Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. This is the fifth part in a multi-part dev diary about the 'Heinlein' 1.3 update and accompaying (unannounced) content DLC. The topic of today's dev diary is the changes to space creatures coming in Heinlein.
Grounding the Space Creatures (Free Feature)
I've always loved the concept of space creatures - massive beings capable of living in vacuum, travelling between the stars under their own power. With Stellaris, I felt that we went a long way with the addition and fleshing out of space creatures such as amoebas and crystalline entities, but we failed to really ground them in the setting. You encounter them, you research them, you get some information about them... but where do they come from? They're just randomly scattered throughout the galaxy, with no real sense of belonging or having come from anywhere.
This is something we've changed in Heinlein. Instead of just spawning randomly anywhere, space creatures will belong to a particular region of space. They can be found outside it, but its rare, so once you encounter more than one set of mining drones, it's likely that you've entered mining drone space. In the region of a particular space creature, in addition to finding the regular versions of these creatures, you will also find a 'nexus', a system surrounded by powerful variants in which a 'boss creature' lives, and where this particular space creature is meant to have either its origins or their 'home', so to speak. For example, in the center of mining drone space, you will find the Mining Drone Home Base, a powerful adversary that once defeated will yield some significant rewards.
Space Piracy (Free Feature)
Space pirates is another area where we just didn't go far enough with our implementation. Part of that is because we lack a real trade system for them to prey on, but even so, the one-off event that spawns a few ships (that may or may not look completely different from anything else your species uses) just isn't up to par. As such, we've decided to make pirates their own type of 'space creature', with a region of space they live in, a home base and several more variants of ships. From here, they will occasionally set out to raid interstellar empires across the galaxy until one of those empires has enough and attacks them at the source.
Power and Reward Rebalancing (Free Feature)
As part of these changes, we will also be looking at the power of each space creature, tweaking or creating more variants to ensure that they do not cease being relevant as soon as the player has built a destroyer or two. We will also look at rebalancing the rewards you get for killing and researching them, to make both finding and fighting them a more rewarding experience overall. The overall aim of our changes to the power and placement space creatures is to make encounters with them them rarer but more significant.
That's all for today! Next week we'll be talking about Enclaves, a feature in the DLC that will accompany the Heinlein update.
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