
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
.
This Mod provides examples of the following tropes:
- Absolute Xenophobe:
- The Aeternum can tolerate pre-FTL primitives, who are Beneath Notice, and occasionally use them for study. In fact, the reason Flusion has so many sapient races is due to it being one of their projects. Anybody who's reached FTL however is treated as a threat. If lesser galactic powers are lucky, the Aeternum might abduct and preserve a few of their kind for study, but the Aeternum outright say that surrender is not an option, only a battle to the death.
- The Compound view themselves as the Ultimate Lifeform and think all others don't deserve to exist.
- Adaptational Badass: In vanilla Stellaris, The End of the Cycle is already one of the two strongest Shroud entities, but it was born from the Divine faction Zroni's negative emotions 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, surpassing all the other gods you can make contact with. Gigastructures also makes it the true mastermind behind the Aetherophasic Engine, a machine that promises godhood to its builders, and has a plausible 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.
Word of God for vanilla Stellaris has said that they are unlikely to ever define the Hunters, because Nothing Is Scarier. In Gigastructures however, 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. - Adaptation Deviation:
- In vanilla Stellaris, victory via a Galactic Nemesis empire's Aetherophasic Engine destroys the galaxy. As to whether the Galactic Nemesis manages to Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence, this is left ambiguous, but
Word of God has suggested that the Galactic Nemesis has a chance of either succeeding or having their souls stretched across space and time, screaming forever. Meanwhile, empires with the Doombringers origin (meaning they are bound to a Shroud deity called the End of the Cycle) are banned from taking any Crisis Paths, including Galactic Nemesis, with The End being treated as a Crisis in its own right as its psionic aura engulfs the galaxy. In Gigastructures, the entire Galactic Nemesis Crisis Path is a trap set by the End of the Cycle, who uses the Engine to deliver the entire galaxy to its stomach. - Vanilla Stellaris is a Recursive Reality where new universes are born from black holes. In Gigastructures, the traversible multiverse is explicitly finite and black holes are implied to form portals to preexisting universes instead.
- In vanilla Stellaris, victory via a Galactic Nemesis empire's Aetherophasic Engine destroys the galaxy. As to whether the Galactic Nemesis manages to Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence, this is left ambiguous, but
- 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 the group behind Equestria at War 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.
- Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: In timelines where the Katzen become a Fallen Empire, Weeny Pouchkinn makes this his goal. At first, he invests his efforts into studying Time Travel. Eventually, he constructs an Aetherophasic Engine. However, before he can fire it off, he starts to realize that he designed it with suspicious ease, and correctly suspects that some higher power planted the idea in his head for malicious purposes. Thus, he collapses it and works on a superior version using an O-class Matrioshka Brain, a gargantuan star powered computer. If he wins the ensuing crisis war against the other interstellar empires, he then uploads his consciousness into the Deep Shroud, a quasi-multiversal variant of the Spirit World most psychics are familiar with. In this state, he loses the ability to interact with reality, but also becomes immortal and all-knowing. While his existence is unable to go past the heat death of the universe or go before the big bang, he transcends localized linear time.
- Author Appeal: When asked why multiple Gigastructures villains are cat-based (several Katzen and the Blokkats),
Elowiny expressed liking cats. - 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.
- Benevolent Abomination: Empires with Psychic Powers get access to a secondary Shroud Pact with an entity called the Navigator. Unlike the main Shroud deities you can make pacts with, the Navigator will only demand a price for its blessings per service instead of continuously, and that price is a fixed and fair one. The downside is that its price consists of energy harvested from the Shroud. The harvesting process is extremely dangerous, as it has a chance of attracting attention from far less benevolent entities, whose strength will automatically scale up to match your empire.
- Blue-and-Orange Morality: The Blokkat objection to Cetana's plans to turn the galaxy into Empty Shells is not that it would be no different from death, but that consciousness and free will are useful for coming up with new ideas. If it weren't for that, they would be totally onboard with shutting down their own consciousnesses to increase the efficiency of their energy harvests.
- Boss Battle: The mod adds its own crises to the game.
- Kaiser Kattail, a mysterious Katzen dictator who appeared out of nowhere. In most cycles, he appears from Flusion, though in some cycles, he appears from Faust instead. He is a Well-Intentioned Extremist seeking to create a utopian empire, but is too much of a megalomaniac to do more good than harm. He plans to become a Dimension Lord, starting with the current galaxy. He has a strange affinity for esoteric technology and seems to be able to predict the future.
- Weeny Pouchkinn, who has lead the Katzen into becoming a Fallen Empire. Using an O-class Matrioshka Brain for the necessary calculations, he plans to Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence, uploading his mind into the Deep Shroud. His victory will not destroy the galaxy, but it will leave behind a very big mess to cleanup.
- As an April Fools' Day Crossover with Equestria at War, the Sirens conquer the planet Faust and create a gigastructure that can harvest negative emotions for Mass Hypnosis.
- The Aeternum, an ancient Fallen Empire that nearly became a multi-galactic power before their collapse. If they awaken, they plan to commit galactic genocide on their way to recovering their former power.
- The Blokkats, a race of Mechanical Abominations, who plan to harvest the universe down to the vacuum constant, destroying even the Spirit World to use it as a power source.
- The Compound are a race of Absolute Xenophobe dark matter entities and a boss related to the EHOF, an artificial wormhole generator. As of writing, they are usable, but not recommended, and default to disabled since they are stuck in
Development Hell.
- Bread and Circuses: In most timelines, Meopa's Longevity Treatment starts to fail and causes him to become paranoid. When his age-induced insanity is strong enough, he commits Genocide from the Inside, leaving only a Lost Colony of Katzen. In the few timelines where he recognizes the problem before it is too late, he will pick one of two Katzen as his successor. If that successor is Weeny Pouchkinn, Pouchkinn will double down on his Godhood Seeker quest. To ensure the rest of the Katzen don't figure anything out and object to his plans, he converts the Katzen to a Fallen Empire, too busy living a life of hedonism to interfere with him.
- 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 Galactic Nemesis 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.
- Cat Girl: Due to popular demand, one of the alternate portraits for the Blokkats portrays them as anime cat girls. They will automatically switch to these portraits if the difficulty setting is at its highest and the player is using certain overpowered mods, forcing the Blokkats to adapt and reverse-engineer the "power of anime". They proceed to rename themselves the United Blokkatgirl Harvesters.
- 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.
- Control Freak: One Kaiser's biggest weaknesses is his megalomania. He insists on controlling everything, which eventually means betraying any alliances he has formed to usurp them and over-centralizing everything on his capital planet of Flusion. If his enemies manage to take Flusion, the rest of his empire collapses with it.
- 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.
- For April Fools' Day, the creators collaborated with the creators of another mod, Equestria at War, to create a siren crisis.
- If the player is using the ACOT Stellarborne origin, making them Semi-Divine, or if they are using the Warship Girl mod, the Blokkats will discover that you are even more advanced than themselves and Lyunita, go Oh, Crap!, and determine that the source of your unstoppable power is something called "anime". They proceed to reverse engineer it and marvel at the fact that turning their avatars into Cat Girls makes them so much more powerful.
- The mod it has the most interactions with is Ancient Cache Of Technologies.
- 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.
- In vanilla Stellaris, a Cosmogenesis Crisis Aspirant that chooses to enter the black hole at the center of the galaxy uses a special project to jump to it off screen. In Gigastructures, said black hole can simply be accessed directly.
- Deal with the Devil: It's possible to ally with the Blokkats. They immediately make it clear that the only way they will allow that is if your empire is converted into Blokkats, but they will allow your previous selves to be in control if you complete a series of difficult challenges that show you are capable of the same scientific ability and efficiency normal Blokkats are. Do so, and they are as good as their word, and you become an independent wing of the Blokkats. However, the same thought enforcement mechanisms placed on all Blokkats will also be placed on the new ones, so there will be no rebellion from within the inside as they will become as obsessed with energy collection as the rest of them are.
- De-Power Zone: The Background Magic Field that is the Shallow Shroud coalesces via living things. Go sufficiently far past a galaxy's boundaries, and the Shroud thins. This property of deep space makes it uncomfortable for living things to traverse through and while their souls will survive doing so, they become unable to draw energy from the shroud, disabling any Psychic Powers they may have.
- Determinator: For all of his faults, Kaiser is no quitter. In his cycle, Pouchkinn was a Reluctant Mad Scientist. Due to a freak accident, this version of Pouchkinn was annihilated, but the tiny fragments that were left, his megalomania and determination, were infused into Kaiser, without Kaiser also inheriting the traits that subdued said megalomania.
- 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:
- The Penrose Sphere
, a type of construct designed to extract energy from the surrounded blackhole's spin. - The Matrioshka Brain
, a supercomputer divided into layers, powered by the dyson sphere at the center of it. - The Birch World
is a type of Shellworld
, divided into matrioshka doll-like layers, built around a blackhole. The blackhole is used for several purposes. For one, the Birch World's shells are built at just the right distance from it to use it to generate Earthlike gravity. The blackhole is also used as a heat sink. The birchworld itself is Powered by a Black Hole, using the penrose sphere process at the harder end of the sci-fi spectrum for energy, and using matter bores at the softer end for minerals. With the ACOT Magitek upgrade to a Birch Void Sphere, the owner no longer even has to care about the blackhole's event horizon when finding uses for it.
- The Penrose Sphere
- 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 - 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.
- Perhaps fittingly, given Stellaris is very much a
- 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.
- Equal-Opportunity Evil: Kaiser originates from Flusion, a planet on which multiple sapient races have co-existed for millions of years, due to Aeternum experimentation. Kaiser believes in the superiority of the Katzen, but as far as he is concerned, being Katzen is a matter of belonging to their culture, not a matter of species. Under his rule, the Katzenartig Imperium is as strictly meritocratic as possible.
- 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. Even on the incredibly rare occasions that he gets lucky enough to overcome all of his adversaries, his own megalomania ends up as his empire's undoing. He will start to add galaxy after galaxy to his collection, but sooner or later, the Katzenartig Imperium's sheer size and over-centralization makes its collapse inevitable, no matter how well Kaiser automates its governance.
- 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.
- For Science!: The Cosmogenesis Crisis Path revolves around reckless reality warping to create a custom new baby universe according to their own designs. Gigastructures has some custom endings for Cosmogenesis. Getting the best one requires the Cosmogenesis Empire to be just reckless enough without overdoing it. Underdoing it will gain a mediocre ending, while overdoing it will result in a Downer Ending. But being just reckless enough gets them an enlightened glimpse of the true nature of reality and allows them to make their new universe far superior to what they could have done otherwise.
- 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'.
- Greater-Scope Paragon: Lyuinita, a multi-galactic empire spearheading the Grand Intergalactic Federation, an alliance of multi-galactic powers. In the background, they are the biggest force opposing the Blokkats. Unfortunately, the universe is a big place even to them, and they are roughly evenly matched with the Blokkats. As such, a lot of galaxies, automatically including the playable one, are beyond their current ability to directly help.
- Hellgate: The Psychic Hypersiphon is a Magitek gigastructure that allows empires with Psychic Powers to harvest energy from the Shroud. Unfortunately, hostile spirits get pulled into our reality alongside the psionic energy, and they scale to your own empire's strength, thus it is absolutely not worth it. The Aeternum appear to be the only empire capable of using them safely.
- Holding Back the Phlebotinum:
- The Fallen Empires are protected against Interstellar Weapons by a special shield generator.
- The Blokkats can't destroy the galaxy if you do it first via the Aetherophasic Engine, right? For "your safety and theirs" (because in Gigastructures, the Aetherophasic Engine is explicitly a delusional mass suicide rather than an ascension), the Blokkats use some form of Teleport Interdiction to block the Aetherophasic Engine's funnel to the Shroud, preventing it from activating for the duration of their invasion.
- In the Ancient Cache Of Technologies mod, the highest tech tier very literally puts you in God Mode. When you face the Blokkats, the higher ranking gods leave you with your sufficiently advanced tech, but deactivate God Mode as a test for you and the Blokkats.
- Horrifying the Horror: The Blokkats are normally as dismissive of the sirens as they are just about every other faction, but on the highest siren difficulty setting, which describes the sirens as being backed by some multiversal power even greater than the eternal multiversal cycle, even the Blokkats will express confusion and fear.
- Human Aliens: The Roqualians of Flusion are the only natural native sapient species and with convergent evolution, are nearly identical to humans. The biggest differences between them and humans are that they have a wider variety of hair and eye colors, four fingers, lifespans that do not increase with modern medicine, and what amounts to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder on a specieswide basis.
- 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.
- I Read It for the Articles: One of the systems you can find contains a square ringworld. The ring world is in ruins and it's creators have apparently vanished without any other traces, but it does have an intact AI. However, the AI has no idea how Squareworld fell into ruins either. He says that he was so engrossed trying to get a better understanding of his creators by studying "reptilian reproduction" that by the time he returned his focus to the real world, the place had already long since fallen into collapse with no evidence of what did it.
- 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.
- In lore, the Blokkats have likewise overly concentrated themselves on their capital, the Blokkonstrukt. If the leading multi-galactic powers, usually the Lyuinites, manage to destroy it, any surviving scattered Blokkats will be unable to rebuild their civilization.
- Land of One City: The Frame World Origin only allows the player to start in the aforementioned 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.
- Layered World: The Gigastructures multiverse is divided into several separate layers
.- The topmost layer is Realspace, the universe we know. It has 3 spatial dimensions and 1 temporal dimension.
- The 2nd layer is known as Quasi-Space, Sub-Space, or Hyper-Space. It consists of 4 spatial dimensions and 1 temporal dimension. That 4th dimensional curve means that if one were to travel faster than the expansion of the universe, they would eventually end up where they started, much like traveling in a seemingly straight line in 2 dimensions would on Earth. The Shallow Shroud is a Background Magic Field dragged into this layer by living things, creating a Spirit World and the power source behind Psychic Powers.
- The 3rd layer is known as the Deep Shroud, the Profundum, or the Perpetuity, and exists as an extension of the Universal Timeline. It consists of 9 spatial dimensions and 1 temporal dimension. Unlike the Shallow Shroud, it has almost no connection to psionics. The Deep Shroud is the container for other universes, forming The Multiverse that the civilizations within can theoretically access. While theoretically possible to traverse, doing so is so dangerous that it isn't worth it in most timelines, making Multiversal Conquerors infeasible.
- The 4th layer is known as the Abyssal Shroud, the Baranthrum, or the Logic Pool. It consists of infinite spatial dimensions and temporal dimensions. The Abyssal Shroud is a greater multiverse containing all of existence. The laws of physics stop making sense within this layer. Travel to it requires an entire universe worth of energy and can only be done briefly. It is utterly impossible to traverse the Abyssal Shroud to a different Timeline via controlled means. It can only be done when Timelines randomly collide as a natural occurrence. On the rare occasions that this happens, this can temporarily alter the laws of physics, allowing for existences such as the Perpetual Motion Machine, something that is impossible in the default Gigastructures timeline.
- Longevity Treatment: The original Katzen Empire invented cybernetics capable of increasing longevity. Mad Scientist Weeny Pouchkinn's enhancements are so good that he is practically The Ageless. Meopa's inferior enhancements are unable to maintain his sanity and depending on how self-aware he is in this timeline, he will eventually Abdicate the Throne or more likely commit Genocide from the Inside.
- Lost Colony: The Katzen originate from the Gatzo system, the same star system containing the Paluush. The Katzen spent most of their effort on unifying their home system, which had multiple planets and natives, but they also sent out several colony ships to find new worlds to settle. In timelines where Meopa realizes that his Longevity Treatment is no longer keeping his mind in one piece, he chooses a successor, who leads the Katzen into becoming a Fallen Empire. In these timelines, all of the colony ships will fail and die. In timelines where Meopa goes mad and commits Genocide from the Inside however, one of these colony ships will make it to the planet of Flusion and invade, keeping the Katzen race alive, but forced to redevelop their tech from scratch.
- Lotus-Eater Machine: If a Cosmogenesis Crisis Aspirant chooses to penetrate the singularity inside a Blokkat Vester, one possible outcome is transporting themselves to the Blokkonstrukt, the Blokkat capital. The Blokkats will proceed to disable the Crisis Aspirant with an illusion of total victory.
- 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. His megalomania comes under constraint and he becomes a Reluctant Mad Scientist. 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 and eventually becomes a time traveling hero. In other timelines, he becomes Emperor Scientist of the Katzen, 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 variant of the Aetherophasic Engine is greatly superior to that of a conventional Galactic Nemesis, so his plans to Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence won't destroy the galaxy like the normal ones do. 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 Milky Way Is the Only Way: Since the base game does not support multiple galaxies, neither does the mod. Even if it did, it would probably put intense strain on your computer. The farthest you can travel in Gigastructures is to the Cohesive Stars, a galactic cluster, via the E.H.O.F., an artificial wormhole generator. Nevertheless, 2 extragalactic civilizations, the Blokkats and Lyunita are described, the former of which forms an Endgame crisis. Lore describes the difficult logistics of multi-galactic travel, and how the handful of Empires that succeed do so. The ones that do so most efficiently usually do so via a scaled up version of the E.H.O.F..
- More than Three Dimensions: The Deep Shroud, the term used to refer to the sub-multiverse the Gigastructures game takes place in, consists of 9 spacial dimensions and 1 dimension of time. The explanation for how their builders prevent gigastructures from collapsing under the stress of their own weight is that they inflate the spatial dimensions beyond the third, allowing them dilute the force of gravity across the other spatial dimensions.
- The Multiverse: Lore says there is one. It exists in two layers, the Deep Shroud, and the Abyssal Shroud. The Deep Shroud is the immediate multiverse containing its own series of laws. The Deep Shroud is massive, but still finite. The Abyssal Shroud is the verse containing Deep Shrouds, and unlike the Deep Shroud is truly infinite. However, it is extremely difficult to traverse the Deep Shroud via controlled means. It is absolutely impossible to traverse the Abyssal Shroud by controlled means, only occasionally happening due to complete random 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.
- Multiversal Singularity: Due to the absurd improbabilities that originally lead to his existence, the multiverse has only ever had exactly one Kaiser, and even across infinite cycles, it is extremely unlikely to ever produce more. Every time every player fights him, it is the exact same entity at a different point in time.
- 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. Ascension via Weeny Pouchkinn's method grants immortality and The Omniscient at the cost of any power to actually do anything and is still localized to the current cycle. 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. Creating a custom universe via Cosmogenesis is not a lie, and the crisis aspirant can stretch out their time to infinity, but their chance of succeeding is low, and even with infinite internal time, it still technically won't exist past a multiversal reset anymore than a natural universe. 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 "gender" amongst themselves.
- Non-Action Big Bad: Kaiser is an Emperor Scientist and an Omnidisciplinary Scientist, but one field he isn't skilled at is personal combat. If push comes to shove, he uses his personal Deflector Shield and a Gravity Master device on his tail to defend himself, but his preferred solution to direct threats is to run away and let his soldiers deal with it.
- 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, Behemoth Planetcrafts, and a star to forge a Stellar Systemcraft.
- Pocket Dimension: The Blokkwork is an artificial layer of reality created by the Blokkats. It is used as a network for them to transfer energy between pylons instantaneously. As it expands throughout the universe, they can use it to extract any energy that isn't too dense, such as exo planets.
- Powered by a Black Hole:
- The E.H.O.F. is a wormhole generator that creates wormholes by manipulating the gravity of a blackhole. The Supermassive E.H.O.F. is a bigger version built around the blackhole at the center of the galaxy (or at least, one of a similar size), acting as a scaled up version, which, lorewise, connects your entire empire via wormholes like a Portal Network. Though not present in gameplaynote , in Gigastructures lore, Supermassive E.H.O.F.s are used by multi-galactic empires to keep their civilizations connected.
- There is the Penrose Sphere gigastructure, a theoretical means of extracting energy out of the spin of a blackhole.
- The Birchworld uses the blackhole as a natural gravity source. It also uses the Penrose process to extract energy and matter bores to extract minerals, much like the equivalent megastructures used on smaller blackholes.
- The Blokkat Vester uses a blackhole to connect to the Blokkwork, a Pocket Dimension they use to store and transmit energy.
- The ships used by the Lyunites, heads of the Grand Intergalactic Federation, are described as using similar but more developed designs to the Reality Warper Horizon Needle, which uses its own singularity to warp reality
- Precursor Killers: Every once in a while, the Aeternum will partially awaken and attempt galactic genocide. They do not accept surrender or voluntary servitude. At most, if they find a race interesting, they might capture a small colony of them for sociological experiments. Shortly afterwards, they will collapse again, either due to losing interest or being stalemated by the current galactic powers. If the player declares war on them, the current Empress Alice will refer to this as the Great Filter.
- 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.
- Reality Warper: Cosmogenesis empires figure out how to use Gravity Master tech for reality warping via "shortcuts". The Lyuinites and the Blokkats have existed long enough to figure out how that tech actually works and make refinements. They use ships that, like the Cosmogenesis Horizon Needle, use a singularity to make edits to reality, though their hands are too full dealing with one another to make expeditions to other universes. Reality warping is also one method of intergalactic space travel, increasing the local speed of light in a bubble around the ship, though this method is delicate enough to be considered a last resort, as even a minor mistake will result in the ship's destruction.
- Refuge in Audacity: Cosmogenesis Crisis Aspirants seek to penetrate a blackhole in order to rewrite the baby universe inside to their own liking. Blokkat Vesters use a singularity to connect to the Blokkwork, a Pocket Dimension they use as a power network. A Cosmogenesis Crisis Aspirant can choose to enter it, For Science!, despite having themselves no idea what the result will be. If they succeed, the Crisis Aspirant will end up transporting themselves to the Blokkwork. Depending on what options they choose, they can then exit it into a massive battle between the Blokkats and the Grand Intergalactic Federation. The Blokkats will be so stunned by the sheer recklessness and improbability of what the Crisis Aspirant pulled off, that it will delay their calculations for all of a few nanoseconds, enough time to turn the tides of the battle.
- 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.
- Robot Wizard: Normal robots just barely have souls
. Any psychic sensing them will see no more mind glow from them than from the environment surrounding them. Having said that, creating a robot with a soul powerful enough for Psychic Powers isn't impossible in Gigastructures:- The Aeternites
invented Psykosynthetics, a type of robot with an artificial soul. - The Blokkats used the Synth Ascension path long ago, but they too have souls strong enough to use Psychic Powers. They create them by siphoning off psionic energy from the Shroud, including the souls of lesser beings, to shred them all up and fabricate the artificial soul of a new Blokkat.
- The Aeternites
- 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 More than Three Dimensions to dilute their gravity and
Word of God has joked about duct tape. But mostly? These structures are simply awesome! - Likewise, even if the real life laws of physics allowed for these structures, several of them would be Awesome, but Impractical in real life, but again, they're awesome, and being a game, the impracticality is abstracted away.
- 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 More than Three Dimensions to dilute their gravity and
- 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.
- Subspace or Hyperspace: The scientists of the first Katzen FTL civilization kept debating what to call the next layer of reality and couldn't agree on whether to call it subspace or hyperspace.
- 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.
- Tragic Dream: The reason Kaiser Kattail will never create a "perfect" Imperium in any Cycle is because he is obsessed with the idea that, one day, he will find the technology or warp in reality needed to time travel past the Unravelling and turn every Imperium he has made into utopia. This is literally impossible - time travel in this setting relies on doing tricks with the Shroud and other higher dimensions, and they too are reset, meaning there is no way to get back to anything before an Unravelling.
- 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: Thoughout the entire multiverse, there is exactly one Kaiser. The circumstances that created him are simply that improbable. Every single time the player fights him, Kaiser is not an Alternate Self, but the exact same entity, only at a different point in time. 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. After his escape, he will wait for a suitable cycle and try again.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: Kaiser's ethics can be described as a combination of xenophilia, militancy, and authoritarianism. He is convinced that if he unites the universe in a war to end all wars, it will create a utopian Melting Pot Sci-Fi Setting. Due to inheriting Weeny Pouchkinn's megalomania, he is not willing to leave bystanders to their own devices or even federate with them beyond the shortterm, all must bow to him directly. In timelines where he helps the Grand Intergalactic Federation defeat the Blokkats, the ensuing war where he attempts to become a Dimension Lord is described as killing even more people than the Blokkats.
- 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.
- World Pillars: The Birch world is a type of matrioshka shell world, built around a black hole in layers. Each layer is supported by pillars. In the case of the Aeternum Precursor Birch world, these are called Atlas Pillars.
- 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.
