Subscribe to download
Trace's Better Lithoids

This mod aims to improve the Lithoids DLC in various ways, giving more portrait variety, adding new species, and integrating Silfae's Silicoids mod with some polish.


- Lithoid portraits have more varieties, with more every update. All gained at least one variety, some more than doubled. Sometimes there's subtle changes to the texture. Original palettes maintained sensibly.

- Adds new 'remixed' portraits from vanilla files to fit niches. Current focus is more civilised, less bestial 'humanoid' shape Lithoids. There's even Lithoid clothing.

- Revives the Silicoid mod by Silfae. Merged into the Lithoid portrait set. Rather than just maintain it I've allocated audio, improved scaling, made graphical fixes and added more appearances.

- Additionally adds a few useful traits based on Silfae's.

- Portraits can show up on AI empires.

- Now adds Silfae's silicoid city standalone thanks to better game moddability. [doesn't currently show in game, I just wanted to update to 4.0 asap]

- Two new rooms. One with opaque background, recycling the Silicoid cityset to show a mining colony on an asteroid, in vanilla artstyle. The second is a runic, more civilised Lithoid room.

- Adds 3 prescripted empires: A golem building guild that combines a weak nerd race with a strong dumb 'golem' race, a friendly warrior rockman empire based on the advisor voice's personality and a Terravore hivemind.
(These currently don't show, non-game-breaking they're just very low priority and not worth delaying 4.0 update for.)

- This mod used to change vanilla balancing but a combination of Paradox patches, added content, and slight changes to how modding works means I took that feature out.

Features I'm testing, in order of likelihood:
- Separate parts of the models to drastically increase combinations.
- Integrate the split-face concept art version.
- At least one original species portrait.
- Visible cyborg and psionic feature, if I'm able.
- Crossovers with other DLCs. e.g. if you own both Lithoids and Aquatic, you can play as coral.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Other notes:
1. This mod is compatible with mods that touch pop categories and species classes. Still working out how compatibility works in modern Stellaris, mod's still not all-compatible, as promising as 4.0 looked, but better than before.
2. I retired the 'lite' version which didn't have the traits and balance changes, which leads me into:
3. The base DLC has slowly gotten better and integrated things from this mod's original scope. Lithoids are less underpowered as when their DLC came out, there's more content tidbits like having premade empires, they added a humanoid lithoid portrait, more balancing was done.. GG Paradox.
_______________________________________________________

* I am against plagiarism or content reupload, but Silfae seemingly retired from Stellaris modding. I feel it is acceptable to revive the mod, merged into the Lithoids DLC. Besides, it's not a straight port, bits of it are now remade or original.
If contacted I will happily cut them and add them back when redrawn.

I recommend 'Random Species Names' for many more Lithoid names:
https://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1827170321

Here is an alternate, more synthetic and crystalline, Lithoid shipset:
https://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2085237886

Very fitting Silicoid shipset from Master of Orion:
https://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2874728415

Thanks to Cavmanic for help and sharing their fixes!
https://steamproxy.com/id/caparkster/myworkshopfiles/?appid=281990