Animated Holosphere Portraits: Revisited

Have you seen the azure, chitinous portraits from Silfae’s "Holosphere Rising" mod? Do you want to manage techno-arthropoid hives with up-to-date gameplay elements and play the Holosphere as originally designed? Then this mod is for you!

There are other mods which contain these portraits, so why should you choose this one? None of the others update special holofrixit caste-based gameplay, but this one does! Please enjoy my adaptation of Silfae’s custom empire into modern Stellaris.

All gameplay features from the original mod are upgraded to be fully compatible with Stellaris 3.8 "Gemini," the latest version when this was written. Updates include:

• Update Holofrixit shipset (Unbidden) – fallback to molluscoid (the fallback for the Unbidden)
• Enhance Holofrixit portrait usage:
  
  • Fix portrait selector and mesh errors (lead to error logs)
  • Set all the main Holofrixit portraits to have a version with and without the Unbidden sparkles
  • Adjust portrait grouping so that all Holofrixit portraits can be selected when creating a custom empire
  • Add Pop-job-based selectors for empires not using the custom origin
• Attach special Holofrixit features to an origin, which allows players to opt out of it
• Rebuild Holofrixit "caste"-based playstyle to work with the Pop job system and new way of assembling robot Pops
  
  • Remove "buildable" Pops
  • Reduce amount modifiers attached to Holofrixit trait
  • Adjust special "caste" traits (Hologanglion, Holowarrior, Holofrixigram and improved versions) for up-to-date modifiers
  • Add Holodrone trait for basic drones
  • Add Xechiro trait for highest caste
  • Start with Pops from each of the five castes, but overall fewer than normal
  • Holofrixit government is now divided into the Xechiros Protocol government and Hive-network authority, available only with the Holofrixit origin
  • Add random names for the Holofrixit government
  • Only Xechiros may be rulers or Governors, only Ganglions may be Scientists, and only Holowarriors or Xechiros may be Admirals and Generals – Holofrixigrams can be leaders with tech_synthetic_leaders, Drones can never be leaders, and other non-holofrixit species may produce leaders normally
• Remove unnecessary old army overrides
• Adjust Holowarrior and Hologenotype armies
• Update Polarizing Nexus energy storage building
• Pop portraits influenced by job stratum
• You can use Silfae’s Holofrixit portraits for your own empires without any DLC requirements
  
  • Main Holofrixit species class consumes energy instead of food
  • Holofrixit portraits are also available as Arthropoids, so you can choose to play without the requirement for energy upkeep (since Stellaris 3.8)
• Disable the "Holocrisis" until updated postponed indefinitely
• Support being able to choose a single-gender species (since Stellaris 3.2)

The Launcher will tell you that some mods are outdated – that is because the dependencies are both out of date with the game’s version number. This mod overwrites and replaces all incompatible code so that the portrait mod will function as originally designed. You can safely ignore the out-of-date warning for the dependency mods.

Built for Stellaris version 3.8 "Gemini." Not compatible with achievements.

This mod also alters the requirements for ruler-stratum jobs and some "complicated" specialist/complex drone-stratum jobs. Only Xechiros can work the majority of ruler jobs (Ganglions can be Head Researchers), and Drones cannot work any jobs that require "thinking" (similar to syncretic proles or zombies). Jobs have also been re-weighted so the Holowarriors prefer military jobs. These overrides also mean that this mod will need to be explicitly updated any time Paradox makes changes to the overridden jobs.

Job overrides:

• Ruler: head_researcher
• Specialist: enforcer
• Worker: soldier
• Gestalt: coordinator, evaluator, synapse_drone, brain_drone, calculator, patrol_drone, warrior_drone, chronicle_drone
• Event-related: dimensional_portal_researcher_gestalt, space_time_anomaly_researcher_gestalt

Job-related triggers overridden:

• complex_specialist_job_check_trigger – Holodrones and Holowarriors can’t do complicated work but they are smart enough for non-complicated specialist/drone jobs
• is_organic_species – most Holofrixits qualify as organic

Furthermore, this mod alters some core game rules in common/game_rules/00_rules.txt to implement some of the Pop reproduction/assembly requirements and special rules for Holofrixit leaders. In particular, these rules:

• can_generate_leader_from_pop
• can_generate_military_leader_from_pop
• can_species_procreate
• can_species_be_assembled
• can_fill_ruler_job

In order for this mod to function, you must install these three mods and load them before this one:

• Holosphere Rising by Silfae
• Silfae’s city sets updated by Nozeminer
• Special Leadership Privileges for Battle Thralls and Bio-Trophies by me

This mod should be added before the game has started. If you remove it from a game in progress, your game may have graphical problems if any species was using the custom portraits or city graphics.

This mod overwrites the corresponding species class added by "Silfae’s city sets updated." It also overwrites a total of 4 triggers and 13 jobs from the base game; expect the error.log to have 18 lines from these overrides.

See Change Notes

Hosted on GitHub[github.com].

The Silfae’s Revisited series of mods were inspired by Endugu’s approach of requiring the original mod for graphics and then adding or altering code for compatibility. This helps the original modder get credit. Thanks to both Endugu and Silfae!

[discord.gg]