The L-Cluster

Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Today, we're going to be covering the headline feature of the Distant Stars Story Pack that will be accompanying the 2.1 'Niven' update.In Distant Stars, some Black Hole systems are home to mysterious "L-Gate" structures that the player can find while exploring the galaxy. Originally part of the regular Gateway network, these L-Gates were heavily modified shortly after the initial construction of the network. The gates are operable but stuck in perpetual maintenance loops, possibly due to intentional sabotage. L-Gates cannot be activated by the usual Gateway technologies, instead requiring the collection of insights relating to subspace and the nanite technology used to activate the gates. Insights can be collected in a wide variety of ways - from anomalies and exploration, from defeating certain enemies, and from researching a repeatable technology that becomes available once your empire is sufficiently advanced to conduct independent research on nanites.Once an empire has amassed enough insights, they will be able to open an L-Gate and access the L-Cluster, a cluster of stars located just outside the galaxy and entirely inaccessible from the regular hyperlane network. What precisely you will find there, we are not going to be spoil in this dev diary, but suffice to say that there are several possible outcomes, and that the gates may have been locked down for a reason...On a technical level L-Gates are a new and fully moddable bypass type, distinct from Wormholes and Gateways. L-Gates cannot be built and there is a finite number of them (up to 10) in the galaxy. They use a hierarchical (or hub-and-spoke) connection design, where all roads lead to the L-Cluster. This means that an L-Gate can only send a fleet to the L-Cluster, but once in the L-Cluster the fleet can travel to any L-Gate in the galaxy. This bypass type, along with the ability to create whole new areas of the galaxy (and specify their location relative to another system or the galactic core) is available for modders to use as part of the free Niven update.That's all for today! Next week we're going to continue talking about the Distant Stars Story Pack, on the topic of new anomalies, new systems and new Leviathans.