General - You can now rename characters, star systems, houses, factions, and leagues in the dev console - Added VSynch option - Replaced hair color palette with more realistic choices - Random portrait generator avoids genetically unlikely skin / hair combinations - The game now better highlights when you cannot ask any more rulers to join your attack because you ran out of AP - Added "Remove Trait" effect in Creator - Minor tweaks to text, story events
Fixes - Flags that provide an effectiveness bonus to a character now work correctly - Inheriting another house no longer reduces your maximum house size - Fixed bug where you couldn't add your home system's forces to an attack when you ran out of AP, despite that action being free - Characters will no longer end affairs irrationally - Fixed issue where a duke would refuse a system if its baron didn't like them - Fixed soft-lock when you attempt to train a character who cannot be trained further - A Rebuild Colony assignment is now stopped if another faction rebuilds the colony first - Fixed issues with some expeditions when your house is inherited by another ruler - The upstart duke starting option now works correctly - It is no longer possible to start the game as an upstart duke unless you select it as a game customization option - Fixed bug where enough damage reduction effects would heal the defender - Fixed rare crash issue when AI ruler inherits a faction - Fixed errors in shown reasoning when a ruler refuses an offer that would have made them indebted to you - Fixed bug where random character generation in family designer was always using the default hair color - Fixed story event with exploding viridium mine so that it does not repeatedly explode - Fixed story event where your children ask you to pick a favourite, so that it no longer triggers for dead children - Fixed "submerged library" expedition so that your companion cannot be a child, ill, or under arrest
Update Notes for v1.0.3.3
- Fixed bug that was corrupting the guided scenario if your faction was inherited by another ruler - Fixed unclear guided scenario message when building up your fleet in combat - Bloodlines: Fixed issue where rulers would sometimes assign the same guardian to multiple wards in quick succession - Fixes to story events
Update Notes for v1.0.3.2
- The suggestion to upgrade your bloodline is no longer shown if you are not using the Bloodline DLC features - Fixes to story events - Fixes to German localization
Star Dynasties: Bloodlines — Inheritance, Child Upbringing, Upgrade Tree
Welcome back to our two-parter on the features of Star Dynasties’ new Bloodlines DLC. If you missed our intro dev log about the new family designer, you should definitely check it out. Today, I’ll describe the remaining DLC features: child upbringing, managing inheritance, and bloodline upgrades.
In Bloodlines, we want to make children a more important part of your house and your story. To achieve this, we’re giving you the ability to mold the children in your family, influencing their traits and skills as they grow into adults. Children will now be a source of story events, and you can use them as political pawns with other rulers. Of course, one child will be particularly important - your heir - and these features will bring them to life like never before.
For each child related to you, you will be able to assign one of your council members, or yourself, as the guardian of that child. Guardians influence children in two ways. First, they give their ward a gradual stat increase in the guardian’s best and second-best skills. Secondly, the guardian also has an influence on the personality traits that the child will acquire as they grow. Let’s talk about both in some more detail.
When a child is born, they have a predisposition to be good in one skill and not another. Unless you designed them yourself as part of your starting family, you won’t know what their strength is - but you will sometimes learn this information when the child demonstrates their aptitude in a particular area. For example you might find them fixing some machinery, indicating an affinity for Technology, or trying to resolve conflict via persuasion, suggesting a strength in Diplomacy. If you learn what skill they are best at, it’s often a good idea to assign them a guardian that reinforces that skill, or instead focus them in some other area to balance your house or their strengths.
In the base game, characters adopt traits from their parents. If a child has two Humble parents, that child is very likely to become Humble as they grow, and exceedingly unlikely to be Proud. With Bloodlines, the guardian will also influence the traits a child is likely to adopt, by making choices during story events representing seminal moments in the child’s upbringing. If you happen to be the guardian, you’ll be the one making those decisions: for example, deciding that it’s worth denying yourself a small boon now to demonstrate honorable behaviour to your ward, in the hope they’ll become honorable themselves.
You can also ask another ruler to be the guardian of one of their direct children. Having a ruler’s child as your ward is a great way to keep that ruler friendly: you could arrest the child, or even execute them, if their parent acted against you. Similarly, you may find yourself giving another ruler your child as a hostage… erm, ward, if you want something from them in return.
Managing Inheritance
You’ve done your best to raise your heir into a fine scion of your house, ready to take the reins when you pass away. Then they go and get caught murdering another noble, ruining their reputation and making them a distinctly dicey prospect as the next ruler of your empire. What’s a prudent parent to do? In Bloodlines, we give you the tools to change who will inherit your house.
Ruling houses - that is, those which rule at least a single star system - now have a succession rule that determines who will inherit the house when the current ruler dies. In the base game, all houses use the “Oldest Child” rule, where unsurprisingly the oldest child (or their oldest child, if they are deceased) inherits the house. In Bloodlines we have four cardinal succession rules (Oldest Child, Youngest Child, Closest Relative, and Oldest Sibling), and each rule has variations by gender, e.g. Youngest Son, or Oldest Sister.
Changing a succession rule might be the right call, but it will incur a significant political cost. If you are desperate to get rid of your current heir, but are in a precarious political position, you may instead choose to disinherit them. Disinheriting an heir simply removes them from the succession list without changing the current succession rule of the house. If your heir has committed a crime against you, this will even be seen as a just punishment.
But what if none of your would-be heirs are particularly appealing? Your son may be a murderer, but his sister is a half-wit, and your brother is old and childless. Never fear: you will now be able to appoint any member of your house, or any kin member in your empire, as your heir. However, this comes with the most significant political cost of all. If you’re going to tear up centuries of tradition to hand-pick some nobody as your successor, you’d better have plenty of goodwill with your vassals.
And of course, since you will have the power to alter House inheritance, your family members will naturally try to exploit this themselves. Look out for events where House members try to disinherit each other!
Lastly, if you are playing on Custom difficulty you can choose to Abdicate your rule, causing your heir to immediately inherit. This is only available on Custom difficulty because, to be honest, it can break the game. Use it responsibly as part of a role playing run, or abuse it to inherit into a stronger character… the choice is yours.
Bloodline Upgrades
One element that some have felt was missing from the game is some kind of tech-tree of upgrades. Now, as I’ve said before, this is a really awkward fit for Star Dynasties: in our universe technology is stagnant and no significant research is taking place. In response to this feedback we built the Expeditions systems during Early Access, which was our way of bringing technology to the forefront in Star Dynasties.
In Bloodlines, we now introduce an upgrade tree tied to something that is at the heart of the game: your dynasty.
Bloodline upgrades should be rare, and you will not be able to acquire the entire tree in one sitting. Thus you’ll need to decide whether to go deep into specific branches (the final upgrade in each branch is stronger than the remaining upgrades), or whether to spread your points around more tactically.
Bloodline upgrades can complement a themed run by making a particular playstyle more powerful. It’s also a great way to experiment with different playstyles, as it makes assignments or strategies you don’t normally use more attractive.
You earn bloodline upgrades in two ways. First, by expanding your dynasty: every ruler who is related to you will earn you bloodline upgrade points each turn. Secondly, by earning status: every kin member who commits an act that earns status will also earn you bloodline upgrade points. When you collect enough points, you can choose an upgrade from the tree.
Thus you acquire bloodline upgrades by expanding your dynasty and seeing them do well. In the base game you had some motivation to place kin members in positions of power, and to support them: being kin, they tended to like you and would act in your favour by eg. not rebelling, or helping in combat. But you were unlikely to, for example, install your brother (a skilled House member!) as the ruler of a conquered system, and if a kin ruler’s opinion of you declined it was easy to just write them off.
Bloodline upgrades gives you a natural motive to install and maintain your kin members in positions of power in your empire and elsewhere: the more kin you have ruling systems, the more Bloodline upgrades you get! It also motivates you to find marriages that establish relationships with higher ranking rulers.
Pick up Bloodlines!
This DLC has been a long road for us! We’re excited to finally share it with you, and we hope when you get your hands on it you’ll agree that these features enrich the base game and make ruling the cosmos all the sweeter.
Fixed a bug where asking a vassal faction to submit dissolved your league
Fixes to German localization
Star Dynasties: Bloodlines — Available Now!
The first DLC for Star Dynasties is here! Bloodlines will give you the ability to design your own starting family, raise your children by assigning them a guardian, use them as political pawns, change the heir of your house, and invest in a persistent set of “Bloodline upgrades” for you and your kin.
[previewyoutube="r7NsghRD-70;full"]
The Bloodlines DLC is the result of listening carefully to the feedback you’ve all made over the last six months. You have shown us that the game is at its best when the relationships and drama between characters come to the fore, and no group of characters are more salient than your family. We also wanted to add some specific features that have been requested pretty frequently, and which we feel would naturally enrich the game. Bloodlines ties these elements together under the theme of dynasty and legacy.
You can pick up Bloodlines for $7.99 / €6.59 / £5.79
In this dev log, I want to focus on the first feature of the DLC, the new family designer. But before that, here’s a preview of how configuring a new start will change in the base game, in the 1.0.3.0 patch that accompanies the DLC: an across-the-board change that’ll improve things for players of the base game and DLC alike.
This is the new House configuration screen, in which you define the details of your house, and its traits. In contrast with the previous system, your starting traits are now split into two separate lists: one for your house, and one for your starting character. You are no longer forced to choose whether to have a strong starting character at the expense of a weak house. Instead, the strength of both your starting character and house will depend on the difficulty setting. A harder difficulty means fewer points, but remember: you can (should?) take a few negative traits to give you the points to buy positive traits you want.
You’ll notice several new things about the screen. First, you can now define your Succession Rule and manipulate how many Family Customization Points you have. These are both features that are tied to the DLC and will not be available in the base game (more on both later).
One thing I’ll draw your attention to is the “Load Config” button at the bottom of the screen. This will allow you to load the setup you used in a recent game, which means you no longer have to configure your house and starting character from scratch every time you start a new game. Some players want to “reroll” the starting galaxy a few times; we want to support that.
This is the new Starting Character configuration screen. You can now choose to start the game at a younger age. Another new element is that you can now choose how well rounded your character will be in terms of their secondary skills.
One nice quality-of-life feature is that you can now randomize different parts of your starting character separately. If you’ve defined your character’s stats but want to try some different portraits, you can randomize the latter without losing everything else.
Family Designer
The Family Designer will give you the freedom to start the game with the family you desire. Want to start the game as a single young upstart, looking to build a dynasty from scratch? You can. Want to roll your own family and friends and conquer the galaxy? You can! Want to build the Space Lannisters and scheme your way to ultimate power? You can, and more.
You can also add members to your starting houses that are not related to you. This allows you to build starting houses with trusted inner-circle friends and advisors who aren’t kin. (Internally we’ve been calling these people “Duncan Idahos,” for any Dune fans among you.)
Although the Family Designer is mostly focused on your own House, you can use marriage ties to influence your relations with foreign Houses at the start of the game.. When you add a spouse to one of your family members, you can select the type of House that character came from. Your spouse can be the relative of a lowly noble, or they can be the relative of a duke. That duke will then be generated and added to the game when it is created. When adding parents or (adult) children to your family, you can also define them as having married outside of the family, similarly establishing relationships to foreign houses.
This could create political opportunities for you down the line, since those foreign House heads are now kin to you, and will view you more favourably. But having ruler relatives is about to become more important for a different reason… but more about that in the next dev log.
Same sex marriages are supported, whether it’s you or your other family members getting hitched. If you add children to those marriages in the family designer, they will be the natural offspring of the character that is your blood relative, and the stepchildren of that person’s partner.
Lastly, the family designer also comes with tools to generate families for you if you just want to jump right into the game. Or perhaps you want to see what kind of weird random family you can manage to take to galactic pre-eminence.
One limitation of the designer is that it does not allow for “historical” information. For example, you cannot define a long dead ancestor for the house. Similarly you cannot define a divorced spouse from which your first child was born - all your children are assumed to be the children of your other spouse (unless you are in a same sex marriage, as covered above). The tradeoff is simplicity, both in understanding how the family is laid out, and of the toolset to generate it. We still think you can put together some pretty interesting custom families, even if not every conceivable Space Family is quite covered.
Balancing Families
One challenge with the new Family Designer is how to keep the game balanced. As fun as it is to roll your own family, or one that mimics a family from your favorite book or tv show, we also want to prevent the player from rolling a family of superheroes that spoil the challenge of the game. To manage this, you will have a number of Family Customization Points which you spend on family members. Older (i.e. more skilled) characters, characters with lots of traits, and characters that establish links to other houses are more expensive. You can build a balanced family, or one that is very good in one or two areas. You can build a family with a set of children that will grow and flesh it out, or you can sacrifice the next generation for some highly skilled members in the here and now. The system should allow for multiple viable builds and strategies. We can’t promise this system is perfectly, unassailably balanced, but we did spend an entire week bashing out families to try and break the game, so we’ve taken care of the worst exploits.
Back to that Family Customization slider you saw in the House Configuration screen: one way you can get a larger family is to give up some of your House trait points. You can also do the reverse: start with a very small family, and instead invest in a stronger set of House bonuses.
However, despite the need to make balanced starting families, we didn’t want to restrict you from building whatever family you wanted. So on the Custom difficulty setting you can give yourself a lot more Family Customization Points, allowing you to build whatever family you wish, as long as it respects the house’s size limit (but there’s also a new house trait that gives your house a bonus to your house size limit). And yes, we did try building Space Starks and Knock-off Atreides to make sure you’d be able to as well.
More Info To Come!
There are of course more things to explore in Bloodlines, but the family customization was worthy of its own separate dev log. I didn't want to spill the beans on everything just yet, and want to give you a chance to find all the new features in Bloodlines yourself. The next dev log will be coming soon, and will be about the other features in the DLC: child upbringing, managing inheritance, and bloodline upgrades!
Star Dynasties Bloodlines + Base Game Update Patch Notes
Hi everyone!
In case you missed it, we just released Star Dynasties: Bloodlines, a DLC that expands your toolkit as a ruler over your house. It includes a family designer, the ability to properly teach and raise your children, an upgrade tree, and more!
The base game and mod editor have also undergone quite some changes, so check out the patch notes below.
Bloodlines DLC Features
You can design your starting family when creating a new game
You can assign guardians to children in your house. The guardian influences the child's skills and traits.
When you are the guardian of a child, you can mold their personality through story events
You can change the succession law for your house, disinherit your current heir, or appoint a new heir altogether
You can abdicate your rule (on Custom difficulty)
You can unlock bloodline upgrades that provide a benefit for the remainder of the game
You acquire bloodline upgrades in relation to how many other rulers are your kin members, and their actions
A set of events have been added around the themes of rivalry, child upbringing, and heir competition
A set of 5 expeditions have been added
Base Game Changes
Start Game Customization
The New Game screen has been broken up into separate screens for configuring your starting house and character
The trait points for configuring your starting house and character are now separate
It is now possible to reload a previous starting configuration
It is now possible to randomize smaller elements of the starting configuration at a time
Added a starting trait that gives you a bonus to the house's size limit
You can now set your House's color to gray
The "Poor Infrastructure" starting trait can no longer be taken with any trait that grants an installation
The "Home System: Assembly Plant" starting trait now works correctly
Balancing / AI Changes
When you make a request, a friendly ruler will no longer refuse because they think it is to your disadvantage
When an archon accepts vassalization or submission, their previous vassals now become independent (instead of becoming your vassals)
An archon can only offer or accept to become the vassal of a league or faction that their personal faction borders directly
Rulers are now less likely to give up territory when negotiating
Dukes are now better at judging when systems in their domain need unrest quelled
Characters that like you are now less likely to betray you in political negotiations
You must now wait two turns between hosting feasts in someone's honor (instead of one)
The per turn chance of killing someone with Assassinate is now capped at 50%
The crime of rebellion is less severe for a vassal duke whose territory is larger than the remainder of the league
Skill increase rate from assignments has been reduced by 20%
General Improvements
When an offer or request is invalid, it will still be shown in the action list, but the tooltip will explain why it is invalid
You can now seduce your spouse
Added a small set of new house emblems
Performance improvements to End Turn phase
A portrait will now switch from an infant to a child at age 6
It is now possible to arrest children
The claims suggestion is no longer shown for claims that cannot be immediately championed
The CALL / JOIN / ASK buttons in combat buildup now use icons instead of text
General Fixes
Eliminated various memory leaks that were creating slowdowns in longer sessions, and long game loads
When your heir is already a ruler, the flags from your house are now inherited correctly
Fixed occasional soft lock issue when player dies
Fixed a rare game freeze during the end turn phase
Fixed bug where moving an assignee home while they are Spreading Dissent on a system that eventually becomes depopulated would lead to an End Turn crash
Fixed a bug leading to inconsistent behaviour when AI was making political negotiations
Fixed rare crash when a claim is championed
Fixed bug where the wrong moral act was sometimes shown when championing a claim to resurrect a dead faction
It is no longer possible for the player to be offered someone's hand in marriage without them being aware of the character
The "military disadvantage" suggestion now correctly cycles through the different systems if there are multiple
Fixed bug when divorcing a character in another house for whom you are the marriage authority
Fixed issue where the effectiveness of Assassinate and Defame tasks against members of your house was being reduced to 1
Fixed bug where player character was not being shown in the list when asked who an assignee should provide personal protection to
The "Grant Independence" and "Assist Tax Collection" actions are no longer shown for noble houses on your system
It is no longer possible to have multiple assignments covering up the same secret
Autosaving no longer overwrites saves from other games with the same player faction name
Fixed issue where some opinion flag effects were being applied twice
The rivalry flag is now removed when the rival dies
Fixed issue with unhappiness from taxation
Fixed an issue where sometimes a secret shows up as [NULL] when it is revealed
The "Combat Simulator" and "Arena" installations now provide their bonus action only in the stated range
The Continue main menu button now skips over saves that cannot be loaded because they need missing content
Lots of minor fixes to UI text, story events
Fixes to German localization
Modding Tool Changes
General Improvements
You can now add hidden flags to a global "Galaxy" entity, that can also be matched for and filtered based on flags
Custom Assignments can now be shown as invalid in action lists by defining appropriate prerequisites
You can now set a money cost for custom assignments
You can choose whether a custom action automatically predicts its result in the action tooltip
The "Branching" effect now shows the contents of a Notes field when collapsed
The "Hidden" and "Sequenced Storylet" effect now show additional information when collapsed
Added "roleAdm", "roleMil", etc... text tokens
Added more colors to icon color picker
Added a new set of icons
The "Transfer Military Strength" effect now takes an amount parameter
New Components
Added "Has Bloodlines DLC" filter on Galaxy
Added "Is Legal Head Of" filter
Added "Marriage" internal event that can be hooked into by "Story Event After Internal Event for Character"
Added "Can Succession Law Be Changed To" filter
Added "Do Change Succession Law" effect
Added a Claim Matcher
Added "Ruling Claim To" source
Added "Can Offer to Champion Claim" filter
Added "Do Champion Claim" effect
Added "Second In Line Of" source
Added "Heir Of" source
Added "Houses In Inheritance Of" source
Added "Heir Of By Succession Rule" source
Added "Is Using Succession Rule" filter
Added "Skill Level In Role Of" property
Added "Variable on Galaxy" property
Added "Remove Flag From Galaxy" effect
Added "Is Poor In Best Skill Of" filter
Added "Line Of Succession Of" source
Added "Is Heir Of" filter
Added "Can Be Appointed Heir Of" filter
Added "Can Abdicate" filter
Added "Can Disinherit Heir" filter
Added "Do Appoint Heir" effect
Added "Do Disinherit Heir" effect
Added "Do Abdicate" effect
Added "Is Best Skill filter"
Added "Ruler Has Importance" filter
Added "Do End Guardianship" effect
Added "Do Start Guardianship" effect
Added "Do Ward Potentially Adopts Trait" effect
Added "Guardian Of" source
Added "Ward Of" source
Added "Skill Increase Rate Of Ward" flag effect
Added "Skill Increase Rate Of All Wards" flag effect
Added "Can Be Guardian" filter
Added "Can Be Guardian Of" filter
Added "Can Be Ward" filter
Added "Can Be Ward Of" filter
Added "Can End Guardianship Of" filter
Added "Is Guardian" filter
Added "Is Guardian Of" filter
Added "Is Ward" filter
Added "Is Ward Of" filter
Added "Player Action Cost" flag effect
Added "Cannot Join Combat Against (On Character)" flag effect
Added "Skill Increase Rate of All Wards" flag effect
Added "Ruling House Fleet Strength" flag effect and installation flag effect
Added "Tournament Effectiveness" flag effect
Added "Damage Repaired After Combat As Commander" flag effect
Added "Transfer Military Strength" effect
Added "Has No More Than N Traits From Set" filter
Added "Story Event After Player Assignment Completed"
Added "Factions Of League" source
Added "Would Move Away In A Marriage To" filter
Added "Opinion
House Members to Non-Kin Foreigners" flag effect
Added "Defender Combat Moves when Attacking" flag effect
Added "Has Same Best Skill As" filter
Added "Cannot Join Combat Against" flag effect
Added "Effectiveness in Specific Assignments (Modifier)" flag effect
Added "Bloodline Upgrade Branch Element" to config bundles
Added "Story Event After Bloodline Upgrade Activated"
Added "Add Available Bloodline Upgrade" effect
Added "Get Well Probability for Player Kin" flag effect
Added "House Fleet Strength By Vessel Type" flag effect
Added "Led Fleet Strength By Vessel Type" flag effect
Added "Dummy Flag Effect on House" flag effect
Added "Opinion - Members of House to its Head" flag effect
Added "Tournament Effectiveness (Members)" flag effect
Added "Opinion - Vassals to Ruler Based on their System Unrest" flag effect
Added "Vassal Unhappiness From Taxation Modifier" flag effect
Added "Mercenary Cost Percentage Modifier" flag effect
Added "Opinion - Ruler of System towards Leader of Faction" flag effect
Added "Opinion - Local Nobles To Ruling House Head" flag effect
Added "Effectiveness in Specific Assignment on Home System" flag effect
Added "Passive Secret Discovery of Head Modifier" flag effect
Added "Can Grant Independence" filter and "Do Grant Independence" effect
Added "Effectiveness in Specific Assignment for House" flag effect
Added "Tournament Injury Chance (Members)" flag effect
Added "Trait Likelihood For Player Kin" flag effect
Added "Domain Size" property
Added "Story Event After System Attacked"
Added "Was Generated At Start" filter for houses
Added "Do Copy Last Name From Founder Of House" effect
Added "Is At War" filter
Added "Do Clone Character Opinions" effect
Added "Do Clone Character Skills" effect
Added "Do Clone Character Traits" effect
Renamed "Opinion - Local Nobles to Ruling House Head" flag effect to "Opinion - Local Noble Heads to Ruling House Head"
Renamed "Passive Secret Discovery of Head Modifier" flag effect to "Passive Discovery of Head's Secrets"
Renamed "Effectiveness in Specific Assignments" flag effect to "Effectiveness in Specific Assignments (Multiplier)"
General Fixes
The "Do Remove From Council" effect now correctly predicts dishonor
"Story Event After Player Assignment Completed" is now correctly restricted only to player houses
Custom Assignments on Character are no longer shown on dead characters
Fixed bug where "Chance That Something Happens" was not showing up correctly in prediction text
The "Do Humiliate" effect now works correctly
The "ap" and "cr" text functions now work correctly
The "Age" property is now correctly sensitive to half-years, i.e. a character will be reported as e.g. 15,15.5,16 over the course of 3 turns; not 15,15,16.
The "Do Fall In Love" effect now does nothing if the character is already in love with the potential love interest
The "Remove Claim" effects no longer crash Creator when selected
Fixed issue where the "General Opinion" flag was effecting opinions both of and from the target character
Fixed issue where the "Is Assigned" filter was crashing story events
The "Can Be Married To" filter now works correctly
The New Character Spawner will now adjust the age outside of the minimum range if the chosen parents are too young
The New Character Spawner will now ignore or swap the chosen parents if their sexes where incorrect
The New Character Spawner no longer crashes story event execution if the character cannot be created
Fixed bug where it was not possible to re-add an installation after having removed it in Creator
The end of the year is almost upon us, and with that come the annual Steam Awards. Star Dynasties is all about stories and drama. We want every game to feel like you're in the middle of a space opera, complete with scheming family members and ambitious neighbors.
If you enjoy the emergent narratives offered by Star Dynasties, consider giving us a vote!
Notes for 1.0.2.1 Hotfix
- Fixed an issue that was causing end of turn soft locks
Star Dynasties Update & Modding Contest -- WIN Steam Credit!
Hello everyone!
We're very excited to introduce the first official Star Dynasties modding contest! Always wanted to take a crack at the editor? Now is the time to flex your creative muscles and make magic. We've also pushed a small update that introduces a new mechanic, and adds some options to the modding tool!
You must send us a link to your mod, either in the Discord server's #sd-modding channel, or by responding to this Steam announcement.
You can enter with up to 2 different mods
The contest runs for 1 month, from November 18th until December 18th. You can enter the contest until the end date of Dec 19th.
The winner will be the mod that most impresses us. We are particularly looking for mods that tell stories with interesting choices, add interesting actions or abilities for the player, or introduce elements from other sci-fi settings.
The creator of the best mod will receive a €100 Steam Credit digital gift card. Please note that the currency will be converted to your regional equivalent.
Never looked at the modding tool before? Do not fear! Here's a few tips to get you started:
Want to see what a fully finished mod looks like? Subscribe to a mod in the Steam Workshop. You'll be able to open the mod in the editor to take a look under the hood.
Feel free to ask for technical advice on the Discord
Also feel free to use existing sci-fi settings. We'd love to see completely original mods, but a lovingly-crafted Dune-inspired mod can also do the trick!
So what are you waiting for? Hop on the editor and tinker away!
Patch Notes
Today's update brings a new mechanic to the game that will allow you to expand your house without going through the usual channels of marriage or childbirth. Opting to go the scouting route has a drawback; you won't be able to see the stats of your new house member until you accept them, and a kin member will never be as loyal as your own flesh and blood. Still, desperate times call for desperate measures.
General
You can now scout for potential new members to add to your house
It is now easier to find marriage candidates for members of your house
It is no longer possible to try to seduce a dead character
Fixed scenario where a join request in combat was still dishonorable for both accept and refuse
Fixed bug where selecting the Pacifists starting trait gave you the Tactical Tradition starting trait instead
A house member's death will now always be shown to the player, even if their notification settings are "Lowest"
The player will always be notified that a secret was revealed if they were aware of the secret beforehand
The notification that you have successfully assassinated a character will now be shown even if you have set notifications to Lowest
Fixes to German localization
Tweaks to story events, UI, tooltips
Modding Tool
You can now add names for characters, star systems, and factions to the game, using a "Name List Element" inside a "Config Bundle"
Added "Is Parent Of" filter
Fixed bug in "Can Be Married To" filter
The "Do Assign Council Member" effect now correctly predicts the dishonor from firing the previous councillor
The "New Character Spawner" now lets you choose the best skill of that character
"Add Status Event" now works on dead characters
Added "Fired From Council" internal event that can be hooked into by "Story Event After Internal Event for Character"
Added "Die from Illness" flag effect
You can now disable createables in Core using the "Ignore Createable" element in "Config Bundle"
Added "Is Discovery Difficulty" secret filter
Fixed bug with inverted choice prequisites that had no override text