Stellaris: Biogenesis is the kickoff to the ninth DLC season of Paradox Development Studio’s venerable 4X strategy behemoth. As the name suggests, the focus is on biology and adaptation. Specifically, Biogenesis opens new pathways for players to customize their species, fleets, and ascension paths — and even experience life as a living planet.
Stellaris: Biogenesis introduces three new Origins. The first, Starlit Citadel, starts players with a powerful, highly defensible megastructure in a system that includes a portal to a mysterious new realm. The new deepspace megastructure opens up fresh strategies for controlling and exploiting hyperlane chokepoints.
The Wilderness Origin eliminates the boundaries between species and planet. Players enter the galaxy as a mutualistic intelligence in the form of a sapient world. Wilderness has a distinct play style that relies on food for interstellar travel and a new resource called biomass for planetary domination. Functionally, biomass falls somewhere between consumer goods and minerals, but in practice, it completely replaces the latter.
“Stellaris: Biogenesis is an excellent contrast to Season 8’s exceptional Machine Age DLC and a welcome return to form after October’s disappointing Grand Archive Story Pack.”
Standard planet districts and building types are done away with and replaced with unique, origin-specific alternatives. Colonization takes an interesting turn as well. Inhabiting new worlds no longer requires special ships; instead, the planet’s gestalt consciousness is sent down with its terraforming spores. By the time the terraforming is complete, the world is automatically inhabited. The implications of an all-consuming consciousness growing under the nose of alien lifeforms are bound to lead to some pretty saucy species builds — and make Wilderness one of the more fun new Origins in years.
Wilderness also requires bioships — genetically modified living vessels produced with food instead of minerals. These new meat ships are a more fleshed-out version of the cloned fauna fleets introduced in Season 8’s Grand Archive DLC. But instead of being collected, they’re engineered from scratch using the genetic material of any living thing unlucky enough to cross your path.
The meat ship system is at the heart of this DLC, but it requires time and research before its full potential can be unlocked. Unless you choose the pièce de résistance, Origin: Evolutionary Predators.
Evolutionary Predators are what they eat, and their hunger for fresh DNA to nosh on has driven them to the stars. This Origin allows a species to absorb the genetic advantages of its prey in the form of traits. But how you digest your fellow star travellers is a matter of taste and time. Species can be vassalized, enslaved, kept as livestock, purged, or simply encountered. All, however, will be slowly sampled and used to progress a situation log event that ends with your evolution.
As your neighbours are devoured and reduced to genetic soup in Stellaris: Biogenesis, the Malleable Genes trait will automatically select new traits to apply to workers, creating an optimized workforce. Malleable Genes is a powerful trait, but to balance its strength, it comes with a hefty starting cost of 6 trait points. For context, players typically start with two trait points, with more powerful traits costing both. To make Malleable Genes work, players must choose some serious negative traits before the build can be confirmed.
To bolster this new mechanic, Stellaris: Biogenesis introduces 16 new species traits. Some are general, but the more interesting ones are locked behind phenotypes. But fear not, simple human — the acid blood of the Necroids, the egg-laying prowess of the Reptiles, and the ability to have explosive excretions may be incompatible with your current bodies, but science can change that.
“Biogenesis is easy to recommend as an essential addition.”
Once your species of fervent gene slurpers are unleashed upon the stars, they’ll gain access to three new customizable traditions: Cloning, Mutation, and Purity. These traditions belong to a new class called “Flexible Traditions,” each of which includes two unique modifiers and three empty slots that can be filled with modifiers from the other two traditions.
Rounding out the Stellaris: Biogenesis are two new biological ship sets, seven new civics, 18 new authorities, 65 new events, and a host of reactive species portraits and conference room designs. Finally, a new crisis path lets the player become the problem by unleashing customizable, system-destroying Kaiju on an unsuspecting galaxy!
It’s a massive DLC — the Evolutionary Predator’s origin alone offers enough substance to explore for hundreds of hours. Old species have been given new traits, and familiar events now carry greater weight.
But those events also come with fewer interruptions, thanks to the free, all-encompassing 4.0 Phoenix update, which releases alongside season 9 on May 5th. Phoenix brings quality-of-life improvements, performance upgrades, and a complete overhaul of the planetary UI. The most noticeable change is better pacing in the early game. The update spreads notifications out more evenly and saves the player from an early game barrage of prompts. Players can even set rules to reduce the intrusiveness of prompts and eliminate automatic pauses altogether.
A change to notifications might sound trivial, but it’s an improvement that could be lifesaving for the game. By the time the Grand Archive DLC was released, Stellaris had accumulated eight seasons’ worth of events and prompts constantly dinging away, turning what was once a sublime, ambient space sim into something closer to walking onto a casino floor.
Stellaris: Biogenesis is an excellent contrast to Season 8’s exceptional Machine Age DLC and a welcome return to form after October’s disappointing Grand Archive Story Pack. As Stellaris gets older and its DLC roster grows more extensive, choosing which packs to load can be difficult, especially for newer players, but Biogenesis is easy to recommend as an essential addition.
