The base cost of genemodding projects has been increased, so even modding a single Pop is quite expensive. Cost per Pop was reduced to compensate, meaning that it's more efficient to modify large numbers of Pops at the same time.

A cost (equivalent to 3 trait points) was added for swapping out a Pop's habitability trait. This cost only applies to the cost of the special project and does not take up actual trait points.

Some traits had their costs and effects rebalanced. The advanced traits from Biological Ascension, in particular, were made cheaper.

Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris dev diary, being written while I am at home with fever and a ruined throat. Still, I felt we had missed one too many DDs lately and felt OK enough to take one for the team. The topic of today's dev diary will be some changes coming to genetic modification in the 1.8 'Čapek' update.A frequent complaint about the genemodding mechanic has been that it's hard to keep track of your modified species: Though two species with the same name and portrait are treated as the same species, they are still displayed as entirely separate entries in the species list, even if they have the exact same traits. What's more, because identity is tied to species name, we are forced to disallow renaming when modifying species, as you'd end up with a species that might be 95% identical to its parent species but still treated as though they were horribly alien to them.Our solution to all of these issues is templates. Templates are species genemodding configurations that you can create, edit, save and then apply. You take the desired base species, hit 'Create Template', and then set the species up as however you wish it to be, including the ability to rename the modded species to whatever you want. Once the template is created, it is saved and will be displayed in the species list as aof whatever the original species of the parent species is. In other words, if you take regular old Humans and turn them into Arctic Humans, and then modify the Arctic Humans into Desert Humans, Desert Humans and Arctic Humans will both be shown as distinct subspecies of Humans, and will be recognized as part of the same broader species. If multiple species share the same name and portrait at the start of the game, whichever species spawned first will be considered the parent species of the others.Once a template is created, you can apply it. By hitting Apply Template, you can then choose which pops in your empire will be converted to that template. Selection is done for all pops of the same parent species at once, so you do not have to do a separate special project for each subspecies you want to turn into the new subspecies. To continue our example from above, you can turn Human, Desert Human and Arctic Human Pops into Super-Human pops all at once. All pops that have a template applied to them become part of the same subspecies, no matter when they were converted, so you should never have several subspecies with the exact same name and traits unless you explicitly set it up to be that way. It is possible to edit a template freely up until the point where it applied to some Pops, after that you will have to split off a new template from it.Along with these changes, there are also some balancing changes:All in all, these changes should serve to make genemodding a much more intuitive and user-friendly experience and give you a much easier way to organize and categorize the different species in your empire.Next week... well... I can't actually tell you about next week yet, but the name of the author chosen for the 1.8 might offer some hint. See you then!