[2019] Relics & Relic Worlds

Hello everyone, we have a new Dev Diary from grekulf!

As most of you probably know, the next upcoming DLC for Stellaris will be the Ancient Relics Story Pack. Last week I also promised I would show something awesome, by which I meant the headline feature of the story pack – the Relics themselves.

We announced Ancient Relics on Tuesday and we also streamed a lot of stuff that will be coming with Ancient Relics and the free 2.3 update that goes with it. If you haven’t seen the stream yet, you may want to check out the summary on YouTube.

Relic Worlds
A smaller part of Ancient Relics are the Relics Worlds. It is a new planet class that is essentially a planet entirely covered in ruins. If you find a Relic World, it's very likely that you will be the first to get to excavate its archaeological site. An archaeological site found on a Relic World should have many chapters and have a high difficulty.



A Relic World can be restored to an Ecumenopolis, but it will lose its unique deposits and archaeology site if there is one.



The homeworld of the First League precursors have been changed into a Relic World. We felt that this fits way better thematically and we also felt that finding a “free” Ecumenopolis was too strong. You will now have to work a little harder to restore the ancient city planet.

As mentioned before, we haven’t quite had the time to refresh the old precursor content, but this is something we want to do over time, so eventually it's quite likely you’ll be able to find more Relic Worlds and associated archaeological sites.

Relics
The Relics are a really cool new feature to Stellaris. Relics are very powerful artifacts and trophies that you can collect. Every Relics has a passive effect as well as an activation effect. All Relics share the same activation cooldown, so you will have to choose which one you will want to activate. The activation cooldown is 10 years.



Most relics will have an Influence cost for the activation cost, but in some cases this will be different.



The Relics system itself will be included in the base game, and you will be able to find a few Relics from previous content. Each crisis will have a Relic tied to it, and owners of MegaCorp will be able to get The Galatron. Owners of Apocalypse will be able to take the Khan’s Throne and owners of Leviathans will be able to take a trophy by defeating the Ether Drake.



Ancient Relics will feature a whole bunch of new Relics that you can collect. In total you’ll be able to find 20 of these new Relics.

The system is very moddable, and since the Relics system itself is free, mods will be able to use the system without requiring its users to own Ancient Relics. We’re very much looking forward to seeing what cool new Relics the community can conjure up!

Relics Design Intentions
I started as the first UI/UX designer at Paradox Development Studio over 6 years ago now, before switching over to purely doing game design and now eventually taking over as the game director for Stellaris. EU4 was the first game I worked on, and the macro builder is what I see as my first large contribution to our games. I’ve always thought that the UI/UX design and game design need to mesh really well for a solid experience. Although we can’t always get it right (my faults included), it's really fun to do something different here.

With the Relics I wanted us to start experimenting with more visual rewards. I wanted something that would be so cool to find, collect, and look at, that you almost didn't care about what the effects of the thing were. I wanted large icons with a slight animation, kind of like golden Hearthstone cards. Originally we only planned to have passive effects for them, but in order for the player to experience the visual rewards more often, we had to create incentives for them to open the UI and look at them. That is how the active effects came into play. By giving the Relics a really cool activation effect, players will open the UI more often and get those “feel good” moments by looking at their Relics.

From a design perspective, I am very happy with how the Relics turned out. We’ve made a really nice-looking UI with a thematic background that really fits the art style. We’ve also made awesome and animated relic icons that are really rewarding to collect and look at. The activation effects for a lot of the Relics are also really cool.

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Ancient Relics is turning out to be a really cool addition to Stellaris, and it's going to be really great seeing how you guys react to the content once you get a chance to try it out.

That is all we had to share for this week’s dev diary. Next week we will be back with something different, technically speaking.