written by Eladrin

Hello again!

This week we’re going to look at some more things that are going into the upcoming Stellaris 3.5 “Fornax” release.

One of the things going into Fornax is something we’ve wanted for a very long time on PC – a Megastructure section in the Outliner.

As shown here, the Megastructures section will list all megastructures within your territory, including ruined ones as well as Gateway Sites (but not completed gateways, as that would be too much clutter).

Never again will you lose track of where you left that Gateway Site or Ruined Sentry Array!

We talked about some accessibility improvement goals before the summer, and some of them are going into Fornax.

When enabled, Mouse Side Button Mode allows Mouse 4 and Mouse 5 to toggle pause state and galactic/system views.

Page Up and Page Down will also now adjust the camera zoom level.

Other accessibility improvement projects are ongoing for future updates. I hope to have text to speech available in an Open Beta later on in the year for the 3.6 “Orion” update.

The Caravansary Caravan Coalition will now reward their most loyal patrons with Golden Tiyanki status. Those who have purchased a sufficient number of Reliquaries will now be granted the honor of being able to purchase as many as they like, directly for credits, with no more cooldowns for their best customers.

Good luck, the Galatron is waiting!

(This should make a couple of related achievements significantly less painful to acquire. They do eventually get pretty expensive, however.)

Continuing from last week, here are the rest of the new Species Pack achievements we’re planning for Fornax.

Aquatics:

Holy Water – Drench a Fallen Empire’s holy world.

There Be Dragons – Have at least 13 dragons you own in your capital system.

Necroids:

With Great Power – As a Necrophage, do not invade any pre-ftl civilisations until you defeat the crisis OR have at least 10 observation stations around pre-ftl worlds.

Recent History – As a Memorialist empire, have Galactic Memorials on five tomb worlds that did not start the game as tomb worlds.

Lithoids:

Room for Desert – Consume another empire’s desert homeworld.

Can You Smell What the Lithoids are Cooking? – As a Lithoid empire, keep another Lithoid pop as Livestock or Process them.

Plantoids:

Growing Like Weeds – As a budding species that does not have the Clone Army origin, achieve a base organic pop assembly of at least 10/month on your capital.

Tend the Garden – Become the custodian of Wenkwort Artem, designating it a resort world with a Ranger Lodge and all original blockers present.

Humanoids:

Directive 67 – As a Clone Soldier empire, denounce a Spiritualist fallen empire as a crisis in the Galactic Community then destroy them, without blowing up their final planet.
(We’re so mean to the Spiritualist Fallen Empire!)

Destroy the People of Earth! – As the Commonwealth of Man, destroy the United Nations of Earth with your ruler being a human with a symbiotic brainslug, without blowing up their final planet.

We also have one more being added to Synthetic Dawn:

Machine Supremacy – Win the game as a machine uprising.

Now I’ll turn it over to Iggy for an update on Relics.

Hello everyone! I am Iggy and I am back to show you the fruit of our collaboration from back earlier in the summer. Firstly we reviewed some of the feedback about the untouched relics so please enjoy even more relics with enhanced flavor and fewer pain points.

The Khan’s Throne now grants you access to the Satrapy Subject Preset letting you extort fleet capacity from your subject.

Also the Defragmentor will now have a usage for non-robot empires granting 10% energy upkeep reduction to all jobs buildings and districts.

And finally the Head of Zarqlan now has the spiritualist ethics attraction locked to the active, and the size of the fleet increases with activation, up to a max after 5 uses. Also due to popular demand the head will now spawn for the AI instead of the player 25% of the time and the AI will colonize holy worlds when they possess the relic.

Further Changes to Already Balanced Relics:

• The Psionic Archive now allows Gestalt Empires to find Psionic Theory which in turn will grant them access to Zro Mining.
• The Brood Queen will now grant a stacking empire modifier to swarm type weapons (Missiles and Strike Craft) for each use and will also spawn the Carrier variant on use.
• The Pox Sample will increase the likelihood that you find Biological Technologies
• The Omnicodex now gives +25 relation with non robot empires if you are a robot one.
• The Reality Perforator active modifiers now last 2-5 years instead of 1-5 years

For the rest of the changes please see Dev Diary #259.

Next week is PDXCon at Münchenbryggeriet here in Stockholm, but we’ll still have a dev diary taking a peek at some of the content coming out with Fornax. If you come visit us at the convention, we’ll have Fornax up and running, a Stellaris Q&A Panel where we’ll be taking questions from the audience, and I’m planning on holding a small workshop where we’ll reveal how our summer experiments have gone.

There are still a few tickets left if you’re in the area.

See you next week!