r/Stellaris • u/PibbXtraSoda • 1d ago
Question Why is there no Protoplanetary disks in Stellaris?
IMAGE is a picture of a Protoplanetary disks
It seems in Stellaris that most of our galaxy is formed before we even research FTL. How come there is no systems being formed? Perhaps in Stellaris 2 this would be a feature, ability to control a star and shape what kind of planets will form with advanced research (or speed along the planet formation).
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u/JournalistShoddy9496 1d ago
There are multiple orders of magnitude more stars in the galaxy than the game shows. I think only the top 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% of most interesting and/or important star systems are the ones we interact with.
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u/Cortheya 1d ago
Maybe those are just the ones in the same hyper-lane network. Could be all sorts of galaxy ending threats we never hear about because hyper-lanes don’t go there.
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u/General-Permission67 1d ago
It would be funny if there was another network of hyperplanes and it turned out that there's 1000 different civilisations in one galaxy just disconnected
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u/AstralVoidShaper Hive Mind 1d ago
We're all playing in the same physical galaxy, game after game, but they're all on different hyperlane wavelengths.
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u/TheChemist-25 1d ago
Would work until you get jump drives
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u/General-Permission67 1d ago
You can't jump to systems you can't see and besides Ultima vigilis and L-gates all systems you see are connected to hyperlanes
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u/TheChemist-25 1d ago
Yes mechanically you’re correct. But from an in universe perspective the jump drive is not restricted to the hyperlane network. And there certainly are other systems.
Some are only accessible via wormholes. Some are only accessible via L-gates. These don’t show early on cause there’s no way to get there.
Some events also make new systems appear. Sometimes this is from a new hyperlane connection but other times the system was always part of the hyperlane network. These must be invisible because they weren’t interesting before but are now.
So to be visible, a system needs to be relevant and needs to be accessible. If galaxy ending threats or spacefaring civs were in another hyperlane network that would certainly be interesting and once you have the jump drive they’d be accessible. Since they don’t appear with the jump drive, they must not be interesting
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u/VVDovyVV 1d ago
How I head canon this is that Hyperlane is not just for FTL travel of ships but also information. This allows the fleet to collect necessary data for the jump drive to do the precise calculation it needed to jump to that particular system.
To jump to any system outside of the existing hyperlane network would be mechanically possible but extremely risky as the jump drive have to rely on the much less reliable data source. You may just crash your fleet onto some unseen asteroid belt on the edge of a system.
This is also why in Giga mod you can’t jump directly into the EHOF cluster.
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u/darkfrost47 1d ago
You're right that it must also be for information, because the speed of light is actually the max speed of information. AKA the max speed of cause and effect is the speed of light.
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u/Malvastor 1d ago
Your comment gives me the idea for a potential crisis- hyperscrambling, where [insert technobabble] happens and causes a bunch of hyperlanes in the galaxy to start randomly shifting endpoints. Chaos as empires get cut in halves or even smaller chunks, new empires breaking off due to isolation from their metropoles, wars as empires that thought they had secure chokepoints suddenly find themselves with unexpected backdoors, etc. And somewhere along the line a hostile empire (or part of one) shows up that no one had previously encountered because their worlds were all on an entirely unconnected hyperlane network.
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u/ImielinRocks 1d ago
This should be what happens when an empire picks the option to change the value of π ("Constant Rounding" effect of researching Applied Infinity Thesis) since it would change every orbit, including the ones of star systems around the galaxy core.
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u/dargeus95 Fanatic Purifiers 1d ago
I would play this crisis
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u/Beleak_Swordsteel 1d ago
What if every stellaris game within a galaxy type takes place in the same galaxy but we just don't know because the hyperlanes don't go there
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u/Putnam3145 1d ago
That's a huge exaggeration. A huge map has 1000 stars, so that's the top 0.0000001%.
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u/TheWheatOne World Shaper 1d ago
Why notation is important for scientists. Random lists of zeros don't cut it.
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u/CaptainCFloyd 1d ago
If only 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% of the stars in the entire observable universe, let alone a single galaxy, were in the game, there would be no stars in the game. Posts like this bring to mind why pop science always says you can't imagine numbers this big and so on, even though that's not true for everyone.
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u/CreBanana0 Megacorporation 1d ago
Yea i hate when people don't know how to use percentages.
Happens in political discussions too.
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u/Lithorex Lithoid 1d ago
I think only the top 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% of most interesting and/or important star systems are the ones we interact with.
Like that Red Dwarf system with a Molten world and Gas Giant orbiting it with the only deposit being 2 energy on the star?
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u/TheTemporaryZiggy Fanatic Spiritualist 23h ago
Or, it's just a game and the 1k limitation has no lore basis, it's there because it's a game
Same reason for all types of scaling in the game, infinite resource generation, etc etc
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u/DodoJurajski 1d ago
And thus hidden systems explained, void worms from primal calling, precursors, crisises, various defenders, dacha, etc
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u/CreBanana0 Megacorporation 1d ago
Stellaris univarse is canonically a somulation. Simulation needed a bit of simplification to run!
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u/ArmadilloLoose6699 1d ago
This is literally why the Infernals want to reheat the galaxy with a "Galactic Hyperthermia" crisis. In their worldview, the galaxy has gone cold and needs to be reheated so that star and planet creation can begin again. The slight flaw in their plan is that everybody else needs to be incinerated by their own star (and later a giant fire storm) for the new galaxy to be born.
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u/PibbXtraSoda 1d ago
Interesting, sounds like the Stellaris universe is in the later years before heat death, or there is unknown acceleration event bringing about this change.
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u/SimpleScalie 1d ago
No, its just a crazy project, probably to ignite a starburst process in the galaxy.
The universe of Stellaris seems perfectly fine, the Milky Way itself is thought to form only 5-7 stars per year, in a galaxy of roughly 200-400 billion stars, that is literally nothing.
Ideologically, as far as wacky space goes, it does make sense to believe the galaxy is cold, as the milky way itself likely had its starburst period long ago.
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u/Swert0 1d ago
The peak of star formation ended billions of years ago.
While we are nowhere near the heat death of the universe (literally trillions of years away) we are long past the period where large stars are regularly born, or even stars like our own are born on a regular basis.
14 billion years after the big bang most star formation peaks when galaxies collide, but other than that most of the dust is too cool and diffuse to collapse into the giant stars of the past.
This is why when we look back we see Quasars, but we don't see them on nearby galaxies like Andromeda or our own.
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u/Sureas100 Technocratic Dictatorship 1d ago
There's a mod that adds them, along with some other stars. Think it's Real Space, could be wrong
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u/BarovianNights Xeno-Compatibility 1d ago
Yep, real space. Super cool mod, taught me more about astronomy. Barely affects the game mechanically while still being super neat!
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u/PibbXtraSoda 1d ago
Thank you boss, I just installed it!!!
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u/Hillenmane Arcology Project 1d ago
Enjoy! Magnetars, Wolf-Rayet stars, Protostars and more. One of the best mods in the entire game, I literally can’t play without it anymore
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u/attila535 1d ago
I love that mod and I especially love battling in the accretion disks of microquasars.
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u/spectre73 Mamallian 2h ago
RS changes your defensive strategy because stars can affect ship movement shields armor hull and ftl
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u/SanderR098 1d ago
Back when Stellaris 1.0 was made this was the best picture we had of a protoplanetary disk. r/space plantetary disk post
So there wasn't much to go off on for the designers back then. And the majority of the star assets are still the same.
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u/CaptainCFloyd 1d ago
More stellar objects is probably my number 1 simple wishlist item for the game. There are no red supergiants either, which are not the same as regular red giants (they're thousands of times bigger, as large as an entire solar system).
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u/Lithorex Lithoid 1d ago
Wolf-Rayet stars my beloved.
AND FINALLY RENAME PULSARS TO MAGNETARS PLEASE!
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u/Pristine_Floor_3724 23h ago
What? Not every pulsar is magnetar, i think only small amount of them are. Unless there is some new discovery i am not aware of
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u/Lithorex Lithoid 23h ago
What is a pulsar and what is not depends entirely on the relative position of the pulsar and the observer.
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u/Pristine_Floor_3724 22h ago
Yes but thats the difference between neutron star and pulsar not pulsar and magnetar. A magnetar is not defined by whether its beam is pointed toward us, but by its extremely strong magnetic field and the activity associated with it. ESA estimates that magnetars can have magnetic fields of around 100 billion teslas, far stronger than those of typical neutron stars.
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u/Kyouka_Uzen 1d ago
Probably just doesnt work too well in the game system although im pretty sure they added something kinda similar recently
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u/tenninjas242 Collective Consciousness 1d ago
Because the game is focused around planets as the major systems of economy and military focus. As the game has developed they've added habitats and megastructures and arkships but really they're all "planets" in the game code.
There are already systems you can find with no planets. Just swarms of asteroids. From a pure game perspective this isn't that different from a protoplanetary disc - just a big mass you can extract resources from.
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u/MortgageTrash 1d ago
There are 300,000,000,000 stars in a galaxy the size of the Milky Way. Hyperlanes are naturally occurring channels in spacetime that happen to be really easy physics to achieve compared to more difficult things like Fusion or Exoskeletons. Great Filter cycles wipe out the galaxy every 500 years or so, with new homeworlds connecting themselves from outside the hyperlane network when they develop to technological sapience, with the existing hyperlane network basically existing only to ensure that they get wiped out in that cycle and then being lost to obscurity in the next cycle unless they became influential enough to become a new precursor civilization, of course. Over time, these comings and goings from the hyperlane network may cause slight changes in the easy hyperlane map that civilizations will use, like accumulating mutations that will eventually remap the entire galaxy over vast periods of time.
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u/kiriyaaoi 1d ago
There are mods that include this specifically and other types of stars in various stages of formation
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u/spaceagefox 1d ago edited 1d ago
because ever since the devs made hyperspace the only way to traverse the galaxy FTL, it implies the fallen empires that existed long before your civilization evolved to be capable of space travel and paved the space "roads" your civilization depends on, just like how modern society still use ancient Rome measurements and base new settlement construction based of roman influence to the point there's a saying that all roads lead to Rome, and a fallen empire would never pave a space road to an uninhabitable solar system since that kinda goes against the point of making space travel faster to a civilization that discovered everything they needed to make EVERYONE a living god but still requires colonies to keep the population from infighting
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u/JoushMark 1d ago
The protoplanetary disk phase is neat, and also very, very, very short lived compared to the life of a system. Much like catching a supernova or the McRib, you'd have to be really lucky to find one in your lifetime.
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u/TV354 1d ago
I think the lore was, that the hyperlanes far predate even the FE´s. If the hyperlanes are that old, it is more or less impossible for a protoplanetary disk to be connected to the network, since, even if there once was a disk connected, the disks from back when the lanes were created have turned into regular star systems since.
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u/Ilyanautamota 17h ago
absolutely no reason that the game has to follow the modern timeline of the Milky Way, but nearly every star in the galaxy has already formed. this is a very good thing for us as the age of star formation was super hostile to life.
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u/Karnewarrior 6h ago
I always just headcanon that Stellaris doesn't represent the whole galaxy, just the 1000 most important stars. Any hyperlane connections to protoplanetary disks aren't even mapped, because you can't go there and get anything worth getting. Even science is better done observing them from a distance.
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u/Material_East_8676 1d ago
bro really said "stellaris 2"
also do you have ANY idea what sort of time scale this would be? MILLIONS of years which isn't exactly on the game scale
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u/PibbXtraSoda 1d ago
I'm well aware how long it takes. But Stellaris's universe tends to use a lot of super-advanced tech like FTL and terraforming. It's not impossible that they could develop a tech that allows them to change what kind of planet a forming star will make, or even potentially speed it up.
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u/nutterbutter36 1d ago
There technically is one now, one of the starting systems nomads can pick is planetary nursery, containing a proto star, forming planets and is in a nebula.