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Stellaris Dev Diary #306 - Habitat Experiments

Hi everyone!

I hope your summers have been going well! I got a bit sunburnt, but today we’re back and ready to talk about some of the promising experimentation we’ve been doing with the Habitat system.

We’ll be going through the entire development process in this dev diary, so there’s going to be a lot of ideas that were interesting but were subsequently discarded for various reasons.

Why Are You Looking at Habitats Again?​

The Stellaris Custodian team looks to three primary categories when deciding what to pursue:
  • Directives: Things dictated by me, the Game Director, usually for long term strategic reasons.
  • Community: Things you ask for. Pain points, quality of life improvements, bug fixing, and other good ideas from the community.
  • Passion: Things the individual developers really want to do.

Conveniently, a lot of times all of these align quite nicely.

Let’s start by looking at the history of Habitats in Stellaris.

Habitats were introduced way back in the 1.5 ‘Banks’ update in Utopia.

In 2.3 ‘Wolfe’, alongside Ancient Relics, we removed the Voidborne requirement to build Habitats, adjusted their habitability a little bit, and gave them varying districts based on what they were built over.

The 2.7 ‘Wells’ patch made the next major change to Habitats, adjusting their costs, requirements, and adding multiple tiers.

Since then, we’ve added a couple of special Habitat variants, and various other reworks have shifted their fortunes up and down in the overall balance of the game. Recently, there have been many requests from the community to review the tendency of AI empires building dozens of Habitats when they’re otherwise unable to expand.

Due to how production and population work in Stellaris, this led to an interesting quandary - it is theoretically “correct” for the AI to create many Habitats if it was blocked in, but it was tedious as a player to deal with invading up to a dozen Habitats per system. (The current interactions with population growth have also always been troublesome on the game balance side.)

Habitats were feeling far too common, were too good at certain things, and weren’t capturing the base fantasy that we were looking for. They’re the central pillar of a very popular playstyle that we wanted to preserve, though, so this made them a perfect target for “summer experimentation”.

Everything in this dev diary is considered experimental, and may or may not make it live.
All numbers are placeholders for prototyping purposes only. There is no set release date for any of these changes at this time, but we welcome community feedback.

Different Takes​

One of the most common requests from the Community was to add a Galaxy slider to restrict the use of Habitats. Options could have ranged from banning Habitats entirely, to “Nobody (except Void Dwellers) can create Habitats”, requiring the Ascension Perk to build them again, restricting only the AI, or placing (hard or soft) limits to the number of Habitats that could be built.

We also discussed “what if Habitats cost fractional Starbase Capacity to build” - with Void Dwellers and the Voidborne AP granting discounts to this value. This was more appealing, since the soft cap would control AI use of Habitats nicely without significantly hindering players that wanted to go all-in on them.

These discussions led to some questioning about whether Stellaris Habitats were satisfying the general fantasy well enough, and whether Habitats should be more “hard sci-fi”, with lower habitability bases or even ceilings for those accustomed to planetbound life, and whether we could make changes that would address balance challenges like Hive Void Dwellers.

A More Complex Take​

We made a list of some of the current challenges caused by the existing Habitat system, and this led to the idea of “what if all the Habitats in a system were linked?” We could retain the interesting expansion of Habitats across a system while reducing the burden when seizing the system, and potentially address some of the other problems introduced by an excess number of Habitats in the galaxy.

Alfray threw together an incredibly hacky and utterly unshippable version of this, and continued iterating on it during the Summer.

Under this variant, the first Habitat built within a system is the Central Habitat Complex. Additional Habitats are Support Habitats that add additional space and versatility to the Central Complex. A reminder, many values are grossly unbalanced placeholders in the following screenshots.

At this point I went on vacation, so I’ll turn this over to Alfray to talk about his investigations.

Once More Into the Alfray​

Keep in mind that the numbers shown in the below screenshots are never intended to be the final values, but were used purely for testing purposes of how the systems felt to use and play with.

Firstly, to counteract the expected changes that with minimal Support Habitats, the Central Complex would be small, cramped and overall not great to live on, I gave Void Dwellers extra districts and building slots as a unique modifier (This saw further refinement in a later prototype).

An early version of Void Dwellers

Support Habitats as Megastructures:​


The first iteration of these prototypes made use of Support Habitats as additional megastructures.

Habitat Central Complex, v1
Support Habitat v1
Expanded Support Habitat v1
Advanced Support Habitat v1

In this prototype, we had the maximum amount of each type of resource collection district (Energy, Minerals, Research) limited by the size of the deposits the habitats were constructed over, similar to how buildings for Strategic Resources are limited.

Support Habitats provided additional Districts, Building Slots, and Housing to the Habitat Central Complex, while reducing the Habitability (to reflect the civilian traffic between habitats) as they are upgraded. The final tier also allowed the Habitat Complex to use deposits on moons of their orbited planet.

On the surface, this prototype seems to satisfy our initial requirements and more:
  • Conquering systems with Habitat-spam was easier due to there only being one functional “planet” per system.
  • Constructing multiple Habitats per system felt rewarding as it upgraded your existing colony.
  • The removal of multiple starting colonies removed one of our main concerns for allowing Hive-Minds to have access to the Void Dweller origin - their high pop growth rate due to excessive numbers of spawning pools in the early game. (Iggy had some thoughts on this that he’ll be mentioning in a future Dev Diary).

A Void Dweller Habitat Complex with way too many districts

A Void Dweller Habitat Complex.

A very cluttered system

The rather cluttered system said Habitat Complex is in.

However, the Support Habitats couldn’t be interacted with outside being upgraded, which felt like a major downside. Enemy ships would happily fly past and ignore the Support Habitats, they couldn’t be specialised or downgraded.

All things considered, this prototype showed that making habitats into a single logical planet spread across many entities in a solar system felt good, but megastructures were not the path forward.

Support Habitats as “Starbases”:​


Keep in mind that the numbers shown in the below screenshots are never intended to be the final values, but were used purely for testing purposes of how the systems felt to use and play with.

The below screenshots feature placeholder art and the default art for starbases, their buildings and modules.


The second iteration of this prototype investigated treating Support Habitats as special Starbases (much like Orbital Rings).

In this prototype, the districts available to Habitat Central Complexes depend on the configuration of any Support Habitats in the same system. Thus construction of a Habitat Central Complex would automatically build a neighbouring Support Habitat in orbit of the same planet.

When built, a Support Habitat would start with a module that matches any deposits on the planet it orbits. Each <District> Module on a Support Habitat, gives +3 Max Districts of that type to the Habitat Central Complex.

Upgrading the Support Habitats, still provides the same modifiers as shown in Megastructure Prototype. Additionally each tier of the Support Habitat allows construction of an additional Support Habitat module and the second and third tiers allow construction of a Support Habitat building.

Expanded Support Complex v2

The starting Habitat Central Complex and its neighbouring Support Habitat for a Void Dweller empire.

New Habitat Complex v2

A newly constructed Habitat Central Complex, completely unspecialised.

Allowing the choice of which districts the Habitat Central Complex has access to via specialisation of the Support Habitats brings some interesting changes to how Habitat-dependent empires play.

Due to the nature of the prototype, the buildings for Support Habitats haven’t seen much investigation yet, but would likely include buildings much like those on an Orbital Ring, the lunar extraction support that Advanced Support Habitats experimented with in the Megastructure Prototype above and other such buildings.

Research Habitat Complex, v3 or so?

A Research Habitat Complex, using some of the district capacity to provide hydroponic districts.

Due to the nature of summer experiments, we can’t say if or when this prototype might make it into the live version of the game, but it’s something that we’re interested in exploring further.

…But the fourth one stayed up!​

Thanks, Alfray.

That variant listed achieved a lot of the goals we were looking for, but was cobbled together out of the scripting equivalent of sticks and twine as a quick and dirty implementation. It also required a lot of back and forth clicking that we really weren’t too fond of. So after that one burned down, fell over, and sank into the swamp, we came up with another iteration.

My feedback: Simplify things.

The latest variant we’ve been playing with has been especially promising. In this one, we turned the “Starbase” style Support Habitats into single tiered “pre-specialized” units (renamed to “Orbitals” for UX purposes) rather than requiring Modules to be built on them - so you could build a Mining Orbital, Research Orbital, and so on.

This dramatically simplified the flow of building out Habitats while simultaneously improving the implementation.

It's an Orbital!

Pre-Specialized Research Orbital.

Habitat Transit Hub. Hey wait, Maintenance DRONES?

Unique buildings on the primary habitat complex can increase the effects of the orbitals.

Upgraded Habitat Transit building.

We’re still doing some experimentation with this model, but so far we’re liking what we’re seeing. Technologies can add special Orbital types or buildings that can modify the primary Habitat Complex, and it’s very easy for us (or modders) to add new types.

We've been looking at jobs per districts too - the Complexes have different challenges from the older Habitat system, and further updated the Voidborne Ascension Perk. Void Dwellers will start with its effects (similar to how Teachers of the Shroud empires effectively start with Mind over Matter).

Void Dwellers Final Text
Voidborne Ascension Perk v3.final.final(2)

Void Dwellers get Habitat Build Cost reductions in Traditions.

What’s Next?​

For now, I’d like to get some of your thoughts on what you’ve seen today, which we’ll bring into our internal design discussions. It would also be great to get feedback on whether you like this sort of diary, where we go through the overall process (including the failures).

Next week I'd like to talk about a Summer Experiment relating to leaders that didn’t pan out quite so well, and our plans on how to proceed with that.

See you then!
 
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I like the central habitat managing population for a sector. I also like adding pseudo-Starbase structures for Habitats since that's a point of parity between Planets and Habitats that's currently lacking.

I'm not sure I see a reason to strongly differentiate between Mining/Research Stations and Habitat Expansions short of incremental resource costs for building up the central habitat.

I think Void Dwellers shouldn't have access to the Voidborne perk. It's kind of an automatic pick if they do. I think that they should have access to a lot of the bonuses up-front rather than buried in the Tradition trees, too, since that will somewhat restrict their play lines. Realistically I think they should always be *a little bit* better on Habitats than other origins, even after other origins pick up the Voidborne perk. Being as totally non-functional as they are on planets really hurts.

I'm sure it's already been brought up, but when habitability bonuses start coming into effect, other races are going to start taking over Growth on habitats with Void Dweller empires because of the innate growth rate penalty of Void Dwellers. I think at some point there should be an event or technology or something that singificantly mitigates or outright negates that penalty in order to make it so the primary species in a Void Dweller empire is still able to grow on the habitats.

I think tying Habitats to Starbase capacity is a bit of a mistake the way Starbase Capacity currently works. If you do it, there should be changes made to Starbase capacity to help accommodate the larger number of "starbases" that are going to be floating around, including softening the Starbase cap so it's not a straight +25% upkeep on every starbase for each starbase you are over cap. Alternatively, maybe Starbase Cap should be done away with and, instead, Starbases and Starbase-like structures (read: Orbital Rings) would simply contribute directly to Empire Size, or maybe a hybrid approach is made where exceeding Starbase Capacity instead applies an Empire Size penalty (something like 5-10 size per starbase over capacity?).
 
I love this style of dev diary! I generally try not to complain too much about videogames anyway, but this sort of in-depth look helped heaps in being able to understand why y'all make certain decisions, and why """easy alternatives""" or "cool ideas" might be worse in ways we can't really see. I really appreciate y'all trusting us with this.


I'm a big fan of habitats, and I like them mainly because I love the idea of playing tall and making the best use of the space I have - I really don't like going to war aggressively, so for me an enjoyable part of Stellaris is expanding out to my limits and then focusing on developing the space I've secured, and preparing to defend it against whatever comes knocking. I love that this new habitat system would no longer anti-synergise with my generally preferred tall playstyle (Rogue Servitors getting increased penalties to empire size on a per planet rather than per system basis), and that it feels more "tall" to build up one big habitat per system. Should be very nice gameplay wise as well, to have one planet to manage the bits and bobs of rather than "6 identical habitats where we mindlessly click for a build order because this is the 5th time we've done this to a newly conquered system". This new system looks much, much better.

Question, the Dev diary talked a fair bit about Hive Minds being able to start with Void Dwellers, which would be fantastic. Does this mean that Machine Intelligences could start with Void Dwellers as well, specifically Rogue Servitors? I love the roleplay and fantasy of the Servitors having successfully saved their creators from extinction by evacuating them to orbit, and now they have to figure out where to go from there.
 
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suggestion
1.It feels that it will be more interesting if different sized planets have 1.different amounts of building slots available, instead of all having twelve. A thirty sized planet having the same amount of building slots as a five sized planet seems weirdIt might be interesting to remove the cap on building slots so that players can build a really huge planet
2.A population mechanic that relies on the growth of planetary numbers could be an obstacle to the game moving forward
3.Maybe turn leaders into powerful but rare specialized leaders and low level leaders that can be used in large numbers For example, it occupies capacity based on level and can limit upgrades
 
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What if I build a Habitat on Dragon's Hoard? Will those resource still be wasted?
 
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I like some of the ideas here but what is to stop the ai spamming habitats even with this new system?

I think the habitat influence cost should double for every habitat you build in the same system.

I also think there should be some relation to empire size so that its more costly/harder for larger empires to build than smaller empires, thereby maintaining the tall v wide strategy.
 
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Hi everyone!

I hope your summers have been going well! I got a bit sunburnt, but today we’re back and ready to talk about some of the promising experimentation we’ve been doing with the Habitat system.

We’ll be going through the entire development process in this dev diary, so there’s going to be a lot of ideas that were interesting but were subsequently discarded for various reasons.

Why Are You Looking at Habitats Again?​

The Stellaris Custodian team looks to three primary categories when deciding what to pursue:
  • Directives: Things dictated by me, the Game Director, usually for long term strategic reasons.
  • Community: Things you ask for. Pain points, quality of life improvements, bug fixing, and other good ideas from the community.
  • Passion: Things the individual developers really want to do.

Conveniently, a lot of times all of these align quite nicely.

Let’s start by looking at the history of Habitats in Stellaris.

Habitats were introduced way back in the 1.5 ‘Banks’ update in Utopia.

In 2.3 ‘Wolfe’, alongside Ancient Relics, we removed the Voidborne requirement to build Habitats, adjusted their habitability a little bit, and gave them varying districts based on what they were built over.

The 2.7 ‘Wells’ patch made the next major change to Habitats, adjusting their costs, requirements, and adding multiple tiers.

Since then, we’ve added a couple of special Habitat variants, and various other reworks have shifted their fortunes up and down in the overall balance of the game. Recently, there have been many requests from the community to review the tendency of AI empires building dozens of Habitats when they’re otherwise unable to expand.

Due to how production and population work in Stellaris, this led to an interesting quandary - it is theoretically “correct” for the AI to create many Habitats if it was blocked in, but it was tedious as a player to deal with invading up to a dozen Habitats per system. (The current interactions with population growth have also always been troublesome on the game balance side.)

Habitats were feeling far too common, were too good at certain things, and weren’t capturing the base fantasy that we were looking for. They’re the central pillar of a very popular playstyle that we wanted to preserve, though, so this made them a perfect target for “summer experimentation”.

Everything in this dev diary is considered experimental, and may or may not make it live.
All numbers are placeholders for prototyping purposes only. There is no set release date for any of these changes at this time, but we welcome community feedback.

Different Takes​

One of the most common requests from the Community was to add a Galaxy slider to restrict the use of Habitats. Options could have ranged from banning Habitats entirely, to “Nobody (except Void Dwellers) can create Habitats”, requiring the Ascension Perk to build them again, restricting only the AI, or placing (hard or soft) limits to the number of Habitats that could be built.

We also discussed “what if Habitats cost fractional Starbase Capacity to build” - with Void Dwellers and the Voidborne AP granting discounts to this value. This was more appealing, since the soft cap would control AI use of Habitats nicely without significantly hindering players that wanted to go all-in on them.

These discussions led to some questioning about whether Stellaris Habitats were satisfying the general fantasy well enough, and whether Habitats should be more “hard sci-fi”, with lower habitability bases or even ceilings for those accustomed to planetbound life, and whether we could make changes that would address balance challenges like Hive Void Dwellers.

A More Complex Take​

We made a list of some of the current challenges caused by the existing Habitat system, and this led to the idea of “what if all the Habitats in a system were linked?” We could retain the interesting expansion of Habitats across a system while reducing the burden when seizing the system, and potentially address some of the other problems introduced by an excess number of Habitats in the galaxy.

Alfray threw together an incredibly hacky and utterly unshippable version of this, and continued iterating on it during the Summer.

Under this variant, the first Habitat built within a system is the Central Habitat Complex. Additional Habitats are Support Habitats that add additional space and versatility to the Central Complex. A reminder, many values are grossly unbalanced placeholders in the following screenshots.

At this point I went on vacation, so I’ll turn this over to Alfray to talk about his investigations.

Once More Into the Alfray​

Keep in mind that the numbers shown in the below screenshots are never intended to be the final values, but were used purely for testing purposes of how the systems felt to use and play with.

Firstly, to counteract the expected changes that with minimal Support Habitats, the Central Complex would be small, cramped and overall not great to live on, I gave Void Dwellers extra districts and building slots as a unique modifier (This saw further refinement in a later prototype).


Support Habitats as Megastructures:​


The first iteration of these prototypes made use of Support Habitats as additional megastructures.


In this prototype, we had the maximum amount of each type of resource collection district (Energy, Minerals, Research) limited by the size of the deposits the habitats were constructed over, similar to how buildings for Strategic Resources are limited.

Support Habitats provided additional Districts, Building Slots, and Housing to the Habitat Central Complex, while reducing the Habitability (to reflect the civilian traffic between habitats) as they are upgraded. The final tier also allowed the Habitat Complex to use deposits on moons of their orbited planet.

On the surface, this prototype seems to satisfy our initial requirements and more:
  • Conquering systems with Habitat-spam was easier due to there only being one functional “planet” per system.
  • Constructing multiple Habitats per system felt rewarding as it upgraded your existing colony.
  • The removal of multiple starting colonies removed one of our main concerns for allowing Hive-Minds to have access to the Void Dweller origin - their high pop growth rate due to excessive numbers of spawning pools in the early game. (Iggy had some thoughts on this that he’ll be mentioning in a future Dev Diary).

View attachment 1008242
A Void Dweller Habitat Complex.

View attachment 1008243
The rather cluttered system said Habitat Complex is in.

However, the Support Habitats couldn’t be interacted with outside being upgraded, which felt like a major downside. Enemy ships would happily fly past and ignore the Support Habitats, they couldn’t be specialised or downgraded.

All things considered, this prototype showed that making habitats into a single logical planet spread across many entities in a solar system felt good, but megastructures were not the path forward.

Support Habitats as “Starbases”:​


Keep in mind that the numbers shown in the below screenshots are never intended to be the final values, but were used purely for testing purposes of how the systems felt to use and play with.

The below screenshots feature placeholder art and the default art for starbases, their buildings and modules.


The second iteration of this prototype investigated treating Support Habitats as special Starbases (much like Orbital Rings).

In this prototype, the districts available to Habitat Central Complexes depend on the configuration of any Support Habitats in the same system. Thus construction of a Habitat Central Complex would automatically build a neighbouring Support Habitat in orbit of the same planet.

When built, a Support Habitat would start with a module that matches any deposits on the planet it orbits. Each <District> Module on a Support Habitat, gives +3 Max Districts of that type to the Habitat Central Complex.

Upgrading the Support Habitats, still provides the same modifiers as shown in Megastructure Prototype. Additionally each tier of the Support Habitat allows construction of an additional Support Habitat module and the second and third tiers allow construction of a Support Habitat building.

View attachment 1008244
The starting Habitat Central Complex and its neighbouring Support Habitat for a Void Dweller empire.

View attachment 1008245
A newly constructed Habitat Central Complex, completely unspecialised.

Allowing the choice of which districts the Habitat Central Complex has access to via specialisation of the Support Habitats brings some interesting changes to how Habitat-dependent empires play.

Due to the nature of the prototype, the buildings for Support Habitats haven’t seen much investigation yet, but would likely include buildings much like those on an Orbital Ring, the lunar extraction support that Advanced Support Habitats experimented with in the Megastructure Prototype above and other such buildings.

View attachment 1008246
A Research Habitat Complex, using some of the district capacity to provide hydroponic districts.

Due to the nature of summer experiments, we can’t say if or when this prototype might make it into the live version of the game, but it’s something that we’re interested in exploring further.

…But the fourth one stayed up!​

Thanks, Alfray.

That variant listed achieved a lot of the goals we were looking for, but was cobbled together out of the scripting equivalent of sticks and twine as a quick and dirty implementation. It also required a lot of back and forth clicking that we really weren’t too fond of. So after that one burned down, fell over, and sank into the swamp, we came up with another iteration.

My feedback: Simplify things.

The latest variant we’ve been playing with has been especially promising. In this one, we turned the “Starbase” style Support Habitats into single tiered “pre-specialized” units (renamed to “Orbitals” for UX purposes) rather than requiring Modules to be built on them - so you could build a Mining Orbital, Research Orbital, and so on.

This dramatically simplified the flow of building out Habitats while simultaneously improving the implementation.

View attachment 1008247
Pre-Specialized Research Orbital.

View attachment 1008248
Unique buildings on the primary habitat complex can increase the effects of the orbitals.

View attachment 1008249

We’re still doing some experimentation with this model, but so far we’re liking what we’re seeing. Technologies can add special Orbital types or buildings that can modify the primary Habitat Complex, and it’s very easy for us (or modders) to add new types.

We've been looking at jobs per districts too - the Complexes have different challenges from the older Habitat system, and further updated the Voidborne Ascension Perk. Void Dwellers will start with its effects (similar to how Teachers of the Shroud empires effectively start with Mind over Matter).

View attachment 1008271View attachment 1008265
Void Dwellers get Habitat Build Cost reductions in Traditions.

What’s Next?​

For now, I’d like to get some of your thoughts on what you’ve seen today, which we’ll bring into our internal design discussions. It would also be great to get feedback on whether you like this sort of diary, where we go through the overall process (including the failures).

Next week I'd like to talk about a Summer Experiment relating to leaders that didn’t pan out quite so well, and our plans on how to proceed with that.

See you then!

Besides Void Dwellers, Knights of the Toxic God and Payback origins also have their unique Haibtats. Will these also be reworked?

KNIGHT HABITAT.png

PAYBACK HABITAT.png



Also, what about Habitats in Federation's End and Ithome's Gate?
FEDERATIONSEND.png


ITHOME.png
 
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I'm not sure whether you guys already considered this, it's not explicitely mentioned in the Dev Diary; my opinion is that habitats should only be able to be built in systems without a inhabitable celestial body, and it should disable terraforming. It doesn't make sense for a habitat to be built, especially now that it's a lot more of an investment, when you can just settle a planet right? With the probably exception of void dwellers. Maybe people will very much disagree with this, but it at least limits where you can build them and works for immersion.
 
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Fingers crossed for KotTG getting a superhabitat and being able to make their knights even more ludicrously powerful.
We are the Knights Who Say... Damn. That's a Lot of Quest Progress.

This is probably a buff by default, between squires and how knights scale off population. Didn't consider that, it's one of my favorite origins even just mechanically.
 
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I'm not exactly a fan of reducing habitability to reflect civilian traffic between habitats. If anything, pop demotion time is increased because if you got a job on Habitat A, you would have to relocate from Habitat B. I seriously doubt a spacefaring civilization would require their population to sit on one habitat and move everywhere by space bus to get to work. If you live in Scotland and have a job in London, you don't drive there every day; you either find a job in your local area or move closer to London. And because those support habitats add district slots I assume the pops already live there.
Using habitability to represent that feels more like the ability to drive a car in the middle of summer without the air conditioning, or in the middle of winter without heating.

Using amenities would probably be a better solution, in my opinion. They are already used to represent infrastructure, so why not use them instead?
 
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I'm not sure whether you guys already considered this, it's not explicitely mentioned in the Dev Diary; my opinion is that habitats should only be able to be built in systems without a inhabitable celestial body, and it should disable terraforming. It doesn't make sense for a habitat to be built, especially now that it's a lot more of an investment, when you can just settle a planet right? With the probably exception of void dwellers. Maybe people will very much disagree with this, but it at least limits where you can build them and works for immersion.
How would it be immersive for planets being magically prevented from being terraformed because there is a hunk of metal floating in the general vicinity?
 
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How would it be immersive for planets being magically prevented from being terraformed because there is a hunk of metal floating in the general vicinity?
Same way it is for the presence of a hunk of metal floating in the general vicinity of a planet to prevent you from building a hunk of metal in the shape of a ring around a planet, and the other way around.

...wait.
 
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Hi everyone!

I hope your summers have been going well! I got a bit sunburnt, but today we’re back and ready to talk about some of the promising experimentation we’ve been doing with the Habitat system.

We’ll be going through the entire development process in this dev diary, so there’s going to be a lot of ideas that were interesting but were subsequently discarded for various reasons.

Why Are You Looking at Habitats Again?​

The Stellaris Custodian team looks to three primary categories when deciding what to pursue:
  • Directives: Things dictated by me, the Game Director, usually for long term strategic reasons.
  • Community: Things you ask for. Pain points, quality of life improvements, bug fixing, and other good ideas from the community.
  • Passion: Things the individual developers really want to do.

Conveniently, a lot of times all of these align quite nicely.

Let’s start by looking at the history of Habitats in Stellaris.

Habitats were introduced way back in the 1.5 ‘Banks’ update in Utopia.

In 2.3 ‘Wolfe’, alongside Ancient Relics, we removed the Voidborne requirement to build Habitats, adjusted their habitability a little bit, and gave them varying districts based on what they were built over.

The 2.7 ‘Wells’ patch made the next major change to Habitats, adjusting their costs, requirements, and adding multiple tiers.

Since then, we’ve added a couple of special Habitat variants, and various other reworks have shifted their fortunes up and down in the overall balance of the game. Recently, there have been many requests from the community to review the tendency of AI empires building dozens of Habitats when they’re otherwise unable to expand.

Due to how production and population work in Stellaris, this led to an interesting quandary - it is theoretically “correct” for the AI to create many Habitats if it was blocked in, but it was tedious as a player to deal with invading up to a dozen Habitats per system. (The current interactions with population growth have also always been troublesome on the game balance side.)

Habitats were feeling far too common, were too good at certain things, and weren’t capturing the base fantasy that we were looking for. They’re the central pillar of a very popular playstyle that we wanted to preserve, though, so this made them a perfect target for “summer experimentation”.

Everything in this dev diary is considered experimental, and may or may not make it live.
All numbers are placeholders for prototyping purposes only. There is no set release date for any of these changes at this time, but we welcome community feedback.

Different Takes​

One of the most common requests from the Community was to add a Galaxy slider to restrict the use of Habitats. Options could have ranged from banning Habitats entirely, to “Nobody (except Void Dwellers) can create Habitats”, requiring the Ascension Perk to build them again, restricting only the AI, or placing (hard or soft) limits to the number of Habitats that could be built.

We also discussed “what if Habitats cost fractional Starbase Capacity to build” - with Void Dwellers and the Voidborne AP granting discounts to this value. This was more appealing, since the soft cap would control AI use of Habitats nicely without significantly hindering players that wanted to go all-in on them.

These discussions led to some questioning about whether Stellaris Habitats were satisfying the general fantasy well enough, and whether Habitats should be more “hard sci-fi”, with lower habitability bases or even ceilings for those accustomed to planetbound life, and whether we could make changes that would address balance challenges like Hive Void Dwellers.

A More Complex Take​

We made a list of some of the current challenges caused by the existing Habitat system, and this led to the idea of “what if all the Habitats in a system were linked?” We could retain the interesting expansion of Habitats across a system while reducing the burden when seizing the system, and potentially address some of the other problems introduced by an excess number of Habitats in the galaxy.

Alfray threw together an incredibly hacky and utterly unshippable version of this, and continued iterating on it during the Summer.

Under this variant, the first Habitat built within a system is the Central Habitat Complex. Additional Habitats are Support Habitats that add additional space and versatility to the Central Complex. A reminder, many values are grossly unbalanced placeholders in the following screenshots.

At this point I went on vacation, so I’ll turn this over to Alfray to talk about his investigations.

Once More Into the Alfray​

Keep in mind that the numbers shown in the below screenshots are never intended to be the final values, but were used purely for testing purposes of how the systems felt to use and play with.

Firstly, to counteract the expected changes that with minimal Support Habitats, the Central Complex would be small, cramped and overall not great to live on, I gave Void Dwellers extra districts and building slots as a unique modifier (This saw further refinement in a later prototype).


Support Habitats as Megastructures:​


The first iteration of these prototypes made use of Support Habitats as additional megastructures.


In this prototype, we had the maximum amount of each type of resource collection district (Energy, Minerals, Research) limited by the size of the deposits the habitats were constructed over, similar to how buildings for Strategic Resources are limited.

Support Habitats provided additional Districts, Building Slots, and Housing to the Habitat Central Complex, while reducing the Habitability (to reflect the civilian traffic between habitats) as they are upgraded. The final tier also allowed the Habitat Complex to use deposits on moons of their orbited planet.

On the surface, this prototype seems to satisfy our initial requirements and more:
  • Conquering systems with Habitat-spam was easier due to there only being one functional “planet” per system.
  • Constructing multiple Habitats per system felt rewarding as it upgraded your existing colony.
  • The removal of multiple starting colonies removed one of our main concerns for allowing Hive-Minds to have access to the Void Dweller origin - their high pop growth rate due to excessive numbers of spawning pools in the early game. (Iggy had some thoughts on this that he’ll be mentioning in a future Dev Diary).

View attachment 1008242
A Void Dweller Habitat Complex.

View attachment 1008243
The rather cluttered system said Habitat Complex is in.

However, the Support Habitats couldn’t be interacted with outside being upgraded, which felt like a major downside. Enemy ships would happily fly past and ignore the Support Habitats, they couldn’t be specialised or downgraded.

All things considered, this prototype showed that making habitats into a single logical planet spread across many entities in a solar system felt good, but megastructures were not the path forward.

Support Habitats as “Starbases”:​


Keep in mind that the numbers shown in the below screenshots are never intended to be the final values, but were used purely for testing purposes of how the systems felt to use and play with.

The below screenshots feature placeholder art and the default art for starbases, their buildings and modules.


The second iteration of this prototype investigated treating Support Habitats as special Starbases (much like Orbital Rings).

In this prototype, the districts available to Habitat Central Complexes depend on the configuration of any Support Habitats in the same system. Thus construction of a Habitat Central Complex would automatically build a neighbouring Support Habitat in orbit of the same planet.

When built, a Support Habitat would start with a module that matches any deposits on the planet it orbits. Each <District> Module on a Support Habitat, gives +3 Max Districts of that type to the Habitat Central Complex.

Upgrading the Support Habitats, still provides the same modifiers as shown in Megastructure Prototype. Additionally each tier of the Support Habitat allows construction of an additional Support Habitat module and the second and third tiers allow construction of a Support Habitat building.

View attachment 1008244
The starting Habitat Central Complex and its neighbouring Support Habitat for a Void Dweller empire.

View attachment 1008245
A newly constructed Habitat Central Complex, completely unspecialised.

Allowing the choice of which districts the Habitat Central Complex has access to via specialisation of the Support Habitats brings some interesting changes to how Habitat-dependent empires play.

Due to the nature of the prototype, the buildings for Support Habitats haven’t seen much investigation yet, but would likely include buildings much like those on an Orbital Ring, the lunar extraction support that Advanced Support Habitats experimented with in the Megastructure Prototype above and other such buildings.

View attachment 1008246
A Research Habitat Complex, using some of the district capacity to provide hydroponic districts.

Due to the nature of summer experiments, we can’t say if or when this prototype might make it into the live version of the game, but it’s something that we’re interested in exploring further.

…But the fourth one stayed up!​

Thanks, Alfray.

That variant listed achieved a lot of the goals we were looking for, but was cobbled together out of the scripting equivalent of sticks and twine as a quick and dirty implementation. It also required a lot of back and forth clicking that we really weren’t too fond of. So after that one burned down, fell over, and sank into the swamp, we came up with another iteration.

My feedback: Simplify things.

The latest variant we’ve been playing with has been especially promising. In this one, we turned the “Starbase” style Support Habitats into single tiered “pre-specialized” units (renamed to “Orbitals” for UX purposes) rather than requiring Modules to be built on them - so you could build a Mining Orbital, Research Orbital, and so on.

This dramatically simplified the flow of building out Habitats while simultaneously improving the implementation.

View attachment 1008247
Pre-Specialized Research Orbital.

View attachment 1008248
Unique buildings on the primary habitat complex can increase the effects of the orbitals.

View attachment 1008249

We’re still doing some experimentation with this model, but so far we’re liking what we’re seeing. Technologies can add special Orbital types or buildings that can modify the primary Habitat Complex, and it’s very easy for us (or modders) to add new types.

We've been looking at jobs per districts too - the Complexes have different challenges from the older Habitat system, and further updated the Voidborne Ascension Perk. Void Dwellers will start with its effects (similar to how Teachers of the Shroud empires effectively start with Mind over Matter).

View attachment 1008271View attachment 1008265
Void Dwellers get Habitat Build Cost reductions in Traditions.

What’s Next?​

For now, I’d like to get some of your thoughts on what you’ve seen today, which we’ll bring into our internal design discussions. It would also be great to get feedback on whether you like this sort of diary, where we go through the overall process (including the failures).

Next week I'd like to talk about a Summer Experiment relating to leaders that didn’t pan out quite so well, and our plans on how to proceed with that.

See you then!
Hi everyone!

I hope your summers have been going well! I got a bit sunburnt, but today we’re back and ready to talk about some of the promising experimentation we’ve been doing with the Habitat system.

We’ll be going through the entire development process in this dev diary, so there’s going to be a lot of ideas that were interesting but were subsequently discarded for various reasons.

Why Are You Looking at Habitats Again?​

The Stellaris Custodian team looks to three primary categories when deciding what to pursue:
  • Directives: Things dictated by me, the Game Director, usually for long term strategic reasons.
  • Community: Things you ask for. Pain points, quality of life improvements, bug fixing, and other good ideas from the community.
  • Passion: Things the individual developers really want to do.

Conveniently, a lot of times all of these align quite nicely.

Let’s start by looking at the history of Habitats in Stellaris.

Habitats were introduced way back in the 1.5 ‘Banks’ update in Utopia.

In 2.3 ‘Wolfe’, alongside Ancient Relics, we removed the Voidborne requirement to build Habitats, adjusted their habitability a little bit, and gave them varying districts based on what they were built over.

The 2.7 ‘Wells’ patch made the next major change to Habitats, adjusting their costs, requirements, and adding multiple tiers.

Since then, we’ve added a couple of special Habitat variants, and various other reworks have shifted their fortunes up and down in the overall balance of the game. Recently, there have been many requests from the community to review the tendency of AI empires building dozens of Habitats when they’re otherwise unable to expand.

Due to how production and population work in Stellaris, this led to an interesting quandary - it is theoretically “correct” for the AI to create many Habitats if it was blocked in, but it was tedious as a player to deal with invading up to a dozen Habitats per system. (The current interactions with population growth have also always been troublesome on the game balance side.)

Habitats were feeling far too common, were too good at certain things, and weren’t capturing the base fantasy that we were looking for. They’re the central pillar of a very popular playstyle that we wanted to preserve, though, so this made them a perfect target for “summer experimentation”.

Everything in this dev diary is considered experimental, and may or may not make it live.
All numbers are placeholders for prototyping purposes only. There is no set release date for any of these changes at this time, but we welcome community feedback.

Different Takes​

One of the most common requests from the Community was to add a Galaxy slider to restrict the use of Habitats. Options could have ranged from banning Habitats entirely, to “Nobody (except Void Dwellers) can create Habitats”, requiring the Ascension Perk to build them again, restricting only the AI, or placing (hard or soft) limits to the number of Habitats that could be built.

We also discussed “what if Habitats cost fractional Starbase Capacity to build” - with Void Dwellers and the Voidborne AP granting discounts to this value. This was more appealing, since the soft cap would control AI use of Habitats nicely without significantly hindering players that wanted to go all-in on them.

These discussions led to some questioning about whether Stellaris Habitats were satisfying the general fantasy well enough, and whether Habitats should be more “hard sci-fi”, with lower habitability bases or even ceilings for those accustomed to planetbound life, and whether we could make changes that would address balance challenges like Hive Void Dwellers.

A More Complex Take​

We made a list of some of the current challenges caused by the existing Habitat system, and this led to the idea of “what if all the Habitats in a system were linked?” We could retain the interesting expansion of Habitats across a system while reducing the burden when seizing the system, and potentially address some of the other problems introduced by an excess number of Habitats in the galaxy.

Alfray threw together an incredibly hacky and utterly unshippable version of this, and continued iterating on it during the Summer.

Under this variant, the first Habitat built within a system is the Central Habitat Complex. Additional Habitats are Support Habitats that add additional space and versatility to the Central Complex. A reminder, many values are grossly unbalanced placeholders in the following screenshots.

At this point I went on vacation, so I’ll turn this over to Alfray to talk about his investigations.

Once More Into the Alfray​

Keep in mind that the numbers shown in the below screenshots are never intended to be the final values, but were used purely for testing purposes of how the systems felt to use and play with.

Firstly, to counteract the expected changes that with minimal Support Habitats, the Central Complex would be small, cramped and overall not great to live on, I gave Void Dwellers extra districts and building slots as a unique modifier (This saw further refinement in a later prototype).


Support Habitats as Megastructures:​


The first iteration of these prototypes made use of Support Habitats as additional megastructures.


In this prototype, we had the maximum amount of each type of resource collection district (Energy, Minerals, Research) limited by the size of the deposits the habitats were constructed over, similar to how buildings for Strategic Resources are limited.

Support Habitats provided additional Districts, Building Slots, and Housing to the Habitat Central Complex, while reducing the Habitability (to reflect the civilian traffic between habitats) as they are upgraded. The final tier also allowed the Habitat Complex to use deposits on moons of their orbited planet.

On the surface, this prototype seems to satisfy our initial requirements and more:
  • Conquering systems with Habitat-spam was easier due to there only being one functional “planet” per system.
  • Constructing multiple Habitats per system felt rewarding as it upgraded your existing colony.
  • The removal of multiple starting colonies removed one of our main concerns for allowing Hive-Minds to have access to the Void Dweller origin - their high pop growth rate due to excessive numbers of spawning pools in the early game. (Iggy had some thoughts on this that he’ll be mentioning in a future Dev Diary).

View attachment 1008242
A Void Dweller Habitat Complex.

View attachment 1008243
The rather cluttered system said Habitat Complex is in.

However, the Support Habitats couldn’t be interacted with outside being upgraded, which felt like a major downside. Enemy ships would happily fly past and ignore the Support Habitats, they couldn’t be specialised or downgraded.

All things considered, this prototype showed that making habitats into a single logical planet spread across many entities in a solar system felt good, but megastructures were not the path forward.

Support Habitats as “Starbases”:​


Keep in mind that the numbers shown in the below screenshots are never intended to be the final values, but were used purely for testing purposes of how the systems felt to use and play with.

The below screenshots feature placeholder art and the default art for starbases, their buildings and modules.


The second iteration of this prototype investigated treating Support Habitats as special Starbases (much like Orbital Rings).

In this prototype, the districts available to Habitat Central Complexes depend on the configuration of any Support Habitats in the same system. Thus construction of a Habitat Central Complex would automatically build a neighbouring Support Habitat in orbit of the same planet.

When built, a Support Habitat would start with a module that matches any deposits on the planet it orbits. Each <District> Module on a Support Habitat, gives +3 Max Districts of that type to the Habitat Central Complex.

Upgrading the Support Habitats, still provides the same modifiers as shown in Megastructure Prototype. Additionally each tier of the Support Habitat allows construction of an additional Support Habitat module and the second and third tiers allow construction of a Support Habitat building.

View attachment 1008244
The starting Habitat Central Complex and its neighbouring Support Habitat for a Void Dweller empire.

View attachment 1008245
A newly constructed Habitat Central Complex, completely unspecialised.

Allowing the choice of which districts the Habitat Central Complex has access to via specialisation of the Support Habitats brings some interesting changes to how Habitat-dependent empires play.

Due to the nature of the prototype, the buildings for Support Habitats haven’t seen much investigation yet, but would likely include buildings much like those on an Orbital Ring, the lunar extraction support that Advanced Support Habitats experimented with in the Megastructure Prototype above and other such buildings.

View attachment 1008246
A Research Habitat Complex, using some of the district capacity to provide hydroponic districts.

Due to the nature of summer experiments, we can’t say if or when this prototype might make it into the live version of the game, but it’s something that we’re interested in exploring further.

…But the fourth one stayed up!​

Thanks, Alfray.

That variant listed achieved a lot of the goals we were looking for, but was cobbled together out of the scripting equivalent of sticks and twine as a quick and dirty implementation. It also required a lot of back and forth clicking that we really weren’t too fond of. So after that one burned down, fell over, and sank into the swamp, we came up with another iteration.

My feedback: Simplify things.

The latest variant we’ve been playing with has been especially promising. In this one, we turned the “Starbase” style Support Habitats into single tiered “pre-specialized” units (renamed to “Orbitals” for UX purposes) rather than requiring Modules to be built on them - so you could build a Mining Orbital, Research Orbital, and so on.

This dramatically simplified the flow of building out Habitats while simultaneously improving the implementation.

View attachment 1008247
Pre-Specialized Research Orbital.

View attachment 1008248
Unique buildings on the primary habitat complex can increase the effects of the orbitals.

View attachment 1008249

We’re still doing some experimentation with this model, but so far we’re liking what we’re seeing. Technologies can add special Orbital types or buildings that can modify the primary Habitat Complex, and it’s very easy for us (or modders) to add new types.

We've been looking at jobs per districts too - the Complexes have different challenges from the older Habitat system, and further updated the Voidborne Ascension Perk. Void Dwellers will start with its effects (similar to how Teachers of the Shroud empires effectively start with Mind over Matter).

View attachment 1008271View attachment 1008265
Void Dwellers get Habitat Build Cost reductions in Traditions.

What’s Next?​

For now, I’d like to get some of your thoughts on what you’ve seen today, which we’ll bring into our internal design discussions. It would also be great to get feedback on whether you like this sort of diary, where we go through the overall process (including the failures).

Next week I'd like to talk about a Summer Experiment relating to leaders that didn’t pan out quite so well, and our plans on how to proceed with that.

See you then!

a big perk habitats had was the ability to stack multiple in one system. if tehse changes go live, does this mean that we would not be able to do that anymore? like would the Void Dweller origin now start with one unified habitats instead of three?
 
Hi everyone!

I hope your summers have been going well! I got a bit sunburnt, but today we’re back and ready to talk about some of the promising experimentation we’ve been doing with the Habitat system.

We’ll be going through the entire development process in this dev diary, so there’s going to be a lot of ideas that were interesting but were subsequently discarded for various reasons.

Why Are You Looking at Habitats Again?​

The Stellaris Custodian team looks to three primary categories when deciding what to pursue:
  • Directives: Things dictated by me, the Game Director, usually for long term strategic reasons.
  • Community: Things you ask for. Pain points, quality of life improvements, bug fixing, and other good ideas from the community.
  • Passion: Things the individual developers really want to do.

Conveniently, a lot of times all of these align quite nicely.

Let’s start by looking at the history of Habitats in Stellaris.

Habitats were introduced way back in the 1.5 ‘Banks’ update in Utopia.

In 2.3 ‘Wolfe’, alongside Ancient Relics, we removed the Voidborne requirement to build Habitats, adjusted their habitability a little bit, and gave them varying districts based on what they were built over.

The 2.7 ‘Wells’ patch made the next major change to Habitats, adjusting their costs, requirements, and adding multiple tiers.

Since then, we’ve added a couple of special Habitat variants, and various other reworks have shifted their fortunes up and down in the overall balance of the game. Recently, there have been many requests from the community to review the tendency of AI empires building dozens of Habitats when they’re otherwise unable to expand.

Due to how production and population work in Stellaris, this led to an interesting quandary - it is theoretically “correct” for the AI to create many Habitats if it was blocked in, but it was tedious as a player to deal with invading up to a dozen Habitats per system. (The current interactions with population growth have also always been troublesome on the game balance side.)

Habitats were feeling far too common, were too good at certain things, and weren’t capturing the base fantasy that we were looking for. They’re the central pillar of a very popular playstyle that we wanted to preserve, though, so this made them a perfect target for “summer experimentation”.

Everything in this dev diary is considered experimental, and may or may not make it live.
All numbers are placeholders for prototyping purposes only. There is no set release date for any of these changes at this time, but we welcome community feedback.

Different Takes​

One of the most common requests from the Community was to add a Galaxy slider to restrict the use of Habitats. Options could have ranged from banning Habitats entirely, to “Nobody (except Void Dwellers) can create Habitats”, requiring the Ascension Perk to build them again, restricting only the AI, or placing (hard or soft) limits to the number of Habitats that could be built.

We also discussed “what if Habitats cost fractional Starbase Capacity to build” - with Void Dwellers and the Voidborne AP granting discounts to this value. This was more appealing, since the soft cap would control AI use of Habitats nicely without significantly hindering players that wanted to go all-in on them.

These discussions led to some questioning about whether Stellaris Habitats were satisfying the general fantasy well enough, and whether Habitats should be more “hard sci-fi”, with lower habitability bases or even ceilings for those accustomed to planetbound life, and whether we could make changes that would address balance challenges like Hive Void Dwellers.

A More Complex Take​

We made a list of some of the current challenges caused by the existing Habitat system, and this led to the idea of “what if all the Habitats in a system were linked?” We could retain the interesting expansion of Habitats across a system while reducing the burden when seizing the system, and potentially address some of the other problems introduced by an excess number of Habitats in the galaxy.

Alfray threw together an incredibly hacky and utterly unshippable version of this, and continued iterating on it during the Summer.

Under this variant, the first Habitat built within a system is the Central Habitat Complex. Additional Habitats are Support Habitats that add additional space and versatility to the Central Complex. A reminder, many values are grossly unbalanced placeholders in the following screenshots.

At this point I went on vacation, so I’ll turn this over to Alfray to talk about his investigations.

Once More Into the Alfray​

Keep in mind that the numbers shown in the below screenshots are never intended to be the final values, but were used purely for testing purposes of how the systems felt to use and play with.

Firstly, to counteract the expected changes that with minimal Support Habitats, the Central Complex would be small, cramped and overall not great to live on, I gave Void Dwellers extra districts and building slots as a unique modifier (This saw further refinement in a later prototype).


Support Habitats as Megastructures:​


The first iteration of these prototypes made use of Support Habitats as additional megastructures.


In this prototype, we had the maximum amount of each type of resource collection district (Energy, Minerals, Research) limited by the size of the deposits the habitats were constructed over, similar to how buildings for Strategic Resources are limited.

Support Habitats provided additional Districts, Building Slots, and Housing to the Habitat Central Complex, while reducing the Habitability (to reflect the civilian traffic between habitats) as they are upgraded. The final tier also allowed the Habitat Complex to use deposits on moons of their orbited planet.

On the surface, this prototype seems to satisfy our initial requirements and more:
  • Conquering systems with Habitat-spam was easier due to there only being one functional “planet” per system.
  • Constructing multiple Habitats per system felt rewarding as it upgraded your existing colony.
  • The removal of multiple starting colonies removed one of our main concerns for allowing Hive-Minds to have access to the Void Dweller origin - their high pop growth rate due to excessive numbers of spawning pools in the early game. (Iggy had some thoughts on this that he’ll be mentioning in a future Dev Diary).

View attachment 1008242
A Void Dweller Habitat Complex.

View attachment 1008243
The rather cluttered system said Habitat Complex is in.

However, the Support Habitats couldn’t be interacted with outside being upgraded, which felt like a major downside. Enemy ships would happily fly past and ignore the Support Habitats, they couldn’t be specialised or downgraded.

All things considered, this prototype showed that making habitats into a single logical planet spread across many entities in a solar system felt good, but megastructures were not the path forward.

Support Habitats as “Starbases”:​


Keep in mind that the numbers shown in the below screenshots are never intended to be the final values, but were used purely for testing purposes of how the systems felt to use and play with.

The below screenshots feature placeholder art and the default art for starbases, their buildings and modules.


The second iteration of this prototype investigated treating Support Habitats as special Starbases (much like Orbital Rings).

In this prototype, the districts available to Habitat Central Complexes depend on the configuration of any Support Habitats in the same system. Thus construction of a Habitat Central Complex would automatically build a neighbouring Support Habitat in orbit of the same planet.

When built, a Support Habitat would start with a module that matches any deposits on the planet it orbits. Each <District> Module on a Support Habitat, gives +3 Max Districts of that type to the Habitat Central Complex.

Upgrading the Support Habitats, still provides the same modifiers as shown in Megastructure Prototype. Additionally each tier of the Support Habitat allows construction of an additional Support Habitat module and the second and third tiers allow construction of a Support Habitat building.

View attachment 1008244
The starting Habitat Central Complex and its neighbouring Support Habitat for a Void Dweller empire.

View attachment 1008245
A newly constructed Habitat Central Complex, completely unspecialised.

Allowing the choice of which districts the Habitat Central Complex has access to via specialisation of the Support Habitats brings some interesting changes to how Habitat-dependent empires play.

Due to the nature of the prototype, the buildings for Support Habitats haven’t seen much investigation yet, but would likely include buildings much like those on an Orbital Ring, the lunar extraction support that Advanced Support Habitats experimented with in the Megastructure Prototype above and other such buildings.

View attachment 1008246
A Research Habitat Complex, using some of the district capacity to provide hydroponic districts.

Due to the nature of summer experiments, we can’t say if or when this prototype might make it into the live version of the game, but it’s something that we’re interested in exploring further.

…But the fourth one stayed up!​

Thanks, Alfray.

That variant listed achieved a lot of the goals we were looking for, but was cobbled together out of the scripting equivalent of sticks and twine as a quick and dirty implementation. It also required a lot of back and forth clicking that we really weren’t too fond of. So after that one burned down, fell over, and sank into the swamp, we came up with another iteration.

My feedback: Simplify things.

The latest variant we’ve been playing with has been especially promising. In this one, we turned the “Starbase” style Support Habitats into single tiered “pre-specialized” units (renamed to “Orbitals” for UX purposes) rather than requiring Modules to be built on them - so you could build a Mining Orbital, Research Orbital, and so on.

This dramatically simplified the flow of building out Habitats while simultaneously improving the implementation.

View attachment 1008247
Pre-Specialized Research Orbital.

View attachment 1008248
Unique buildings on the primary habitat complex can increase the effects of the orbitals.

View attachment 1008249

We’re still doing some experimentation with this model, but so far we’re liking what we’re seeing. Technologies can add special Orbital types or buildings that can modify the primary Habitat Complex, and it’s very easy for us (or modders) to add new types.

We've been looking at jobs per districts too - the Complexes have different challenges from the older Habitat system, and further updated the Voidborne Ascension Perk. Void Dwellers will start with its effects (similar to how Teachers of the Shroud empires effectively start with Mind over Matter).

View attachment 1008271View attachment 1008265
Void Dwellers get Habitat Build Cost reductions in Traditions.

What’s Next?​

For now, I’d like to get some of your thoughts on what you’ve seen today, which we’ll bring into our internal design discussions. It would also be great to get feedback on whether you like this sort of diary, where we go through the overall process (including the failures).

Next week I'd like to talk about a Summer Experiment relating to leaders that didn’t pan out quite so well, and our plans on how to proceed with that.

See you then!
Also, you mention that Void dwellers will start with the Voidborne AP effects. does that mean that, that origin will be getting those buffs and then also be able to stack them with the AP's buffs? OR is it more of a teachers of the shroud situation where the AP is basically already applied to the origin and thus getting a "Free" 9th AP?
 
Hello everyone. I'm new here to the forum and to the game. I've played for about a month now as a console peasant, so I haven't experienced Toxoids, First Contact, or Galactic Paragons. I'm not sure if that makes my opinion on habitat changes less relevant, but I've been enjoying Void Dweller, so I wanted to chime in.

Firstly, I love this Dev Diary. I wish more companies would be transparent like this and more often.

Next, I really like the idea of habitats functioning from one central station. I love the idea presented in the final prototype with orbitals having specialized types. It concerns me, though, like some have mentioned, about the huge loss of building slots in a system presented with these ideas. I think if I were to see these changes, I'd want districts to be modified from one central station, but still have the ability to put some buildings on orbitals. I'm more than alright with habitats and their orbitals having specialized buildings unique to them.

My biggest concerns with the prototypes would have to be the loss of Pop growth and the prototypes not showing Trade Districts. In my experience with Void Dwellers on PS5, my Pops grow rather slowly. I know some of the updates console doesn't have will change this some, but it concerns me nonetheless. Not seeing Trade Districts in the prototypes worries me, as currently it's one of my favorite things about Void Dwellers on habitats. It may be a meme, but I enjoy seeing how high I can get my trade value to go with my Megacorp. I sincerely hope that if going the specialized orbital route, Trade Districts would still be present as an option.

My final concern (that I can think of right now) would be I don't see any of these prototypes reducing lag in the late game. Sure, habitat and fortress spam might be less, but each orbital, especially if they have functions beyond what a mining station does, will still add to the load. I think if the orbitals did have building slots, like starbases, where there is no Pop management would be best. Ultimately though, I think locking habitats behind the Void Dweller and/or the Voidborne AP would alleviate this issue or as most people seem to want (myself included) a setting in the game setup to control AI behavior regarding habitats and an option to dismantle habitats, gates, etc.
 
  • 3
Reactions:
The fundamental problem with habitats is structure spam in the mid- and late-game where you get dozens of the things to manage in addition to everything else. Your fourth prototype gets halfway to solving the structure spam problem by consolidating pops into a single system-wide habitat. Now go all the way to solving the habitat structure spam problem and get rid of the spammy "orbitals". Have them be buildings or districts on the habitat itself instead.

Simple solution I posted previously: Have ONE habitat per system. No free-floating extra orbitals, modules, or what have you. If you want the habitats to interface with mining/research/observation stations, simply give the habitat a bonus for each type of station in the system, and/or have buildings/modules/districts/whatever directly on the habitat that affect orbital stations.
 
  • 4
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The fundamental problem with habitats is structure spam in the mid- and late-game where you get dozens of the things to manage in addition to everything else. Your fourth prototype gets halfway to solving the structure spam problem by consolidating pops into a single system-wide habitat. Now go all the way to solving the habitat structure spam problem and get rid of the spammy "orbitals". Have them be buildings or districts on the habitat itself instead.

Simple solution I posted previously: Have ONE habitat per system. No free-floating extra orbitals, modules, or what have you. If you want the habitats to interface with mining/research/observation stations, simply give the habitat a bonus for each type of station in the system, and/or have buildings/modules/districts/whatever directly on the habitat that affect orbital stations.
I don't think there's a substantial micro or gameplay difference between queueing up habitat expansions (with a cap based on number of deposits/bodies in the system) and queueing up construction ship orders. The main difference is that doing it with a construction ship fulfills that cram-the-system-full ideal that used to be the norm with the old habitats, and it feels more satisfying.

If they cost 75 influence each, they'll be happening infrequently enough (unless you've effectively already won with vassal spam) that the difference between spam clicking "expand habitat" in the decisions menu and just queueing up another build order isn't going to involve any extra clicking. The worst part is that it can potentially be interrupted if an enemy enters the system (unlike a colony build queue).
 
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I might be alone with my opinion but usually I tend to avoid building/getting habitats all together. They just aren't fun. I don't like the restrictions and the micro management that come with them or the fact that they clog my planet list. I also feel it's very expensive to grow them to a point where they are more useful than annoying.
I got no idea how to fix my problem but maybe someone has a smart idea - or like I said, that is my problem entirely then nevermind.
I build habitats when I run out of planets... which is never. Or when I have a void-dweller pop in my Empire that runs out of space... which is almost never.
 
Would it be possible to make habitats destructible through conventional weapons or even espionage? Empires never seem to have an issue blowing up marauders' habitats, so why not a hostile neighbor? It could even have its own policy, like Orbital Bombardment has already.
 
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