A collection of rare deposits (the rare ones NOT associated with rare resources) and blockers have been updated to correctly display as rare on the main planet view ui.
Agnostic blocker weights were shaved slightly as I felt they were somewhat too common.
Standard production feature weights were reduced slightly as small worlds were exhibiting 1 or 2 more features than they should.

There was a really serious bug in this, possibly introduced last patch? I'm amazed I had no reports about it honestly!

A whole block of my scripted_variables were completely disconnected, resulting in ridiculous feature spawning at game start.

No idea how it even happened!

All fixed now.

Very minor update.

Added a check for artificial planets to the event that removes deposits for GPM headroom. Thanks to Inny for the suggestion!

A "small" update today. No game-play changes or anything, but I've shrunk the art-icons on the back-end. You guys were only ever seeing 98x75px in-game and yet I was bundling MASSIVE art files of 512x512! I've come to believe this contributes to a slight stutter when clicking into system view (if you don't play on an SSD) and it was, frankly, pointless. So all the icons are now the correct display size and thus the mod has a much, much cleaner and smaller footprint.

Rarity Rebalance Update:
When first releasing this mod I initially opted to copy Vanilla exactly in terms of the weighting/rarities for features and their potencies:

1. All features (of the same rarity) give the same number of districts. For example:
- All common mineral features give +1 mining district.
- All uncommon food features give +2 agriculture districts.
- All rare energy features give +3 generator districts.
- And so on.

2. Different worlds have biases to spawn more of one type of feature over another. For example:
- Wet worlds are more likely to have food features.
- Cold worlds are more likely to have mineral features.
- Hot worlds are more likely to have energy features.
- And so on.

However, when you expand the variety of planetary features (as this mod does) there is actually a big problem with Paradox structuring things this way! And you may have noticed this yourself while playing: the odds of seeing any NON TYPICAL feature become very rare indeed. You will almost never, for example, come across the rare volatile motes features I made for cold worlds because they are non standard for the planet class and fighting against so many other very common valid options. What does this mean? Well... even though this mod contains literally hundreds of planetary features all with unique art and flavour descriptions... many of them don't show up. Which is very lame considering the point of the mod is to diversify our planetary features. And It's a problem that becomes much worse when:
a) You play with fewer planetary features.
b) You play with fewer habitable worlds (as many do for performance/RP reasons.)
c) You play on smaller galaxies.

As in these scenarios there is even less spawning to "roll the dice" and average out to getting some cool ones in the galaxy.

I knew this was all a bit of an "issue" when releasing the mod, but at the time I reasoned that these rare types would just be things that keep the game fresh and interesting even through many many playthroughs. The reality is that I was just clinging too closely to Paradoxes setup for no good reason. So now I have changed it for the better.

The new setup is this:

1. All features (of the same rarity) have the SAME chance to spawn as one another, regardless of planet class. For example:
- A rare mineral feature is just as likely to appear on an Alpine world as a Tropical world.
- A volatile motes feature is just as likely to appear on a Desert world as a Tundra world.
- An uncommon food feature is just as likely to appear on a Continental (wet) world as a Desert (hot) world.

So you get maximum variety and good odds on everything! But hold on, what about the planet class bias mechanic? Shouldn't wet worlds still be good at food? Well:

2. The potency of these features now changes based on planet class. They are stronger (+1 extra district) if on their preferred type. For example:
- Any common food feature gives +1 farming district when found on cold and hot worlds, but +2 on wet ones.
- Any uncommon mineral feature gives +2 mining districts when found on wet and hot worlds, but +3 on cold ones.
- Any rare energy feature gives +3 energy districts when found on wet and cold worlds, but +4 on hot ones.
- Any common crystal feature gives +1 crystals when found on hot and wet worlds, but +2 on cold ones.
- And so on.
(Note: Masters of Nature ascension perk still doubles these values. So the ascension perk is a bit stronger this release and probably worth a run!)

So as you can see the exact same game-play will result:
- We find wet worlds with more farming and exotic gas industry opportunities
- We find hot worlds with more energy and volatile mote industry opportunities
- We find cold worlds with more mining and rare crystal industry opportunities

But the actual planetary features we're seeing and that are creating this experience are more diverse. The actual make-up of the worlds and the storytelling is more varied, even on small galaxies and low habitable world counts.

The one exception to this is that gaia worlds still have their +50% bonus chance to have alien pets and betharian stone features.

So that's the update! Hope it makes sense. I have still provided a configuration.ini of sorts - Everything can be adjusted in the scripted_variables file, so have fun tweaking if you like and let me know how it plays.

Tiny bit of house-keeping on the scripted triggers due to the fact Planetary Diversity left it's Beta.

Basically no changes at all, just a version update.

Everything still works fine (Tested on it's own + with new PD).

Forgot the add the on_actions for the new events, done now.

Updated!

As far as I can tell the recent patches have no feature changes or updates affecting this mod at all. Let me know if I'm wrong about that.

One of the four "unexplored" blockers accidentally never had it's energy costs assigned. Added that now, thanks for the bug report "Borsk"!

Tweaked the hidden event that gives you the xenology tech when you posses some alien wildlife. It now has a 50% chance to trigger every 2 years, so it's not such a "hard science" and predictable thing, a bit like rolling for the tech conventionally. Fixed a bug that meant only one empire would get this per campaign, too (woops!)

Added new similar events for rare crystal, volatile mote and exotic gas mining too. Same principle - 50% chance to get the tech option every 2 years.

Renamed "Unmapped" areas back to "Unexplored". I don't know why I ever changed this in the first place, unexplored is a much cooler and more appropriate term.

If anyone can let me know if I need to do anything to support "All these worlds" or other compatibility things, let me know.

Todays was a pretty big update!

Rewrote massive chunks of the event scripting now that i've learned about switches and scripted effects. It's all a lot more compact/cleaner now.

There is now something of an .ini/configuration file for people to use in the scripted_variables file! From that one place you can change the balance/settings of a bunch of stuff, like deposit rarity, clear costs, district bonuses, just about everything.

And while setting that up I noticed a few little issues with the mod I hadn't spotted, so those are fixed.

Dangerous wildlife deposits have been cleaned out of this mod!.

Why? Because I just released a sequel (or expansion) mod to this called "Dangerous Wildlife Expanded". It's designed as a companion piece built with exactly the same idea - instead of one deposit, there are now 44.

It's entirely dedicated to the concept of finding fun and cool alien wildlife. Each with a planetary feature, art, lore, armies, and more. You fight the wildlife, use it for yourself, ride it as cavalry, find giant bosses. Lots of stuff. And the idea of the "dangerous deposit" I dabbled with on this mod is fully implemented there.

Check it out if you like.


Some other very minor changes to file names.

I'll probably do another update tomorrow where I create a little configuration file for people tomorrow, so you (and I) can really easily change spawn rates and other values in here. Keep an eye out.