Finding a new habitable planet for your lovely (or not so lovely) citizens to colonize is always cause for celebration in Stellaris – but after a while, your excitement may start to wane.
After some playthroughs, most of us will have seen almost every type of planet Stellaris has to offer.
Sure, a Tomb World with a meaty archaeological site or a Gaia world with good modifiers are always fun. Still, it doesn’t match the excitement of discovering completely new and unique celestial bodies.
If you want to feel that joy of exploration again, fan-made mods are your best bet.
Time is precious when the average Stellaris campaign takes upward of 24 hours to complete, so I put together this ranking of fantastic planet mods to save you some time.
Across history, there have always been cities and settlements that refuse to be led by an outside power. These eventually came to be known as city-states.
Games like the Civilization series feature City-States and similar figures to provide the empire-building player with trading partners or conquering targets that won’t immediately put them at odds with other empires.
The Planet States mod by Kyllian introduces a similar mechanic into Stellaris. At the start of every game, some “Planet States” will spawn around the galaxy, waiting to be discovered.
These planets will all be fanatics of some government type, such as Authoritarian, Militarist, or Egalitarian, and they’ll provide different bonuses to their trading partners based on that.
If you want to extend the time you can spend focusing on a single planet rather than expanding across the stars, you have to try the Bigger Planets mod by Corsairmarks.
This fantastic add-on doubles the number of districts you can have per planet. It also duplicates the number of features, including blockers and deposits, you’ll find on any new planet you choose to settle.
Note that this mod won’t affect each planet’s visual size or the size value the game assigns to each celestial body.
One of the most exciting additions of the Synthetic Dawn update was the possibility of terraforming a celestial body into a Machine World.
Machine Worlds can only be inhabited by robots, making them less tempting for your enemies to conquer (unless they are also a machine empire). Additionally, the previous features of the planet stop being important, so you can build whatever districts you want as long as the planet’s size allows it.
The Real Machine Worlds mod by LogicSequence gives you yet more reasons to try out Machine Planets by introducing 25 new intriguing and flashy textures for these heavy metal worlds.
This even allows ring worlds to have machine-based rings instead of their original dust belts.
In Stellaris, it’s remarkably easier to find a new world able to sustain life than you’d expect – even with futuristic space colonization tech.
Creator Dezert seeks to make the game a bit more challenging and realistic by reducing the amount of life-supporting planets by 10% to 90%. Some of these will be candidates for terraforming, but for the most part, you’ll have to look hard for your next home.
This profoundly changes the game and forces you to value every habitable planet more.
Losing a world is now a real tragedy, and you need to be more careful with planet-destroying events.
Aren’t you tired of every planet looking the same?
The game features several planet types, such as Arid, Tropical, or Frozen – not to mention Tomb and Machine worlds – but there’s little variety among members of the same group.
You see one Desert planet, and you’ve seen all of them.
Well, not anymore! The Immersive Galaxy – Planet Variety mod adds hundreds of new textures for every planet type. It also improves how night lights look on an inhabited planet’s surface.
Another great option to expand your planetary variety without messing with the game’s balance is All These Worlds by Lex Peregrine.
ATW adds a wealth of new uninhabitable planets with all-new textures and characteristics that’ll make exploring the void a lot more exciting, but that’s not the main feature from my point of view.
The mod also affects habitable planets, but rather than adding more, it just renames the ones you’d have gotten in vanilla galaxy generation and adds a couple new modifiers related to their atmosphere quality and biosphere diversity.
These modifiers also change how these planets look, creating new versions of the nine base habitable planet types with different textures and portrait backgrounds.
I was amazed when Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 revealed the true identity of the villain: Ego, the Living Planet.
Always the Stellaris fan, my first thought was how this would be a fantastic event chain if it was in my favorite sci-fi grand strategy game.
A living planet is one of those “incomprehensible for feeble human minds” things that Stellaris does so well.
Modder Lord Roscoford did something even better: he gave us a chance to play as the living planet with a new custom origin and the objective of eating as many planets as possible.
Consuming planets allows you to develop your living world through different evolutionary paths for various bonuses.
A lot of thought went into this mod, and it’s really creative, so make sure to check it out.
The following entry goes a little bit farther than just increasing planet variety.
Annatar’s Real Space is a massive galactic overhaul introducing a wide range of all-new types of stars and over 100 variations of star system configurations.
In addition, the mod makes planet orbits more realistic and adds 50 new textures for gas planets like our own Jupiter.
But Real Space doesn’t reach its full potential until you try all the add-ons, such as New Frontiers, which adds even more planets and tons of events, and Planetary Stations, which lets you colonize previously uninhabitable worlds.
If you’re interested in making planets more fun and not just prettier, Guilli’s Planet Modifiers is the way to go.
This fantastic gameplay mod injects over 300 new possible modifiers for all kinds of planets, including ringworlds, machine worlds, relic worlds, etc.
It even modifies previously overlooked planets like barren, frozen, toxic, and molten worlds.
Besides the massive variety, what sets this mod apart is the polish and balance.
Just as some of these modifiers make planets incredibly valuable, they come with fair and exciting drawbacks that’ll make you think and force you to adapt your playstyle.
Planetary Diversity has been the gold standard for extra planet variety since it was released way back in 2016.
This mod introduces a whopping 54 new planet types to colonize in Stellaris, along with a couple extra rare planets hiding many exciting research opportunities and fortuitous events.
These new planets have custom textures and planet backgrounds that’ll add much-needed variety and a heightened sense of discovery to your next Stellaris adventure.
Some of them even feature their own custom origins, and you’ll get access to all-new “Nature Mastery” technology to aid in your terraforming and colonization efforts.
Not only that, but this mod supports several add-ons adding more Exotic Worlds, Space Habitats, and even Ringworlds.
It’s truly a thing of beauty, and it’s only a couple clicks away.
Nelson Chitty is a Venezuelan expat living in Argentina. He’s a writer and translator passionate about history and foreign cultures. His ideal weekend is spent between leisurely playing games of Civilization VI and looking for the next seinen anime to marathon.
