+Star Forge Mk2
After a lot of work I came up with a design that could mimic better a giant industrial station. So I present the new starforge.
The new megastructure spawns a habitat inside the sun which can be colonized by any species in order to construct specialized buildings that allow the empire to shift its production focus from either a minerals source, and a powerful shipyard, increase your fleet capacity or mineral storage. Its the dream of any tall empire build.
Megasturcture:
All megastructure stages take 18000 minerals and 1800 days to construct.
Buildings list:
Starforge core:
Acts as capital. All other buildings rely on it.
Maintenance: 500 energy
Production 250 minerals
Ship fabricator units
Four types (alpha trough omega) which each allow a increasing focus on ship production speed at expense of greater cost.
Mass Fabricator units
Again four types (Alpha trough omega)
At increasing energy costs they allow you to increase your starforge mineral output at the expense of lower efficiency. (still higher than trading with enclaves though)
Power Cores
Only four can be built adjacent to the core. They cost a lot of energy to mantain.
Power core Alpha:
Produces 150 energy.
Power core Beta:
10% minerals production bonus
Power core Gamma:
-10% ship build costs
Power Core Delta:
+50% ship build speed
Warehouses
Standard warehouse: Stores 3000 minerals
Military supplier: +25 fleet cap.
Compatibility issues
This mod replaces the following base files:
colony_events.txt
colony_events_2.txt
colony_events_4.txt
Modification of the event files is required to avoid crazy stuff happening such as you getting walking trees on your starforge.
I reused a lot of internal scripting from it without renaming, so its not compatible.
The star forge still requires a spaceport!
The fake planet still requires a spaceport to deploy fleets, and the spaceport model can be seen grazing the star’s corona. There’s no fix for this other than making ALL the spaceports invisible for a given graphics style.
I can build some unrelated colony buildings in it
Since fixing that would require me to fiddle with 00_buildings.txt making this mod uncompatible with pretty much everything else building related, I chose to leave this as an issue.
My building sprites are misalgined
You should get the icon fixer patch that is listed as dependency for this mod.
Having 25 pops work on a space station is unrealistc!
Thankfully the pop element is generic enough so it can mean anything from 1 to a billion people according to your imagination. I considered making a special kind of droid pop that can only be built on the station, while making it unhabitable by anythnig else.
Unfortunately a bug on stellaris scripting doesn’t allow the custom bot populations to be spawned via script (so you can colonize the fake planet trough an event at first place). Hopefully the upcoming robot revamp patch will make this solution feasible. Keep in mind you still are getting way better mileage per pop than most(all?) planets.
The balance on the buildings is terrible. My hair is on fire and I feel miserable
Balance is a work in progress, I’m up for suggestions. Keep in mind this thing is balanced with the 1200-energy per dyson sphere mod in mind (because face it, 400 energy for the dyson spheres is pathetic). Be my guest to make custom balance patches. Keep in mind that the tooltip values are without the population bonuses applied, which tend to pile up and make the buildings far more efficient. I’m considering making them use even more energy for now.
A machine that uses stellar matter to produce resources should not require external energy to run. Its unrealistic
While indeed unrealistic, keep in mind
A: This thing would perform artificial nucleosynthesis of heavier elements on an industrial scale. Machinery to run that would require immense power.
B: Balance-wise this is an energy "sink" for all the extra energy you’ll get in late game with dyson spheres and the stellar catalysts from my other mods.
The megastrucure mod is redundant since there’s the fake planet
Fake planet meshes failed to run animations on my test. So I kept it there as a placeholder so the stellar vacuum can work.
The <crisis> ruined the star forge by turning it into a lifeless rock/ball of gloop
I still haven’t patched the crisis events to account for the new planet classes. Due to the size of that undertaking I’m still postponing it.
My star forge is not behaving as expected
Feel free to report any other unusual behavor by the planet entity. There might be other bugs lurking around.
