• We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.

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.
image11.png

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.
image1.png

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.

image4.png

Pretty reasonable imo

image9.png

No, you really can’t refuse

image10.png

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.
image6.png

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.


image13.png

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.
image5.png

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.

image12.png

Greetings from Tellon
image8.png

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.

image2.png

Everything is used and reused in the Wilderness.
image7.png

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.

image3.png

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.

image14.png

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.
 
  • 108Love
  • 76Like
  • 3
  • 3
  • 2Haha
Reactions:
In the stream I saw that Cloning had access to some advanced traits, but it seemed to be because they had encountered them in other species. Where exactly have the advanced traits been put in the new system? I know Leviathan traits were sent to Mutation, but did all the others get sent to Purity? Is it a mix, are some in multiple, can the variable tree dictate which traits you obtain?
 
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.

This could be just me being thick, but why is this origin expected to have workforce issues far beyond any other empire? Reading this sentence, I'm seeing biomass as some resource that is gained by pop growth, but is unrelated to the actual pop system. Is it that the biomass itself represents population, so you're spending your pops themselves in order to develop the planet?
 
  • 2Like
Reactions:
It's cool to play as a planet. Maybe in the future we could have the machine equivalent (you play as a planet-sized supercomputer that actually is a planet by in game definition, and you expand by building new giant supercomputers like habitats).
And if one day we get space nomads, we could also play as intelligent leviathans...
 
  • 3
  • 2Like
Reactions:
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.

How exactly do wilderness pops work? Is it like Virtual pops and they just fill up every available job? I saw that pop growth will correlate to biomass collection, but I'm unclear on how their actual pops work and how they fill jobs. Would you elaborate?

So, we're taking "Gaia Theory" to its logical extreme.

How long until we cut out the middle man and just bolt a Jump Drive onto a planet?

Gigastructural Engineering did it years ago.
 
This could be just me being thick, but why is this origin expected to have workforce issues far beyond any other empire? Reading this sentence, I'm seeing biomass as some resource that is gained by pop growth, but is unrelated to the actual pop system. Is it that the biomass itself represents population, so you're spending your pops themselves in order to develop the planet?
They showed on stream that pop growth in biomass empires is converted to biomass generation, and it seemed to work on a virtual system where jobs are automatically filled. The empire doesn't seem to have real pops. On stream the management tab said the planet had 0 pops even though the jobs were all being worked. It seems the idea is that jobs, districts, and pops are all merged into a single thing with wilderness, so biomass is converted into districts and buildings that produce jobs which will always be worked since you have effectively set aside that biomass to work the job.

The way biomass interacts with pop growth is that it is the resource measured for logistic growth, instead of pops. They did not elaborate on how that works in regards to the fact that biomass is a global resource while pop growth is planetary.

Why they have the workforce modifier was confusing, since they can take traits that are based on having pops (budding) they do seem to have pops in some capacity.
 
  • 1Like
  • 1
Reactions:
vertuallity traditions aren't to far from that, but the nuances can be important. speaking of which, not having a fast track to synthetic age is kind of weird. when's that coming?

edit - my compter glitched, I'm talking about MI version of wilderness.
 
How exactly do wilderness pops work? Is it like Virtual pops and they just fill up every available job? I saw that pop growth will correlate to biomass collection, but I'm unclear on how their actual pops work and how they fill jobs. Would you elaborate?
Did some more digging on the stream and at 22 minutes Steven says that bombardment will destroy biomass like it kills pops at a 1 to 1 ratio. He clarifies that pops and biomass are tied 1 to 1. So it seems that you maybe do need biomass to fill jobs then.
 
  • 1
Reactions:
Did some more digging on the stream and at 22 minutes Steven says that bombardment will destroy biomass like it kills pops at a 1 to 1 ratio. He clarifies that pops and biomass are tied 1 to 1. So it seems that you maybe do need biomass to fill jobs then.
So 1 Biomass = 1 Pop and all Wilderness pops have +1000 Workforce, effectively letting them fill all jobs unless you did something crazy or spent all of your biomass, and the tradeoff is you spend pops biomass to build stuff. Am I understanding this correctly?
 
So 1 Biomass = 1 Pop and all Wilderness pops have +1000 Workforce, effectively letting them fill all jobs unless you did something crazy or spent all of your biomass, and the tradeoff is you spend pops biomass to build stuff. Am I understanding this correctly?
That seems to be the case based on what they've said.

That seems silly though so it might be that the 1000 Workforce modifier is per 100 pops and it's 1 Biomass = 1 Pop and 100 Wilderness pops have +1000 Workforce. Based on what they've show though idk. Sorry, I want these answers too and am also not totally sure.
 
  • 1
Reactions:
That seems to be the case based on what they've said.

That seems silly though so it might be that the 1000 Workforce modifier is per 100 pops and it's 1 Biomass = 1 Pop and 100 Wilderness pops have +1000 Workforce. Based on what they've show though idk. Sorry, I want these answers too and am also not totally sure.
the sensible thing to do would be for wilderness to drop pops entirely, and have districts produce resources directly - but that might brake the game's code into itiy-bitty little specks.
 
  • 3
Reactions:
the sensible thing to do would be for wilderness to drop pops entirely, and have districts produce resources directly - but that might brake the game's code into itiy-bitty little specks.
Species traits still affect the job production(i.e efficiency traits), so your species still matters, and you're right it's also probably easier to still do it mostly through jobs so that all the modifiers in the game that affect resources from jobs and pops don't have to be altered for the origin.
 
  • 1
Reactions:
Will Wilderness be allowed to use any portrait? Or is it just plants.

I Demand the ability to make a Jeff Devouring Wilderness..All will be Planet Jeff.
There are no limits on portraits. We saw in stream that they could use Stargazers, who are Molluscoid, as the species.
 
Mutation should be allowed for devouring wilderness, think about Junji Ito- Remina. A Eldritch Horror Planet that would even scare the WH40k Chaos Gods
 
  • 3Like
  • 2
Reactions:
Mutation should be allowed for devouring wilderness, think about Junji Ito- Remina. A Eldritch Horror Planet that would even scare the WH40k Chaos Gods
kinda sad itts not a option, I understand why cloning is off the table though. But due to the lack of pops I guess it makes sense no traits to give them so purity is the most useful. I am surprised we can't do a psionic one though maybe in the next dlc with hiveminds getting it?