Modding has been the lifeblood of many of Paradox Interactive’s biggest games, so it’s no surprise to hear that the studio is hoping to provide plenty of opportunity for fans to create their own content for its upcoming space 4X Stellaris.
Each aspect of the game’s custom galaxy creation is moddable. That includes the basic type of galaxy - spiral, elliptical and ring - the classes of each star in the game, of which there are up to 1,000, and the contents of each separate star system.
”When we generate the contents of each star system we use different system initializers depending on what the system is being used for,” explains project lead Henrik Fåhraeus. ”If you, for example, were to start as a pre-scripted human you will be placed in our solar system, on Earth. Yes, all of this is moddable also. These initializers allow us to make sure that you, as a player, will always have something interesting to do within a system.”
Some systems will be more immediately valuable than others - black hole stars tend to make nearby planets rather inhospitable after all - but Paradox says there will always be something to find, wherever you decide to explore. Just don’t go rushing in blind.
”We generate a lot of interesting special content in the different systems, including the ones that no empire is controlling. This content ranges from debris to ships of unknown origin, that could be friendly or not so friendly… Speaking from personal experience when it comes to the “not so friendly” ships, I recommend all players to scout systems before going there with their science ships to survey a potential future colony. It is not fun having your science ship blown out of existence with your most skilled scientist aboard.”
Stellaris continues to sound pretty damned good. I have to say I was a little disappointed when Paradox announced its new game was a space 4X, just because that’s a pretty oversubscribed genre, but everything I’ve heard so far has me intrigued.
