Greetings to the void-dwellers and planet-bound alike! This week well be talking about some changes were planning on making to the engineering marvels that are Orbital Habitats. These are currently slated for the May update that Game Director Daniel mentioned two weeks ago. Introduced in Utopia, Orbital Habitats provide a way to continue some form of limited expansion after colonizing all of the habitable planets within your empire. In the 2.3 Wolfe update, we added some specialized districts to them based on the celestial body they orbited, opening up the possibility for things like building dedicated astro-mining facilities, and recently in Federations, we added a Void Dwellers origin which let you start your empire among the stars in three habitats. This May, well be introducing multiple tiers of habitats. These will be accessible to anyone with the Utopia expansion or using the Void Dwellers origin from Federations. The first tier of Orbital Habitats now comes a bit earlier in the tech tree and require fewer alloys to build. The basic Orbital Habitat is smaller than the old version, starting with 4 district slots. They also have a simpler appearance than the ones currently in the game, a core of a station to build upon later.
Fungoid Orbital Habitat The Habitat Expansion engineering technology is placed around where the Habitat technology used to be in the tech tree, and will allow you to upgrade an Orbital Habitat that has filled all of its districts to an Advanced Habitat using a planetary decision that costs some time and alloys.
Upgrading to an Advanced Habitat provides 2 additional district slots and allows basic housing buildings to be built even for normal empires. The Advanced Habitat upgrade adds a ring of modules around the central core.
Avian Advanced Habitat A third technology permits upgrading a fully developed Advanced Habitat that has a Habitat Central Control into a Habitat World.
Habitat Worlds have 8 districts, shown as another ring of modules around the habitat.
If you want to read more about the upcoming habitat tiers, see the full forum post here!