Good news everyone!This week we will talk about the Ship Designer. Last week we said that this week would be about “War, Peace, Influence and Claims”, but due to some really good (and secret) reasons we have decided to postpone that Dev Diary for a later date. Now let's continue with how you customize your ships in Stellaris...Customizing your ships is vital for making sure that your ships are equipped for any challenges that awaits them in the galaxy. Your ships have a build cost, build time and maintenance cost that is calculated from the different sections and components that your ship consists of. The ships also receive a wide range of different values; all these are affected by what sections and components you use on your ship. These values can be modified by, among other things, researching technologies and the traits of your leader.Every ship consists of at least one section that you can place different components on. A Corvette, for example, has one only section but a Battleship has three. The number of slots on each section (slots to place components) may vary between different sections. You can choose all different sections by yourself. The sections are divided into categories based on where they are placed on the ship, so a stern section cannot be placed in the middle section position.Every section may have available weapons and utility slots. These slots can be of Small, Medium or Large sizes. The different sizes affect the size of the component you may place in the section; a large weapon component may, for example, do more damage but has a lower hit chance. Some sections also have a hangar slot, but more on those in a later dev diary...Weapon components are, like the name suggests, different components that work as weapons of some kind. It could be something like a huge X-Ray Laser or some point-defenses that are great for when you encounter hostiles using missiles.Utility modules are passive components that affect the properties of the ship. It could be different types of shield or improved power reactors. A reactor is vital for your ship to function; several different weapon and utility components drain power, and unless you have enough reactors providing the necessary power, your ship will not be able to function (it’s an invalid design).We also have some required components depending on the class of ship you are trying to build. One of the basics is what FTL capability your ship has, so you may build some ships with warp and others with wormhole FTL. It is, however, only possible to have ships with the same type of FTL in the same fleet. You may also set what thruster to use, which affects the speed of your ships and their evasion chance. For military ships, you can also set what combat computer to use on the ship, which affects how they behave in combat. Different combat computers can be unlocked by technologies. There are a lot more types of components than the above, but this should give you a hint of the basic mechanics..For those of you who really don’t like to fiddle around with designing your own ships (and we know that you are legion), we have the option to auto-generate new ship designs whenever you research a new technology with something that the game thinks you should use on your ships. This algorithm is very close to what the AI will use.In the mid and late game you may also use the designer to customize your military defense stations and make sure that noone will ever be able to penetrate your solar system defenses.That is all for this week, I hope you enjoyed it despite the fact that I don’t write as well as Goosecreature! ;-)Next week we will talk about fleet combat in Stellaris