Over the Hills news - Mass Effect: Beyond the Relays mod for Stellaris

Welcome everyone to the first Beyond the Relays Dev Diary since we released our 1.0 build and exited beta. We have taken some time to both resolve some of the issues that arose once 1.0 went live and hammer out how things will be tackled moving forward. Now that all of the boring stuff is complete I, Risker34, have the honor to bring you a run down on our plans for the near future.

Hotfix 1 will be the releasing alongside this diary and will include:

• Hyperlane visibility is readded
• Geth Ships are no longer invisible
• Illium's empire modifier giving an insane buff to their colonization now corrected to be an insane nerf. (Illium is a corpo world, but doesn't have any representation in lore of actual expansionist tendencies, so any growth there should be essentially nonexistent.
• Swolus portraits have now become normal sized Volus
• Elcor portraits have grown a bit bigger
• AI Alliance now use proper Alliance portraits
• Sol's asteroid belt repositioned
• Disabled empire's desires to subjugate others (temporary change pending our galactic community update. Done to address the constant attempts at vassalization.)
• Swapped Fortuna and Strenuus's relays.
• Corrected Rachni habitability issue, as well as the duplication of their home system. Should now just start with Utukku.
• Space Traversal tweaks - Hyperlane travel speed has been cut in half to better reflect it being standard ftl, in system travel speed increased to help balance travel in system.
• Removed spool up/down time for hyperlanes
• Borders are now a suggestion

Hotfix 2 will follow Hotfix 1 and be slightly further out and include:

• Fix the Linux and MAC shipset errors
• Hunt down the portrait bug allowing vanilla portraits to replace some species
• Fixes to our custom soundtrack, including replacing the two songs that are currently the main theme with the correct tracks

Patch 1.1 will be our first content update after 1.0 and will mark the beginning of our Elkoss phase which will include:

• The reintroduction of Cerberus, the Collectors, and the Quarians

They will not have story mechanics but they will be on par with the empires released for 1.0

• Sandbox mode, essentially vanilla stellaris with a Mass Effect coat of paint
• Different galaxy sizes
• Improved Krogan portraits
• Additional Music
• Marauders in the Terminus

Several marauder empires will be added to the Terminus systems and Skyllian Verge to challenge the council. They will be meaner than vanilla marauders and may even pose a larger threat than might seem at first glance, watch your STG reports closely.

• Independent Colony system

Many non-marauder factions will be added throughout the Terminus to represent the large amount of local and dependent powers that exist throughout the region. While they may not be powerful individually they will be strong if they can be united and they can give larger powers a useful staging point if they can gain influence over these small but proud empires.

• Mercenary enclaves

The Blue Suns, Eclipse, and Bloodpack will be joined by two other mercenary groups to form a series of mercenary enclaves throughout the galaxy.

This brief rundown is only the preliminary report of these patches, as we get closer to release we will be producing more dev diaries that go more in-depth about what each individual release will include. But since the launch of 1.0 was such a large event for us, and it had been such a long time since we released a dev-diary, we felt it was important to update everyone on what we have brewing behind the scenes.

For a more frequent stream of leaks and first looks come join us on our Discord, Instagram, Twitter, or Youtube ! Or if you want to help out the project by contributing Artwork, Filling out the world with Creative Writing, or Physically building the Mod one line of code at a time, apply to join the team today! You can also apply to just mess around in our Dev Builds and tell us all the things that aren’t working.