Xeno rework Expansion (WIP) 5.3

The Hive:
      Playable Xenomorph Species — a dedicated XENO species class with a deep pool of biological, behavioral, and body traits. (seeded by Xenomorph Species Rework)
      Three Brood Lineages — Standard Xenomorph, Spitter, and Deacon, each with its own prescripted empire and AI personality. (seeded by Xenomorph Species Rework)
      Nine Origins — hive starts from apex Prime to the Queen Mother's Throne, Laboratory Escapees, Crashed Derelict, Scattered Brood, Acheron Survivor, and the Black Resin Spitter Cradle — plus two captor-side origins for everyone else.
      Egg & Offspring Economy — drone clutches and royal egg-layers produce Xenomorph Eggs; brood tenders mature them into Offspring that pay for research chains, growth, and expansion. Run dry and the brood collapses.
      The Royal Ladder — Queens, Brood Queens, Matriarchs, Empresses, and the Queen Mother as jobs, buildings, rulers, and guards, with Praetorian and Paladin defense castes.
      The Hive Evolution Chamber — every pop the Hive converts feeds an Evolution Point pool; spend it in a dedicated menu to cultivate exotic war-castes: Widow, Pyrogen, Puppeteer, Warlock. (caste roster inspired by TGMC; menu inspired by Plague Inc)
      War-Castes & Host-Lines — Runners, Lurkers, Spitters, Crushers, Chargers, Aquatic Stalkers, Neomorphs, Ravagers, and Boilers as armies; consumed host species unlock hybrid strains with their own traits. (TGMC and the Alien franchise)
      The Capture Pipeline — the Raiding bombardment stance, battlefield leader captures, and fleet-wreck harvesting feed the Captive Pits, an interactive menu of long-form captive event trees.
      Brood-Tribute Subjugation — defeated empires become permanent broodstock tributaries; the galaxy answers with the Restraint casus belli that frees every subject the Hive holds.
      Divergent Brood Ecologies — fully infested worlds mature into one of five permanent ecological roles, so no two hive worlds read the same.
      Planetary Adaptation — gradually raise Xenomorph habitability through different approaches, costs, and risks. (seeded by Xenomorph Species Rework)
      Black Resin Development — cultivate hive worlds into resin networks and Black Resin Brood-Worlds, the advanced end-state of world consumption. (seeded by Xenomorph Species Rework)
      Queen-Network Systems — capped, tech-gated research and diplomatic interactions with known Xenomorph empires, managed from a report dashboard. (seeded by Xenomorph Species Rework)
      Adaptive Strain Cycle — the brood periodically mutates between Hyper-Aggressive, Docile Breeder, and Infiltrator strains. (seeded by Xenomorph Species Rework)
      Galactic Infestation — infestation spreads innately through contact with every Xenomorph empire; the Virulent Strain civic amplifies it. (seeded by Xenomorph Infection)
      Brood Architecture — specialized Queen, military, breeding, research, recycling, and harvesting buildings across the hive economy. (seeded by Xenomorph Species Rework)

The Captors:
      Xeno Traffickers & Xeno Keepers — origins that begin with an enslaved Xenomorph secondary species (the trait locked in from creation) as stock-in-trade or livestock.
      The Captor Industry — containment labs, specimen vaults, breeding programs, rendering works, exhibition galleries, and corporate civics from trafficking syndicates to eradication mandates. (adult systems built on Lustful Void)
      The Captive Queen — hold a living Matriarch: condition her, breed her, ransom her, display her, or lose her to a containment breach, through her own interactive menu.
      Biosecurity & Containment — anti-xenomorph civics, technologies, and tradition trees for ordinary empires that would rather survive the Hive than own it. (seeded by Xenomorph Infection)

Both sides:
      23 tradition trees covering captures, brood development, infestation, containment, and ascension, with 16 ascension perks.
      Compat patches for Ethics & Civics: Bug Branch and Expanded Gestalts: Forgotten Queens ship alongside the mod.

x21 Planet Types — five infested world families, each with Fortress / Brood / Foundry specializations, plus the resin end-state

x23 Tradition Trees — 23  Tradition trees across hive, captor, corporate, and defensive play

x31 Civics + x9 Origins — hive doctrines, corporate exploitation, and anti-xenomorph defense

x142 Traits — 118 species traits and 24 leader traits

New Features
The Hive Evolution Chamber. A new empire edict opens the Evolution Chamber — a dedicated menu crowned by a green-yellow hex-lattice of the brood's expanding genome. Every pop your Hive converts feeds a pool of Evolution Points; spend them in the Chamber to cultivate four exotic assault castes along a short branching path: the Widow (a cheap spawning swarm), the Pyrogen (living incendiaries), the Puppeteer (necrotic terror troops), and the Warlock (the psychic capstone). The more the Hive consumes, the stranger it becomes.
      Brood-Tribute Subjugation. Winning a Brood-Tribute war now binds the defeated empire to the Hive permanently as an oppressive tributary — a standing herd, kept and drawn from for as long as the Hive wills it.
      Restraint — the galaxy's immune response. Other empires gain a counter casus belli against any Hive that holds tributaries. Victory frees every subject the Hive holds, and the freed remember their liberator.
      Divergent Brood Ecologies. When planetary adaptation completes, each infested world (unless bound for the Black Resin) matures into one of five permanent brood-ecology roles — Spawning Grounds, Hunting Grounds, Synaptic Shoals, Acid Marshes, or Carrion Fields.

New Content
Three world-doctrine civics for hive empires: Synaptic Ganglion (the Hive's first empire-size lever), Metabolic Strip-Mining (the crust is food — plus an exclusive decision that chews worlds down to husks), and Digestive Assimilation (stronger armies; every won invasion triggers an empire-wide Digestion Surge).
      Two egg-economy civics: Fecund Brood (egg-laying castes produce more) and Hatchery Doctrine (faster hatching, better storage).
      Two research-locked assault castes: the Ravager Pack (melee elite) and the Boiler Battery (fragile long-range acid artillery).

Balance Changes
Streamlining sweep: removed dormant and never-finished content, merged redundant buildings into clean upgrade chains, reduced clutter. Nothing visible in a normal game was lost.
      Two tradition picks that granted nothing but a tooltip now carry real effects.
      The carapace forge building chain is buildable again.
      Brood-Tribute's immediate plunder was trimmed — the permanent tributary is the reward now.

Fixes
The monthly colony flicker is gone. A one-time colony-setup routine was wrongly re-running every month, briefly stamping hive districts onto worlds that can't hold them and re-adding buildings that a mismatched self-destruct check immediately tore down. It now runs exactly once per colony, the self-destruct checks were corrected, and colonies without any xenomorph population can no longer end up with no valid capital building.
      The unavoidable start-of-game collapse is gone. Every hive start was seeded with a research building that drains Xenomorph Offspring before any producer exists — guaranteeing a deficit spiral into a ten-year bankruptcy that demolition couldn't escape. Instead, every hive colony now starts with a Hatchling Nursery, the offspring producer the economy expected all along.
      The introduction primers no longer overflow the screen (oversized under UI Overhaul Dynamic). Both are now short cover pages with per-topic sections you browse like a menu; nothing was cut.
      The captor origins' Xenomorph stock is a true Xenomorph again. The Kept Xenomorphs secondary species (Xeno Keepers / Xeno Traffickers) now starts with the Xenomorph trait locked in — previously it couldn't be picked at creation, which also locked out every dependent xenomorph sub-trait.
      Royal Jelly Pods come pre-built on every Xenomorph empire start — the origins that didn't seed them (Acheron Survivor, Black Resin Spitter Cradle, Deacon Brood) now begin with them too.
      Fourteen buildings finally explain themselves — the royal capital chain, egg chambers, host-processing line, Submission Den, Hunt Arena and more had placeholder descriptions; each now describes what the structure is for and how its castes fulfill it.
      The three prescripted Xenomorph empires were being silently hidden from the empire-selection list; rebuilt and visible again.
      Hive-only civics no longer appear in other empires' civic menus, and anti-xenomorph civics no longer appear for gestalts.
      The Galactic Infestation civic was renamed Virulent Strain — the infestation itself is innate to every Xenomorph empire; the civic only amplifies it.
      The Black Resin origin's homeworld now seeds the correct hive-world districts.
      A deep verification pass revived a family of silently dead script: the hive-world conversion one-project-at-a-time interlock works (and locks against vanilla arcology again), the queen-capture decision actually resolves instead of eating its cost, several purge outcomes now fire, the egg-storage caretaker grants its full capacity bonus, hive-empire job variants receive the same category bonuses as everyone else, both custom bombardment stances show real names, and assorted parse errors and unreadable tooltips were cleared.
      Cleaned broken "?" icons out of the Xeno Traffickers, Xeno Keepers, and Aliens of War tooltips.
      Localisation repairs: missing job plural forms no longer leak raw text into tooltips, the Specimen Gallery renames were re-attached to their correct internal keys, and the Broodmare Pen family (technology, building, job) had its missing text restored.

UI & Icons
31 new custom icons: 12 civic icons, 12 job icons, and 7 tradition pick icons — the five Brood Harvest picks finally each have their own icon.
      A custom green-yellow hex-lattice banner headlines the Hive Evolution Chamber.
      Redundant "available only to..." and "cannot be combined with..." tooltip lines were stripped — the menus already show what you can and cannot take.

Older releases
      Earlier release history will be archived here with the next public update.