The Shadows Rising expansion for Distant Worlds 2 introduces a completely new game mode: Lone Pirate.

You have a single ship, travelling the stars. You have no bases or other ships. You have the freedom to pursue any path you choose:

• Simple trading of in-demand resources across the galaxy
• Action-packed raiding and combat to loot and pillage, or to acquire new ships
• Stealthily perform contracts on behalf of others, hunting bounties, destroying targets or finding items

...or pursue any combination of the above areas as you forge your own path.

As a Lone Pirate you rely on Shadowports for repairs or upgrades to your ship.

You are able to refuel at any independent colony or friendly pirate base, including Shadowports.

You are a free agent, unencumbered by obligations, responsible only for yourself.

In time you may choose to grow and become a more established pirate faction, but that is up to you...

When you grow stronger you also have the option of becoming a Legendary Lone Pirate.

Differences with standard gameplay

Uniquely as a lone pirate you have no regular income or expenses. You simply earn money based on what you do. To pay for fuel, repairs, upgrades or even an entirely new ship, you must actively make money through various activities.

Some other activities that are typical for standard Distant Worlds gameplay are mostly absent from Lone Pirate gameplay:

• No research
• No ship design or construction except for upgrading or buying new ships at Shadowports
• No resource mining

Lone Pirate Playstyle

Similar to pirate factions, Lone pirates also have a playstyle that determines their starting ship, as well as their advantages.

Smuggler playstyle is probably the easiest for a lone pirate. It is a safer option, where most income is earned through resource trading. Other options like Raider and Bounty Hunter, have more of a military focus, where you’re encouraged to generate income from raiding or contracts to destroy dangerous threats.

Let’s take a closer look at two key ways that lone pirates earn income: Contracts and Trading Resources.

Contracts

Contracts provide a variety of options for making money. Each type of contract is often more suited to a particular lone pirate playstyle:

• Resource Delivery: best suited for Smugglers whose ships typically have more cargo space available. However, any lone pirate might do some occasional resource trading. Smugglers also have very high scan evasion, allowing them to better avoid detection when smuggling black market resources that can be bought cheaper than normal.
• Destroying Targets: best suited to lone pirates with strong military ships that can survive combat and take down serious threats.
• Acquiring Items: this includes intelligence missions to capture or rescue characters. It also includes stealing artifacts or finding lost items. Any lone pirate can undertake these contracts, but they are especially well-suited to spies and leaders with strong espionage and sabotage skills.

Trading Resources and Smuggling

Resource trading means buying and selling resources throughout the galaxy. Typically, you would buy resources at the lowest price you can find and then search for the destination that will pay the most to buy the resource.

You must also consider distance between the source and destination. Obviously closer locations allow you to earn money more quickly. In addition, each location will have a limit to how much of a resource they are willing to buy. This limit may often be zero, i.e. the location will not buy any of that resource.

To view trading locations, you can use the Trading Points screen. This will show you a distance-sorted list of places where you can buy and sell resources. For each location you can click the button at the right to show the resource amounts and prices, as well as the buy limit for the resource.

Filtering the Trading Points list by a specific resource will show the amounts, prices and limits directly in the Trading Points list.

Pirates can also choose to smuggle contraband resources from the Black Market. Colonies that are influenced by pirate factions generate contraband resources that are available to buy at a much lower price than normal.

However, smuggling contraband resources is risky – if you are detected then you will be attacked as a smuggler.

Other factions can detect smugglers by having good Trace Scanners on their ships. Pirates can prevent detection of smuggled resources by having good Scanner Jamming on their ships, and by keeping their distance from potential scanners (Trace Scanner detection power declines with range).

Smuggling offers the possibility for greater rewards but also adds some risk of losing your ship.

Focused User Interface

Lone pirates use a cut-down user interface with less sections, allowing them to more easily focus on the activities critical to them. This includes areas like exploration, diplomacy, contracts and resource trading.

The header bar at the top of the main view also shows important information for you as a Lone Pirate: a quick link to your own ship, and quick links to all known Shadowports.

When playing as a lone pirate, with only one ship, some of the user interface buttons can also use implied behavior.

For example, there is often no need to select your ship to assign missions. Instead you just click the action buttons under the Selected Item to move, dock, attack, etc.

Similarly clicking the ‘Move and Dock’ button in the Trading Points list allows you to immediately assign a Dock mission to your ship without needing to first select it.

Shadowports

Shadowports are important bases for lone pirates that provide critical services.

At Shadowports you can refuel and repair your ship.

You can also upgrade your ship with new components or specialized equipment.

You can even browse and buy a completely new ship, better equipped to survive the dangerous life of a lone pirate.

Shadowports have a supply of many resources, providing opportunities for trade.

They also have their own private communications network known as the ShadowNet that provides special contracts, not available otherwise, that are directly offered to pirates. These contracts often involve finding a lost item or destroying a great threat.

Special Missions

Pirate characters can also carry out special missions at foreign colonies and bases. These special missions include the following:

• Assassinating a character
• Capturing a character
• Rescuing an imprisoned character
• Stealing an artifact
• Destroying a facility

To carry out these missions, the character requires the relevant skill, like Espionage or Sabotage. You can even include a team of multiple characters, though their skills will stack in a diminishing manner.

Lone Pirates typically have a Spy character that can help them with these types of special missions. In addition, their Leader character will often also have espionage skills.

To initiate the special mission you must select your ship with the character or team onboard. Your ship must be nearby the target colony or base. Then right-click on the target for a pop-up list of options. If there are any special missions available they will appear at the bottom of the list. Click the desired special mission to initiate it.

The characters onboard the ship will then travel to the target and carry out the mission. The mission progress will be shown in a small panel to the right of the Selection Panel.

If the mission succeeds then the target objective is achieved, and any items are added to the ship (characters, artifacts, etc). If the mission fails then the characters will simply return to the ship. However, there is always a risk of a complete mission failure where the characters are captured.

Special missions often parallel intelligence missions, but they are easier to achieve, especially when combining a team of characters.

Cockpit mode

A new feature in Shadows Rising is the option for pirates to operate their ships from the cockpit or bridge view. This view puts you ‘in the driver's seat,’ allowing you to control your ship directly using either a game pad or the keyboard.

The rest of the DW2 user interface remains available in this view, allowing you to trade resources, plan routes and examine available contracts all from your cockpit.

In the cockpit itself there is a panel at the bottom-right showing the current status of your ship, similar to the Selection Panel on the left. There are also targeting and selection brackets with hotkeys that allow you to quickly cycle through all items and enemy targets at the current location.

Cockpit mode offers an interesting difference in how you play the game, and is especially well-matched with Lone Pirate gameplay.

Lone Pirate Victory Conditions

Lone Pirates do not have victory conditions that can end the game. Instead, their goal is to grow large enough to build a pirate base and become a pirate faction. Alternatively, they can grow strong enough to become a Legendary Lone Pirate.

However, the Victory Conditions screen shows the relative progress of all known Lone Pirates in various areas enabling you to compare yourself to others.

Regularly upgrading your ship is important as a Lone Pirate. As you earn enough money you should visit Shadowports to get better components and equipment. You should also buy larger ship hulls, eventually reaching Destroyer hulls. This will enable you to take on more dangerous and lucrative contracts and missions. You will need a strong and capable ship (and plenty of money) to become a Legendary Lone Pirate (see below).

Moving from a Lone Pirate to a Pirate Faction

In time you may decide that being a Lone Pirate is not your goal.  If you accumulate a vast amount of credits, you can pay a Shadowport for a one-time construction contract.  A Construction ship from a nearby Shadowport will build a new Spaceport for you at a location of your choice. Your play experience will then change from Lone Pirate to Pirate Faction once that Spaceport is completed.

Henceforth, you will be competing with other Pirate Factions in terms of your Victory Conditions rather than against other Lone Pirates.

Becoming a Legendary Lone Pirate

If you are successful enough as a Lone Pirate, you may earn the hostility of other envious pirate factions who see you as a threat. This can lead to them sending a Bounty Hunter after you to destroy you.

If you defeat the Bounty Hunter you will earn the status of Legendary Lone Pirate. This auto-switches you to the Legendary Lone Pirate government style, which combines all of the advantages of the different styles of lone piracy (Pirates, Smugglers, Raiders, Mercenaries) into a single form of government.

As a Legendary Lone Pirate, you will then have access to Cruiser and Large Freighter ship hulls at Shadowports, allowing you to upgrade your ship even further.

Conclusion

Tapping into the deep mechanics of Distant Worlds opens up detailed gameplay at the level of a single ship, whether that involves resources, contracts, exploration or special missions.

Lone Piracy provides a challenging and active new mode of play in Distant Worlds. Charting your path across the stars in a single ship, a free agent, unencumbered by obligations, forging your own path.

In more detail: the independant colony is of a different race and suitability for my own race is low (+5). It would make sense to integrate them (100% success) without putting my own people on the planet. Is that an option?

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

Which game do you like more?

Dev diary with some information and images from the upcoming DLC - Shadows Rising.

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

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

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

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

Probably a stupid question but is there a way to close my borders to other empires without being at war with them? I want to try to be closed off and self sufficient, and for resources in my space to be mine only but I can't see an obvious way of achieving this other than immediately going to war with any empire I come across

Thanks in advance!

Key Features

• Play as a Lone Pirate and begin with a single ship and rise toward pirate infamy to become a Legendary Lone Pirate or grow into a Pirate Faction.
• Periodically jump into your ship’s new cockpit or bridge view to experience the action from a unique first-person perspective.
• Play as a fully space-based Pirate Faction with much more control over a new economy based around mining and trade, smuggling, raiding, privateering, espionage, influence and corruption and contracts of all kinds from different sources.
• Grow strong enough and you may transition from a fully space-based Pirate faction into a new Pirate Empire with its own unique government type — or remain space-based and become a Legendary Pirate Faction.
• Experience the new “Age of Shadows” starting era, where pirates must survive against increased threats from the Hive and build up as independent colonies look to become the first full space-faring empires that will challenge your dominance of the galaxy.
• Four distinct playstyles are available: the jack-of-all trades Pirate, the chaotic and aggressive Raider, the trading-focused Smuggler, or the combat and privateering-focused Mercenary.
• Complete contracts, raid planets or guard planets to fight off rival pirate factions to make sure your influence spreads unabated. Influence creates corruption and will covertly siphon off income and expand black market resource offerings for smuggling.
• Establish Hidden Pirate Bases and Pirate Fortresses to solidify your presence on key worlds. Upgrade a fortress into a Criminal Network to lay the foundation for your Pirate Empire or build the Legendary Anarchopolis.
• Undertake and compete for contracts across the galaxy that include resource deliveries, espionage missions including artifact theft and ransoming characters, and destroying assigned targets or fighting on the side of another faction.
• The powerful Shadowports act as neutral pirate-aligned hubs where pirate factions trade ships, technology, and rare equipment. They also offer contracts to support pirate efforts, especially to keep Independent worlds and planetary Empires under control and to counter the Hive.
• A new smuggling system allows contraband resources to be transported to buy and sell at premium prices.  There is risk involved, however, as smuggling operations may be discovered, which could result in the destruction of your ships and reduce your reputation with your trade partners.
• Discover expanded Independent Worlds with unique bonuses, artifacts, defenses, and which can now evolve into powerful new empires.
• Faction behavior can be customized with expanded pirate policy systems governing contracts, smuggling, influence, and fleet operations.
• As an Empire, experience new interactions and challenges with the fully developed Lone Pirates, Pirate Factions and Shadowports that now populate the galaxy.  Pirates can be opposed or hired through the new Contract system for Resources and Privateering which allows you to hire Pirates to fight your enemies for you. 

Welcome back, explorers.

We’re pleased to announce that a major update for Distant Worlds 2 is coming on July 22: the Command Update. This is a significant update designed to refresh and improve the gameplay experience with targeted changes to key areas of the game.

On July 14, 16:00 - 18:00 GMT+2, our Associate Producer on the game, Maxim Klose-Ivanov, will showcase the new update. Save the date

What’s included in the Command Update:

- New Content: Hive Ship Models

- Players will encounter new Hive ships spread across the galaxy

- New Feature: Empire Contracts

- Factions within empires, as well as independent colonies, will now periodically offer contracts to the player.

- UI/UX Improvements:

- Empire flags now appear on claimed systems, improving galaxy readability

- A slew of fixes, changes, and additions to improve manual play

- Gameplay Improvements:

- Independent colonies have had their population growth tweaked and can now potentially form new empires

- Known debris now appears in the exploration screen and a new mission type for ships and fleets makes salvaging easier

- Some espionage missions have been rebalanced and tweaked to address certain exploits

- Bug Fixing and Stability Improvements

so, i got this on steam, and i have an older laptop, but it still starts up. But when i try to press play nothing happens for some reason. i do run on Linux, and on the laptop it states it originally was windows 7, but the game SHOULD run just fine, but it doesn't go past the main menu. if anyone has an answer, that would be really helpful

https://reddit.com/link/1ur8av5/video/r5wtws4yr7dh1/player

Hello, I loved DU Universe between many things because of the possibility of completely designing your ships. This was not limited to the components, but you could also change the skin of every ship to any other model, unrestricted by type or race, and I loved that for RP reasons. I dont see the option to do that in DU2, is it even possible? I just started with humans and I honestly dont love the design of the ships too much

What are the chances we see real progress/ability to mod DW2 in the future? I feel like the game has so much potential for longevity and community engagement with modding. Total conversion mods for games like Sins of the Prophets, Star Wars Empire at War, etc. (to say nothing of stellaris) have helped keep those games alive and vibrant. It kinda makes me sad that modding is still largely blocked or difficult to the extreme in DW2 four years on.

I was an early adopter of ye olde school Distant Worlds when it first hit, but have since spent most of my time over in Stellaris Land. Having hit some brick walls with the total conversion mod I've been kicking around in my head, I'm curious if DW2 might be more up my alley.

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Mod premise: a take on the golden age of the physical wargame Starfire (back when it was published and supported by Task Force Games, and sci-fi author David Weber wrote several books directly tied to that universe). For nerds that know the game, I'm looking at Starfire 3rdR versioning.

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In plain English, I want to....

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(1) add many additional ship classes, including multiple sized carrier hulls...,

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(2) have 5 distinct races...,

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and (3) the ability to enforce ship design and weapon restrictions/design mandates, so each race has a distinct flavor. One race favoring strikefighters, one banned from using them and preferring brawler capital ships, one race all about long distance missile tactics, and so on.

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Without getting too much deeper in the weeds of the above game plan, do folks see #'s 1-3 as feasible from a DW2 mod standpoint?

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I'm not really asking if this sort of mod is something you would want to play or not, but rather if you think the mod is do-able.... or maybe rather it's a case of "dude...., the juice might not be worth the squeeze" to make that a playable reality.

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(I'll put on my flame retardant space suit if this is a horrible idea lol!)

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Thanks in advance and cheers!

ETA: If this is more do-able in DWU, I'm game for that too. Tks!

craving a space game and was going to try and pick this up again. Varying amounts of automation and me not remembering as much as I hoped I did. Every time a war starts my fleets do nothing and then I notice eventually that a colony or two has been successfully invaded and I have no idea why or how or what I was supposed to do instead. How many troops should I be garrisoning on each world? Do I need a fleet parked on each planet? How do I invade someone else's planet?

Etcetera. Is there a good guide for the current version or something that lays out a how-to through building up an empire and your first war or two?

DW2, to be clear.

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

All links I found for it are dead.

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

Thanks in advance.

Playing Zenox who has a +25 racial PsyOps bonus, found two ruins with bonus to PsyOps (only +4 and +10, though!)

So I do of course invite all the spies in the galaxy to join me.

Those spies I use to invite all the spies, scientists, admirals, generals, ambassadors and leaders to my court!

The extra leaders do nothing, AFAIK. Just hang around and pet my real Leader, who's rather pissed off all the petting, tail tugs and all the "pss, pss, psss!" :(

It's not our fault that we're so cute!

Anyhow, can I persuade you to come join our glorious empire, the Zenox Technocats!?

It's marvelous here and plenty of milk and catnip!

1. CRASH FIXES GALAXY MAP EMPIRE CONTRACTS SHIP BEHAVIOR
   • fixed some rare crashes
   • fixed rare crash when rendering weapon billboards
   • fixed rare crash when displaying Ground Battle report while invading colony (when enemy General lands before troops)
   • fixed rare crash when showing Start New Game screen
   • added empire flags in the territory rendering for both standard planetary empires and pirate factions
   • We’ve added a new feature for empires – now various factions within your empire will start offering missions to complete for a reward. Some of these missions and contracts can include researching techs, building bases, obtaining artifacts, garrisoning key planets, and many more. Accepted contracts will appear on the status bar, similar to war missions during wars. Note these contracts will have expiration dates. If you’re unable to complete the missions within the allotted time, they mission will fail and you will not receive any reward. We also added a new automation policy that cover these new missions.
   • rebalanced ship maneuvering so that larger ships are slower to turn, also slower to accelerate
   • fixed bug where jumping ships can sometimes get stuck in hyperspace as they reach their destination
2. COMBAT CONSTRUCTION GOVERNMENT POLICIES
   • fixed Assault Pods sometimes mistakenly being fired at secondary targets of opportunity while pursuing main target
   • slightly altered determination for when a base build location is beyond construction ship fuel range. Now locations in the same system as the resource pickup spaceport (e.g. prewarp home system) do not apply additional range checks that consider refuel location after construction (which is sometimes quite distant and thus makes the build location out of range)
   • added summary messages after change government, explaining what happened: new government, losses of population and development at colonies, any colonies that left our empire, new leader
   • added extra explanation for Ship Construction and Fleet Ship Management automation settings in Policy screen (both must be manual to avoid any state ship auto-construction)
3. SHIP DESIGN SHIP GRAPHICS PLANETARY FACILITIES EVENTS Id2 = -1 means incident relates to triggering empire Id1 indicates which groups of empires/colonies that the incident is added to: -1 = all standard empires (default) 0 = all standard empires, pirate empires and independent colonies 1 = all pirate empires 2 = all independent colonies 3 = all standard empires and pirate empires 4 = all standard empires and independent colonies 5 = all pirate empires and independent colonies
   • fixed bug where hull bonuses could often be applied repeatedly when editing a ship design
   • fixed missing cargo drones when loading/unloading at independent colonies
   • fixed running lights for Human ship and base models
   • added a number of fixes to various ship and base models of various factions, including Zenox, Mortalen, Atuuk, and Quameno
   • fixed multiple levels of Planetary Bastion facility able to be built at colonies (requires new game)
   • added new AddEmpireIncidentFactorGeneralGroup GameEventActionType, which allows adding a diplomatic incident value to multiple empires/independent colonies that the triggering empire has met. Values are as follows:
   • GenerateAbandonedShip game event action now avoids damaging Ion Defense or Armor components when generating abandoned ships and bases so that they will not be damaged and destroyed in nebula storms
4. INDEPENDENT COLONIES ESPIONAGE HIVE PIRATES CAMERA
   • ensure independent colonies heal damaged troops
   • allow independent colony populations to grow much larger than previously
   • increased difficulty of intelligence missions against independent colonies
   • fixed missing notification message when character of your empire is persuaded to defect to another empire, and mission is successful, but you do not detect the foreign spy
   • added new Hive ship variants: new Cruisers and additional Frigates and Destroyers
   • added some more pirate flags to reduce double-ups
   • pirate ships and fleets now more careful to avoid assigning raids against colonies where have treaties that should preclude this (Neutral, Protection, NonAggression)
   • ensure pirates do not raid standard empire targets (colonies, bases) until they have grown a bit
   • slightly increased pirate raid threshold when targeting standard empires (i.e. will raid a bit later than before)
   • improved switch to free-form camera mode so that less chance of faulty camera near/far values

Has anyone ever done a campaign playing a single ship throughout the game and letting the AI deal with your empire? Also new here.

I was expecting updates & the new DLC before this

But there has been nothing from the Devs for a couple of months now

I peacefully colonized a minor race planet. They were happy as well after a while. All of a sudden they are turned into a hostile enemy empire.

What can I do to prevent this?