Trace’s Better Lithoids

This mod aims to improve the Lithoids DLC in various ways like tweaked balancing, new portraits, and integrating Silfae’s Silicoids mod with additional original looks and fixes.

– Lithoid portraits have more variety with more coming each update. Some portraits have as much as double the appearances with extra details or vivid colours over base portraits. Original palettes maintained sensibly.

– Adds new portraits edited from vanilla files to fit visual niches unused in vanilla. Current focus is more civilised, less bestial ‘humanoid’ shape Lithoids. There’s even Lithoid clothing.
There’s so many portraits the vanilla game portrait list can’t show them all – I advise using a UI rescale mod.

– Revives the Silicoid mod by Silfae.* It’s been merged into the Lithoid portrait set. Rather than merely update I’ve allocated voice files, improved scaling, made sweeping graphical fixes and added original new appearances.

– Portraits will show up as AI empires, for more potential variation and replayability.

– Additionally brings Silfae’s traits up to a modern standard with fixes and more interesting effects. I cut the redundant or unbalanced ones.

– Two new rooms. One with opaque background, recycling the Silicoid cityset to show a mining colony on an asteroid, in vanilla artstyle. The second is a runic, more civilised Lithoid room.

– Adds 3 prescripted empires. A golem building guild that combines a weak nerd race with a strong dumb ‘golem’ race, a friendly warrior rockman empire based on the advisor voice’s personality and a Terravore hivemind.
(Sometimes some are hidden for under the hood changes, but this won’t break existing saves.)

– The Lithoids age mechanic is better by upgrading the Lithoid trait.
The minimum leader age is lower, the maximum 5 years lower, age extension 10 years longer, pop growth reduction from 25% to 20% (less drastic than other mods). My reasoning is that the base game increases new leader ages so far that they were barely any better, for *much* slower pop growth.

– Pops with the Lithoid trait mine +0.1 minerals. I nerfed this from feedback, so it’s only vaguely superior over vanilla.

– The ‘byproducts’ traits produce 0.02 because 100 pops for a single resource unit for 2 trait points was just sad.

No promises but in testing:
– Visible cyborg and psionics on portraits, if I’m able.
– Portraits painted from scratch.
– A coral Lithoid for Aquatics-Lithoid DLC crossover.

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This mod is compatible with mods that overhaul pop types such as Photosynthesis due to me cutting out old feature creep!
This also makes the ‘lite’ version less important but it’s available if you don’t want Silfae’s traits and my balance changes. However it is retired as of 2022 due to launcher issues.
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* I am against plagiarism or content reupload, but Silfae hasn’t come online for years. I see it as acceptable to revive the pack merged into the Lithoids DLC.
If they object I’ll take the portraits out, but the OG mod is broken so somebody has to fix it.

Besides I’ve actually been remastering their work and added whole new appearances.

I recommend ‘Random Species Names’ for many more Lithoid names:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1827170321

Here is an alternate, more synthetic and crystalline, Lithoid shipset:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2085237886

Very nice and actually fitting Silicoid shipset from Master of Orion:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2874728415

Thanks to Cavmanic for help and sharing their fixes!
https://steamcommunity.com/id/caparkster/myworkshopfiles/?appid=281990