Aesthetic Terraform Stations

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Author: corsairmarks

Last revision: 9 May, 2023 at 21:56 UTC (8)

File size: 251.9 KB

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Description:
Overview

Do you have trouble finding your "in-progress" terraforming planets? Or maybe you miss terraform stations? This mod is for you! The new terraforming gameplay is a bit less clunky to use, but does suffer from a lack of visual pizzazz. This mod reintroduces terraform stations, and the best part is that you don’t have to do anything special, use resources, or pay maintenance!

When a planet begins terraforming, this mod will automatically spawn a terraform station above it complete with sound effects, an animated terraform beam, and a healthy green glow around the planet. These stations are real gameplay objects, but losing (or disbanding) them does not affect the terraforming process – it is purely a visual embellishment. Once terraforming completes, your geo-engineers will automatically dismantle the terraform station. If you cancel terraforming, expect a delay of up to one month (30 days) before the station will be automatically decommissioned.

Recommend a Shipset

Would you like this mod to offer a sub-mod for your favourite shipset? Please ask nicely and provide a link to the shipset you’d like to have matching terraform stations. For compatibility, I’ll use the terraform station graphics if the shipset has a unique model, or whatever model is defined for the terraform station in the mod’s entities. Finally, I’ll fall back to picking the same model as the mining station, research station, or possibly outpost (if there are not custom graphics for the mining/research stations).

Changes

Reintroduces terraform stations and existing (but unused) graphical effects to provide a more obvious indicator when planets are terraforming. Events attached to the on_terraforming_begun and on_terraforming_complete provide the basic functionality. However, there is no on_action for when terraforming is cancelled – instead, each station checks monthly whether the planet below is still terraforming – if not, it decommissions itself.

Compatibility

This mod reuses existing game entities and 3D assets plus new events to handle the spawning and despawning for terraform stations. The terraform station ship size is restored to the game and used to create real stations as visual markers. What this means to you is that this mod should work with practically any other mod, although new shipsets will use their fallback option for terraform stations.

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

When to Install

This mod should be added before you start a new game so that all empires are assigned a (hidden) ship design for terraform stations. Without the design, there is no way to spawn the terraform station fleets. Furthermore, this mod should not be removed from a game in-progress. Losing access to the ship size or entities may cause issues if there are any terraform stations still active, and attempting to fire an event that doesn’t exist will frequently result in a crash.

Recommended Companion Mods
Known Issues

The terraform station "beam" is a fixed length and may not reach down to small planet, or might become buried beneath the crust of larger planets. There is not a good way to dynamically scale the entity inversely to planet size with script, so an arbitrary length was chosen.

Changelog

See Change Notes

Source Code

Hosted on GitHub[github.com]

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