hehe i feel it, i usually play pacifist/isolationist empires and dick around with weird goals. but sometimes it’s fun to beat the breaks off the galaxy

have you tried wilderness yet? sentient ecosphere is super cool to RP. also had tons of fun with tree of life idyllic bloom/empath hivemind; “you will be assimilated and your biosphere improved, please do not resist :)”

Broken chains with worker coop megacorp or rational consensus is pretty fun. The first contact pack has some good content for playing as space communists. I also got nemesis so I could access more espionage trees to make the run more interesting.

I feel u tho, there’s only so many ways to run the same build and I can’t really bring myself to do the whole god-empress of the galaxy thing anymore.

Cosmogenesis was pretty fun as a crisis, I was the only democracy in the galaxy so I figured we’d skip town.

definitely consider endbringers! the lore is really cool and it’s a lot of fun to just take it to the galaxy like a complete asshole (i usually play pacifist). i had so many crime events happening on random planets i just gave up trying to manage it at some point, didn’t even consider turning on automation cuz i legit did not need to fuck with them at all (one of the covenant buffs is something like +100% mining station output? fuck.)

There are a metric fuckton of mods. Anything ranging from full conversion mods that change the games setting to Star Wars,Mass Effect or Star Trek to various mods that improve UI and many mods that add more content to various parts of the game. Really kinda depends what you are looking for.

also MUSIC! there are tons of music packs on the steam workshop with shit from allll over. feel free to snap up a few of those if yall play with music enabled! those are all completely safe to pad your list with.

i swap between liking and hating mods because of balance issues. sometimes i can win the game by 2250 with good rng. that being said…

Non-Gameplay:

UI Overhaul Dynamic: A must get. Scales the UI to your resolution. I use it along with the Tiny Outliner Patch to make a sleak/clean UI. Note that you do not need the tiny outliner mod for the submod to work. There are some different versions of UIOD so pick whatever you like.

Immersive Galaxy and Skybox: Must have for me. Makes the galaxy 7x prettier. Also the HD Blue version. But pick whatever you like.

Some other random low impact mods: Tech Tiers Revealed useful for picking technologies because you have to research X amount of level 1/2/3s etc before others show up, Flags Emblems and Backgrounds merged lots of flag and background options, Softer Hyperlanes pretty, Light Borders pretty, View uninhabitable planet sizes adds a planetary decision to see the size of barren and other uninhabitable worlds EXTREMELY GOOD for finding big barren planets to terraform with Astrocreator Azaryn’s thing.

Gameplay mods I like:

Planetary Diversity: Bread. this mod and most of its submods add a lot of variation to the game (which after 4200 hours can get a little stale). Make to enable the random similar biome policy after you unlock terraforming (unless you want to choose sub-biomes for rp purposes.) I don’t use their Planet View mod because UIOD’s is better IMO.

Guilli’s Planetary Modifiers & Features: Butter. one of those indispensable but extremely imba mods. i love the variation it adds, and you can get some cracked planetary features, but sometimes it makes things too easy. Has built in synergy with PD.

Gameplay mods that are ok i guess:

More Events Mod: Adds variation. Some of the events are poorly written. Others have clunky timing. Some are straight up IMBA and run ending if you get bad RNG. But overall is pretty fun.

Gameplay mods that suck IMO:

Gigastructures: Might get hate for saying this, but man this mod blows. The structures are cool as fuck, and some of the crisis it has are pretty cool and unique, but overall just changes the flow of the game too much for me. Has a lot of options to configure it though, so you can turn off stuff you don’t like.

Others:

I won’t link these cuz this post is already too long but some other fun mods are NSC3, ACOT, and Real Space. There are also numerous total conversions to play, the most well known being Star Trek: New Horizons. If you end up playing a total conversion, it should be noted you should not use any other gameplay mods with them, but the UI mods should be fine.

also the more mods you add the more conflicts you have to account for/patches you have to get. smaller modlists are generally better. you can use Irony Mod Manager to order things easier/find conflicts. Mod load order info from the stellaris wiki.

fwiw the run this post is about was vanilla outside of a few UI mods.