Video Game / Gigastructural Engineering And More

Somehow not the most insane things you can build

Those who dare to think big are destined to become the masters of the heavens themselves

— Macroengineering tradition tree quote

Gigastructural Engineering & More is a Game Mod for Stellaris originally by Elowiny, themed around, as the name implies, more and larger megastructures. However, that is not where the mod ends, adding a new midgame crisis, two new endgame crises, and a post-endgame crisis. In total, it adds 45 new megastructures, The Katzenartig Imperium, The Aeternum, The Compound, and The Blokkat Harvesters, providing a significant cast of characters and lore to add to the game, all individual components being completely optional.

It has a lore wiki here and a gameplay wiki here.

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This Mod provides examples of the following tropes:

• Adaptational Badass: In vanilla Stellaris, The End of the Cycle is already the strongest Shroud entity, but it was presumably born from the Zroni and is local to the playable galaxy like all of the others. In Gigastructures, it is a Time Abyss that predates countless cycles of the universe and a Deep Shroud deity existing at the level of the multiverse. Gigastructures also makes it the true mastermind behind the Aetherophasic Engine, a machine that promises godhood to its builders, and has a probable chance of working in vanilla, but explicitly doesn't in Gigastructures, being a trap to feed the End.
• Adaptational Explanation: In vanilla Stellaris, "the Hunters" are the Greater-Scope Villain to the Invading Refugees that are the Prethoryn. An event indicates that the last galaxy the Prethoryn fled from has gone dark, as if it stopped existing. In Gigastructures, it introduces its own final endgame crisis, the Blokkats, as the explanation. The Blokkats will say that they are the "Hunters" that the Prethoryn are fleeing from, though they are not actively hunting them, they are simply expanding their harvesting operations. The Blokkats will also gloat that they are an example of the universe ending singularity that the Contingency was intended to stop. The mod's creators say that they will retcon this if the Stellaris development team ever releases canonical explanations.
• The Ageless:
  • Weeny Pouchkinn, Katzen Mad Scientist, has kept himself alive for many thousands of years via his cybernetic implants.
  • Kaiser, Katzen dictator, is pretty much a Time Abyss, even accounting for the fact that he uses Time Travel to skip cycles of the universe.
• And Man Grew Proud:
  • At their peak, the Aeternum were poised to become an extragalactic civilization, with aspirations to conquer the entire universe. In order to see this through, Empress Alice II became a Godhood Seeker. Their civilization managed to create an artificial dragon with the peak of their technology. The Empress intended to then transfer her consciousness into it, but the project held an unintended consciousness of its own. It proceeded to punish its creators for their hubris before departing to parts unknown, causing the Aeternum to collapse, with the survivors consolidating in their birchworld.
  • Their awakening is a potential repeat. On the one hand, they have rediscovered their ambition. On the other hand, their pride and isolation prevents them from taking even the most basic of precautions before declaring a genocidal total war on everybody, like actually going out to double check how strong the younger races have grown.
• Apocalypse Anarchy: As the Blokkats eat more and more of the galaxy, your people will start panicking, causing more and more instability. On the bright side, your scientists will start feeling more motivated too.
• April Fools' Day: In commemoration of April Fool's Day, the mod's creators collaborated with another group to create a new crisis, expanding the planet Faust to have an option where their siren Expy attempts Mass Hypnosis via a Gigastructure.
• Arch-Enemy: Even after having long surpassed them, the Blokkats hate and even slightly fear the Paluush. When the Blokkats return, the Grandbunny will offer to project her power at a system of your choice to dissuade the Blokkats from going there.
• The Ark: The Blokkats don't usually consider lesser civilizations worth the effort of actively hunting down. Those who lack the strength to fight back, but have enough tech to flee, will often build ark ships to evacuate their empire from the galaxy. However, while the Blokkats will not actively hunt them, they also don't need to, since the Blokkwork can consume any mass below a certain amount, and it is constantly expanding.
• Beast Man: A good chunk of the custom races in this mod are basically humanoid Earth animals.
  • The Paluush are bunny people.
  • The Katzen are humanoid cats.
  • The representatives of the Aeternites are bald blue humanoids, causing outsiders to have misunderstandings, but due to genetic engineering, the appearances of their kind are diverse, most of them looking like various humanoid Earth animals. According to outside lore, baseline Aeternites look like humanoid tanukies.
  • The default blokkat portrait displays their avatars as boxlike constructs with a cat face and ears. One of the two alternate portraits portrays them as Cat Girls instead.
• Bring It: Your empire's default response to the arrival of the Blokkats is a "That isn't good", but if you have certain other overpowered mods and have activated the highest difficulty, where the Blokkats recognize your empire as an actual threat, your empire's response is a confident Bring It.
• Broke Your Arm Punching Out Cthulhu: Killing the Grandbunny of the Paluush is extremely difficult, will require the sacrifice of many powerful soldiers, and will result in the destruction of the Paluush and their home world instead of letting you conquer them. Hope the artifact you get out of it was worth it.
• The Cake Is a Lie: In vanilla Stellaris, civilizations can decide to become a Crisis Aspirant in order to attempt to follow in the divine Zroni's footsteps, building the Aetherophasic Engine and sacrificing the galaxy to presumably Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence. In vanilla, it isn't explicitly shown whether it works as advertised or not, but it explicitly doesn't in Gigastructures lore, where it is treated as a delusional mass suicide on the Crisis Aspirant's part. In Gigastructures, the Aetherophasic Engine is nothing but a trap, planted in the minds of the Crisis Aspirant by a Deep Shroud deity, the End of the Cycle. Instead of receiving the promised godhood, the Crisis Aspirant simply ends up delivering their galaxy to the Eldritch Abomination's stomach.
• Can't Live Without You: If the goddess of the Paluush dies, the entire species will die with her.
• Conqueror from the Future
  • Kaiser is technically from the past, but since the multiverse is effectively in a semirandomized Stable Time Loop, he still counts, continually jumping to a specific historical time point whenever his last attempt at conquest fails.
  • The Chablokk ancestors of the Blokkats fought with the Paluush ten-thousand years ago, and yet their Blokkat descendants are one hundred thousand years old for this reason. The Chablokks were so desperate to escape their Paluush Arch-Enemy that they resorted to time travel to be free of them.
• Creative Sterility:
  • After the downfall of Empress Alice II due to her failed Godhood Seeker quest, the Aeternum, who were on the brink of expanding to an extragalactic power, collapsed. Some of the more ambitious royals have attempted to rally their society, but to no avail as the Aeternum have grown content with their present status and complacent. That changes a little in the endgame when they finally awaken.
  • Since the emergence of their goddess, the Grandbunny, the Paluush have declared the end of history. They are completely content with their current lives and can get what they want with their unusually potent Psychic Powers. They have been temporarily forced out of their complacency once by the ancestors of the Blokkats, during which they were forced to innovate psychic Magitek. After driving them off, they considered finishing them off due to vague predictions of what they would someday become. Before they could do so, the Grandbunny awoke from her slumber, and it suddenly became obvious that they should completely dismantle their new interstellar civilization and return to a primitive lifestyle until the end of time. According to the lore, in most timelines, this works out for them, but in some timelines, the Blokkats return, consume all of the galaxy except for the Paluush home world, and laugh as the Paluush freeze to death without their star.
• Crossover: Gigastructures is designed to detect certain other mods and react to them to a certain degree. While the events of other mods are not considered to be part of Gigastructures's default timeline, some of the infinite cycles will intersect with them, so Kaiser will still be familiar with their concepts.
  • The mod it has the most interactions with is Ancient Cache of Technologies.
    • ACOT unlocks higher difficulties where some of the custom empires get access to the technology defined by the mod.
    • Stellarite Kaiser, his second highest difficulty, where he, via unknown means, gets ahold of a mysterious Lost Technology left behind by the gods.
    • The highest Aeternum difficulty, where they manage to become a Champion and gain access to the highest tech tier of the ACOT, but proceed no further, making them Semi-Divine. On this difficulty in an unprepared galaxy, the Aeternum rush the galaxy, very literally deleting occupied planets left and right. Even max difficulty Fallen Empires are subject to a Curb-Stomp Battle.
    • ACOT also unlocks some higher tier giga structures, like upgrading the ludicrous monstrosity that is a Birch World into an even more ridiculous monstrosity called a Supermassive Birch Void Sphere.
    • The gods aren't picky about their methods to fight the Shadow and feel the Blokkats may be worthy of helping them, so as a test for both the local galactic gods and the Blokkats, they will deny access to the Light (which gives empires divine powers so high it's no different from cheating) and restrict the lesser gods to fighting the Blokkats with Sufficiently Advanced Technology.
  • Other mods will unlock new mockery from the Blokkats. For example, they will tell you that an empire that has reached its "Zenith" has nowhere to go but down, becoming an ascendancy increases your chances of stopping them by a negative number, or make fun of the source of your weapons.
• Cruel Mercy: According to the lore, in timelines where the Blokkats reencounter their ancient Arch-Enemy, the Paluush, the Blokkats have long since surpassed the Paluush due to the Paluush's complacency, but still have an almost instinctive fear of them. In timelines where they proceed to win, they harvest the rest of the galaxy with their vesters, but leave the Paluush star of Gatzo alone. Once the rest of the galaxy is done, they use another tool to harvest Gatzo and all the surrounding matter except the Paluush home world. They even devour most of the Shroud, weakening the Paluush goddess to the point that she alone can only slow down the Paluush's doom. Instead of offering the mercy of a quick death like for most of their victims, the Blokkats laugh as the Paluush slowly and painfully freeze to death in a dark lonely void. When the last Paluush is dead, the Blokkats preserve the Paluush homeworld as a trophy.
• Cult of Personality: Kaiser builds worship around himself to ensure complete loyalty. Even when he abandons his people to flee into the next cycle, some of his followers will believe in a second coming. To be fair, Kaiser does rationalize being a Dirty Coward this way, figuring that some day, he will obtain a time machine capable of going into past cycles so that he can rescue his past followers, but lore says that this is impossible.
• Danger in the Galactic Core: In vanilla Stellaris, there are originally no hyperlanes leading to the galactic core, and there are only a few stories covering it. This mod adds a project to open hyperlanes leading to it.
  • The galactic core may or may not already have a fallen empire called the Aeternum already occupying it. One of the mod's crises involves them awakening.
  • If a civilization manages to take control of the supermassive quasar in the center of the galaxy, they can build the Quasi-Stellar Obliterator, a superweapon capable of taking out multiple star systems in one shot, turning them into a threat against the entire galaxy.
• Dissonant Serenity: The Blokkats are relaxed, matter of fact, reasonably polite, and out to devour everything that exists without compromise.
• Dyson Sphere: Alongside the one in the base game, several variants of this concept are added, such as the Penrose Sphere, Matrioshka Brain, and the Birch World.
• Easter Egg: If you zoom inside of the supermassive blackhole at the center of the galaxy (or optionally, inside a cohesive system),, you will see a shadowy figure resembling Steve from Spore.
• Expy:
  • Perhaps fittingly, given Stellaris is very much a Spiritual Adaptation of the Spore's Space Stage, the Aeternum are quite similar of The Grox Empire. A powerful, mysterious, ancient, reclusive and extremely technologically advanced (even compared to the late-game player's empire) empire that gives little information about itself to other empires, has a seething hatred for other species, resides in the galactic core, and stays inactive until a war starts, at which point there is no turning back, and no peace to be made. About the only real difference is that unlike The Grox, the Aeternites will eventually declare war on the entire galaxy with the intention of exterminating them, serving as an alternative Final Boss to the other endgame crisis'.^note Unless you fight the Blokkats
  • The planet Faust is a parody of Equestria from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. They have a variety of matching races that live in harmony, like humanoid ponies or griffons. One of the nations will dominate and achieve Faster-Than-Light Travel. Their civilization is powered by Power Crystals, a sort of magical variant of the usual Rare Crystal resource.
• Enemy Mine: If the player uses a supermassive quasar to build a superweapon called the Quasi-Stellar Obliterator, a fallen empire will unite with as many younger races as it can to form the Galactic Defense League, with the goal of defeating the player before they wipe everyone else out.
• Eternal Recurrence: Following Kaiser Kattail when he time tunnels into the future reveals that after the Natural End of Time, a massive thing known only as the Atom Shredder rises out of nowhere to cause a new big bang, and in the aftermath, The same history of the Katzens more or less plays out, with Kaiser Kattail popping out just in time to try and conquer the galaxy again.
• The Evils of Free Will: The Blokkats are so obsessed with efficiency, that they have placed enforcement mechanisms on their own minds. Since free will and chaos are important for creativity, a certain amount of it will be tolerated so long as things are going well, but making plans to end the harvests for silly reasons like compassion is out of the question. If the harvests are not going well, then thought enforcement will minimize free will for theoretical maximum efficiency.
• Failure Is the Only Option: Kaiser is a wannabe Dimension Lord. Very rarely, he gets as far as Galactic Conqueror, but he always fails in the end and is forced to escape to the next cycle of the universe.
• The Federation: The Grand Intergalactic Federation is a multi-galactic alliance. Occasionally, other civilizations substitute for them, but in the default timeline, they are the only power strong enough to rival the Blokkats, and are usually the ones to champion the resistance against them.
• Flat-Earth Atheist: Word of God says that in most ACOT Crossover timelines, the Aeternum will rationalize away any evidence that the Stellarites (the gods, as defined by ACOT) exist. The highest Aeternum difficulty level is the exception, where they became a Champion, but didn't go further.
• Flat World: Your scientists can stumble across a flat Earth, sustained by artificial gravity generators. They have no idea what its makers were thinking, and assume that the primitives currently living on it are going to be very confused when they leave it. One of the custom origins provided by the mod allows you to play those primitives.
• Genocide from the Inside: His life artificially extended, for centuries, Meopa was a seemingly benevolent and competent ruler over the Katzen people. However, he grew increasingly paranoid in his old age. Then one day, during a war going badly, he nuked the Katzen homeworld. The modern Katzen are descended from a small interstellar expedition that left before everything went to hell.
• Gratuitous German: Most of the Katzenartig Imperium's terminology falls squarely into this trope, with the most notable example being the Riesiegerkatzenpanzer, roughly translating to 'Giant Cat Tank'.
• I Die Free: Gigastructures has three custom primitive civilizations. The Katzen and Skeletoids become competing midgame crises. The Paluush give you brief aid during the endgame when you face the Blokkats. All of them receive bonuses to make them difficult to defeat early despite being primitive, but it isn't impossible, thus the Lord British Postulate applies. Out of the three, only the Skeletoids will submit to bring conquered. The Paluush would rather die than leave their home world or abandon their primitive lifestyle, so their goddess, the Grandbunny, will use her Psychic Powers to mass suicide the species and make their home world permanently uninhabitable out of spite. Likewise, the primitive Katzen choose to detonate their entire nuclear stockpile over being captured, though things change after Kaiser takes over.
• Interstellar Weapon: Two, the Nicoll-Dyson beam, a star whose output is redirected to a Planet Killer or even star-killer weapon, or the Quasi-Stellar Obliterator, an Active Galactic Nucleus with its power used to kill entire star clusters.
• Just Toying with Them: In most timelines, Kaiser isn't actually trying very hard. For all of his faults, Kaiser is very patient and has an indefinite number of chances to try again, so he isn't in a rush to win. Kaiser's difficulty setting reflects how seriously he is taking it this cycle and how lucky he got with technology in this timeline. When he is actually trying to win, indirect options like sponsoring insurrections in his empire are taken off the table.
• Kaiserreich: The Katzenartig Imperium is themed around this, being a highly militaristic and expansionist empire, united around a powerful monarch known as Kaiser Kattail, who depending on your settings will usually try to conquer the galaxy starting around the 2300's.
• Keystone Army:
  • The Skeletoids have access to a different form of magic than Psychic Powers. However, the source of their magic is their planet, which they make into a Magitek Planetcraft, and therefore a valid military target. Once that goes down, so does all the Magitek that left.
  • The Katzen Imperium is overly centralized, so the loss of their capital will make their empire collapse.
  • The Blokkats have constructed themselves from an artificial form of matter. One that is extremely unstable without their infrastructure to back it. Destroy their mothership, and the relay that keeps them in one piece is disrupted, killing most of the Blokkats invading your galaxy.
• Land of One City: The Frame World Origin only allows the player to start in the afromented colony and nowhere else, with them unable to colonize any other cities and any conquered planets during Total War will automatically be resettled into the Capital.
• Mad Scientist: Weeny Pouchkinn, one of the Katzen. He can be hero or villain depending on the timeline. In some timelines, he becomes The Hermit to conduct extremely dangerous research most governments won't allow. In this case, he will gladly join you if you let him in order to take a break from the tedium of unsuccessful Time Travel experiments. In other timelines, he becomes Emperor Scientist of the Katen, leads them into fallen empire hood, keeps them distracted with Bread and Circuses, and becomes a crisis as he becomes a Godhood Seeker. The good news is that his plans to Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence won't destroy the galaxy like an Aetherophasic Engine. The bad news is that it will still rewrite the hyperlanes and cause galaxywide earthquakes, resulting in severe societal disruption, not that he cares. Kaiser does not show up in the latter type of timeline.
• Magic Harms Technology: One of the planets in the mod is covered in a mysterious field, which apparently causes the laws of physics to work differently. Advanced conventional technology becomes non-functional, whereas the natives somehow make use of a force reminiscent of fantasy magic. Try to invade them via conventional means? Their necromancers will curbstomp your sci-fi armies.
• The Magocracy: There is one planet covered in a mysterious field that makes magic possible. When the primitives unite and attempt to takeover the galaxy, their empire is actually called a Magocracy.
• Mechanical Abomination: The Blokkats are something like this. Instead of being made from baryonic matter, they are constructed from an artificial form of matter comprised of uncountable numbers of attomachines that each have computational capacities comparable to planetary-scale computers. They were once beings of flesh, but went through the Synth ascension route via Brain Uploading. Despite this, they have twisted artificial souls on par with gods due to Soul Eating. Their objective is to preserve their existence indefinitely by accumulating so much mass-energy they can propagate their civilization into future versions of the universe. They do this by dismantling entire galaxies, and even harvesting the vacuum energy constant.
• The Multiverse: Lore says there is one. The immediate multiverse is massive, but still finite. There is a greater and infinite one, but it is entirely out of the reach of the main timeline. It is also completely and utterly impossible to traverse any part of the multiverse via controlled means. It can only be done by the whims of chance. Aspiring Multiversal Conquerors need a lot of luck to exist at all and will never get very far.
• Multiversal Conqueror: They've existed, but only extremely rarely, only thanks to luck, and never get beyond a handful of universes. Portals can be opened by random chance, and in some timelines, the laws of physics will temporarily change, but in the default timeline, it is completely and utterly impossible to traverse into other universes through controlled means.
• My Rules Are Not Your Rules: The Katzenartig Imperium operates on a different rule set than conventional empires, which is somewhat to their advantage. The Watsonian explanation is presumably that Kaiser has a different perspective of how the universe works, giving him a technological edge. The Doyalist explanation is to make Kaiser a more challenging fight.
• Natural End of Time: The default timeline will always end with the expansion and eventual heat death of the universe. Eventually, it will be reset with a new big bang. A lot of things will be random, but certain historical events are effectively universal constants. For civilizations that want to persist past the heat death of the universe, there are no easy options. Ascension to godhood via the Aetherophasic Engine is explicitly a lie and a trap in the story of the mod. Escaping to another universe won't help, because the immediate multiverse, as vast as it is, is still finite, and will end at the same time as everything else. The greater multiverse is completely inaccessible in most cycles and only becomes accessible very rarely by random chance. The Blokkats' method is to harvest the entire universe and use that energy to send a tiny fragment of their civilization into the next cycle. Kaiser has an artifact from a cycle where the laws of physics were different, allowing him to send himself into the next cycle a lot more easily.
• No Biological Sex: The Blokkats used the Synth ascension route so long ago that they no longer even have the concept of a "genitor" amongst themselves.
• Not Worth Killing: The reason the Blokkats usually leave their harvesters unguarded (by their standards) is because their calculations estimate it to be more efficient than having them escorted by a military force when a majority of galaxies are not advanced enough to pose a threat. Likewise, it is deemed that those capable of fleeing aren't worth the energy costs of catching. Besides, when the Blokkwork expands enough, it will catch up with and consume them anyways, so the Blokkats don't have to go out of their way to catch them now.
• Nuke 'em: The Katzens love nuclear weapons and nuclear power, with nearly everything Katzen powered by fission or fusion reactors, and the Katzens making copious use of nuclear weapons, both as part of their conquest of Flusion and of the galaxy.
• Offscreen Villain Dark Matter: In older versions, Kaiser's Katzen Warforges were able to produce war machines without the need for resources, so taking him out by attrition was not an option.
• Our Souls Are Different: As in vanilla Stellaris, all beings have a presence in the Shroud that persists upon death. Even robots have souls, albeit ones far weaker than those of organics. Some of the most advanced races, such as the Aeternum and the Blokkats, have even developed tech revolving around souls.
• Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions: Some variants of materialist just treat Psychic Powers as another form of science, but others have trouble taking them seriously and dismiss them with this trope. The Blokkats, who fit the former category, find members of the latter category strange.
• Outside-Context Villain: No one knows where the Katzen known as Kaiser came from. An even greater mystery is his uncanny ability to predict the future and get his hands on tech outside of common sense. It is if this narcissistic, but charismatic dictator just showed up out of nowhere. After he flees, his enemies figure out too late that he comes from a previous cycle of the universe, hence his ability to predict the future and his strange tech.
• Overflow Error: Stellaris mostly uses 32 bit variables. Gigastructures is one of the stronger mods, and while it will not by itself cause an overflow error, synergizing it with certain other overpowered mods will give you numbers so high that they will overflow right into the negatives.
• Perpetual Motion Machine: Lore states that this is occasionally possible in some timelines, but not the default. The Shroud, the power source behind Psychic Powers, is a vast, but still finite source of energy. Some civilizations can harvest energy from other dimensions, but the accessible multiverse is also finite in the default timeline. Even "mirror" universes exist in a finite supply. This a minor reason the Blokkats harvest the universe without regard for loss of life (though the fact that most of them have a Lack of Empathy is a bigger problem). Kaiser originates from a cycle of the universe where this was possible, hence why he is able to infinitely cycle the universe, a feat even the Blokkats struggle with.
• Planet Spaceship:
  • You can rebuild ordinary moons into Attack Moons.
  • When you've advanced enough, you can rebuild ordinary planets into Behemoth Planetcrafts.
  • Still not enough? With the right ascension perk, you can combine multiple attack moons and behemoth planetcrafts to forge a Stellar Systemcraft.
• Punny Name: Another mod by the same author turns Stellaris into a Sugar Bowl of living plush creatures, implying that the Paluush were intentionally named for plush bunnies.
• Puzzle Boss: The Blokkats. Their mothership is protected by a shield that is invincible against conventional technology. Their opponents need to figure out how to reverse-engineer enough of their tech to build a weapon capable of temporarily disrupting it.
• The Right of a Superior Species: Most Blokkats have a Lack of Empathy for other species. If you are a primitive compared to them, then they think of you as mere energy patterns to be harvested. If you are their equal, then they see you as a threat in need of eradication. There are a small number of Blokkats that enjoy watching primitives or keeping them as pets, but even for them, the energy harvests still take priority to the point that it has been literally hardwired into their psyche.
• Ring World Planet:
  • The mod offers the ability to surround the vanilla Stellaris ringworld with more rings.
  • With enough tech and an ascension perk, you can build an Alderson Disk instead.
  • There is a chance of you encountering an abandoned "Square World", where the would-be ring has corners. How does it handle the uneven gravitational pressure? It uses a form of Unobtanium and some unconventional alien technology.
• Royalty Superpower: The descendants of the Paluush Grandbunny inherit much stronger Psychic Powers.
• Rule of Cool: Realistically speaking, a lot of these structures should collapse under the sheer stress of their own weight. How the heck do they hold themselves up? One of the megastructure descriptions mentions some Technobabble involving the use of extra dimensions and Word of God has joked about duct tape. But mostly? These structures are simply awesome!
• Serial Escalation: Much of the content of this mod effectively falls into this. Instead of putting one ringworld around a star, put four. Ringworlds not enough? Build an Alderson Disk. The Prethoryn want to consume all the life in the galaxy? The Blokkats want to harvest the galaxy down to the vacuum energy constant!
• Soul Power: The Aeternum and the Blokkats have the tech to manipulate souls and even create them artificially. They can even produce mechanical beings with sufficiently powerful souls to have Psychic Powers.
• Space Is A World War I Battlefield: In the mind of the Kaiser, armored warfare on planets is directly translatable to space, with most Katzen admirals having traits related to armored warfare giving minor bonuses.
• Stable Time Loop: You can travel to the past, but You Already Changed the Past applies. Also, it is impossible to go before the birth of the current cycle of your universe.
• Tank Goodness: The Katzenartig Imperium loves tanks, with most Katzens apparently trained in armored warfare from their youths, their smallest warships looking like tanks with rocket engines, and their iconic ground vehicle the Riesiegerkatzenpanzer being five hundred meters long, 185 meters tall, and 75 wide, carrying a hypersonic nuclear railgun as its main armament and hundreds of secondary guns.
• That's No Moon: Technically, the Attack Moon, Behemoth Planetcraft, and Stellar Systemcraft all started out as actual celestial features (the first two can be constructed by specialized megastructure shipyards, but the construction process requires harvesting celestial features for their basic mass), but successfully constructing any one of them makes them subject to this.
• Throwing Down the Gauntlet: Gigastructures can detect the coexistence of certain other popular mods. Some of these, such as Ancient Cache of Technologies, are as overpowered as Gigastructures, or worse, can synergize with it. In this case, the highest difficulty is unlocked, where the Blokkats recognize you as an actual threat. During their broadcast to the galaxy, the Blokkats will declare that they have detected the existence of civilizations capable of actually threatening them, and as such, the Blokkats will not hold back and will not permit any civilizations to flee. They won't let any of the local civilizations join them either as they don't need a Bastard Understudy.
• Time Abyss: Kaiser is very old, and while he hasn't lived most of it, his existence technically predates the current universe.
• Tulpa: The Grandbunny is basically the goddess of the Paluush species, formed from the wish for peace of the more empathetic Paluush. She also amplifies the collective Psychic Powers of all Paluush, which is part of why they are so much more powerful than normal psions.
• Villain: Exit, Stage Left: Kaiser has an artifact from a previous cycle of the universe where a lot of the laws of physics were very different from normal. If Kaiser is in danger, he will use it to escape to the next cycle of the universe. It will automatically activate if he is brought to the brink of death by surprise. In theory, he can be killed for good if someone somehow figures this out and disables the artifact, but Kaiser will always retreat immediately if he notices anyone trying to figure him out.
• Who Wants to Live Forever?: The Aeternum have the tech to keep themselves alive until the heat death of the universe, but nothing to help themselves psychologically handle it.
• Soul Eating: The blokkats harvest the Shallow Shroud, as well as all the souls residing in it. They then process those souls into the artificial soul of a newborn blokkat. The blokkat will inherit personality traits from those souls, but the souls themselves will suffer until the Natural End of Time finally dissolves everything.