Key Features

Changes in 1.3.8.0

CRASH FIXES
- fixed crash when attempt to dock at abandoned spaceport
- fixed rare crash when generating a new game (GenerateShadowportEmpire)
- fixed rare crash when opening Create Contract dialog
- fixed rare game lockup/hang when assigning pirate Guard missions against a colony they want to influence

GAME SETTINGS
- ensure Gamma and other display settings are properly set at game start

START NEW GAME SCREEN
- in Start New Game screen split out Victory Conditions step and Story and Events step

GALAXY GENERATION
- ensure there are never any duplicate system names when generating a new galaxy, including Black Hole names

USER INTERFACE
- when playing as a Lone Pirate the default filter for Characters screen is now 'All' instead of 'Non-Spies' (requires new game)
- removed irrelevant tooltip warnings for contracts when playing as a Lone Pirate (e.g. do not require resources at own spaceports to fulfill Resource Delivery contracts)
- ensure Lone Pirates always see messages relating to capturing and scrapping ships (regardless of message filters)
- Selection Panel now shows accurate assault pod strength available, also factoring in last time used
- right-click pop-up mission menu for ships and fleets now shows warning when a Capture or Raid mission cannot be carried out due to no available assault pod strength
- added new message when one of your ships docks at a location (Dock mission). Clicking on the message selects the ship, opens the Dock Menu and pauses the game. Can turn message off using new 'Ship Docked' message filter
- altered docking greeting message to be more appropriate when not docked at Shadowport
- fixed Titan troop icons not being rendered properly for projects in Research screen
- research projects with no components/shiphulls/bonuses/etc now render correctly in Research screen (show as an empty project)
- fixed occasional flickering content in vertically scrolling panels
- added new Population screen in 'Your Empire' section of Control Center, showing a breakdown of the population in your empire by alien race

POLICIES
- added new policy setting: 'Prevent Colonization With Secondary Races' which determines whether to use non-dominant races when colonizing new uninhabited worlds. When turned on this means that only your first, main race is used to colonize new worlds - other races acquired from independent colonies or migration are not used to establish new colonies

CONSTRUCTION ORDER QUEUE
- pirate construction ships now properly build queued spaceports (not at colonies)

RESEARCH
- ensure research project for pirate base ship hull (typically a Medium Spaceport) is researched at game start so that can retrofit to new designs for same role

DIPLOMACY
- fixed pirates getting negative diplomatic incident against a planetary empire when they eliminate another planetary empire (should be only when eliminate a pirate faction)

AUTO-DESIGNER
- tweaked automated ship design so that Escorts and Frigates will always have a close-in weapon (if available), even when other race-specific factors decrease priority (e.g. Zenox)

SHIP ORDERS
- manually-controlled ships no longer auto-assign refuel mission after completing a raid

SHIP CAPTURE
- fixed lone pirate ship capturing so that does not assume have lost ship and restart at Shadowport
- fixed lone pirate ship capture so that always scrap captured ship or base for money. Note: We’re intending further changes in this area

RAIDS
- colony raids now also spawn defending militia troops at the colony, thus extending the raid time, especially when the colony has no other defending troops

INDEPENDENT COLONIES
- ensure independent colonies that become planetary empires work properly to grow and expand
- ensure independent colonies that become planetary empires do not have full knowledge of galaxy map

PIRATES
- ensure pirate factions always use names from Governments.xml file if they exist
- pirate factions are now eliminated when they lose their last spaceport (same as previous behavior) instead of also requiring removal of their Hidden Pirate facilities (their facilities are also removed when they are eliminated)
- when a pirate faction is eliminated, most of their ships will attempt to join another nearby friendly pirate faction instead of joining the conquering empire
- pirate raider troops are now much better at damaging enemy pirate facilities when raiding colonies

DOCKING
- disable Dock button under Selection Panel when selected base is abandoned (when playing as a Lone Pirate)

RESOURCE TRADING
- ensure can load/buy resources from own empire in Resource Trading screen even when have no money

LONE PIRATES
- Lone Pirate military starting ships now have a cargo bay component to better enable them to carry out resource trading

COCKPIT MODE
- added prominent brief message when attempt to manually control a ship in Cockpit Mode that already has a mission (should first cancel the mission)

SHIP DATA
- fixed faulty firing arc for Pirate Raiding Escort ship hull

EVENTS
- fixed Ancient Boskara Homeworld event to ensure capturing Hive ships works as well as destroying them

MODDING
- race dialog in the diplomacy screen is now included for modding (all files in dialog subfolder)
- randomly generated characters can now use static images per role instead of requiring a full Spine character animation (or just using the default static race image). To use you must supply static PNG images with the following path: Characters/[RACENAME]_[ROLENAME], e.g. Characters/Ackdarian_Admiral. Valid role names are as follows: Admiral, Ambassador, General, Leader, Pirate, Scientist, Spy. Supplied images can either be in a bundle file or as a loose image file (with ".png" extension)
- characters can now have 2 images: the default small one, and an optional larger one used in the diplomacy/character screen when there is no animation
- full support for defined characters via the CharacterDefinitions.xml file. This includes custom skills and traits and custom images as outlined above

It seems whatever Heroic does, I think it's just running the GOG setup but not sure, anyway either it didn't try or did fail to install XNA 4.0 and I didn't know enough to find the crash dump file in %USERPROFILE%\Documents\My Games\Distant Worlds Universe which I stumbled across days later and clued me in immediately.

Also: somehow whatever AI firefox defaults to thinks DW:U doesn't have a fullscreen mode, which is wrong, it defaults to that, you just have to put singlequotes in front of the SCREENWIDTH and SCREENHEIGHT lines in the install dir's Startup.ini file.

Posting 'cause I was checking the AI's answers on things and it led me astray, then told me to post here to get the right answers fed to its next training round.

I was doing a humans playthrough just now. Decided to go into missiles and railguns to fit the roleplay. I had specialized missile escorts/frigates/destroyers on fast hulls, and more close-up railgun sluggers for regular and fleet hulls.

However, what I noticed was that railguns, EVEN the most upgrade ones dealt incredibly piss-poor damage, taking absolutely forever to destroy any one single enemy ship of much lower tech level; this is with multiple heavily-armed destroyers swarming the same frigate, by the way.

So I decide to go with blasters for a moment. Test out the Impact Assault Blasters (of lower tech level than my railguns). They absolutely shred through enemy fleets in an instant. My ships don't get destroyed anymore because of being bogged down taking forever to take out one smaller ship.

I think railguns are due for a buff. In terms of fire rate and/or damage. Their DPS is absolutely abhorrent for their tech level, to the point where their actual strengths just don't matter very much because blasters are plain better. It makes trying to roleplay with them absolutely suck on higher difficulties, because you need all the advantages you can in fleet combat then.

I'm not saying make them basically blasters, but at least make them a viable, competitive option. In DWU they at least shredded enemies to bits in the early and mid game, both from mine and the AI's usage. Here, the AI with their corvidian shields barely notice my forge rail guns

For that matter, beam weapons also seem ludicrously underpowered (Thuon and all its successors), so that'd probably warrant a buff too.

(I like what XL mod did with the weapon rebalances, so perhaps inspiration could be taken from that?)

There seems to be a massive improvement in models and texture rendering in the new DLC. Wonder if something in the engine changed or improved? I kinda now hope that the devs are willing to give a go at redoing the ship, asteroid, and planetary models.

The three major ways I know of are:

1. Protection agreement with empires
2. Building Freighters who on automation will run around buying and selling.
3. Bases on independent colonies

For #1 I'd gladly buy information from pirates. Most of them won't trade such information with you, but those who do, will sell you contact info, and if it costs:

• a few hundred: It's a lone pirate
• a few thousand: It's a Pirate faction
• many thousands: It's likely an empire

I would pay close to 10k credits for a yearly income of ... 250 x 12, is it?

Other alternative is to buys exploration ships and control them manually. Note that such a ship must have proximity scanners (or improved versions)

Here I must confess: I have not played Pirates much (yet): Had not had the time.

But it seems to me that:

Protection agreements are reliable. The empire may refuse at first, but then give in after some time.

For some reason they have to like you first. And you do not need to have military close to intimidate them.

Freighters: The income is small and irregular, but I SUSPECT you hit small jackpots now and then. At least I've registered rare occasions when I've suddenly got a lot of money, and I suspect some freighter to sell some expensive material.

Pro tip: Your freighters likely starts with Kaldos warp drives. This is the Warp Drive that initiates a jump quickly, but it is slow and thus the worst (but safest) warp drive for a freighter. I would rather recommend Equinox for profit (it moves fastest) or perhaps Calista-Dal, which is slow but uses the least fuel. (I would go for Equinox!).

In fact, you're likely to find that your designer always prefer Kaldos. This is due to a Policy Setting (P) , weapon and component focus, set Hyperdrive focus to Speed!

Hidden Pirate Base: At the start you'll earn something close to 226 credits, double that if you get 100% Pirate influence.

This is a pitiful amount. I suspect it scales with the indie's income (thus population and time), but I'm dubious to whether this is worth the cost of the building (and possible upgrades).

I am fairly certain it is worth setting a small ship to Guard "your" colony, to get that Pirate influence to 100%. Maybe raid too. I don't like to raid, for I am a terrible bad Pirate! =D (and not 'terrible bad' as in evil, but bad at being a pirate)

Trading is also a potential source for income. But it seems your partners are poor.

I have Tech trading disabled, but if you don't you can sell that for a pretty penny if you ever find a rich empire :)

It's also dubious strategy to sell advanced technology to empires.

Are there any other ^major ways to earn credits as a Pirate faction?

HOW TO INSTALL

1. Go to GitHub and install the Mod Loader
https://github.com/lucky-wolf/DW2-Mod-Launcher/releases

1. Subscribe to the mod on Steam.

2. Run the Mod Launcher

3. All your subscribed Mods will be listed there.

4. Right-click on "Control the Stars"

5. Click on 'Configure'

6. Select the Star Density and Nebulae to whatever option you want.

7. Run the game.

Other Mods that use Mod Launcher

- Smarter Ship Management
- Improved Freighter Logistics
- Nebulizer
- Galaxy Generation Overhaul

For a long while I tried to build a new Hidden base but I could not figure what was missing. I was quite far into my game and was even ready to switch to the empire gameplay, but doing so would only grant me one world (the one I started with)... I could not find anything about how to do it online (even google gemini could not did it as nobody talks about it). So I decided to try something I was avoiding since the beginning, raiding a planet (I played as a mercenary doing combat and trade missions). Low and behold, that how you can build a base! If you don't raid, you have no one on the ground so your influence vanish quickly. Once you have a hidden base, you actually get some reliable income.

So if you want to expand; raid every colony you can reach at least once. You still need to raise the money though (10 000 to initiate it).

Edit: Maybe the raid was not the requirement, just that it pushed the influence over 50 when I did it. I raided another world and I could not build a base there as the influence was not high enough. Parking a fleet might be the right way to do it.

Edit 2: I thought I had read the manual properly. It is explained how to build an hidden base. You do need 50% to build it. All this to realize I should have not skipped any pages. I wish there was some hints in game though.

Now that the new DLC (Shadows Rising) is out for DW2, what things would you guys prefer to be improved/fixed/added for the base game? Could be anything: Bugfixes, UI elements, tech rebalances, new ship components, new automation/management options, etc etc.

I have my own thoughts on stuff, mostly that vanilla could borrow some tech rebalances from XL mod (Kudos to the makers of the mod, by the way), and possibly a game editor option to research techs on click (Like it existed in DWU). That's all I can think off the top of my head so far.

What would you guys want?

In my ongoing campaign (started ~month ago) the PD (buckler, multi-beam, interceptor missiles) only has Seeking and Fighter intercept values. When I start a new campaign, they all show Direct Fire intercept values of roughly 1/2 of Fighter/Seeking values.

Have there been any changes to PD recently? Is it some sort of a visual bug?

I don't have much time, so i haven't given it a decent try to form an opinion yet. I love the cockpit view, the new options during game creation look awesome.

Has anyone put enough time into the new features? Anything good? Anything bad?

Playing as a mercenary pirate faction in shadow rising, I have trouble understanding how to replace another pirate faction that influenced an Independent planet before me.

Do I need to destroy the facility ? To have more influence than my rival ? What happen to the base if I destroy their faction ?

I tried looking in the in game encyclopedia but alas found nothing.

Greetings all!

Title says it all... anyone have a clue as to how to go about these contracts?

I go to the system indicated, and search it, but there are no clues as to what to do net. I had thought that something would happen that would give me an idea as to what the next step would be, but nothing. My spy ignores these contracts as well.

Help?

So I've been interested by Distant Worlds for ages and the Nookrium sponsor video has probably pushed me over the edge for this steam sale.

But... I am not "run screaming" from spiders but I definitely prefer to avert my eyes when spiders are on screen. And one of the major/fleshed out races is just spider people. Not detailed enough that it full on triggers me but enough that I would rather not deal with it.

Is there an in-game mode or a mod I can use to change their avatars and so forth?

Thanks

I was wondering why my homeworld has bottleneck when Producing my capitals war fleet. Turns out the private sector was on debt LMAO. I was turning 100% tax rate because Securan(my first time trying this race) has insane boost on colony happiness. Turns out there are no civilan ship to do the transport all over my empire.

I've been eyeing this game for a while for its complexity and similarity with Stellaris. I've been seeing a lot of players saying its fully automated, a lot of the building, exploration, fleet/ship management and building and it seemed like a bad thing for others and some served as a beginner introduction to have a feel to the game. But what do you guys think, what are your tips for beginners that we could look forward to or makes it more fun rather than the game playing everything for us?

Title.

What is this?

This is a dependency marker for ModLoader. It contains no code, assets, or gameplay changes and does nothing by itself. It does not install ModLoader.

Other mods can list it as a required dependency, so players see "depends on: ModLoader" and know what they need.

What can ModLoader do?

• Load DLL mods into the game
• One-button Workshop mod upload
• Load order control: the game already lets you do this in-game, but ModLoader lets you set the order before you launch

Installation

1. Download the latest release from GitHub
2. Extract .zip it anywhere you see fit (it can work from any folder on your machine)
3. Run DW2ModLauncher.exe

For DLL mod authors

It is advised that you mark your mod as dependent on this workshop item so that any user can easily find Mod Loader

Download

https://github.com/lucky-wolf/DW2-Mod-Launcher/releases

I'm asking because I'm testing to see how well my PC can perform on the most demanding settings while running at 8x. The number of civilian ships presumably indicates enough I would think.

I want to focus on missiles for my current game but I'm wondering if there's any reason to pair them with a different weapon type.

This is, very approximately, how the Distant Worlds 2 game (as of Sept, 2026) calculates planetary GNP. This does not take into account other costs and benefits of holding a planet, such as colony maintenance.

Maximum population, in millions, is [~0.0278 * (diameter of planet) * (suitability of planet for dominant species, minus ~6) * (1, or 1.1 if the climate is that native for the dominant species)].

A raw economic worth score may be calculated as (population * suitability for dominant species).

Expected GNP, in k, is something like [(raw econ score) / 100 * (development level as a percent) * (100% - corruption) * (100% + empire and planet economic modifiers)].

Notes and comments:

* Please comment if these calculations don't work for you. I've checked them repeatedly, so I don't expect them to be complete garbage, but Y.M.M.V.

* Will be inaccurate if no one species is dominant.

* Your net income from planets is *very* strongly dependent on suitability. Below about 35, expect little income after maintenance.

I really enjoy watching content about distant worlds 2 and was thinking about buying the game, but I'm not sure if it would run acceptably. I have a Ryzen 5500, 32GB of DDR4 RAM, an RTX 4060 (16GB VRAM), and an SSD. How well do you think it will run?

So I just went to war with one empire, and they sent two entire fleets to attack one of my colonies. I had a fleet already there, and I sent another to assist.

Here's the thing though, both fleets proceeded to hang around and do nothing even as the enemy drew closer and started firing at the space port at the planet. They literally did not react at all. Both fleets have the posture "engage system targets" and one of them is an automated defence fleet.

As well as that, the space port and mining station nearby also didn't fire at all even as the enemy drained their shields. I had to manually get my ships to start firing, otherwise they would just sit there and do nothing.

Does anyone have an idea for why that is? My ships and bases have max tech, they have plenty of fuel and energy, they just.....didn't engage. At all.

I've admittedly never seen if they do. Just curious.