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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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This all looks incredible. Unique resources, unique build mechanics, just incredible.

And because I'm greedy I have to ask:
I know anyone can use the cityset but any chance of a "light" civic version of this origin that swaps building mineral costs and energy upkeep for food and maybe the "growing multiple buildings" part to allow a regular empire to get just a bit biopunk?
Any plans to piggyback on some of this alternate economy work to spice up some old content? A robot void dweller variant where you're sapient habitats Von Neumann-ing out into the galaxy was brought up in another thread.
 
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Really looking forward to playing as a Wilderness Hive. It's a bit of a shame they can't pick any other ascension than Purity (would've been interesting to play as a mutating Wilderness, for example), but it still sounds like a really cool origin.

Is the Biomass resource only used by Wilderness empires, or do other bio-empires have use for it as well?
 
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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.
question How will this work with traits that add workforce multipliers? will things like intelligent add a extra 110 workforce ((100+1000)*1.1)=1210 or will it go (100* 1.1) +1000 =1110
 
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Those fallen hive ships are sick. Please tell me you can unlock them with Cosmogenesis if you use bioships.
 
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The wilderness thing looks very spicy and promising!

I would have prefered a more "show don't tell" approach to the fallen empire, it seems wholly "coherent" in its speeches for a fragmented collective.

Like another comment mentionned, hopefully cosmogenesis allow the usage of those FE bioships
 
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1. Can the AI play as the Wilderness orgin (or will it break?)
2. Will the Wilderness hivemind have special interactions with other empires based on there orgins (for example tree of life) or civics (terravores as a example).
 
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Do empires with Bioshipsets get the Fallen Hive Mind Empire ships instead of the regular Fallen Empire ships?
 
Both things look amazing!

Can you clarify how you can influence which hive to influence? Also does Scion work with them?

What types of lore are available for them regarding their “internal” split? Just that they split due to some disaster?

Does wilderness work with any planet type? And if so is there unique flavor based on climate? Also how does colonization work? Do you terraform and upon completion just get the planet? Is there a terraform time reduction?
 
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I always wanted to play as living worlds, and while the existing hive minds have tackled that to a degree this is in a whole new level, and it's beautiful!

However, it is a pity that we did not get a Plantoid themed Biological ship-set, as I don't feel that the two new ones fit it properly (perhaps with some recolors). Thematically, they do fit really well with Spaceborn fauna though.
 
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Do you have plans to allow players who have the bioship set to aquire this fallen empires ship set if you go cosmogenesis. Because, that'd be amazing.
 
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