Stellaris released its first major expansion, Utopia, earlier this year, and since then we’ve already gotten another big patch (albeit one that had some problems early on), and the team at Paradox has already started to lift the veil on what lies ahead (last week was Gene modding). There’s no timing for the next update yet, but it will consist of two parts—the free Čapek Update, and a paid Story Pack. A new development diary has started to detail some of what we can expect from the new updates, especially when it comes to Fallen Empires.
Stellaris DLC: The Čapek Update And New Story Pack Revamp Fallen Empires
Fallen Empires have always been one of the most intriguing aspects of Stellaris, and these behemoth ancient civilizations turned inward have already been expanded several times. Well, they’re going to get yet another revamp, and it sounds pretty exciting. First up, the Story Pack will introduce a new type of Fallen Empire: the Fallen Machine Empire, with the new type Ancient Caretakers.
Like the War in Heaven in the Leviathans DLC, this new Fallen Empire type will have story elements associated with it; it’s a decrepit civilization of synthetics (robots) that once protected something called the ‘Custodian Project.’ In their fallen state, though, the synthetics behave erratically; they’re hard to understand, you can’t see their relation with you, and they give you weird quests and make strange demands. And, as the dev diary teasingly hints, a certain “triggering event” can cause the Empire to Awaken, potentially leading to big trouble (theory: they’re tied to the revamp for the synthetic AI end-game crisis and The Contingency). Paradox says they’ll behave very differently than other Fallen and Awakened Empires, so that’ll be exciting.
The free Čapek Update will bring numerous other changes to Fallen Empires. First, they’ll be slightly easier to make first contact with: You’ll make contact when in an adjacent system, not only when you accidentally trespass in their space. Likewise, each of the Fallen Empire types have been slightly tweaked. Here are the details, via Paradox:
-Keepers of Knowledge were changed to have their behavior (Hatred of AI) no longer directly conflict with their ethos (Materialist). Both their Fallen and Awakened variants no longer hold a grudge against AI, but instead have doubled down on their obsession with collecting and hoarding knowledge. Satellites of Awakened Keepers of Knowledge are no longer required to ban AI, but will have to contribute a major share of their research to their overlord.
-Holy Guardians were changed to be a bit more interactive, and are now able to offer tasks and give gifts to the younger races, though they will mostly only deign to do so to fellow Spiritualists. They have also taken over some of the Keepers of Knowledge's hatred of AI, and you can expect their Awakened variant to offer no quarter to synthetic civilizations.
-Militant Isolationists and Enigmatic Observers have mostly been left unchanged, asides from some updates to their initializers and ship designs, such as removing the Synths previously used by the Militant Isolationists and giving them to the Keepers of Knowledge instead. They will now also start with more trait points for their species than the other Fallen Empires, to represent their focus on the biological.
The release date for the next Stellaris Story Pack and major update has been made clear enough: “it’s not coming out anytime soon.” Luckily, in Paradox time, that probably means a few months, rather than a year, but with Sweden’s summer break beginning, it’s definitely not coming out in the immediate future. We’ll keep you posted on the latest.
