As with all my mods I have something of a configuration file in the scripted_variables file you can use if you like, though there isn't much there this time. It lets you change various aspects of what is listed below.

Colony Age Details:
You need communications with an alien empire to see their colony ages.

Primeval World (Only Fallen)
Ancient World (200 years + )
Old World (100 years - 200 years)
Mature World (51 - 100 years)
Established World (26 - 50 years)
Young World (11 - 25 years)
New World (<10 Years)

Your homeworld age at game start is by default "1" - as in, you've just got FTL capabilities. You can customise that for roleplay if you like in the scripted_variables file.


Ecology / Wildlife / Biome View Details:
You need to scan a world first to see the special ecology icon - they aren't visible in observer mode, either.

General:
1. Presapient life
2. Terraforming
3. Devastation
4. Archaic Flora (Fallen)
5. Archaic Fauna (Fallen)

Modifiers:
1. Titanic life (and delicious titans)
2. Migrating Forests (and reserve)
3. Exofungus Infestation
4. Alien Infestation
5. Predatory Plants
6. Cunning flora
7. Nutritious Food
8. Invasive Xenoflora (OR spreading invasive / overwhelming invasive)

Star Light Details:
I spent a good deal of time wondering why Stellaris worlds often feel less "Alien" and exotic than alien environments depicted in other media. And one of the big reasons I think that is because of colour and lighting.

The local star now has two impacts on your planet view.
First, it will physically place the star in the sky above your cities - so you'll see it shining down on your populations! I think the default city view, with it's dynamic portrayal of different sized cities and moons and orbital rings and stuff is really magical and cool - this feature adds more to that! Black holes, binary systems, trinary systems and so on are all now visible on your alien worlds. Mousing over the star (or stars) will give a little detail about them on a tooltip which also explains the lighting changes (explained below in a second). The star image won't appear above tomb worlds, as their city art depicts fairly heavy clouds that would obscure the star from view. (Quite ironic since tomb worlds are supposed to have no atmosphere in Vanilla, but let's not over think it - this was Paradoxes art implementation and I'll stick with it). Similarly uninhabitable worlds and other planets with unique/weird art in vanilla won't portray the stars up there.

Second, the star will actually shine coloured light onto your colony, tinting the planet and giving it a cool alien irradiance. The effect is fairly subtle, as I really didn't want to tramp on the existing art - but just to provide some diversity. Interestingly, if you look at promotional material for early game editions you'll see they play with the colour balance and saturation of the planet art and tiles a lot, too. So not only does this mod bring planet backgrounds back for your buildings, it'll also similarly tint them in fun ways!

One way in which I've tried to make the effect more prominent without compromising or tampering with the underlying art is that I've made the artistic planet frames also change colour based on the local star. This is a fun technique you can see Paradox do with frames on the diplomacy screen (different empire diplomacy subtly rethemes the dialogue window).

Not all stars cast light and tint your planet, however. I think it's really important that "clean" art has a place in the mod. These are the decisions I've made:

Untinted:
Class-G Stars do not tint your planet. Theoretically I could go with a slightly yellow tint here. However: Sol in real life is a class-G star so I'm treating the class as the sort of "Default" natural/unaffected look. It's anthropocentric but consider this: When we find Sol in game and look at earth, we wouldn't expect it to be tinted super yellow (or any other colour). And, ultimately, you are a human that evolved on earth with this light, so I've made it baseline.

Other miscellaneous stars also have no assignment: Pulsars, Neutron Stars, and Astral scars. Same will be true for random modded star classes.


Class-A Stars = Blue tint

Class-B Stars = Purple tint (very alien and fun one!)

Class-F Stars = White Tint

Class-K Stars = Orange Tint

Class-M and Class-M Giants = Deep Red Tint (another fun one)

Black Holes = Dark Tint (doesn't completely remove the light of the world for art/useability reasons, but dims it in a fun way).

Viridescent Lightbringer (Toxoids) = Green Tint

I'm not sure what the spawn rates for a lot of this stuff really is if I'm honest. Can habitable planets even appear in black hole systems in Vanilla? Well, maybe you got one from a mod and in which case there are some fun interactions to find!


Weathers Effect Details:
Weathers List:
Rain, Storm, Snow, Blizzard, Dust, Fog.

Lots of the following information you can customise for yourself in the scripted_variables file. But by default here is how the mod works:

At game start 30% of the standard, habitable worlds in the galaxy will receive weather of some sort.

The type of weather they receive naturally is determined by their climate:

Dry worlds can be dusty.
Cold Worlds can be snowing or experiencing blizzards.
Wet worlds (and savannah worlds) can be rainy or stormy.

Lastly, the foggy weather can appear on ALL worlds.

Natural weather won't appear on weird planet classes, only the basic habitable ones. But you can artificially change weather, too:

Changing weathers:
You can only change the weather of your own colonies and after you have the "Weather Control Systems" technology.
You can also only change the weather once every ten years.

There is no habitability or other game-play involved here at all! I'm aware there are a lot of amazing concepts! But this was always meant to be a purely UI mod. This is just for a bit of fun.