So I have a little "Background" section on the main page there, which goes into bit of detail, but it used to be much longer. I had to cut it down because of the character limit! Here is the full story.

So the genesis for this mod really comes from three places.

First, it's essentially an expansion (or sequel) to my other mod "Planetary Features Expanded".

The idea with that mod was always to keep things fairly low-key, mostly about the art and flavour, and not tamper with vanilla too much. But while making it I realised just how powerful and cool the engine is and the interesting things that can happen with deposits. In particular I stumbled upon this concept of a "Dangerous" blocker - imagine a rare deposit and signified with red text. But what mechanic could come with it that wasn't just some heavy negative district modifier?

At the same time while making the first mod I was looking at the "Dangerous Wildlife" deposit and expanding it to now have a unique image/description for every climate. And while inspiration for a lot of that mod became quite difficult, I found there were LOADS of cool ideas for the dangerous wildlife. Pretty much any cool monster from real life or or fantasy was up for grabs, but the mod had no real space for all that because they were blockers, which meant techs, which meant tech spam and mechanic changes and blah blah...

It struck me during all this that while Stellaris does a bit with uplifting pre-sapient candidate aliens, it really doesn't do all that much for alien fauna and the many threats when colonising alien landscapes that are nonetheless filled with life. Nearly all the content in the game deals with higher forms of aliens. There is a real gap there.

So that's one bit of the story.

One of the things I always like in modded stuff (for any games) are mods that restore old/broken or unfinished game concepts. For Stellaris there is the army attachment system - which I've always loved, especially for their lore/flavour, and Xeno cavalry was basically the best of them! (That made it in to 1.0, anyway). Ground combat in general is great for storytelling, but I realise it's kind of useless, especially with the recent bombardment updates. So as a sort of seperate thing, I've wanted for a while to make a mod that gives a bit more reason for players to field defence armies, to be able to participate in ground combat and get army XP, train their generals, etc, but without the clunk of transport fleets, and without having to wait for war. So I came to this idea that the dangerous deposits could spawn violent enemy armies as their mechanic. And by doing this I now had space now for all those cool wildlife concepts that didn't fit in the other mod! A deposit of violent mutants could spawn mutant armies to fight, and so on. It didn't take much after that to think - wouldn't it be cool if we could end up using those armies for ourselves? To recruit them like titanic life? And if we're going that far, what about RIDING on them? That would give me Xeno Cavalry back in a really meaningful way! And there we have a mod that does a bunch of cool things all at once with one little idea.

The breeding, the bosses, the overrun worlds, devouring swarms eating them, they're all just fun bonuses that came later when I was just thinking about more cool things I could do to fully "complete" the idea.

Lastly... I have a bit of an unhinged theory about the development of the game that I wanted to resolve which relates to the "Xenomorph Army".

As I already explained on the original mod page: For Stellaris 1.0 you had the "Morphogenetic Field Mastery" tech which came bundled with TWO things, Xeno Cavalry, and Xenomorphs unlocking at once. Eventually attachments got removed and now things look really clunky. What does subconscious communication have to do with Xenomorphs? Almost nothing. In-fact, all the other flavour text about Xenomorphs in game suggests the opposite - that we can't control them at all! They're insane ravenous monsters destroying everything in sight, it's even supported in mechanics with their super high collateral damage. So yeah, the game is in a weird place right now with that. But the thing is, things were already clunky at 1.0 too.

What I guess happened is this:
Originally, during development, Xeno Cavalry had it's own tech with it's own story idea. It was clearly the subconscious communication thing but I also guess that it was treated as a sort of lower form of Morphogenetics.

And then secondly were Xenomorph armies which probably had their own dedicated tech - Morphogenetic Field MASTERY, where we've now taken what we've learned by bonding with Xeno wildlife and are now manufacturing our own abominations.

Basically I think there was a mini "Morphogenetics" tech path during development.

But in the later days, before release, the studio realised that having entire techs dedicated to such tiny unlocks (a single army attachment and that's it??) was too weak. And ground combat wasn't shaping up to mean that much. So, scrambling, they bundled everything together. Remember: A lot of sudden cutting happened to the army system right before release, they remove the entire air / orbital phases of the system and a bunch of attachments never even saw the light of day.

So that's why cavalry was awkwardly bundled with morphs, and why we are suddenly the "Masters" of this branch of genetics we haven't even heard of before.

So here I am, years later, thinking about planetary features and that dangerous wildlife boar icon and how cool it would be to mount it.

And suddenly it all clicks.

That's what this mod actually started as - re-implementing this tech path that I imagine might have existed once, separating Cavalry and Morphs into their own things. For a long time it was called "WP's Morphogenetics".

Later I realised that stars of the show was really the wildlife itself, and the name changed, and it became more of a sequel to Planetary Features Expanded.

And for what it's worth that all explains why this mod edits the Morphogenetic field mastery tech. Technically, even though it has nothing to do with Xenomorphs, this mod does affect them - they come in at tech t5 now (instead of rare at t4). They're the end of the tech path. It's a subtle change but it's there. Through morphogenetics we catalogue a bunch of strange and dangerous monsters, genetically manipulating them. Then finally we just say screw it, let's make our own - and Xenomorphs arrive. It's not on the mod page images or anything, but they have a new localisation text now.

So there you have it!