Lunar Prospecting

"At Deep Rock Galactic, we pride ourselves on having obtained practical dominance of the most lucrative belts of the Outer Rim. While our foolish and cowardly competitors generally regard these systems as too volatile or high-risk, to us they are home. "
Deep Rock Galactic Corporation – Deep rock Galactic

Have you ever looked out from the observation deck of your orbital habitat, at the vast mineral reserve orbiting tantalisingly out of reach on some nearby moon, dreaming of securing that wealth and prosperity for you and your people? Well dream no more, for your natural satellite assets are finally within reach with Lunar Prospecting.

So how does it work? Well, first you’ll need to construct a space port on your habitat through the planetary decisions, this will provide some small benefits in the form of amenities and open up the potential for large scale orbital mass transit.

After that activating the Lunar Prospecting decision allows you to survey any moons orbiting the host planet for usable resource deposits, once this is done you can construct a new district to harvest said resources. It will also add any strategic resource deposits to the habitat, allowing you to construct mines for them. Please bear in mind that the results of the prospecting are dependant on the deposits on moons orbiting the planet, the decision does not create resources, it simply catalogues them.

Don’t worry if you make a mistake or you find new deposits later, resource districts can be demolished and the moons resurveyed later for an additional cost, existing resource districts from planetary deposits or orbital surveying can also be removed and the mod will even remember which ones you had if you wish to rebuild them later.

Special thanks to President Memes for helping to write the Lunar Prospecting decision. The concept is theirs; the resulting spaghetti code is my own.

Mining district
Mining districts require a mineral or alloy deposit on a nearby moon and allow you to mine said minerals onboard the habitat.

Energy district
Energy districts require a nearby energy deposit (gestalts still get them by default) on a nearby moon to allow the habitat to build energy districts.

Research district
Research districts require a research deposit or a rare resource deposit (Living metal, Zro, Dark matter or nanites) on a nearby moon to allow the habitat to build research districts.

But that’s not all, the mod adds three new habitat districts with their own features and requirements.

Salvage district
The salvage district requires an alloy deposit on a nearby moon and lets you mine it with scrap miners for alloys and (fewer) minerals, alloy deposits also still grant access to the mining district if you’d prefer to just mine minerals from them.

Hydroponics District
The hydroponics district allows you to grow food and requires a normal star in order to be built, it cannot be built on habitats around pulsars, neutron stars or black holes due to the excessive radiation and/or lack of natural light, it is also not available to empires who do not use food.

Administration district
This district comes in several flavours for standard, spiritualist, hive minded and machine empires however they all function identically, housing bureaucrats or their analogues to produce unity for your empire, Administration districts can only be built if the planet the habitat orbits or a nearby moon is colonisable.

But wait, there’s even more, I have recently put great effort into overhauling and integrating my Space Elevators mod to include the new districts from this mod, as well as reworking and rebalancing the existing ones. When used in combination with Lunar Prospecting you can construct a space elevator on a planet and gain bonuses dependent on the districts on any orbital habitat above that planet, and with lunar prospecting you’ll have access to more districts than ever, all with their own bonuses.

This mod doesn’t overwrite any vanilla files and should be compatible with most other mods, however there may be issues with other mods that change habitat districts. I will update this with any reported issues and fix where possible, if you have any feedback or questions feel free to leave them below.

Special thanks to everyone at the Stellaris Modding Den [discord.gg] for all their help
Banner art belongs to Leon Tukker [www.artstation.com]