by PDX_Cosmogone
Hi everyone!
Cosmogone here with the final Dev Diary before May 5th and the release of BioGenesis and 4.0. Today, we’ll be taking a look at the various civics and at the latest innovation in galaxy-threatening technology: Behemoths.
Civics
We have a lot to cover, so I’ll be brief here and let screenshots speak for me.
Regular Empires/Corporate civics:
Crowdsourcing: Faction Output numbers are non final
Genetic ID: Combine with CyberCreed and Dimensional Worship for a no scientist run
Civil Ed: “It stacks with Utopian Abundance” - Iggy (2025)
Hive Civics:
Machine Civic:
[REDACTED]
[REDACTED] are just a fairy tale told to [From.GetSpeciesSpawnNamePlural] to keep them afraid of the dark and keep them in line.
Alright, this one warrants a few more explanations in regards to the new operations made by Iggy:
- Smuggle population is a new operation available to everyone that lets you steal a few hundred pops from a target empire. Whether you are using it to liberate slaves or acquire fuel for the Synaptic Lathe is up to you.
- Prepare Invasion is exclusive to this civic, and for a cost of pops, will let you strike from the shadows at the beginning of a war, flipping starbases in systems close to you and even spawning a handful of armies on some planets in an attempt to conquer them by surprise. The total number of systems affected by this effect depends on how many pops you choose to sacrifice when preparing the operation with a maximum of 2000 pops of the victim’s species for 50% of its controlled systems.
Behemoth Fury
Our new crisis path, only available to bioship empires, will be a must-play for enjoyers of Kaiju movies, titanic dragons, and BIG monsters in general. In it, you seek to transcend the weak form that binds you to planets and prevents you from just having the time of your life in space under the foolish excuses that you need to breathe, be warm, or that solar radiation can mess up your systems.
Your path to a new life begins with figuring out how to craft new spaceborne life:
To support the ever growing number of crisis paths, the Crisis tab has been made more modular than ever and can accommodate new backgrounds and color schemes.
But I digress. Behemoth Fury will see you accumulate Feral Insight to progress through the levels, with the biggest rewards coming from birthing and interacting with Behemoths.
Most of the perks revolve around them directly, but quite a few will significantly buff your bioships, your food production and your society research as your entire empire is skewed towards developing and supporting Behemoths. Here are a few examples:
In order to birth Behemoths you must first prepare a suitable vessel for something this size. A megastructure ought to do it. The Behemoth Eggs are built and hatched exclusively with food so those farmers better get to work, because you’ll need a LOT of it.
Newborn Behemoths are not that impressive yet, sporting a mere 28.5K fleet power, and a lot of it comes from how tanky they are. They are still a far cry from the objective of breeding the ultimate predator, but they are a necessary step.
Note the fancy new ship UI that made way for a brand new “Growth” bar and the very non-threatening “Rage Status”. As your baby Behemoth goes around the galaxy, living its best life by eating ships and pop (by bombarding planets, it’s not big enough to eat them whole yet), it will fill up its growth meter. Once the meter is full, it turns into a button, and if you’re far enough along the crisis path, you’ll be able to click it to send the Behemoth back into an egg, or a Chrysalis if you want to be technical about it.
Once again, you can spend a lot more food in order to let an even bigger beast emerge, ready to feast upon an unsuspecting galaxy.
However, this is not without danger. Behemoths are dangerous beasts, and until you can find a way to fully control them, they WILL escape your grasp from time to time, succumbing to their rage and hunger. With the right stimulation, you can, however, induce this rage artificially, unleashing the Behemoth when the time is right.
When Raging, a Behemoth will attack anything else in the system, then attempt to seek out the closest source of food (a colony or a Behemoth egg) to go and devour it. As a Behemoth Crisis empire, you can defeat them in combat to beat them into submission and take control of them, while other empires that can prevail over a raging beast will kill it.
There is more finesse to this system, such as the fact that fully fed Behemoths no longer randomly rage, or that if two Behemoths meet, they will try to fight each other, possibly to the death. The Rage Status indicator in the fleet view should let you know when your beast is at risk of succumbing to its anger.
It is absolutely possible to get killed by your own feral behemoths and I have lost count of the times where I got game-overed when testing the rage while owning a single colony.
The final level of the crisis is the most transformative in terms of gameplay. As usual, crossing that final line is up to you, and it will have important consequences. First off, the Galactic Community will collectively declare war upon you, and even Fallen Empires have a chance to decide to step in.
Having completed the Mind Meld special project, you will assume full control of one of your Behemoths, which will in turn keep any other in line, preventing them from raging unless you use the rage action.
As you merge the minds of your population with the beasts, you will unlock increasingly powerful bonuses before your final ascension.
What’s that? A final boss? Don’t worry about it.
Your capital will swap its city districts for Mindlink Metropolis ones that produce unity and research for each pop that has already been “Transferred” and whose mind became one with the Behemoth. The starting output is tiny, but it will rapidly increase as long as you can find volunteers.
༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ Kaiju take my energy! ༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ
On the other hand, having a mind link with a beast like the Behemoth can prove a little distracting, and raises questions like “What’s the point of anything in life when all I want is to merge into the beast?”
Such thoughts are represented by the following modifier and will grow worse as you progress through the final situation of the crisis.
Who knew that letting a starbeast into your mind would have consequences?
Speaking of, the Growing Pains situation tracks how well you adapt to your new body and will let you unlock increasingly powerful mutations for your Class IV Behemoth, to grow it into the ultimate starborn predator.
The situation progresses faster depending on your approach and your growth factor, which tracks how many pops have been transferred as well as how much you’ve eaten yet.
At this point your Behemoth has reached its adult size and can simply go around the galaxy, gobbling up habitable planets to absorb their biomass and population.
At this stage of its growth, the Behemoth makes full use of the new fleet UI created for “Hero Ship” and can unlock new activated abilities as you progress through the Growing Pains situation. At every stage, you will be given a choice of bonuses to gain, the first of which regards the type of eggs that you want your behemoth to lay. Eggs will be able to hatch into other baby behemoths or swarms of bioships to support your creature as it devours the galaxy.
Eggcellent
By the end of the situation, you should have unlocked five new activated abilities, located under the usual Orders bar. These abilities can target planets, enemy fleets, ally fleets, or the Behemoth itself. Oh yeah, and one of them lets you cloak your Behemoth if you have First Contact.
Can’t wait to see what modders will do with this. Surely nothing too crazy.
In addition to all that, the Behemoth will not be locked in combat (like a colossus), can still be ordered around while fighting, and even got a fancy combat UI improvement to let you trigger its various abilities.
Stellaris MOBA, when?
Here is a sample of the abilities on this specific Behemoth, but bear in mind that all abilities have swaps, except the Thermoclastic Roar that needs none. This is all pretty novel stuff, so the fleet power doesn’t really reflect abilities like this, and honestly, I’m certain you will manage to break this new system in exciting ways, and I cannot wait for the memes.
I definitely don’t have the room for all the mutations here, so here are a few numbers about the Crisis:
- [strike]26 244 uh no 78 732[/strike] Quite a few combinations of mutations
- 13 different active abilities
- 21 different passive bonuses
- 1 allegedly invincible final boss
There is a lot more that I don’t have time to tell you about and that you’ll need to discover by yourselves, so I will leave you with amazing placeholder UI art, courtesy of our UX designer and featuring a hungry and angry behemoths:
Oh and we also forgot about…
There are things that simply didn’t fit in any dev diary, and others that have recently changed about 4.0, so here is a non-exhaustive list:
- Hive pops can now live and work in non-hive empires without being purged
- We’re adding a whole bunch of new planet-related events
- A whole swathe of new mammalian portraits are available for everyone for free!
- Hive Worlds and Machine Worlds now work on a similar level to Ecumenopoli!
- You can get all the new Fallen Empire Buildings from Machine Age when using Reverse-Engineer Arcane Technology
- You can now forgive the Radical Cult! No longer must you chase them down in every system if you don’t want to.
- Did we ever show you what the finished Timeline looks like?
Partial Features Release Notes
There’s a lot in this release, so we have partial release notes for today. We’ll have the rest alongside the release on Monday.
Preliminary 4.0 ‘Phoenix’ and BioGenesis Release Notes (Major Features Only)
BioGenesis Features
Overhauled Genetic Ascension
- Choose from three Ascension paths: Cloning, Purity, or Mutation
- Evolve your empire's government into one of 18 enhanced authorities
- Customize your genetic ascension by blending Purity, Cloning, and Mutation traditions
Biological Ships
- Command living fleets that evolve alongside your empire
- Customize these ships for specialized roles, from battleships to support vessels, each capable of empowering allies and weakening foes
- Two new biological shipsets, Spinovore and Shellcraft
Player Crisis Path - Behemoth Fury
- Let them fight! Breed an unstoppable biological monster and unleash it on an unsuspecting galaxy.
Three New Origins
- Evolutionary Predators: Push the boundaries of Species Traits by unlocking and combining unique phenotype abilities to craft the ultimate adaptive empire.
- Starlit Citadel: Solve the mystery of your empire’s biological attackers while boosting hyperlane choke-point strategies with early access to the Deep Space Citadel megastructure.
- Wilderness: Begin as a sapient planetary ecosystem, a living gestalt of countless lifeforms united in harmony, seeking to spread its consciousness to the stars.
Hive Fallen Empire
- Encounter a new Fallen Empire, a fractured hive mind struggling to awake between its three splintered personalities.
[strike]Six[/strike] Seven New Civics
- Genetic Identification
- Crowdsourcing
- Familiar Face
- Aerospace Adaptation
- Shared Genetics
- Civil Education
- Bodysnatchers
Deep Space Citadel Megastructure
- A versatile new defensive station capable of holding off powerful enemy fleets at any system.
12 new Species Portraits
- Evolving and changing with levels and roles
Phenotype Species Traits
- 16 new traits based on the abilities of the species
Wilderness-themed City Set and Diplomatic Room
New Music
65 new events
4.0 ‘Phoenix’ Features
Planet Economy has been reworked
- Planets produce and consume resources through Jobs.
- Districts provide Jobs based on their development.
- District Specializations dictate what Job types are provided by Districts and what buildings may be built.
- Buildings typically modify the output of the Jobs.
Pop Groups & Workforce game concepts have been introduced
- Pops are now grouped together based on Species, Strata, Ethics, and Faction.
- Pop numbers have been increased by a factor of 100, allowing more granular manipulation of Pops by various systems.
- Pops produce Workforce that fills up Jobs.
- A Civilian stratum has been added to represent the masses that do not generally contribute to the empire’s military economy.
Pop growth has been reworked
- All Pop Groups on a planet have simultaneous growth every month following the existing Logistic Growth formulas.
- Underrepresented pops are no longer given population growth bonuses.
- Fractional growth is not retained from month to month - if a Pop Group would have fractional growth, it has a chance to gain 1 pop that month based on that fraction.
- All migration is now handled through the auto-migration system rather than push and pull that previously affected pop growth.
- The minimum growth for small colonies has been removed. Early colonization will be reliant on migration from the empire capital.
Empire Focuses and Timeline has been added
- The Empire Timeline keeps track of important milestones of a playthrough, available in a tab in the Situation log view.
- Empire Focus Tasks introduces short and medium term goals for players to strive for, and offers an alternative way of unlocking key technologies.
- [list]
- Empires can choose between Conquest, Exploration, and Development as their primary Empire Focus, affecting what type of tasks are drawn.
- Completing Tasks provides progress towards Guaranteed Technology unlocks that are considered critical for that playstyle.
- Task completion is retroactive and will award progress if drawn.
- Tasks may be discarded for a small cost in Unity.
Trade has been revamped into a standard resource
- Trade is now used as the Market currency.
- The Trade Routes system has been removed.
- Ships now have logistical upkeep paid by Trade [list]
- Based on whether they are docked (free), friendly space (reduced), neutral space (normal), or hostile space (expensive).
- Larger ships have higher upkeep.
- Juggernauts do not have logistical upkeep, and reduce the logistical upkeep costs for ships in their system by 75%.
- Local deficit costs vary based on the base market value of the resources.
Databank game info library has been added
- The main help button now displays the Databank window where you can explore brief articles on many in-game concepts.
There are about 9000 lines in the export log for us to go through to get you the rest, sorry we couldn’t get them sorted by this dev diary!
Next Week
Join us next week for the full patch notes of the 4.0 release and, of course, to play BioGenesis!
Who’s hyped for meat ships?
