Hello Stellaris Community! Were now less than a week away from the release of the First Contact Story Pack! You can preorder it here. For those of you who dont want to read this summary, we have Community Manager Mordred Viking on the Stellaris YouTube reading, so you dont have to! [previewyoutube=8vsr5c1H61Y;full][free features video][/previewyoutube] Today, were here to dig into what the Custodians have been up to while the Expansion team has been working on First Contact. As many of you know, the Custodian team works on fixing bugs, improving the UI, increasing performance, adding new modding support, working on the AI and adding new content to previously released DLC. While there are additions to multiple DLC in Canis Minor, one of the biggest new features is included in the Ancient Relics Story Pack: archaeotechnologies. Archaeotechs are ancient technologies, repurposed to fit and amplify your current technologies and are generally found by excavating dig sites, or completing your precursor event chain and doing the Secrets of special project. Researching the Archaeostudies technology (or starting with the Remnants Origin) will give your empire the ability to construct (or start with) a Facility of Archaeostudies, which produces a steady stream of minor artifacts to fill all your archaeo-needs, as well as increasing the speed at which your researchers can discover archaeotechnologies. To help cover the costs of the new archaeo components, completed dig sites now have a chance to passively generate a small amount of minor artifacts monthly, which lead in turn to a rescaling of the costs of certain minor artifact actions. Additionally for First Contact, the Custodian team has been working on improving the interactions with pre-FTL societies. The free patch includes new diplomatic options such as providing technology, improving and harming relations, and building a spy network. Espionage actions have been added as well, allowing you to plant advanced knowledge on the planet, or infiltrate the pre-FTL government or hive mind. Uplifted species will now gain the literally unplayable Enlightened Origin, giving the uplifted species +10% research speed and +0.5 Loyalty per month towards their Overlord. Overlords of uplifted subjects may also now choose specialty subject types for them (requires Overlord). Other older event chains have been reworked and improved, including adding the ability for pre-FTLs to spawn as several Origins tied to other DLC

• Mechanists (requires Utopia)
• Life-Seeded (requires Apocalypse)
• Ocean Paradise (requires Aquatics)
• Subterranean (requires Overlord)
• Void Dwellers (for pre-ftls in the Federation's End unique system)
• Shattered Ring (requires Federations)

• adjusted several other Pop Factions preferences and demands,
• rebalanced certain planetary designations including a colony designation for habitats,
• increased the Juggernauts speed to be in line with battleships and titans
• changes to traveling via the Quantum Catapult
• grants +33% fire rate after jumping
• Slingshot to the Stars increases bonus to 50% and get increased accuracy when using a Quantum Catapult
• Slingshot Origins also no longer lose a guaranteed habitable world to their quantum catapult

• Deep & Varied Exploration.
  
• Enormous procedural galaxies, containing thousands of planets.
  
• Explore Anomalies with your heroic Scientist leaders.
  
• Infinitely varied races through customization and procedural generation.
  
• Advanced Diplomacy system worthy of a Grand Strategy Game.
  
• Ship Designer based on a vast array of technologies.
  
• Stunning space visuals.

• OS: Ubuntu 20.04 x64
• Processor: Intel iCore i3-530 or AMD FX-6350Memory: 4 GB RAM
• Memory: 4 GB RAM
• Graphics: Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 or AMD ATI Radeon HD 5870 (1GB VRAM). or AMD Radeon RX Vega 11 or Intel HD Graphics 4600Network: Broadband Internet connection
• Storage: 12 GB available space

• OS: Ubuntu 20.04 x64
• Processor: Intel iCore i5-3570K or AMD Ryzen 5 2400GMemory: 4 GB RAM
• Memory: 4 GB RAM
• Graphics: Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti (1GB VRAM) or AMD Radeon R7 370 (2 GB VRAM)Network: Broadband Internet connection
• Storage: 12 GB available space