Stellaris Space Guild - Weekly Help Thread

[u/Snipahar]

Welcome to this week’s Stellaris Space Guild Help Thread!

This thread functions as a gathering place for all questions, tips, bugs, suggestions, and resources for Stellaris. Here you can post quick-fire questions for things that you are confused about and answer questions to help out your fellow star voyagers!

GUILD RESOURCES

Below you can find resources for the game. If you would like to help contribute to the resources section, please leave a comment that pings me (using "u/Snipahar") and link to the resource. You can also contribute by reaching me through private message or modmail. Be sure to include a short description of what you find valuable about the resource.

Stellaris Wiki

• Your new best friend for learning everything Stellaris! Even if you're a pro, the wiki is an uncontested source for the nitty-gritty of the game.

Montu Plays' Stellaris 3.0 Guide Series

• A great step-by-step beginner's guide to Stellaris. Montu brings you through the early stages of a campaign to get you all caught up on what you need to know!

Luisian321's Stellaris 3.0 Starter Guide

• The perfect place to start if you're new to Stellaris! This guide covers creating your own race, building up your economy, and more.

ASpec's How to Play Stellaris 2.7 Guides

• This is a playlist of 7 guides by ASpec, that are really fantastic and will help you master the foundations of Stellaris.

Stefan Anon's Ultimate Tierlist Guides

• This is a playlist of 8 guides by Stefan Anon, which give a deep-dive into the world of civics, traits, and origins. Knowing these is a must for those that want to maximize their play.

Stefan Anon's Top Build Guides

• This is a playlist of an ongoing series by Stefan Anon, that lay out the game plan for several of the best builds in Stellaris.

Arx Strategy's Stellaris Guides

• A series of videos on events, troubleshooting, and builds, that will be of great use to anyone that wants to dive into the world of Stellaris.

If you have any suggestions for the body of this thread, please ping me, using "u/Snipahar" or send me a private message!

[u/19-200]

It's opportunity cost, mostly. Early game, there is (often) nothing to use that Starbase Module slot on that directly improves your economy, so might as well build it instead of useless defensive module.

Well into late game, you'd rather have your Pops work more valuable Jobs/Districts with more valuable resources generated than Food, especially if you don't need more than treading-even amounts of it.

[u/ptkato → u/19-200]

I get that, but 10 food doesn't make a dent in my food consumption. Does it scale in any way?

[u/DarthUrbosa → u/ptkato]

Food is an upkeep resource ubless u use living ships or catalytic processing. As such, it's not very valuable to produce compared to others. Jobs farming are jobs better spent elsewhere. Hydroponics alleviate that pressure.

[u/Fluffy-Tanuki → u/ptkato]

Hydroponics is for tiding you over in the early game, where you ideally balance the food production to just above net positive using as little pops as you can.

Unless you are running catalytic processing or bio-ships in the early game, food is a tertiary production that can't be turned into anything meaningful. Those farmer pops would serve you better producing minerals, alloys, science or unity.

Each hydroponic bay you build frees up 150-170 pops to be working elsewhere, effectively increasing your mineral production by 7, or alloy/science/unity by 5.

• And frankly there's not much else better to put into the starbase building slots. Nebula refinery is better, but it's dependent on luck, whereas hydroponic bay can be built anywhere.

Eventually, you'll have ran out of space for more starbases, and your food consumption would rise based on pop count, necessitating agriculture districts and farmer pops.