While Paradox have yet to spill the beans on their upcoming expansion for Stellaris, they have recently announced a new feature coming in the accompanying 1.5 ‘Banks’ update. To help build up your civilization peacefully on habitable planets, or to simply expand the limits of your empire, Paradox are adding new orbiting ‘Habitats’ in the next Stellaris update.
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Habitats are giant space stations that will function as supplementary colonies, orbiting other planets as an additional place for your citizens to call home. You can build and research whatever you like on these orbital platforms, but expect a lot of them to be used as giant offworld power stations or spaceports. Habitats cannot be built in the orbit of moons or large asteroids, but you can build them around hostile planets within your territory. It sounds like the perfect place to retire, a safe space station orbiting a planet full of horrifying creatures and wracked with toxic rain.
As farming is quite difficult in the cold reaches of space, Habitats aren’t great for food or mineral production but they are perfect for research or energy producers. Habitats have limited tile resources, but if a planet has a certain resource that can be accessed via a mining or research facility, the Habitat will have that resource on one of their tiles.
Do note that Habitats are mainly designed to help supplement the growth of a planet, rather than acting as its own world. Buildings on Habitats cannot be upgraded and require a sizeable upfront cost to build, so don’t start ordering space stations if your empire’s economy is already going down the tubes.
Paradox are planning to reveal more about the new expansion for Stellaris in next week’s dev diary so keep watching the stars to see what is coming in from hyperspace very soon.