WP’s Planetary Features Expanded

When Stellaris moved away from the tile system with 2.2 the studio was pretty hasty about how they translated deposits and blockers into the new "Planetary Features" system. Chiefly: there are too few of them.

PDX provided such a small collection that, despite the fact they are weighted in a variety of ways, all planets end up feeling very similar! You’ll find hot springs (which look icy) in tropical environments, mote deserts (which look hot) on arctic planets and so on.

See if you can guess the planet classes in these two screenshots of vanilla game-play:

The answers are Tomb Worldand then Tropical World. Pretty rubbish, right?

In Planetary Features Expanded you’ll find 407 new deposits to discover, each with custom art and descriptions. The 11 standard habitable planet classes all now each possess their own unique list of 37 deposits. This will hopefully mean all the planets feel distinct while making colony game-play feel fresh again, too.

Things aren’t too different as far as balance is concerned. My deposits provide roughly the same benefits as vanilla, such as +1/2/4 agriculture districts or +1/+3 rare crystals. The key difference is that every feature has it’s own name, art, and description to make sense on the planet it’s on.

You can:

• Establish farms over mushrooms, honeyed rivers, guano piles and even edible soil.
• Harvest rare crystals from cacti, trees, flashing fish, and webbing.
• Generate your power from charged eels, exposed lava, and radioactive lakes.
• And lots and lots more.

You get the idea.

I’ve included a collection of new on-theme blockers. This means new techs to clear them! In general, you’ll mostly interact with just 2: A tech for simple planetary "obstacles" which are common and easily cleared, and a tech for planetary "challenges" which are rarer and more difficult.

There are also 3 techs for removing other rarer blockers you may find.

Just as in vanilla, these techs only show up if you have a colony that needs them. And just like in Vanilla, the AI will research and clear their own blockers – so the reality is you won’t see most techs unless you do other play-through’s with new starting habitable planets.

New in version 4.x I’ve implemented a mouse-over effect so that you see the full sized art of the deposit when reading the tooltip! This means the awesome art on this workshop page is actually in game, and you don’t have to squint your eyes at the very small in game feature icons. (This tooltip effect is on all my deposit mods, by the way!)

• All deposits display their associated resource with an icon in their name, to improve readability of what’s doing what at a glance.
• Rare planetary deposits are written in purple text, to make them easier to identify.
• Especially rare (and therefore troublesome) planetary blockers are marked in red text.
• All vanilla features/deposits still exist – they are filtered into their "correct" categories now (and nowhere else.) I.e teeming reef on ocean worlds, arid landscape on arid worlds, searing deserts on desert worlds. It’s basically what I think should have been done back at 2.2.
• All vanilla civics like "Planetscapers" and "Evolutionary Predators" work. Yes, you can eat the corpse piles. Yes, you can build ranger lodges to unveil secret additional resources from every deposit!

I’m hosting a public google sheet[docs.google.com] with most information if you want to see all the deposits at once.

• I have made two sequel mods to this I thoroughly recommend! "Dangerous Wildlife Expanded" and "Mysterious Worlds".
• I also plan to release "Alien Pets Expanded" and "Orbital Deposits Expanded" in the future to complete the set.
• For more recommendations and compatibility advice check my collection at the top of this page.

If you have an idea for improvement idea please message me any time. Check the dedicated thread below for my further thoughts!

I just want to take a second to give a massive thank you to PancakeLord whose EasyDiffusion guide for making Stellaris-like artwork on the Stellaris forums[forum.paradoxplaza.com] got me into this. Earlier in the year he even collaborated directly on this mod! He brainstormed several deposit concepts, wrote flavour text, and generated the art for several of them (…which I think is best art in the pack). The guy is fantastic.

[discord.gg]