or

Greetings to the void-dwellers and planet-bound alike!This week we’ll be talking about some changes we’re planning on making to the engineering marvels that are Orbital Habitats. These are currently slated for the May update that grekulf mentioned two weeks ago Introduced in Utopia, Orbital Habitats provide a way to continue some form of limited expansion after colonizing all of the habitable planets within your empire. In the 2.3 “Wolfe” update, we added some specialized districts to them based on the celestial body they orbited, opening up the possibility for things like building dedicated astro-mining facilities, and recently in Federations, we added a Void Dwellers origin which let you start your empire among the stars in three habitats.This May, we’ll be introducing multiple tiers of habitats. These will be accessible to anyone with the Utopia expansionusing the Void Dwellers origin from Federations.The first tier of Orbital Habitats now comes a bit earlier in the tech tree and require fewer alloys to build. The basic Orbital Habitat is smaller than the old version, starting with 4 district slots. They also have a simpler appearance than the ones currently in the game, a core of a station to build upon later.The Habitat Expansion engineering technology is placed around where the Habitat technology used to be in the tech tree, and will allow you to upgrade an Orbital Habitat that has filled all of its districts to an Advanced Habitat using a planetary decision that costs some time and alloys.Upgrading to an Advanced Habitat provides 2 additional district slots and allows basic housing buildings to be built even for normal empires.The Advanced Habitat upgrade adds a ring of modules around the central core.A third technology permits upgrading a fully developed Advanced Habitat that has a Habitat Central Control into a Habitat World.Habitat Worlds have 8 districts, shown as another ring of modules around the habitat.The Voidborne Ascension Perk has undergone a few changes as well.The perk now gives each of your habitats 2 additional building slots and automatically grants access to the Habitat upgrade technologies. Regular empires with the perk can also build advanced housing buildings on their Advanced Habitats and Habitat Worlds instead of being limited to only basic structures.Void Dwellers will automatically start with the Habitat Expansion tech option available for them to research, and their primary habitat will begin as an Advanced Habitat while the other two will begin as somewhat cramped regular Orbital Habitats. In our internal playtests, we’ve found that Voidborne is exceptionally valuable for them to pick up early for the extra building slots, and the reduced alloy cost of building new habitats should relieve some of the additional pressure caused by the smaller starting size of their secondary habitats.During this pass we’ve taken care of a handful of other habitat related issues, such as those built above nanite deposits now retain the nanite production, and habitats built above Zro, Dark Matter, Living Metal, or Nanite deposits are now treated as research habitats. As a quality of life improvement, you no longer need to remove orbital mining or research stations to build a habitat, the construction process will automatically disassemble them upon habitat completion.Here are the full tiers of a few of the habitat types:---Next week we’ll have another sneak peek at the May update, see you then!