Check out this list of some of the best mods for Stellaris 2.3 as of right now.
This includes total conversions, overhauls to basically everything, planet to space defenses, new ship classes, better rebellions, epic space battles and even superweapons capable of destroying entire star systems.
While this is by no means a comprehensive list, it does give you an excellent idea of where to start your journey into the world of Stellaris modding.
15. More Events Mod (MEM)
This mod is rather self-explanatory in what it does: it adds more events. The main purpose is to give you more potential action and story-focused events that you can uncover and give your game more flavor and depth by allowing the story of your empire to take some much more unexpected and dramatic turns as the game progresses.
Why you should use this mod
- It adds much more dynamic, branching content.
- It fleshes out the mid-game, helping with the drought of content in the middle of a campaign.
- It adds a variety of new events directly related to who your neighbors are and how you want to interact with them which can end in many different ways.
Get the mod here.
14.” Better Diplomacy: Realistic Opinions”
This mod makes the way the AI empires view you much more interesting as it now considers many more things. The AI will now care about what your stance is towards refugees, your first contact protocol, and even what traditions and civics you take in the unity tree. Before, the AI didn’t care about much beyond border tension, “have you committed genocide lately?”, and “Are you a xenophobe”.
Why you should use this mod
- It makes your diplomatic relations with AI empires much more dynamic since they care about a lot more things than they used to.
- Your civics and ascension perks mean more than just some buffs and if you pick an aggressive one, the AI cares that you have effectively started gearing your entire society towards mass interstellar conquest.
- Your internal politics now affect your relationships with your neighbors rather than just your empire alone.
Get this mod here.
13. Improved Space Battles [Balance]
Improved Space Battles (or ISBS as it is sometimes referred to) is a gigantic overhaul of the naval combat in Stellaris. The primary changes are to speed up the midgame and encourage strategic wars. Currently Stellaris wars in the early and midgame are very rarely strategic wars to seize a handful of systems and most wars require you to utterly destroy an enemy fleet since they can just zoom past your defenses as the technology to lock down systems with stations is usually not unlocked at that point.
Why you should use this mod
- Epic endgame battles complete with massive super-capital ships and system killer doomsday weapons.
- Combat speed of all ships has been decreased so the range of your weapons now matters a lot more than how fast your ships move.
- Endgame Crises have been given SIGNIFICANT buffs, now present a real challenge and will no longer just roll over and present you with their soft underbelly the moment you first attack.
Get this mod here.
12. Overharvest - Unsustainable Development
This mod helps with a rather immersion-breaking aspect of the core game: namely the fact that it feels like you don’t have to care about the environment of your colonies or worry about the consequences of your exploitation. With this mod, you are presented with a choice for how to approach resource management on your worlds. You can live in balance with nature but get fewer resources, exploit a little bit and slowly use the world up or strip mine the world of all its resources and empty it of anything of value.
Why you should use this mod
- Adds an extra dimension to managing your colonies, forcing you to choose between a short-term gain of resources and long-term settlement.
- You can strip-mine entire worlds while your citizens are living on them.
- Adds in management of the environment as an additional element for you to care about in the game.
Get this mod here.
11. Crowded World (2.3)
This mod adds a new civic to empire creation which allows you to start on a homeworld suffering from overpopulation issues. This puts you in an interesting position as you will have to overcome early population issues before you can reap the benefits that come from starting with an early advantage in population. It allows you to simulate a situation that is quite likely to be the reason for many civilizations starting to explore the stars: they have too many people and not enough space.
Why you should use this mod
- Start on an overpopulated homeworld.
- Allows you to simulate an extremely plausible cause of early interstellar exploration and expansion in Stellaris through actual in-game mechanics.
- Make Stellaris more like The Expanse via overpopulation.
Get this mod here.
10. Supernovae - Cosmic Fury
This mod is another one where the name is pretty descriptive. It adds stars to Stellaris which are going to go supernova after a certain amount of time. If you want some extra challenge, the mod will even allow you to start in a system with a dying star and desperately scramble to colonize another planet before your home system’s star explodes and takes your entire civilization with you.
Why you should use this mod
- You can start on a planet orbiting a dying star, desperately trying to colonize another planet and evacuate your people before it is too late.
- Stars can explode, destroying an entire system.
- The supernova mechanic can create some amazing dynamic storylines where you colonize a planet and your people have lived there for generations but then the world’s star begins going supernova and you have to frantically evacuate it to try and save as many lives as possible.
Get this mod here.
9. The Zenith of Fallen Empires 2.0
This mod introduces the possibility for the player and the various AI empires to become Awakened Empires through specialized technologies. This allows the player to use technologies that were previously exclusive to Fallen Empires or players that looted their wrecked ships as well as doing a fallen empire style galactic conquest where you can force normal empires to become your subject.
Why you should use this mod
- You can become an Awakened Empire during your campaign by researching the correct technology.
- Players and normal AI empires can now use Fallen/Awakened Empire technologies without needing to go to war with one of these empires and loot their wreckage.
- You can now experience the War in Heaven from the perspective of an Awakened Empire and force those “ignorant children” that are the normal empires to bow to your greatness.
Get this mod here.
8. Dynamic Political Events
So, have you ever got the feeling, in Stellaris, that your ethics and the ethics of your population don’t do much of anything or that your inter-empire politics are irrelevant? Well, you aren’t alone because Dynamic Political events exist to do something about that very issue. This mod adds a massive number of multi-event chains that helps to make your empire’s internal politics more lifelike and dynamic.
Why you should use this mod
- Adds a massive number of events covering everything from faction demands and integrating alien species into your empire to various scandals involving your leaders and events where a cult begins to worship your ruler as a living god.
- Your internal politics matter now.
- Your empire’s population means more to you than just a list of numbers now.
Get this mod here.
7. Real Space 3.3
This mod makes some rather nice additions to the graphics and system variety. This includes new types of stars, more variation in star type, more realistic planetary orbits, and over 100 new star systems. Also, it adds several new options for your species’ home system and increases the scale of the various planets and systems.
Why you should use this mod
- Adds a variety of more diverse and atmospheric scenery to the galaxy to make your galaxies more interesting to explore.
- Adds several new skins for Gas Planets to the game so there is more variety in the appearance of gas giants and there aren’t just 2 or 3 of this type of planet across the galaxy.
- Adds hundreds of new real star systems that can appear in the game now.
Get this mod here.
6. Potent Rebellions 2.3
A common complaint levied against Stellaris by plenty of the player base is that rebellions are kind of crap. They generally can’t succeed against the player unless they get stupidly lucky. Rebellions can succeed against the AI a decent amount but they don’t generally go anywhere and just sort of sputter out and, after a successful uprising in a single system, they just sit in their one system until they get conquered.
Why you should use this mod
- It adds some espionage mechanics to allow both the player and the various AI empires to sow unrest on another empire’s worlds or support newly independent rebels.
- The chances of specific pops rebelling are now much more circumstantial and their reason for the rebellion is more than just “We are very unhappy so we revolt now”.
- Rebellions can experience a cascade effect where if one planet succeeds in revolting from an empire, any other planets in that empire with a lot of unrest have the potential to revolt as well.
Get this mod here.
5. New Ship Classes
The latest iteration of a mod that’s been around for as long as I’ve been installing mods in Stellaris, New Ship Classes expands the roster of classes available to your fleet. The best part, however, is that it does this in such an excellent way that the classes fit seamlessly into the existing design roster of ship classes from the vanilla game. These ship classes are largely based or real-life classes of warships which could quite likely make the transition to space warfare and they fit in the “slot” they find themselves inserted into quite nicely.
Why you should use this mod
- It vastly overhauls the ship classes to include several new types of ships capable of filling many different roles.
- Fix that annoying issue where you would have to shoehorn a battleship into the role of “Carrier” rather than having a ship that functions as a mobile launch platform for strike craft, as carriers are supposed to.
- Overhaul to ship combat behavior to allow for much more variety in how ships behave in battle.
Get this mod here.
4. More AI Personalities
The personality and behavior of the various AI empires in Stellaris can be rather interesting and enjoyable for the first few playthroughs but, after a while, they can get rather boring. Enter More AI Personalities which adds several different personality types that the AI can spawn with. These personalities include quite a few things you would probably never have thought of such as insane warmongers who go to war because they find it fun, the Space Viet Cong and the Empire from the Elder Scrolls series in space (just to name a few).
Why you should use this mod
- It adds more variety to the behavior of the various AI empires that will spawn in your games.
- Adds some extra flavor to the game’s narrative since you can now find many more types of empires than in vanilla.
- Adds some amusing moments when you discover a bunch of Carefree Hippies just invaded those Quiet Cultists and you think “maybe those cultists weren’t so harmful after all”.
Get this mod here.
3. At War: Planetary Cannons
Have you ever been playing Stellaris and found yourself laying siege to a planet or had one of your planets under siege and wondered why the planet’s defenders never built any kind of anti-starship defenses on the surface like almost every science fiction universe ever depicts? If you have, then this mod is for you. It adds a new building unlocked by certain technologies which will fire at any ships in orbit with a chance to destroy its target every time it fires.
Why you should use this mod
- More flexibility in terms of options for planetary defense.
- Attacking planets is an actual threat to your fleet rather than just a roadblock.
- With proper preparations and a bit of luck, it is now possible for planets to defeat smaller fleets without having to wait for reinforcements to save them.
Get this mod here.
2. AlphaMod 2.3
AlphaMod is a truly enormous overhaul mod for Stellaris which changes pretty much everything that can be changed in the game and then some. It overhauls the way the economy works, introduces an entirely new currency system alongside energy, alters which planetary bodies can be colonized and much more besides. Considering the gigantic amount of content provided by AlphaMod, I would say it is not an exaggeration to describe it as a free expansion rather than simply a mod.
Why you should use this mod
- It massively expands on the game’s default economic and production system, introducing a wide variety of new resources such as natural fuels, biomass, ice, rare metals, and many more with a variety of different uses.
- It introduces a massive number of new empire-wide policies that cover everything from your law enforcement policy and private sector regulations on business to the state policy on unions and religion.
- Massively expands the district and jobs system, allowing for a much wider variety of planetary customization.
Get this mod here.
1. Star Trek: New Horizons
Star Trek New Horizons is, without a doubt, the best total conversion mod for Stellaris. Honestly, mod or not, I think this might be the best Star Trek strategy game ever made. The mod has a massive number of canon Star Trek species, maps, and events from a truly epic scope.
Why you should use this mod
- Lets you follow the story of the formation of the Federation and go from being a loose alliance of different interstellar powers to a single state then grow from there and negotiate new empires into joining the Federation.
- Alternate Star Trek Mirror Universe maps with the chosen empire replaced with their mirror universe counterpart.
- Special mechanics and features for each faction to promote a unique style of play for each different empire such as unrest when at peace for too long as the Klingons and a unique assimilation mechanic as the Borg.
Get this mod here.
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