start you out with its special building, Mutagenic Spas, and all of its alternate versions, give you the option of boosting your pop growth on highly industrialized worlds, as your pops enjoy the fruits of your pollution.

Relentless Industrialists
Relentless Industrialists

Relentless Industrialists will have to deal with an ongoing situation about the environmental effects of their increased efficiency in alloy and consumer goods production. Of course, should you be cold-hearted and profit-oriented enough, it becomes a self-solving problem, if you can afford to work in such a hostile environment.

Scavengers
Scavengers

Arriving hand in hand with one of our changes for the free patch, namely the ability to choose what you wish to gain from debris, alloys or research, the new Scavenger civic will allow an empire to gain both benefits as well as salvage some actual ships from the debris.

Megacorps have access to all three civics.

Detox Ascension Perk​

Detox Ascension Perk

Detox Ascension Perk

Even the toughest species can’t quite survive in a world that is entirely poisonous.

50% poisonous however is another beast altogether.

With the Detox ascension perk, empires will be able to turn those giant balls of death into giant balls of not-quite-death.

Given how perilous toxic worlds are, this act of terraforming will be a bit more involved than normal, since even after the initial phase makes them colonizable, there will be remnants of their toxic pasts interfering with their prosperity.

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Next Dev Diary​

This Thursday we’ll have a dev diary from the Artists, including some interesting things about the character’s outfits and what we’ve done differently there.

See you then! Don't forget you can Pre-Order Toxoids Now!
 
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Like all ethics materialist is a bit of a grab bag of various philosophies. You can view it purely as "science good and ghosts bad" (which is how I play it), but it also encompasses the "fact and logic" crowd who think emotions and ethics are nonsense and all that matters is number go up. Turning the entire planet into an uninhabitable wasteland is a small price to pay for +10% FPS in Call of Blorgball!

Personally I'd change it to materialist OR xenophobe - who cares if all the goolantha go extinct if it means real people get floaty leather couches? That opens up spiritualist xenophobes destroying the planet because "God gave them dominion", which may sound familiar.
i would give it to all ethics and just make it incompatible with civics.
 
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Nice that Scavengers can receive ships from debris. This includes Fallen Empire ships ?

And i hope there is interactions with mechanical leviathans and with the Salvagers.
 
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It's excellent, wonderful , ecstasy at its peak, but we Stellarians always want more and more and MORE !!!

p.s : where are our Aquatics and Overlord Froum Icons ??? Toxiods is soon here and we dont see our Icons !!!
 
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Syncretic Evolution looking very strong with the overclocked perks, since they can't be leaders anyway.

EDIT: Nevermind, since they need the origin it's not possible.
 
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Species habitability cap is interesting, would a -30% hab cap mean that on non-gaian worlds, that species will always, at most, be at 70% habitability? even on gaian worlds/after accounting for +habitability soc techs?

Relentless Industrialists
Relentless Industrialists will have to deal with an ongoing situation about the environmental effects of their increased efficiency in alloy and consumer goods production. Of course, should you be cold-hearted and profit-oriented enough, it becomes a self-solving problem, if you can afford to work in such a hostile environment.

Scavengers
Arriving hand in hand with one of our changes for the free patch, namely the ability to choose what you wish to gain from debris, alloys or research, the new Scavenger civic will allow an empire to gain both benefits as well as salvage some actual ships from the debris.

Megacorps have access to all three civics.
I see megacorps get access to all the civics... will Machine intelligences or Hives get access to Scavengers or Relentless industrialists too? Both can be very on-brand for a world ravaging, or salvaging, machine or swarm style of nation.

Also will relentless industrialists occasionally spawn toxic-world blockers on tomb worlds? I.e. they damage habitability on non-tombs, but once transforming to tombs, you need to occasionally prune away blockers that get spawned.

Detox Ascension Perk
I saw on the 1st look YT stream yesterday, they mentioned that Toxic world terraforming candidates will be pre-seeded at game start (understandable given the number of toxic worlds) - this implied that they wont be found via anomalies as current terraforming candidates are.

Will Non-toxic terraforming candidates also move to a "seeded at game start" kind of model, too?

It would be really nice if that was the case, currently TCs spawn quite late in the game in odd places far from your home system, after the anomalies pool have been exhausted - it would be better if they were seeded uniformly at game start, maybe with the overall number varying with galaxy size, or habitable planet count (though a separate slider just for #terraforming candidates would be great, letting you set up a game with a lot of habitable worlds - but you need to terraform them first to use them).

Given how perilous toxic worlds are, this act of terraforming will be a bit more involved than normal, since even after the initial phase makes them colonizable, there will be remnants of their toxic pasts interfering with their prosperity.
Will there be any unique planetary features, in addition to blockers? E.g. a higher chance to spawn gas extraction sites. or maybe all miners on toxic worlds produce 0.05 exotic gas, inherently, and so on. As, after terraforming the planet away from being toxic, it sounds like its... just a normal planet.

I've found that if a world isn't Gaian, ecu/hive/machine, or ocean (when aquatic)... its basically forgettable. The different climate types need some intrinsic bonuses or mechanics, to feel more unique IMO.
 
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It is near seeing a Detox Ascension perk but no mention of one that will allow us to make a planet toxic.

I assume this will have to be related to one of the other new origin packs which is rumored to give us an ancient but alive colossus. If this is the case then that would mean Toxoids don't necessarily gain bonuses from just living on toxic worlds however a toxic world could provide bonuses if one was used or discovered. I like the way this is sounding.
 
Would it be possible to start with overtuned, rush to get another species into your empire, and then overload your main species with busted traits that destroy leader lifespan while just primarily recruiting leaders from the other species?
 
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Would it be possible to start with overtuned, rush to get another species into your empire, and then overload your main species with busted traits that destroy leader lifespan while just primarily recruiting leaders from the other species?
Yes, if ur empire isnt xenophobe and allows other spevies as leaders.
 
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Regarding Detox - I believe that it has been said that only some of the Toxic planets will be terraforming candidates. Will those be rolled on map generation or generated by scanning, like with Barren worlds?

Why does Hyper Lubrication Basin have "Does not have the Origin Life-Seeded", when Machine empires cannot be Life-Seeded?
 
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Could the terraforming techs be readjusted in cost, to make it more likely to have them around the mid-game? I don't play competitively, but I find it takes until almost the late game before I have climate restoration because it takes a while to roll (in the cases I've seen). Could the tech be moved to the same tier as ecological adaptation, with the caveat that you need ecological adaptation before you can roll climate restoration?
 
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Roughly how fast does the Coordinated Fulfillment Center turn worlds into tomb worlds? Would be a nice addition to radiotrophic, post apocalyptic nations.
 
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