0.7.0 Dev Diary news - Mass Effect: Beyond the Relays mod for Stellaris

Hello everyone and welcome to our most recent dev diary for Mass Effect: Beyond the Relays. As is tradition with this project, it's been a long time since our previous Dev Diary but we have been hard at work both fixing bugs from our original Beta release and working toward our roadmap. This upcoming update is not the Eden Prime update but instead a smaller in-beta update to bring the playable versions of the mod closer in line with our Dev build.

There is a base game bug where empires will occasionally spawn with a single color. Reloading the save should resolve the issue

Well, I am glad you asked. One of the first things you may notice when getting into the game is that we have now added Prothean Dig Sites to the majority of the starting empires.

• Alliance
• Asari
• Turian
• Salarian
• Batarian
• Hanar
• Volus
• Elcor

All have full Prothean dig-sites within their starting borders. The dig-sites are all contained within a single planet, no finishing a site and searching for the next in the chain. Each stage has modest rewards with a larger permanent reward at the end of the tunnel for those who decide to search the ancient ruins.

An AI to surpass vanilla

Something less visual but hopefully equally noticeable is our AI overhaul. As we began playtesting our internal builds of the mod it became clear that in order to get the AI to operate as we envisioned we would need to rework it heavily. With this completed you should be able to see the AI empires in your games acting more in line with how they appear in lore. The AI Empires economies should be competitive with one another and the player, along with their research. Their aggression has also been reworked in such a way as to allow Players, and even other empires, to coexist with powerful AIs without wars immediately breaking out. Corvette spam has also been purged with extreme prejudice and the AI will now begin building fleets with more variety. And It only took the Turians adopting Xenophobia and going on a rampage a few times for us to finally learn our lesson!

which took up a significant amount of time after we released our beta. Planets lacking features or districts have been fixed, empires spawning without an economy should also be resolved. Several issues that caused crashes have been solved.

Of course, much of what the team has been working on is not ready to be pushed with this patch. You'll be hearing more about those soon as we begin releasing Dev Diaries on a more regular basis, but I'll drop some leaks here.

The Galaxy is expanding

Its expansion has taken an immense amount of energy, but once it has finished its metamorphosis we are sure that you'll be excited to play around in it. When it's completed, it will include the following:

• A deeper and more full realization of the Mass Relay Network, having lore accurate representations of both Primary and Secondary Relays
• Multiple map sizes: Currently 400, 600, 800, 1000, and 2000 system maps are under development.
• Additional revision and modification of the map, more systems from lore and fanon, more unique modifiers, planetary features, strategic assets, etc.

Worlds are changing

Along with the map expansion, a full and thorough review of the planetary classes that are currently included is in the works, with those classes from Vanilla and Planetary Diversity that best fit Mass Effect lore being retained, as well as additional new classes created by us as needed.

Empires are coming

We have been busy adding more depth and unique mechanics to the empires. While not every empire has been implemented in accordance with our designs the ones that have been will have unique civics, technologies, buildings, traits, and many of them have special mechanics based on the empire lore. You'll be hearing more about them from their writers as time goes on, but for now about 5 empires are implemented with more on the way.

If any of this sounds interesting to you, or you just want to mess around in our dev builds, apply to join the team today! We are looking for Writers, Scripters, Testers, Voice Actors, Artists, and CSS designers. For more information about what each position does and how to apply check out our application page or reach out to members of our team on our Discord.