This is the classic B-movie image. An alien spaceship crashes into Earth. The farmer comes out with his overalls and his shotgun. There’s a tense moment, where the fates of both species suddenly seem to hang by the razor’s edge: terrified of the sci-fi alien, will the earthling pull and push everyone to war , or will the two life forms collide? okay somehow? First Contact, the new Stellaris DLC coming to the Steam strategy game next month, throws you headlong into this dilemma. With new origin stories, interactions, and a tasty dollop of unexpected technology, you’ll win the hearts of less-advanced societies or terrify them into violent panic.
First Contact focuses on your exploration and interactions with pre-FTL civilizations. First, there are three new player origins. With ‘Broken Shackles’, you didn’t choose to become a galactic explorer: you were captured by aliens and dragged to the stars against your will.
“Payback” casts you as the survivor of a planetary conquest, a grizzled resistance fighter who helped repel an alien invasion of your homeworld, before venturing out into the deep dark yourself. Finally, there’s “Fear of the Dark,” a very mysterious character backstory in which you’re frantically superstitious about… something lurking in the galactic depths. One way or another, the new origins will shape your Stellaris game, but that’s not all.
Now, when you encounter pre-FTL partnerships, you have a whole new range of possible interactions. Depending on their level of technology and how aware they are of your existence, it’s up to you to calm these worlds down and make them allies, or petrify them with your advanced technology and send their civilization into chaos. You are the alien. It’s the farmers who wear long johns. Go carefully.
Luckily, there’s a new tech ace up your sleeve, thanks to a surprise device that makes your ships invisible. Yes, cloaking devices have arrived on Stellaris, which means you can watch your nervous pre-FTL neighbors through invisible vantage points before making contact. Naturally, however, it works the other way around: you’ll want your sensors and scanners working at full capacity, as your enemies can cloak themselves too.
First Contact will launch for Stellaris on March 14, but you can already pre-order the DLC for the strategy game on Steam. It will be released with the next Stellaris update, “Canis Minor” or, to give it its less colorful and technical name, update 3.7.
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