by MrFreake_PDX Hello everyone! Welcome to another mod highlight, Michael_Stellaris has some great mods lined up for us this week, and this weeks theme is exploration! These mods will make the galaxy more interesting and diverse, and who doesnt love new things to find out in the galaxy. Im sure nothing bad will happen. [previewyoutube=L_sMA977O9I;full][/previewyoutube] Dangerous Wildlife Expanded is a very unique mod, adds much more depth to dangerous wildlife, and should make planets feel much more unique, and can even alter the course of your playthrough.

WP's Dangerous Wildlife Expanded

By WoodenPotatoes
This section was written by WoodenPotatoes Firstly, I really liked the idea of expanding on the sorts of non-intelligent fauna we might find around the galaxy, like T-Rexes and Mammoths and whatnot. Stellaris is utterly fantastic with intelligent aliens, primitive aliens, and even has pre-sapients. But what kind of wildlife is out there? What alien monsters and creepy crawlies lurk on foreign worlds? Secondly, I really liked the concept of mounted alien cavalry. So I made this! Features:

• Diversify the flavour of the "Dangerous Wildlife" planetary feature
• Defend your colonies from these creatures as they attack you
• Eventually, recruit them for yourself

Inspiration: I was really inspired by one of the launch army attachments "Xeno Cavalry", and have a lot of fond memories of mounting my psionic warriors on them. I do have a funny bug story from development on this one: In one early prototype of the attack events I hadn't set a flag to tell the monsters to stop attacking if they had already won. This meant that if you, the player, lost to a horde of, let's say, dire wolves, then a couple of years later you might look at your planet see that even more dire wolves had now come out of hiding to attack the new top dogs in charge! This was happening everywhere, best of all on planets with multiple types of wildlife at once. You'd have swarms of giant cockroaches trying to eat T-rexes, Woolly Rhinos duking it out against alien Yeti, Bats vs Spiders, you get the picture. An entire galaxy of raging wildlife. More Events Mod is one of the most popular event mods out there, it definitely deserves to be featured. It contains some really fun event chains, systems, and new things to find out in the galaxy.

More Events Mod

By Malthus
This section was written by Malthus Our mod started out shortly after Stellaris' release back in 2016. A lot of people have worked on and contributed to it over the years, among them great scripters, writers and 2d/3d artists who all shared the same goal of adding more to the the game experience in terms of short stories through anomalies and bigger story arcs with digsites, quests and even some mid game crises (Broken Clock, Vazuran Menace, Surveyor Probe). All of which is meant to add to the Stellaris lore while staying true to it without contradictions - a vanilla+ basically. Over the time it grew quite a bit from just being a few anomalies and events at the start, to now having nearly two dozen digsites, three mid game crises and even custom species portraits which were made for their respective events but are also fully usable for ai empires. It may be bloat to some, but it is just a big package by now. Features:

• dozens of anomalies
• early and mid game events, multiple archaeological sites and a few origins
• multiple mid game crises
• various species portraits

Inspiration: The mod was originally created by vonMourn shortly after the initial Stellaris release. I joined a few weeks later, when he asked around for people interested in contributing to it. Back then I had no idea about scripting and just wanted to add my "Event Horizon" knockoff story about a possessed ship that took its crew into hell. So writing was all good and well, but getting into scripting afterwards was a lot of trial and error back when there weren't such cool helpers like CWTools around. It was a great help though that all the stuff in Stellaris is as easily accessible with a text editor as it is.
The Broken Clock system from More Events Mod -- Guilli's Planet Modifiers and Features adds a ton of new anomalies, relics, and modifiers to make planets, and outer space more interesting.

Guillis Planet Modifiers and Features

By Guilliman
For version 3.12+ of the game, section written by Guilliman A big content expansion mod focusing on Planetary Modifiers. With hundreds of modifiers and lots of content that interacts with them. Features:

• Over 400 new Planet Modifiers
• Many new planet features and blockers
• Terraforming improvements through planet modifiers
• New planetary decisions to interact with planet modifiers
• Tons of story events
• New Anomalies and exploration events
• New policy: survey expeditions
• New Precursor Dig Sites that interact with precursor planet modifiers
• Precursor Discoveries (technologies, components, bonuses,..)
• 29 new relics
• Relic War Goals (claim relics!)
• Espionage to steal relics
• Relic galaxy map overlay to see who has relics and how many (based on intel)
• New precursor planet: "Archaeopolis" (requires Ancient Relics DLC)
• Minor Artifacts uses, techs, armies (requires Ancient Relics DLC)
• Broken Mini-Megastructures that spawn across the galaxy
• Wondrous Planets
• Custom options menu at the start of the game

Inspiration: I always found planets a little boring but I was mostly curious if I could mod a single planet modifier to see how hard it would be. It got a little bit out of hand from there.. :) More Primitives adds more content for primitives. It adds new events, 11 new Primitive eras, pre-FTL colonization of other habitable planets, and more!

More Primitives

By Sparble
This section written by Sparble More Primitives, as the name suggests, is a mod all about Pre-FTL civilizations, with its main focus being Pre-FTL Ages, Events, Situations and Special Projects. The mod started with a handful of primitive events, such as particle accelerator construction with mysterious events related to that, Pre-FTL world war with multiple outcomes, primitives entering a fanatic philosophical age from which they could turn into primitive purifiers, begin to worship multiple benevolent or malicious shroud entities, or embrace deeply philosophical debates such as anti-natalism. These events were expanded over time, and new event chains came along, such as primitives colonizing their solar system before reaching FTL, their reaction to megastructures in their system, or Pre-FTLs entering a robotic age and developing a technological singularity, which would eventually become self-aware an either trigger a global catastrophe or ultimately become the benevolent savior of the primitive species. It's also worth mentioning that More Primitives does not require the First Contact DLC, but adds additional content on top of that if used along with it. Features:

• Plenty of new Pre-FTL Events & Event Chains
• 11 New Pre-FTL Ages
• Pre-FTL Machine Intelligences
• New special projects & interactions related to Pre-FTL events
• Other flavor stuff related to primitives (Pre-FTL buildings, modifiers, planet class, traits)
• Dedicated Cross-Mod Support

You can never have enough primitive content! More Primitives was my first ever Stellaris mod and, with the help of the great modding community, inspired me to expand my initially very limited knowledge about modding, which has resulted in much new and improved content and the release of various other mods over time, expanding and adding new features to expand the Stellaris Universe. Thats it for this week, we have one more Mod Highlight scheduled for August 10th before Dev Diaries resume on August 15th! See you then!