Stellaris mod: RPG Traits
The official Role Playing Traits overhaul for Stellaris. Tired of bland, boring species? Tired of having a dozen races that all feel and play exactly the same? Use RPG Traits! It will give you alien aliens. Aliens that are big, small, that eat dirt, that are made out of electricity, that breed like insects, that are vastly superior or inferior to humans in some way. All of it implemented in a way that your gameplay feels different.
Want to play as a race of Retarded, Immortal, Titanic, Steel-Skinned Snails? Now you can! Or a race of Genius, Lithovore, tunnel-digging insects? Go ahead! How about playing as one giant Living Planet? Sure thing! It's all possible with RPG traits.
RPG Traits overhauls the random trait assignment of AI races, so randomly spawned races get the occasional fancy trait in addition to a combination of strengths and weaknesses that should be very noticeable. You may encounter a race that happens to be very good at mining minerals and want to enslave them. Fallen Empires spawn with very powerful traits that they refined after centuries of research. Custom Races are now supported so you can make up your own species and play against them as well.
I cannot stress enough that this is an OVERHAUL mod with a different philosophy on game design than that of the Stellaris developers. Vanilla Stellaris dares not create real diversity in its aliens, so you end up with antropomorphized aliens that are all just slightly weaker, or slightly smarter, but otherwise they're pretty much human clones. Barely noticeable. This mod throws that out of the window and asks the question "What if there's an alien race that feeds on dirt?" and the answer is you don't need farms, so food requirements are zero for species that feed on dirt; not just -10% or whatever. Alien species are deliberately not equal. Humans are set as the neutral axis (no traits) and when you encounter an alien species, they will often be a lot stronger or a lot smarter than humans; not just a 10% bonus.
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Download the repository.
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Unzip.
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Put the files into your Stellaris/mods folder (any other mods you have should be there as well).
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Activate ONE of the mods in your launcher, NOT BOTH. Just one. Yes. One. Less than two. You get it. Normal is normal HEAVY is extra stuff If you have literally zero idea what that means; pick normal
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Play the game!
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(optionally) Install the LITE or ULTRALITE version, by copying the .txt file inside into the events folder of either the normal or HEAVY version and then OVERWRITE. If you don't know what this does then don't.
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HEAVY is everything that CORE has and more. In addition to overhauling the traits, it will completely overhaul the climate system as well as civics and more. Expect less compatibility with other mods, but more immersion, less nonsensical limits, and more role-playing opportunity. HEAVY is standalone and you should use EITHER the CORE/normal version OR Heavy, not both. Counter-intuitively, HEAVY is compatible with LITE.
LITE By frequent request, a Lite and Ultra Lite version have been made. These are optional addons that reduce the average amount of traits random empires will have if that's your thing.
Do not use these unless you're intensely bothered by the amount of traits on random species!
Why is it not recommended/standard? Because reducing the amount of traits makes AI empires weaker on average, reducing the difficulty even further than it already was. Feel free to try it, but the Main version is always leading for balance purposes et cetera.
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Suggestions are welcome in the subreddit /r/stellarisrpg
If you wish to contribute, think of a good trait/event/whatever and send me the code in whatever way you like. (Make sure to mention it in the suggestions thread first, to avoid spending effort on something that won't be implemented)
Cheers, LuxArdens