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The Blocker Mod

The Blocker Mod aims to deepen and expand the game's planetary colonization and development loop.

Colonizing planets will be slower but also more rewarding. Your Colonists will take on the role of heroic explorers and bring knowledge, bounty, and renown to your empire.

They will also face significant challenges as you settle new worlds. In The Blocker Mod, many Planetary Features take up additional district space and most can be cleared. A Searing Desert will remain a good source of solar power, but no one wants to live there. And you don't mess with Toxic Kelp.

It's up to you to explore and shape your planet's geography. Will you nurture an idyllic farming world of Nutritious Mudlands and rolling Green Hills where xeno-melons grow as beig as your head? Or will you pave paradise with Industrial Wasteland in the name of progress?


The Blocker Mod adds approximately 100 new features and heavily reworks most existing features. It does not alter event-specific features or features added by other mods.

Feature placement has been reworked so that Tropical Islands can only appear where there's likely to be water and Desert worlds will be harder to farm. Planets can have distinct biomes. Almost all features now behave as "blockers" and can be cleared. The cost in time and resources varies considerably, and once they're gone, they're gone - along with any resource districts and bonuses provided.

When you first arrive on a new world, it will have very little if any space for development. You will need to make use of new buildings, decisions, and the features themselves to get your colony up and running.

In general, the mod reduces the volume of resource districts in favour of increasing their efficiency, particularly when paired with other features. Larger worlds will struggle to be self-sufficient while carefully-planned rural colonies can form the backbone of an empire.


As you explore the final frontier, you'll discover the pitfalls and possibilities of alien worlds. Many features can fire events, and your choices can powerfully shape the worlds around you.

Tread lightly. While your colonists can adapt to a life of Moisture Farming, over-use of agriculture may elad to the creation of Floodplains, Dustbowls, or even whole regions lost to Barren.

As your fledgling colonies grow, you'll also need to handle crime and amenities. Hot Springs and Rushing Waterfalls can be a great source of unity, but Hydro Plants have a way of ruining a view no matter which sensory organs you possess. The occasional Sprawling Slum might be useful, but authoritarian dystopias may see happiness penalties stack up faster than it can bulldoze them.

If you find yourself in a spot of ecological bother, the blocker removal technologies have been reworked to provide access to decisions and event choices that can make managing your world easier. Terraforming will also reroll planetary features.

The AI will likewise make choices about which features to clear based on its personality and its planet designations, which should lead to more varied, interesting galaxies.


These courageous champions of civilization have given everything to forge a new life on an alien world. In keeping, this formerly banal job can now provide massive bonuses on new worlds.

Most features provide an additional bonus to Colonist output (gestalt empires get a building that does likewise), often in the form of food, minerals, or research. While the early colonization period may require some patience, it'll also be a boon for your scientists back home who get to study all those new specimens.

Due to the way features are spawned, the occasional outlier planet may spawn with negative district space. In severe cases, these get the Wild World modifier and give an additional boost to colonists as well as a discount on clearance cost/time. The Environmental Engineer trait can also be taken from game start.

New colonial buildings allow you to add extra Colonists, specialize them, and keep them around until a Planetary Capital is established. However, it pays to be mindful of the strain this remote infrastructure can place on national unity, and an empire that over-relies on colonization will soon find it hard to enforce edicts, traditions, and even public order.


By way of tutorial, you'll have a completely unique set of features on your homeworld chronicling the past 150 years of your history. Many of these features are origin or empire-dependent, so should you conquer a Determined Exterminator you can expect to spend some time deprrogramming Battery Farms and shutting down the Central Power Nexus. Or use them for yourself -- it's up to you! Advanced Start empires even have special bonus features for you to find and use.

Most homeworld features are pretty tame, a product more of corruption and failure and so easily overcome with a bit of space-age investment. But as you clear them, you'll slowly lose resource districts and become more reliant on colonies to fuel homeworld industry.

Do note that some origins, like Post-Apocalyptic; Life-Seeded / Ocean Paradise; and Remnants, get special treatment that may also make them more challenging and lively.


The Blocker Mod is made with compatibility in mind but it goes without saying that it may behave oddly with other mods that change planetary features, and you should probably pick only one major feature mod. If you prefer variety, WP's excellent Planetary Features Expanded is a great add and may be somewhat compatible with TBM. For extra content, Guilliman's Planetary Modifiers & Features is always a good standby. The Blocker Mod will be more focused on emergent story and system play.

TBM doesn't overwrite any event features or limit the ability of other mods to add more, but it does overwrite deposit_categories to enable clearing all features. One-off features should retain their effects, but you will want to be extra careful not to clear your Local Production stockpile or origin-unique features.

For the mod to function properly, it is also necessary to overwrite the scripted effect generate_start_deposits_and_blockers. The Blocker Mod needs to be loaded AFTER any other mod that edits this script or it will not work properly. This mod may now be compatible with Planetary Diversity, after v3.13 or so of that mod (see comment thread below for updates).

It is a good idea to load TBM after any other mod that adds features. It's also possible that any mod that adds uniquely scripted planets via initializer may not function properly, but only if that initializer sets deposit_blockers = none, and those are generally easy to patch.

Two blocker-related defines are overwritten, MIN_UNBLOCKED_DEPOSITS and COLONY_DEPOSITS_FIXED_FROM_SIZE.

The Colonist job is overwritten but the file can be easily patched by switching Colonists to the planet_colonist economic category, which is added by TBM.

It should be compatible with most UI mods. It will disable achievements.