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

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.

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 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.

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.

https://reddit.com/link/1vglsuk/video/avlat15nrmhh1/player

Distant Worlds Universe has 30ms frametime spikes whenever zooming near large fleets. RX 7900 XT + 5800X3D. Tested DXVK, MPO off, 60Hz, DPI scaling, affinity changes. Empty space zooms smoothly, large fleets cause a hitch before every zoom step.

https://reddit.com/link/1vglsuk/video/pbrw1e6rsmhh1/player

Do you guys experience this too? Been playing like that till now. If there is any fix for that, that would be great!

Forum Post for this mod with more information and breakdowns: https://forums.matrixgames.com/viewtopic.php?p=5099711

Note there is now a version that is optimized for Alvek's Expansion Mod. The Expansion Mod helps the game run better on modern hardware. You can read more about the EM mod here: https://forums.matrixgames.com/viewtopic.php?t=394715

Link to the DWUR-EM version GitHub: https://github.com/salemonz/DWUR-EM

Link to the DWUR (non EM version) GitHub: https://github.com/salemonz/DWUR

/==== Introduction ====\

With the release of Distant Worlds 2 a few years ago, I thought it was high time to put out a large-scale mod for Distant Worlds 1!

Haha, but seriously...

While I do very much enjoy the combat and quality-of-life changes of DW2, Distant Worlds 1 (Distant Worlds Universe) is still more fleshed out IMO, having the benefit of several expansions and years of refined gameplay that has kept me hooked. ...Aaaand it is in greater need of some new shiny graphics. ...AND AND I'm a 2D art hobbyist, so all the 3D modeling of the ships and whatnot of DW2 is just too much for me.

AI Trigger Warning: I use generative AI for portions of my workflow and to outright create parts of this compilation. I know some folks feel very strongly about AI art, so wanted to put it up front. I’m not an artist. I’m a dad and a spouse with limited time and money to commission real art from real artists for this free mod. If it makes anyone feel better, it still takes a long damn time to arrive at what you see in the 4000+ images in the compilation.

/==== DWUR Feature summary ====\

• Rebalanced 13 races to fix stat outliers, races that simply copied another's stats and created 4 new government types (Warrior Meritocracy, Theocratic Oligarchy, Arena Republic, Cybernetic Collective).
• Overhauled all 46 empire policy files to differentiate AI behavior — war willingness, trade priority, diplomacy, colonization preferences, and fleet composition now vary meaningfully by race instead of sharing near-identical values.
• Pirate policies: Rebuilt 9 broken/empty pirate policy files, corrected 11 tech focus mismatches, and assigned all 46 pirate factions to one of four behavioral archetypes (Raider, Mercenary, Smuggler, Scavenger). Three apex races (Boskara, Keskudon, Mortalen) designated as Legendary pirates. Aligned all PirateDefaultPlaystyle values in race files with their policy archetypes.
• Updated 33 empire ship templates across 14 races and overhauled all 493 pirate ship templates across 46 races — creating 12 missing pirate template folders, adding secondary weapons and fighter bays where lore specified them, and ensuring weapon loadouts match each race's stated preferences.
• Race lore: Rewrote all 46 race Help files entries with standardized formatting, gameplay summaries and revised lore incorporating the balance changes.
• New race and character art for all species (22 original species PLUS the 24 additional ones from Haree78's Distant World Extended Mod aaaaaaaand some tweaks I have made to the races) *New shipsets (44 playable races, 2 NPC races and 3 Pirate sets)
• New art for planets (no AI (finally) ... created by me in Blender ... all but gas giants and frozen gas giants...I'm still terrible at those)
• Scaled down ships and weapon effects for better immersion
• New space stations for all races
• Refreshed engine and weapon effects (hand picked and modified from various sources)
• Refreshed galaxy symbol overlays (decluttered and more specific)
• Refreshed UI (new role graphics and some old DWU UI mod assets)
• Refreshed sounds (mix of old/new/tweaked)

/==== New Race and Ship Sets ====\

When making the new species assets, I kept the original images and descriptions in mind, and at times tried to stay true to the original intent of each species, but at times I took some creative liberties to give as many species as much uniqueness and character as possible.

Each ship set has been re-done. Yes this took a long time. Hope you enjoy! Here are a few samples:

/==== New Planet Art ====\

DWU original and modded planets were…okay…but I wanted to see if I could create my own. I taught myself a bit about Blender and followed some detailed tutorials to dive into planet creation.

/==== Scaled Ships and New Effects ====\

Original ships and stations were okay…but you ended up with moon-sized escorts and moon-sized battleships. I put ship scaling into every design template to give a default sizing for each ship class.

Ship class sizes:

• Capital Ships - 0.950
• Carriers - 0.950
• Large Freighter - 0.950
• Medium Freighter - 0.750
• Small Freighter - 0.500
• Cruisers - 0.750
• Construction Ship - 0.750
• Destroyers - 0.650
• Frigates - 0.500
• Escorts - 0.500

Many of these were already modded into DWU by others (see credits). I hand-picked my favorites, tweaked others and included them here.

/==== Refreshed Overlays, Ship Symbols ====\

Galaxy view in DWU gets cluttered. I edited the ship symbols to be more subdued.

I decided to add special symbols to exploration and construction ships.

As you zoom out, these symbols will help you see where your intrepid explorers and builders are off to. Little easier to distinguish at distance than diamonds vs squares vs circles, IMO.

Similarly, I swapped out the military and fleet icons. Old ones were okay, but again...they've been "refreshed".

/==== Refreshed Sounds and Music ====\

Most sounds and music were fine. Most notably, I swapped out a lot of sound effects from some other games (mainly Stellaris...a couple from the old Stardrive 1 game).

/==== Credits ====\

Thanks to Code Force for the amazing DW series--my absolute favorite Space 4X games.

Thanks to Alvek for the wonderful Expansion Mod!

Incorporated DWU mods:
-- DasTactic's DasChrome Mod
-- Kebw1144's Stuff&Bits Mod
-- Haree78's Distant Worlds Extended Mod

This is the message I got when I just tried to load my save that I had played literally the day before just fine. Does anyone have any idea what this is?

All links I found for it are dead.

I know there are other mods that took the bacon mod further than the original author, but I want to try the original 1.82

Thanks in advance.

Does Distant Worlds Universe have any end game threats that can appear to threaten your empire / the galaxy or is it just coasting by after midgame? I wanted to ask before getting the game myself later when I get the spare money to get it, since other games like Stellaris turned me away due to the DLC mountains, lmfao.

When it comes to Research Potential, does that mean that total number includes all three categories of research? So if the total is 500k for example, then I should aim to have the output for all research combined make up that 500k?

Another thing is what number should I I hit when adding reactors to a base that has the right amount of collecters? The excess energy output or the max reactor output, since the reactors are just there now to power the weapons?

Like the title says, I'm using DWUR (EM version), and I had some ideas but before I waste a bunch of time seeing if they work or not, I though I'd ask if anyone else has already tested them out.

Okay, onto the ideas.

Military Hubs/HQ - I had an idea caused by an issue of basing defensive fleets around planet bases, and the resulting overlapping or lack of coverage in certain areas of my empire. So I wondered if it'd be possible to place stations in strategic places, maybe a supped up Defensive Base, that would serve as that HQ. I'm not sure what I would need for it to work correctly though. I assume it would need cargo space and cargo throughput, but I'm not sure if this is even possible to do. I'd also prefer it if they could do refits.

Shipyards - I've mostly been relying on space ports to do my shipbuilding. These stations are very general in what they do. Holding cargo, refitting/constructing, being a weapons platform, having hospitals/recreations, etc. That being said, they tend to bloat in size, so I thought about moving the majority of my shipbuilding to specialized stations that focus on doing that one task extremely well and in a more scalable way. I'm not sure if that would work though, same as with the military HQs, if my freighters would know to deliver materials there or not.

Mining Space Ports - This one is pretty simple. Does putting mining components on a space port actually result in anything, or is that just wasted space?

I think that's it for now, but if anyone has any ideas in the same vein that they'd like to share then feel free. Thank you for reading!

Hey everyone,

I see that the game is currently on sale for 2€ and it looks very interesting, deep and I like those 2D graphics (which remind me of Starsector).

My question is, as DW2 has been out for a few years now but much more expensive, is DW:U still worth it today?

Are the mods that important to enjoy it? Is disabling the intro video enough to run it on modern hardware?

Thanks!

Playing Distant Worlds Universe, and I wanted to focus on lasers for my ships, but they just don't seem that effective? Enemy shields are slow to drain, even with an entire fleet focusing on them. Energy isn't an issue, so I don't know what it is. Meanwhile missiles smash through shields with ease.

I'm playing the Universe Refreshed mod if that's relevant.

i looked into it and while there do seem to be solutions involving 32 bit wine prefixes, i have zero idea on jow to even start with that.

Is my best bet to just run it through a windows vm?

Edit:

Ok so finally got it to work even if the GUI IS a little clunky.

Trashed the documents folder entirely. Verify files in steam or uninstall/reinstall Apply the full folder of the expanded mod Set resolution to 900p

So for some reason DW Universe no longer running on my win 11 laptop. I've sunk 23 hours a few months ago. Tried everything

Intro video disabled Installed all the .net and DX libraries and binaries Updated java Pretty much have done everything. The game runs into menu screen and just crashes with exceptional error. Any ideas ?? HP pavillion laptop by the way. It used to run on it for me.

I have build 4 resort stations around planets with scenery bonuses which where suggested to have tourist bases built around them.

But when I check my balance sheet it shows 0 income for resort income

I wanna revisit this game but the UI is outdated. Any good mods exist for UI overhaul?

Go forth and multiple on your 0 tax paradise planet....

O you ran out of space....

F U... 50 % tax

Seems to be working well

Hey, I'm a new player just starting out with DWU. I've been digging through the forums to learn the mechanics, but I've run into a problem I can't figure out.

My research bases seem to be stuck in an endless retrofit process. Whenever I upgrade their design, some of them will upgrade just fine, but others get stuck and never finish.

I don't think it's a resource or transport issue. I'm not getting any resource shortage alerts, and my construction ships are able to build new bases pretty quickly.

Am I missing something obvious here, or is this a known bug? Thanks for the help!

New player here, I found two independent planets with population, and I don't see the option to integrate them in my empire in a diplomatic form

Hi there

I like the idea of being able to make any ship viable but wanted some more limitations on ship sizes so that it feels like your up grading your ship building capacity. Otherwise I feel like you just end up with death-ball fleets with no real designations for ship roles

Is there a mod for the first game that puts restrictions on ship sizes?

If not what kind of self imposed restrictions would you put on them.

Cheers

There's a few questions I have regarding Distant World's Universe, I'd appreciate any answers.

1. Should I keep building Mining Stations everywhere so long as the Private Sector still has a positive cashflow?
2. Should I completely ignore planets with lower amounts of resources unless I have a shortage or something? Or I should I go for everything?
3. Should I make sure that I have enough reactors on a ship or station to cover the "max energy use per second" stat for weapons?
4. Is it better to make ships as large and heavily armed as possible or make more smaller ships with less weapons?
5. I know that phasers have a bonus against armour so their lack of shield damage can be forgiven but what is the point of blaster types? I made ships with a dozen Tychon (probably spelt that wrong) Beams and they seemed like they were either doing terrible damage or missing most of their shots.
6. As part of the mod I have, a few of the ship role names have been changed (Frigate to Destroyer, Destroyer to Light Cruiser and Cruiser to Heavy Cruiser) Any way to revert that?
7. Should Mining Stations have Energy Collectors?
8. Do you guys like having many other empires at the start of your game or a smaller amount?

Thanks for answering.

Hello :-) I’m about to start the game and looking for some suggestions for the modpacks I should go with. Thanks a lot!

It is very difficult for me to create each design, I simply do not understand why my ships protect it or move to protect other systems even if I put them in a defensive position, another thing is that they do not usually heal after a battle, the ports are built very slowly and the pirates stop them from attacking me. My question is what designs should I make so that my fleets can protect systems effectively. Do I need shipyard or docking for them to be repaired?