Bioware is taking its time with a new Mass Effect. Until then, return to your favourite RPG universe with a Stellaris mod.
If you know one science fiction universe, you know them all. Big space stations, fleets floating majestically through space, thick laser beams and an ancient threat, you”ve got your off-the-shelf vision of the future, spiced up with a few alien races painted red, blue or green depending on the setting.
Did that generalisation just offend you to death right now? Could you spend hours discussing the differences between Star Trek, Mass Effect and Babylon 5? Then you”re the perfect target audience not only for the current best 4X space strategy game Stellaris, but also for the modding team Binary Helix.
Binary Helix is developing a total conversion mod that is now playable and will completely change the science fiction setting of Stellaris: Beyond the Relays not only brings planets, races, ships and space stations (hello Citadel!) from Bioware”s role-playing game series into the game, but also changes gameplay and balancing so that Turians, humans and Geth behave exactly as you are used to in Mass Effect.
We talked to the developers in the Discord channel of Beyond the Relays and present the mod to you in detail in this article. And if you”re more into lightsabers than N7 armour, check out this Star Wars mod:
Table of Contents
What Beyond the Relays offers
Over 10,000 people have already downloaded the big Mass Effect mod for Stellaris. It currently offers a new galaxy map based on the representation in Mass Effect 1-3. 381 star systems are marked on it, divided into sectors between which an exchange is only possible via mass portals.
There are three game modes:
- Sandbox:All factions start with roughly the same starting conditions as in the basic version of Stellaris.
- Canon: Implementation as true to Lore as possible, in which all factions have their in-game colonies and space fleets at the beginning, but hero Shepard has no influence on events. The scenario begins shortly after the end of the first contact war between Turians and humans.
- Hybrid: You can also play the factions yourself, which are mainly controlled by events in canon mode.
The Total Conversion, which was called Stellaris Effect at the beginning, builds on the discarded mod Mass Effect: Crucible, among others, and partly uses models from Dawn of the Reapers for Sins of a Solar Empire. The spaceships of the Mass Effect series such as Turian cruisers and stations like the Citadel were faithfully recreated. Furthermore, the atmosphere mods Planetary Diversity and Real Space have been integrated into Beyond the Relays courtesy of the creators.
Beyond the Relays currently only exists in English, a German translation is not in sight. Stellaris players who dare to download the game can choose from the following empires (in brackets the homeworld, entries marked with an asterisk are the developers” own creations):
- Aralakh Kahmat (Tuchanka)
- Asari Republics (Thessia)
- Batarian Hegemony (Khar”Shan)
- Cerberus (Cronos Station)
- The Collectors (The Collector Base)
- Courts of Dekuuna (Dekuuna)
- The Followers of Nazara (Heretic Station)
- Geth Consensus (Rannoch)
- Gothones Remnant (Vindicta)
- Illium Corporate Interests (Illium)
- Illuminated Primacy (Kahje)
- Lystheni Order (Sepkai)*
- The Migrant Fleet (Migrant Fleet)
- Omega (Omega)
- Parnack Regime (Parnack)
- Rachni Swarm (Suen)
- Raloi Republic (Azedes)
- Remnants of Rakhana (Rakhana)
- Salarian Union (Sur”Kesh)
- Sed”riicae Collective (Sed”riicae)
- Systems Alliance (Earth)
- Turian Hierarchy (Palaven)
- Vol Protectorate (Irune)
- Vorcha Clandom (Heshtok)
What the developers of the mod say
On Discord we interviewed two of the chief developers of Beyond the Relays. Arrenius is responsible for story and design, while Puck, as one of the original founders of the mod group, mainly takes care of the program code
(~) : When and how did the idea for the mod come about, and how has the project developed since then?
Puck: “My work on Beyond the Relays started about three years ago, relatively soon after I started playing Stellaris. At the time, it was just a small personal side project to implement the different realms and galaxy map from Mass Effect into Stellaris. I never expected to actually finish it or release it.
One day, about two and a half years ago, I saw a post on (Reddit by /u/abaddoneone) who wanted to put together a team to develop a Mass Effect total conversion for Stellaris. I messaged him and things snowballed from there. Of the original team of four developers, I”m the only one still actively involved in development.
Since then, things have really come to life. The team has grown considerably, and the scope of the mod has grown from a standard integration of the map and realms from Mass Effect to a complete overhaul and redesign of some Stellaris mechanics. “
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(~): How many people are working on the mod?
Puck: “Currently Binary Helix (our modding group) consists of 17 members: six coders, eight writers and three graphic designers. However, we are always looking for new talent to join the team!”
(~) : Why did you choose Mass Effect, of all things, as your template?
Puck: “Like a lot of people, Mass Effect really appealed to me on a personal level. When I played Stellaris, I realised there were a lot of parallels to Mass Effect. Everything from the general feeling of being a fledgling empire growing into a larger role in a galactic community to a mechanic that introduces a galaxy-ending threat made me think about how much I wanted to experience the Mass Effect universe in this format. “
(~) : What were some of the biggest challenges in bringing the Mass Effect universe to Stellaris, both in terms of mechanics/coding and story?
Arrenius: “In terms of story, one problem is the difference in time frames. Stellaris games usually cover 200 years of ”history” in-game, whereas all the events of the Mass Effect trilogy took place within three years. Even in Lore, humanity has only been part of the galactic community for three decades. Three decades in Stellaris is perhaps just ten minutes of gameplay.
For this reason, we had to adjust certain aspects of our planning, especially when it comes to things like mid- and endgame crises. What if in our mod the Reaper invasion takes place in 2183 [one year after David Anderson”s birth, editor”s note]? The galaxy wouldn”t stand a chance.”
Puck: “Yeah, the time scaling is definitely one of the bigger hurdles we”ve had, and it”s also affected the rest of our development. Even if you leave out the actual arrival of the Reapers: How do you tell a story that focuses on a few individuals and their respective experiences that take place over a few years in a game whose scale is measured in empires and centuries?
And taking it a step further, how do you account for this in a game that, by design, offers a considerable amount of freedom and choice for the player that not only conflicts with, but may even explode, the storylines of the Mass Effect trilogy? “
“In the end, this led us to make a very conscious decision about the nature of the mod: Beyond the Relays is not a 1:1 retelling of Shepard”s story from an outside perspective. Instead, it offers players the opportunity to play as their favourite Empire in a galaxy without Shepard. Events and key plot points and lore from ME continue to be made available through the various mechanics of Stellaris, leading into the Reaper Crisis “
(~) : Reapers in particular are not currently part of the mod. Why is that, when they are so important to the story of Mass Effect?
Arrenius: “Because they are so important to Mass Effect, we haven”t dealt with the Reapers yet. The Reaper invasion is the climax of the Mass Effect trilogy, and it should be the climax of any Beyond the Relays game. But until we can live up to that climax, with individual events for each empire, mechanics for indoctrination, and complete ship sets, we don”t want a watered-down version.
The Reaper Invasion will also depend on content and mechanics we can release earlier. This will allow us to bang out patches regularly instead of waiting until the whole mod is done before we release anything. “
(~): What are your plans for the immediate future?
Arrenius: “Our top priorities right now are updating the mod for Stellaris 3.4 and writing texts for your advisors. We plan to give each race a unique advisor fully set to music. After that, we”ll take a look at reworking warfare to reflect the kind of limited wars you see in the Mass Effect universe.”
Puck: “As Arrenius has said, the compatibility work for 3.4 is the top priority right now. With one exception among the authors, no one on the team has ever released a Stellaris mod before. We have therefore learned a lot during our work on it.
Now we”re at a point where many of the inefficiencies and bugs from the early days of development really needed to be addressed, and so part of our update for 3.4 includes a full review of all the code currently in the mod to make sure things are as clean and optimised as possible. “
The Future of the Mod
The beta release of Beyond the Relays in early November 2021 was just a first step for the developers. For the coming months and years, they have planned a sequence of updates that will update and improve certain areas of the mod. There is no time frame yet.
- Eden Prime (more details for all races).
- Events and event chains specific to each race
- for each race specific technologies and buildings
- specific diplomacy dialogues for each nation
- specific civics and traditions for each nation
- unique interactions with primitive peoples
- Farixen (focus on war)
- General overhaul of components and research tree
- Implementation of the Farixen Agreement (limits on fleet sizes)
- Revision of combat mechanics
- Implementation of midgame crises:
- Geth advances, Collectors, attack on the Citadel and more
- Elkos Combine (Business and Corporations)
- A better and full implementation of independent colonies and megacorporations
- General overhaul of resources with more uses for mod-specific raw materials
- If possible: include independent colonies and megacorporations as playable factions, corporate wars and and smaller corporations should be better implemented and more fun to play.
- Citadel (Introduction of the Citadel Council).
- Galaxy-wide resolutions like in Mass Effect: declare worlds as sanctuaries, making colonisation no longer possible.
- More playable options for federations
- Sovereign (Reapers)
- Implementation of Reaper Crisis, Indoctrination and Keepe
How to play Beyond the Relays
Download on Steam
The easiest way to play Mass Effect: Beyond the Relays is to download it from (Steam Workshop). Click on the green “Subscribe” button and the mod will automatically appear in the list of mods to download the next time you start the game.
But beware: Currently, the developers recommend not to use the Total Conversion with the current Stellaris version 3.4 after the Cepheus update and the Overlord DLC. Instead, you should revert the main game to version 3.3.4 if you want to enjoy the mod without incompatibilities and unforeseen bugs.
This can be done by right-clicking on Stellaris in Steam and going to the “Betas” tab in the settings. There you can select “3.3 Libra” in the drop-down menu and the game will be reset to the old version.
According to Binary Helix, they are working on adapting the game to the current patch.
Download at ModDB
Alternatively, you can also download the mod without Steam (on the website ModDB.com) . The current version is number 0.7.1 and is about one and a half gigabytes in size.
Installation guide:
- Extract the zip file to your Stellaris mod folder, which is probably located here: “C:\User\PROFILNAME\Own Documents\Paradox Interactive\Stellaris\mod”
- Then you should find a “beyondtherelays” folder and a file called “beyondtherelays.mod”.
- Right-click on “beyondtherelays.mod”, select the option “Open with …” and select the Editor/Notepad.
- Look for the line “path=” “” and insert the address of your Stellaris mods folder there. If you copy it directly from the Windows folder view, you have to replace the backslashes \ with slashes /. Then save the file and close the editor.
- Activate the mod in the Paradox Launcher.
