No first contact, help please?

[PoofyGummy]

I made a bug report about this too, but this is too weird to leave to that forum and maybe....
maybe someone can help me with the console commands.

Since Stellaris is about interacting with aliens it seems odd that such a major point would fail and yet it does.
I am playing a humanoid, pacifist, fanatic materialist democracy with the machinist origin. Civics are technocracy and efficient bureaucracy.
You know something that should be all out easy for space exploration.

And yet no matter what i do i can not get first contact to happen. I have played to a hundred years after game start discovered the entire galaxy, and the "make first contact" tutorial eventually disappeared, but it never was resolved. No matter how many times i reload the beginning and how i try to meet other species:

• sometimes the first thing i get is a notification that they want to establish an embassy, and a popup saying that i encountered aliens
• sometimes i get a popup saying that i encountered an alien fleet, and we could not establish communication, at the same time as getting a notification that they closed their borders, and i can establish first contact policy (friendly, neutral, or cautious) in a different popup, and then the popup about having encountered aliens.
• sometimes i encounter a caravan first, and the first popup is just them offering some trade, and i get a popup about having encountered aliens
• sometimes i encounter a remnant first and i can select how to respond to them, but i don't get any popups about having just met aliens

In the cases where i get a popup about having encountered aliens the tutorial for first contact appears as in the picture above, but in neither of those cases is there actually any mission log research i could do into it.
The only occasions where a proper first contact screen DOES come up is when it doesn't matter (like with remnant empires), or when there are no options (like with trader enclaves).

This is especially annoying, since whatever system is broken is apparently also responsible for meeting space fauna, and xenofauna.
I never found animals to uplift despite having the uplifting technology. I never found pre-warp species. And most importantly crystals and amoebas are always immediately hostile and i get no option to research or pacify them.

This picture is of a trade fleet arriving. It starts the first contact tutorial, but not the actual first contact. They just come to my home planet and start peddling bunkbeds.
There is no research.

I also heard that there are console commands that can be used to trigger some events manually.
Could i do this to save the game i spent a week in?

 

[rubert]

I haven't used the tutorial in ages and I wouldn't be surprised if it was bugged to some degree if you encounter non-empire faction first. Sadly I don't know how you could use events to fix the save game, I'd probably just restart the game without tutorial and play that way.

 

[PoofyGummy]

No, no i DID. I restarted from the day1 save. Before i started the tutorial. No matter what, the interactions are bugged.

 

[Losttruppen]

Start a new game with tutorial off, if the problem persists it wasn't the tutorial. If it's gone then your bug report is about all you can do. There is very little hope this problem will be solved for you to salvage your current save.

 

[PoofyGummy]

Read what i wrote above please. I restarted several times, from the save BEFORE you pick the tutorial. It's the same every time tutorial or not.

 

[Olterin]

I'm not sure the tutorial is still accurate - first contact is done through a different interface these days via envoys. Not sure if the tutorial interferes with that - look for a blue radio array icon in a hexagon on the galaxy map - where you first made the encounter - to initiate first contact proceedings once you have encountered new aliens. This *used to be* in the situation log as a research project.

 

[GloatingSwine]

They do still appear in the situation log as well usually, it has a button to open the contact window.

But they should also appear as a status icon at the top of the screen and a little blue icon on the first system you saw them in on the galaxy map.

 

[Empire of Terra Nova]

if alien empires get communications to you the contact is being established without research

if they were the first one to finish the first contact research they too will establish communications to you

unlike to normal empires, the research of the first contact to space fauna and caraveneers takes only a few turns

so either just keep on looking for a notification on the top of your main screen or check the situation log (unknown aliens will be called something like "alpha/beta/gamma aliens" or so)

 

[PoofyGummy]

As i said above i never got any unknown aliens whatsoever. They all became known the instant i entered the same system as they did.
They also always establish communication first in that save, and instantly, without any sort of research.

 

[Ryika]

Sounds like the game's using the old diplo contact system for some reason. My best guess would be that you have some old mod running without noticing, or something along those lines. Not sure how else that'd happen, so check the launcher and see if the playset contains any mods.

If that's not the case, do a complete reinstall, meaning uninstall first, delete the folder and anything in it that's left, before installing the game again.

 

[PoofyGummy]

Sounds like the game's using the old diplo contact system for some reason. My best guess would be that you have some old mod running without noticing, or something along those lines. Not sure how else that'd happen, so check the launcher and see if the playset contains any mods.

If that's not the case, do a complete reinstall, meaning uninstall first, delete the folder and anything in it that's left, before installing the game again.

Ooooh that's interesting.....I never used mods. I downloaded the game, opened it, started a save, and now a few months later i started playing with it again.
When was the old diplo contact system on?

Also, i haven't mentioned it here yet i think, but i already tested it on a new save and everything seems to be working fine. It's a completely different experience with having to research the aliens you meet. Really cool and realistic!
It's just that save - sadly the one i spent a week on - that is bugged.

 

[Empire of Terra Nova]

Ooooh that's interesting.....I never used mods. I downloaded the game, opened it, started a save, and now a few months later i started playing with it again.
When was the old diplo contact system on?

Also, i haven't mentioned it here yet i think, but i already tested it on a new save and everything seems to be working fine. It's a completely different experience with having to research the aliens you meet. Really cool and realistic!
It's just that save - sadly the one i spent a week on - that is bugged.

it happens quite often that old save games are not compatible with the newer game versions, especially after a major update

 

[rubert]

Ooooh that's interesting.....I never used mods. I downloaded the game, opened it, started a save, and now a few months later i started playing with it again.
When was the old diplo contact system on?

3.0 patch reworked First Contact so that would explain why your old save didn't work properly. The patch and the associated DLC (Nemesis) was released in April 2021 so if you started the game before it likely broke when you continued it in the newer version.

For future reference you can (in Steam at least) switch to the older version of the game though in your case it probably would not have helped if you loaded the old save -> saved it in 3.0 and then tried to rollback to the older version.

 

[PoofyGummy]

Quite sad that the older saves wouldn't work properly. Especially since it would have been trivial to add backwards compatibility here.
You just need a new flag to indicate whether or not the empire has been researched yet. Granted you might lose the ability to communicate with long standing friends, but that's easier resolved than not being able to do diplomacy.

I suspect it isn't even this that is the issue, but the first contact system as a whole somehow.

Like even before 3.0 you were supposedly able to pacify space creatures.
And that's completely missing as well.

 

[Troyen]

Like even before 3.0 you were supposedly able to pacify space creatures.
And that's completely missing as well.

Doesn't this depend on your empire ethics? Believe you can still pacify the space amoeba and crystalline entities if you're Xenophile or Pacifist.

 

[PoofyGummy]

Doesn't this depend on your empire ethics? Believe you can still pacify the space amoeba and crystalline entities if you're Xenophile or Pacifist.

Do i have to repeat this every post? xD
I was playing a pacifist empire.
And the interaction window still doesn't come up.

So the savegame not only has the new diplomacy stuff missing, but also completely disables the first contact screen, EVEN with spacecreatures.

 

[rubert]

Like others said and you self noticed it, you need to make entirely new game or rollback to the earlier version of the game and load a save file not touched in the latest version. Peaceful interactions with Space Fauna are still in the game.

Quite sad that the older saves wouldn't work properly. Especially since it would have been trivial to add backwards compatibility here.

That would add huge amount of complexity when making any changes for little gain, essentially freezing the game development to just minor bug and balance changes. Not going to happen with the current PDX development style. Save games should have version marked in them and the game should warn before loading if the save is from the older (or newer) version of the game to prevent issues like this.

 

[PoofyGummy]

Well anyway i discarded the save.
Thank you guys for helping me figure out what happened.

 

[Ryika]

Save games should have version marked in them and the game should warn before loading if the save is from the older (or newer) version of the game to prevent issues like this.

Mostly off topic, but they do have that information:

version="Lem v3.1.2"

They also have DLC information:

required_dlcs={
    "Ancient Relics Story Pack"
    "Anniversary Portraits"
    "Apocalypse"
    "Distant Stars Story Pack"
    "Federations"
    "Horizon Signal"
    "Humanoids Species Pack"
    "Leviathans Story Pack"
    "Lithoids Species Pack"
    "Megacorp"
    "Necroids Species Pack"
    "Nemesis"
    "Plantoids Species Pack"
    "Synthetic Dawn Story Pack"
    "Utopia"
}

Unfortunately it's not used to warn the player though.