The next DLC for Stellaris expands the playing field: through rifts in space-time you leave the universe and explore completely unknown realms in events, welcome to Astral Planes.
It has become a tradition that new purchasable DLCs are released in parallel with major free updates for Stellaris, and this time will be no exception: Update 3.10, called Pyxis, brings with it the Astral Planes expansion.
And with Astral Planes, a few things are different, both in terms of who developed it and what will be waiting there for Stellaris veterans. Dress warmly! Your brave explorers have a lot in store, it seems.
Astral Planes: Rifts in Space and Time
In the new DLC, completely new realms await you. You’ll explore them in the course of event chains, as your explorers investigate rifts in known space. These will lead you to other universes where anything can happen. Sometimes these override laws of nature that we previously took for granted
An almost infinite number of universes are connected with ours, and ours is not the only one full of wonders…
Stellaris: Astral Planes contains:
- More than 30 astral cracks to explore.
- 8 new relics
- 4 state elements
- 1 origin
- Astral strands and astral actions
- 3 new music pieces by Andreas Waldetoft
.. as well as new insights into some old friends and enemies.
In which game stage will the new content be primarily relevant? Astral Planes brings content for exploration in mid and late game stages.
How does this rift mechanic work?
So, is there an extra map coming into play, with its own systems? No, the rifts basically just open the door to chains of events like you already experience in various parts of Stellaris. Excitement and great content are by no means ruled out this way, but a new freely explorable space region does not become accessible each time.
We haven’t played the expansion ourselves yet either, but based on the information available from two devblogs, this is probably how it plays out:
- Everything starts with an astral scar. This marks the collision of two dimensions, yours and the strange unknown out there.
- These scars appear randomly, are unpredictable, and so may appear late in the game amidst your central systems.
- At some point, they may expand and become an Astral Rift.
- This can then be explored using the
Rift Sphere device
. - While experiencing the adventure, you will have to make decisions that will significantly affect the outcome. If you take higher risks, you can also get better rewards,
What can happen there? So far, the developers remain quite vague, but apart from completely alien environments including deviating natural constants, time travel can also occur. You should be able to meet living specimens of the ancestor races on these, for example.
- From your travels to other universes, you can also bring back a new resource, Astral Threads. These can be used to trigger empire-wide effects.
When will Astral Planes be released? We currently don’t know a release date for the new DLC. But Astral Planes and the update 3.1, will most likely be released this year, Stellaris insiders agree on that.
What does the Pyxis update contain? Officially there are no details about this yet, but there are conjectures, as they (for example the colleagues from Eurogamer put on). They sound credible, but until Paradox makes a statement, these are just educated guesses from experts:
- The (Leader Consolidation Feature)
- Bugfixing and reworking issues from update 3.8
What do you think of the new DLC? Does it appeal to you or are you already waving it off and just leaving the holes in space-time to the left? Are you still on board with Paradox’s addon concept or is it just too small-scale for you? What’s your favorite expansion so far? Feel free to write us your thoughts and stories from this universe in the comments!
Who is developing Astral Planes? This probably sounds like a rather strange question for most of you, since everyone knows that Paradox is the developer and publisher of the 4X title. That’s true in so far, but the Belgian developer Abrakam Entertainment has played a crucial role in this DLC.
And in general, the team, which according to its website is still off Paradox supporting publishers (Nacon) and (Versus Evil) on projects, will be a key player in Stellaris’ future. In the coming weeks, Paradox plans to leave the regular devblogs to them so the community can get to know them better and of course the new DLC.
And if you just can’t get enough of Stellaris, you can find much more content about the ever-growing 4X strategy hit right below.
What do you think of the new DLC? Does it appeal to you or are you already waving it off and just leaving the holes in space-time to the left? Are you still on board with Paradox’s addon concept or is it just too small-scale for you? What’s your favorite expansion so far? Feel free to write us your thoughts and stories from this universe in the comments!
