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The Lawless Space 2.0 (Pirate Expansion)

Are you tired of the lackluster piracy system in vanilla Stellaris? This mod focuses on making pirates a unique and legitimate threat, reworking them with the goal of providing additional challenge for regular empires and liven up the galaxy in general.

Currently supported game version: v4.0.*


Once a regular empire is in contact with another regular empire (if there is one), and 15 years have passed since game start, there is a very small monthly chance for a Pirate Haven station to appear along with several guard fleets. If a suitable free system exists outside the empire's borders, the pirates will spawn there. Otherwise, they instead have a tiny monthly chance to spawn inside the parent empire's borders if it controls at least 32 systems. The spawn chance is influenced by various factors: criminal/deviant activity and low naval coverage (<30%) raise the chance, while high naval coverage (>70%) and enacted GALPOL/ISD resolution lower it.

Each regular empire can only have one offshoot pirate country at a time. Destroying a Pirate Haven forces the owner country to disband and prevents its parent empire from spawning new pirates for at least 15 years.


Pirate countries can raid any regular empire 1 or 2 systems away from their home system once every 7 years on average. These raids are done through covert infiltration, resulting in a small pirate fleet being placed inside the target empire's system as well as the theft of some energy, minerals and trade, scaling with years passed.

Criminal Heritage and Letters of Marque empires can bribe their offshoot pirates to make them neutral (a time-limited opportunity to do so is presented whenever an offshoot pirate country spawns). Bribed pirates no longer raid their parent empire until provoked. Instead, they can raid any regular empire bordering the parent once a starbase is built in the pirate home system.

The Arm Privateers espionage operation is slightly altered to make use of the new features. If the target empire has a hostile offshoot pirate country, the privateers will belong to that country. In addition, the mod fixes a bug in pirate fleet power calculation logic for certain vanilla pirate-spawning events, which resulted in unfairly powerful fleets being summoned.


All regular pirate ships and stations now use stronger exotic designs based on space fauna salvage and have a much lower chance to spawn debris. Each pirate country is randomly assigned 1 of 3 raider designs and 1 of 2 frigate designs upon initial spawn (cruiser and galleon designs are constant).

Destroyed Pirate Heavens provide resource rewards as well as a chance to discover L-Gate insights. The home system guard fleets replenish once every 2 years on average and gradually increase in count and strength up to 7 times. The power-ups happen globally for all pirates, around once every 31 years by default. The interval is dynamically adjusted depending on galaxy settings so that the 6th power-up aways happens at endgame start.

The pirate fleet behavior is largely unchanged, save for a few special cases. Most notably, the Pirate Haven guards are now able to destroy hostile starbases in their systems to prevent enemy occupation.


This mod reuses as much vanilla content as possible, ensuring availability in all languages by default. It only overrides a handful of pirate events and ship designs, keeping the footprint small and making it play nicely with most other mods, except those that alter pirates as well. However, adding or removing it mid-playthrough is NOT recommended.

Have fun with your new lawless threats!