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.
##################
##################
Download the repository.
Unzip.
Put the files into your Stellaris/mods folder (any other mods you have should be there as well).
Activate ONE of the mods in your launcher, NOT BOTH. Just one. Yes. One. Less than two. You get it. If you have literally zero idea what that means, check out the entry below about what Heavy does, to decide on which one is best for you.
Play the game!
##################
##################
The Heavy version is a heavily expanded version of RPG Traits. While the Core version only overhauls Traits and incompatibility is mostly limited to trait-related mods, the Heavy version goes completely loose and overhauls a more things to allow for more creativity in designing species. The main things that have been overhauled are:
E.g. in Heavy you can start on an Asteroid, or live on Gas Giants. You can even play as a Star-inhabiting species. In addition there are some fancy new late-game techs which allow you to do crazy stuff like terraform Gas Giants and Molten worlds (those are stupendously costly though). It's specifically made to go nuts with your sci-fi fantasy. The only drawback to this version is lack of compatibility with mods that also modify these aspects. In addition, Heavy rebalances ALL Habitability modifiers, so it matters much more. This means many mods that add habitability modifiers in some way (which are tailored to vanilla scaling with bonuses like +10% being very common) will be very exploit-y if used with Heavy.
In summary: pick Heavy if you want even MOAR freedom when designing your races, or if you feel like the 9 vanilla planet types are boring af.
##################
##################
While the Steam workshop is very popular, it's also a horrible platform for discussion, comments being arranged chronologically amongst other bad things. So for bug reporting, discussion, updates and suggestions it's highly recommended to go to the RPG Traits subreddit:
reddit.com/r/stellarisrpg/
You can find much more general info there, as well as an updated FAQ and Q&A.
If you wish to contribute, think of a good trait/event/whatever and just send me the code on Reddit or Github. If it's good it'll get implemented and you'll get a mention. (Make sure to mention it in the suggestions thread first, to avoid spending effort on something that won't be implemented)
Cheers, LuxArdens
##################
##################
Notable Contributors, in no particular order of amount of work: /u/Mithril_Leaf - subterranean trait and various ideas
/u/2byzantine4med - almost all of the icons
/u/thefoxymulder - for making some example custom species
/u/dosaki - for the wonderful Strange Homeworlds mod, which I butchered into the HEAVY version
/u/hypernova1912 - for various bits and patches
/u/SiceX - for portrait-specific trait assignment
/u/JJ_of_DisasterCrew, also known as Soviet_Satan on steam - for updating and maintaining the mod during 1.9 and doing several bugfixes
/u/Therlun for making sick trait suggestions
RPG Traits is under MIT License - meaning you can do whatever the heck you want with it, but it sure is nice if you give credit where credit is due
##################
##################
Rather than a dumb list of all the traits and their modifiers (which is rather huge), here are some common tips to players for this mod:
This mod is for ROLEPLAYING. To really enjoy it, you'll need to somewhat abandon the powergaming that is so common to Stellaris. There's very little point to powergaming with RPG Traits, because you can select extremely powerful trait combinations in the starting screen and curb-stomp the shit out of the AI with extreme ease. That's fun for exactly one hour and after that you're done. It's highly recommended instead to creatively make up balanced sci-fi races and play as those.
Some trait combinations will make your game impossible. Use common sense here. The Retarded trait means your species REALLY is retarded. Combining it with another bunch of negative traits will make your game borderline impossible and that's not a bug! It kind of makes sense.
Many traits are locked behind techs. For Robots this was done to avoid early exploits and for Organics it's simply to restrict it to ones that go the Genemodding route. Getting related Ascension perks helps you get the required techs.
While the mod supports random AI race generation, it is still HIGHLY recommended to make up your own custom races and play against those. Stellaris fails heavily in this regard in that 'random' does not equal 'creative' and doesn't necessarily lead to good storytelling. Even in RPG Traits, a randomly generated race will tend to feel empty and artificial compared to a creatively thought up custom species. Making your own custom species is also by definition balanced the way you want it to. So you can give yourself a challenge or play against some very strange empires.
If your screen is too short for the trait menu in the species designer, then you've got a really tiny screen! Try using the UI scaling in the Graphics options. Setting it at 0.8 should make things a lot better.
Titanic may feel overpowered, but do not underestimate how slowly your expansion is. Similarly, Tiny may feel pathetic, but you can expand at a blistering speed.
The 3 Repugnant traits, as well as Lingua Idumentis and Olfactory communication give negative modifiers to diplomacy as well.
RPGT comes with some premade countries to replace the vanilla ones, which are broken. If you wish to remove the prescripted empires, simply delete the folder "prescripted_countries" from the mod. Editing the prescripted empires or forcing them to spawn is done most easily by clicking edit and then saving them as a new species.
HEAVY-specific tips:
There are many more colonizable planet types in Heavy, so late-game you can get flooded in habitable worlds. For your own sanity it might be a good idea to play on a smaller Galaxy size, as each system ends up with around 6 habitable-ish planets late-game!
The Terraforming chains in Heavy go through certain keypoints. E.g. you can't terraform a Gas Giant straight into Gaia, you first have to terraform it into a Barren World, et cetera. Use common sense to determine which is closer to your endgoal.
Terraforming of Gas Giants, Asteroids, Molten Worlds, et cetera is extremely expensive. Really, it's a pretty wasteful thing to do from a powergaming perspective, but I wanted to add the option because you could do so in Masters of Orion 2 as well and that was bloody glorious.
Stars lack a colonize button on their planet screen. Colonize them through the Expansion screen instead, or by simply clicking a Colony Ship and landing on them. This is a silly background problem that just doesn't work otherwise.
##################
##################
Recommended:
Semi-compatible:
NOT COMPATIBLE: