The Galaxy is unexplored and vast. After venturing too far into the unknown parts, two humans from the core discovered the Sith Empire in the Outer Rim. A war between a coalition of aligned worlds in the Core and the invading Sith Empire led to galactic isolation, unease, and fear of the unknown. Yet, a new generation of explorers and colonists is ready to leave the boundaries of their homeworld and create an Age of Prosperity and Exploration.

Hello there! We are so happy to finally put out our first Dev Diary for Legacy of the Old Republic (LotOR). We hope that we'll be able to give you an introduction to the mod we are building, answer some of your questions and receive your feedback (we love it). If you want to be part of the LotOR community, leave feedback and be one of the firsts that see new leaks and info about the mod, then make sure you join the RMG Discord server and choose the Incubator role in the #roles channel.

LotOR's main map is derived from the large map available in our other mod, Star Wars Galaxy 2, made by chriskar. We made small changes to it to better fit the narrative of the Old Republic reaching a system count of 1336.

The map built by chriskar is completely new, and he manually created it from sources like the "Star Wars: The Essential Atlas" book and the SWGALAXYMAP website. All systems were handpicked based on their importance and placed according to both canon and legends info. SWG2 is a good mod, check it out ;).

An important thing to note here is that, on release, not all systems will have lore-accurate planets but we plan to add more with every update. But for release, most of the important systems - and their neighbouring ones - will have lore-accurate planets and asteroids.

To try and please as many people as possible we added two settings that can be used to tailor your experience. These settings will let you decide how lore-accurate you want your game to be. Do you want to experience the story of the Old Republic? Do you want to also use huge ships like Juggernauts?

As you will probably notice in the below screenshot, we kept the vanilla starting year. We've found that changing the starting year leads to things like economic plans breaking or not working as expected, so we decided to leave it to default until we get better moddability features in this area.

Truth be told, the Old Republic timeline is a mess, 20000 years of nothing followed by a decade full with half of the major events (hyperspace must be fast), so it's impossible to represent in Stellaris as it is. We decided to first: compress the timeline; and second: create our custom start scenario.

Since the timeline is compressed in some places more than in others, you can't have a simple way of finding a lore date based on the in-game date, and that's why we think that the in-game starting year of 2200 won't bother many people.

Our custom start was necessary to sustain the gameplay that we wanted, as close to vanilla as possible. The storified TL;DR explains the start scenario pretty well, but I'll try to make it more clear: 

The Great Hyperspace War made citizens afraid that a resurgent Sith Empire was lurking in unexplored systems.This fear led to the loss of any diplomatic communications between any empires and the adoption of isolationist policies.The coalition disbanded and major hyperlanes became empty. But now you come along, a new generation of explorers and colonists, will you have the courage to venture into the unknown, meet old and new friends and maybe even enemies?

As previously mentioned, we are aiming to create a gameplay that feels like vanilla, this way you won't have to re-learn the entire game and the mod will feel accessible even for new players of the game.

You will start as you would in vanilla - with one planet in a system. Your objectives are to explore and expand, reconnecting with the other isolated empires in the galaxy. If you are one of the Core World empires, perhaps you would want to form the Galactic Republic (more on that in its own Dev Diary).

We've kept most of the core elements of vanilla Stellaris while adding Star Wars flavor to them. Some examples would be keeping the same vanilla ship sizes but adding new auxiliary components or adapting vanilla resources and adding a few of our own. We also added new anomalies and powerful relics but we need a dev diary just for them.

The first era that we are delivering on release is the Foundation of the Republic Era. In this era, which will be around 80 years long, you are meant to explore the Galaxy and form the Republic. Maybe you won't like the Republic, maybe you will be one of its founding members or even one of the elected Supreme Chancellors, you choose your path, but don’t forget to prepare for the crisis!

Of course, there are other changes and new mechanics about which I can't tell you in this Dev Diary, so look forward to the next ones. And make sure to join our Discord, ask questions and leave feedback, we love well-argued and constructive feedback :)