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Stellaris Dev Diary #381 - Time to Get Wild

Hello there everyone, PDS_Iggy here! We’ve had a busy week, now let's see what Eladrin wanted me to talk about… The Hive Fallen Empire and the Wilderness origin? In the same diary?


Okay… Buckle up for a Wild ride!

Hive Fallen Empire​

For the first time since Synthetic Dawn, a new ancient will join us in the galaxy: a Hive Mind, once united in purpose, now lies fragmented. Each embodiment is stuck trying to execute its own directive. Each has plans for becoming the dominating force within their former collective… and you might be able to nudge who ends up in charge.
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Stellaris supports conference calls now?

After an uncertain but definitely horrible disaster splintered their consciousness, The Hive was left in 3 fragments: Growth, War, and Control. Each one with its distinct personality, system, and tasks. Though don’t let differences fool you. They are all in a federation with each other, and declaring war on one will see you fight all three.
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So different, yet refusing to be far apart.

This Fallen Empire will spawn surrounding a central system. Each of the fragments branches off with its own unique system. They all surround the central system, Last Thought, but refuse to claim it. Curious. Like most Fallen Empires, they are content seeing the universe pass by them by… unless you do something that interests or annoys them.

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Pretty reasonable imo

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No, you really can’t refuse

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I made some of these events work on AIs. Don’t worry about the fragment’s Traits.


Each fragment has multiple tasks, and each one is quite a bit more reactive than the old “Hey, give us your scientists” events from Fallen Empires in the past. So, make friends where you can and try not to unleash something horrible on the galaxy.
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This shipset had the working name of “Antagonist” in-house.

Something that has always distinguished Fallen Empires from regular empires is that their ships are extra advanced. Well, the same is true here, but instead of using the same old technology of the other Fallen Empires, the fragments use Biological Ones! A special, older, and more intimidating version of the Spinovore shipset.

Just like all other Fallen Empires, this will be your primary source for Dark Matter technology.


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Politics is an old species game.

When the sleepers awake, one must end up on top. Absorbing the other fragments, one of three awakened empires will form, each with different goals and behaviors. Two of them will be participating in the war in heaven, the third one has other plans. Here is Control.

Wilderness​

This, without a doubt, is the most transformative Origin we have ever added to the game. The Wilderness is a Hive Mind exclusive origin, requiring you to play with Biological Ships, and leaves behind mechanical buildings and nasty things like colony ships. The experience we want to bring you here is experiencing the galaxy as a living planet.
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How do you show in a tooltip that everything is different?

As you can see in the tooltip, and what I want to emphasize is that you don’t share a single base building or district with regular empires. You do have some overlap when it comes to civics and such, but in general, you will live as a planet.

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Greetings from Tellon
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Not an asphalted road as far as the planet can feel.

The Wilderness comes with a unique City Set and Diplomatic room; any empire can play with it, but it was made for the Wilderness. The avian-eyed among you might have spotted that we have a new resource icon up there, Biomass. Biomass is gained by growing new pops and is used for developing your planets and colonizing new ones. Since you are spending Biomass to grow buildings, we won’t expect you to have enough around to work them. That is why all Wilderness pops come with a +1000 Workforce modifier. Please don’t figure out some exploit to smuggle them out of the empire.

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Everything is used and reused in the Wilderness.
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The Wilderness does not need colony ships. If they can terraform it, they can become it.

Once you have relearned how to navigate the economy as a living planet, you can spread your spores outward, terraforming a new world by using Biomass, awakening a new colony in your image.

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Plant Houston, we have liftoff!

The Wilderness Origin is compatible with most civics available to hiveminds, but I managed to satisfy an edgy little primal part of myself when I designed the automatically generated names for the Devouring Swarm variant: the Blood Forest.

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People making reaction videos to these, please read them with the intensity and melodrama they deserve.

There is so much more we could show you about the Wilderness, the tradition swaps, the altered technologies, the many unique buildings, but at this point I would like you to find it out on your own!

Next Week​

Next week, it will finally be time to reveal our most primal secrets. Join @Cosmogone as he shares all our new civics and the Behemoth Fury crisis path!

Meanwhile, I have some Hive Minds to appease.
 
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Kinda ironic that the hivemind are separated, but the rest are united.


Also: planetary build queue capacity? Buildings will be capped? Or that they can build more buildings at once?
 
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this origin is what has me looking forward to the dlc the most live this idea and now that the 4.0 update is looking all the more refined i cant wait to jump right in and probably break the game
 
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So, that's what happens when you give a hivemind some philosophy books and they think too hard...
 
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Oh wow, so we can finally play as Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri's Chiron? Exciting!

Do regular Hives get access to any of the WIlderness content? Can you be a non-Wilderness Mutualistic Intelligence?
 
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If there is one thing i wish this origin had, it would be the ability to absorb other planets to make the homeworld bigger, think something like terrorvore, but every 10 planet-sized devoured increased ur homeworld size by 1, up to say 35 which seems like a lot but thats 170 districts worth u would have to consume
 
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We I could do with some context with the "Control Splinter." It asks us to abandon our control of the Hazra system. Would that be a system that's adjacent to the fallen empire's borders, just like how the militaristic fallen empire don't like it when you expand next to them? Or will they demand we just randomly abandon a system nearish to them, because we have the audacity to exist?
 
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Really looking forward to giving Wilderness a try, it's definitely one of the most fascinating parts of this expansion!

And those Fallen Hives better not get too uppity! It's nice to see they are integrated into War in Heaven content.
(now do the same for the Caretakers pls, let the meat and metal fight each other)
 
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Both parts are awesome! I love what you've done with hive minds, and I'm looking forward to the DLC!
 
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OH. MY. GOD.

There is so much content in a single origin. Since only Purity bio ascension is available for them, could you, perhaps, answer: does this origin provides advanced authority unique to it, akin to Evolutionary Predators, or no?

Also, props for the new FE. It's probably the most mechanically complex out of all of them and I can see the Red King making a looong lore video about them.
 
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If there is one thing i wish this origin had, it would be the ability to absorb other planets to make the homeworld bigger, think something like terrorvore, but every 10 planet-sized devoured increased ur homeworld size by 1, up to say 35 which seems like a lot but thats 170 districts worth u would have to consume
You don't seem to be blocked from being an ocean planet, do you?
So you might be able to do hydrocentric