by Eladrin

Hello, Stellaris community!

Last week I said the next dev diary would be on the 26th, but I didn’t want to wait that long to discuss our plans moving forward.

This week we released 4.0.21, with the following changes:

Improvement

• Storm Aftermath events will no longer happen in systems where you are constructing megastructures. Meaning that it will no longer randomly spawn an anomaly under your Dyson swarm that was 99% done.

• Save game transfer speed is now increased in multiplayer by default. If you encounter difficulties in transferring saves, the host can change to using the former transfer mode through settings.

Bugfix

• Memorialists now give their priests the ethics modifiers their civic tooltip promises

• Armies that have landed on planets show properly in the outliner

• Reforming the government to Genesis Guides allows building Genesis Arks

• Ringworld districts now correctly spawn on pre-ftl ringworlds

• Fixed ringworlds colonized by gestalt empires having a mysterious city district that shouldn't exist.

• Fixed the leader survived notification text

• Fixed Fear of the Dark random empires being able to get bioships

• The Purity Breach event can no longer destroy colonies

• Fixed an error preventing refugees from behaving properly

• The Fatal Mutations event should no longer destroy colonies

• The Necrophage Purge option will now only be displayed if you can take it, this is to avoid confusion when pops might be getting purged in your empire unintentionally, such as Hive Pops being disconnected from their hive.

• Evolutionary Predator Empires can now once more gain and keep the Psionic Ephase trait

• The Entrepreneur traits once again grant Commercial Pact Efficiency

• Serviles should no longer end up as Specialists or Elites

• Removed an errant plus from some of the mutagenic habitability tooltips

• Fixed the tooltips listing the effects for the Subsume World decision and Xeno-Compatibility AP

• Biologist jobs that aren't zookeepers now have the correct upkeep.

• Fixed an issue that could occur when machine empires colonised ringworlds.

• Fixed an issue where AI empires would respond with generic text when accepting a Status Quo peace deal, instead of dynamic responses.

• Corrected a localization issue where an AI empire accepting peace would incorrectly refer to the player as having "better things to do" instead of themselves.

• Secondary specializations for fortresses and civilian industries on special worlds correctly have doubled jobs.

• Transport ships for eager explorer civics now equip a subspace drive if you haven't researched hyperdrives. They will automatically swap once hyperdrives have been researched.

• Fix a tooltip in the Demographics tab of the Empire view

• Gestalt empires have access to fallen empire trade buildings

Balance

• Necrophage fixes/buffs:

  • Pops with the Necrophage trait can now grow (slowly) even if there are pops being Necrophaged on their planet.

  • Reduced the Pop Growth Speed penalty on the Necrophage trait from -75% to -50%.

  • Necrophages begin with more of their prepatent species (and fewer of their Necrophage species).

  • Necrophages (and other empires that have multiple species present) should no longer sometimes start with unemployment.

• The Resettlement Prohibited policy now grants +100% Automatic Migration. (In other words, banning manual resettlement increases automatic resettlement.)

• Empires with biological ships can now access repeatable technologies for explosive weapon damage and fire rate

• Machine Worlds now always have their maximum number of jobs.

• Resource Consolidation now starts with fewer Generator and Mining Districts, due to these districts providing 600 jobs each.

• Resource Consolidation no longer has the Malfunctioning Replicator Bay blocker

UI

• The Colonize planet button can now be accessed on the management tab as well as the surface tab

Modding

• Add refresh_auto_generated_ship_designs effect

If you want to see the list of all of the things we fixed in the previous releases, here they are.

We’re continuing to investigate the other issues that you have reported.

It’s time to review the last couple of months and look at what we’ve done and where we’re going from here.

Back in Stellaris Dev Diary #383, I committed to continuing to fix things until the 4.0 release is in the state it needs to be in. 

We’ve released a tremendous number of patches since then at a rapid rate - but our patch cadence has become problematic (and even counterproductive) in some ways. Too often in game development, fixing one bug introduces another - and I haven’t been giving our internal QA testers enough time to fully vet and test the changes we’ve been making. Examples from recent patches include a few weeks ago when an unrelated fix to a pop issue caused Wilderness empires to seemingly randomly destroy themselves by killing all of their biomass, or when another fix just after that caused save games to corrupt and become unloadable. 

We remain committed to continuing to fix things until the 4.0 release is in the state it needs to be in.

We need to change how we’re doing this though, taking a more measured and deliberate approach to allow internal testing to catch up while giving you a more stable environment to play the game in. This means that the patching frequency is going to slow down, but with more impactful releases. Our ongoing plan is to make greater use of Open Betas - the first instance of this is the Wilderness Open Beta that we put up last week (which may or may not ever go live based on your feedback).

We will be more careful in vetting changes and merging them into that ongoing Open Beta, continuing to focus on stability, performance, AI, and bugfixing. My intent is for us to update the Open Beta on a weekly to fortnightly basis depending on internal progress throughout the summer. While the Stellaris team will be continuing development during this time, it will soon become difficult for us to arrange for live patches - barring a critical hotfix or a “eureka moment”, I expect the next 4.0.x live release will be sometime in August. (Which as mentioned earlier, may not include the Wilderness changes.) To the Modders that have been waiting for a moment of stability, now’s your time - and if you run into issues updating your mods, please don’t hesitate to let us know.

For more transparency:

I’m personally currently looking at ways to improve the AI’s behavior. Other things currently in active development are OOS investigations, a number of strata issues that affect slavery, purging, and other oddities among pop employment, and more of a design change rather than a bugfix - based on your feedback we’re looking at having newly grown pops go straight into the Civilian stratum or its appropriate equivalent instead of being unemployed members of their parent pop group. While we liked the verisimilitude of top-heavy planets having more stability issues than ones that were more evenly developed, we acknowledge that having a persistent trickle of unemployed pops feels wrong.

We’re also continuously looking for performance improvements. We’ve found one so far where every empire was calculating their Biomass total far too often - even if they weren’t Wilderness, and while it was one of the heavier scripts in the early portion of the game, that’s not where our biggest problems are.

Some of these will likely go to the Open Beta next week, after more rigorous testing.

I will be putting the Stellaris Dev Diaries on hiatus until August, replacing them with the Open Beta updates on that weekly or fortnightly basis as they occur, and we’ll remain in constant communication with you as we continue to update and improve the game.

Please continue bringing up the issues you find, balance issues you encounter, and providing save games and out of sync logs whenever you can. They help a tremendous amount.

Thank you for playing Stellaris!

by PDX-Loke

Dear Stellaris Fans,

Our latest and greatest Stellaris patch has arrived, resolving a number of bugs as well as bringing further balance to the galaxy.

4.0.21 is now available for download. Please find the changelog below.

Improvement​

• Storm Aftermath events will no longer happen in systems where you are constructing megastructures. Meaning that it will no longer randomly spawn an anomaly under your dyson swarm that was 99% done.

• Save game transfer speed is now increased in multiplayer by default. If you encounter difficulties in transferring saves, the host can change to using the former transfer mode through settings.

Bugfix​

• Memorialists now give their priests the ethics modifiers their civic tooltip promises

• Armies that have landed on planets show properly in the outliner

• Reforming the government to Genesis Guides allows building Genesis Arks

• Ringworld districts now correctly spawn on pre-ftl ringworlds

• Fixed ringworlds colonized by gestalt empires having a mysterious city district that shouldn't exist.

• Fixed the leader survived notification text

• Fixed Fear of the Dark random empires being able to get bioships

• The Purity Breach event can no longer destroy colonies

• Fixed an error preventing refugees from behaving properly

• The Fatal Mutations event should no longer destroy colonies

• The Necrophage Purge option will now only be displayed if you can take it, this is to avoid confusion when pops might be getting purged in your empire unintentionally, such as Hive Pops being disconnected from their hive.

• Evolutionary Predator Empires can now once more gain and keep the Psionic Ephase trait

• The Entrepreneur traits once again grant Commercial Pact Efficiency

• Serviles should no longer end up as Specialists or Elites

• Removed an errant plus from some of the mutagenic habitability tooltips

• Fixed the tooltips listing the effects for the Subsume World decision and Xeno-Compatibility AP

• Biologist jobs that aren't zookeepers now have the correct upkeep.

• Fixed an issue that could occur when machine empires colonised ringworlds.

• Fixed an issue where AI empires would respond with generic text when accepting a Status Quo peace deal, instead of dynamic responses.

• Corrected a localization issue where an AI empire accepting peace would incorrectly refer to the player as having "better things to do" instead of themselves.

• Secondary specializations for fortresses and civilian industries on special worlds correctly have doubled jobs.

• Transport ships for eager explorer civics now equip a subspace drive if you haven't researched hyperdrives. They will automatically swap once hyperdrives have been researched.

• Fix a tooltip in the Demographics tab of the Empire view

• Gestalt empires have access to fallen empire trade buildings

Balance​

• Necrophage fixes/buffs:

  • Pops with the Necrophage trait can now grow (slowly) even if there are pops being Necrophaged on their planet.

  • Reduced the Pop Growth Speed penalty on the Necrophage trait from -75% to -50%.

  • Necrophages begin with more of their prepatent species (and fewer of their Necrophage species).

  • Necrophages (and other empires that have multiple species present) should no longer sometimes start with unemployment.

• The Resettlement Prohibited policy now grants +100% Automatic Migration. (In other words, banning manual resettlement increases automatic resettlement.)

• Empires with biological ships can now access repeatable technologies for explosive weapon damage and fire rate

• Machine Worlds now always have their maximum number of jobs.

• Resource Consolidation now starts with fewer Generator and Mining Districts, due to these districts providing 600 jobs each.

• Resource Consolidation no longer has the Malfunctioning Replicator Bay blocker

UI​

• The Colonize planet button can now be accessed on the management tab as well as the surface tab

• Add refresh_auto_generated_ship_designs effect

by MrFreake_PDX

Hello Stellaris Community!

We’re proud to announce that over the summer, the Stellaris Community Team will be hosting another Mod Jam, with the support of our sponsors at Republic of Gamers!

We’ve had some great results from past Mod Jams, including last year - where for the first time a modder who had never made a mod before placed in the top three. This year, we’ve decided to take a different tack on the classic mod jam setup:

This year you will be choosing the theme!

From now until June 19th, you will be able to vote on the forums, and on discord for one of four themes, and on June 20th, we will officially announce the theme of MODJAM2025 alongside the prizes.

The four themes are:

• Major Event Chain - modders would be asked to make a major event chain similar to the Horizon Signal, that is either associated with a solar system initializer or planet type

• Origins - we have done origins before, back when they were first introduced, but it’s been five years and this theme is a strong contender - modders would be asked to create one unique origin

• Precursor Event Chains - this is another strong contender. With the ability to choose what precursors spawn in the galaxy introduced in 4.0, there’s plenty of room for more (non-canonical) galactic history to be told!

• Crisis Paths - since the introduction of Cosmogenesis in The Machine Age, crisis paths have been moddable, but generally require a lot of work to add to the game when it comes to scripting and artwork (which means we might see fewer finished mods). Modders would be asked to create one unique crisis path and final objective - completing the final objective should trigger the victory screen.

So be sure to vote here and stop by the Stellaris discord to cast your vote for the theme for #MODJAM2025, and we will be back next week to talk about prizes and the theme.

If you’re a modder, sign ups for #MODJAM2025 are open now and will be open until June 20th! Fill out this form - and join us on discord - if you want to participate!

Tentative timeline for #MODJAM2025. This is subject to change.​

We hope you’re all as excited as we are for #MODJAM2025, and we can’t wait to see what the modders come up with this year!

by Eladrin

The Wilderness Open Beta we wrote about in Dev Diary #386 is now available on Steam.

This Open Beta experiments with a different, more robust model for handling Wilderness' mechanics. We believe that it also better captures the spirit of being the planet itself, and provides more control over your economic production. Please see the linked Dev Diary for more details.

Feature​

• Experimental changes to Wilderness:

  • To prevent issues with biomass not being available on planets due to construction, all Wilderness jobs are now automatically worked without requiring biomass. These jobs are worked by your primary species.

  • Jobs for Wilderness are now also properly represented instead of being worked by a single pop with massive workforce bonuses, you now see exactly how the job is worked, and the sliders are also now usable to customize how much of each job will be worked.

  • These changes are intended to prevent situations where some jobs would go unworked, make Wilderness less bug-prone, and are intended to give you more control over your economy in deficit situations. Please provide feedback!

• The experimental fast save transfer for multiplayer is included in this build.

Bugfix​

• Fixed ringworlds colonized by gestalt empires having a mysterious city district that shouldn't exist.

To opt into the Wilderness Open Beta, go to your Steam library, right click on Stellaris -> Properties -> Betas -> select "wilderness- Wilderness Open Beta" branch in the Beta Participation dropdown. You may need to restart Steam to get it to appear.

Our intention is to run this Wilderness Open Beta for the rest of the summer so we can gather feedback on these changes.

by Eladrin

One more before the weekend!

We have another patch today to fix the save game crash once and for all. (I hope.) This one made up 95% of the crashes that occurred in the last 24 hours, so we're feeling good about it. If you're still seeing crashing after this hotfix, please post your save in the bug report forum - it helps a lot.

4.0.20 is deploying now and should make it to all platforms today.

Stellaris 4.0.20 Hotfix​

• Stability: Fixed a remaining issue with loading savegames crashing or freezing the game.

Have a nice weekend!

Edit: stellaris_test has been updated with this as well, with the faster save game transfer. We've added a toggle in settings so you can turn it on and off (defaults to fase), and if this weekend goes well we're expecting to include it in next week's patch.

by PDX-Loke

Hello once again,

The team has created one more patch for you, including a select few fixes to high impact issues discovered in the last patch.

4.0.19 is ready for download now.

STELLARIS 4.0.19 HOTFIX NOTES

Stellaris 4.0.19 Hotfix​

• Improvement: Habitats once again can build Archives in their habitation districts

• Stability: Fixed issue with loading savegames crashing or freezing the game.

We keep fixing and tweaking based on your feedback, accumulating improvements for another proper patch next week.

Until then!

by Eldarin

Hi everyone!

It’s been a little while since our last dev diary - this one’s also going to be a bit short since we’ve been focusing on stabilizing 4.0 as much as we can.

The 4.0.17 and 18 updates we released yesterday is a pretty massive one with some impactful fixes. I'm pleased with the amount of things we got into it.

Here are the release notes:

Improvement​

• The Hive Fallen Empire ships are now available for Biological Ship Empires if you progress down the Cosmogenesis Crisis Path.

• Changes to ecumenopoleis, ring-, nanite-, hive-, and machine worlds:

  • District specialisations now visually swap to the appropriate art and district names for easier differentiation.

  • Secondary districts now have double the jobs of the primary districts.

• Reverted the most recent changes to fallen empire building limitations. We'll be looking at a better solution for a future patch.

  • 4.0.18: Reverted all fallen empire building limitations from 4.0

• Further Improved the Behemoth Fury endings

• Added the Voidspawn Myocardius relic awarded to whomever manages to take down the Elder Voidspawn

• Starbase Capacity tooltip now shows the number of owned systems contributing to Starbase Capacity.

• Habitation districts on knight's habitats now swap to the Order's Demesne.

• The host now gets a tooltip in Multiplayer on the Start Game button with a list of players that are holding up the game

Balance​

• Wilderness Empires no longer have to consolidate 2500 biomass on a planet to build a Grand Archive

• Secondary districts on hive worlds and machine worlds should now support targeted research specialisations

• Wilderness empires now start with a Heartgrove specialisation instead of a Threadway specialisation

• The event A Complete Collection will now only take one pop, avoiding depopulating entire planets.

• AI empires will be more likely to declare a Cosmogenesis empire a crisis as they develop more Infinity Theses

• The Synaptic Lathe will now ask for a refill if it drops below 50 pops instead of letting itself drop all the way to 0.

  • The Lathe had a "stable state" hack that stopped the purge below 40(00) pops to prevent it from decolonizing before - this has been removed as it should no longer be necessary. Burn those pops if you want science.

• The Control Fragment now waits 2 decades before getting upset about your borders. Expand away!

• Fallen Empire biological ships now equip the reactors of one size category larger, this also applies to Cosmogenesis biological ships.

• Resource Consolidation origin needs to have the ability to make more machine (or nanite) worlds to unlock the full potential of their machine world (this includes the doubled jobs in the above patch note)

• Updated weights for techs that unlock rural district specializations

• Doubled the resettlement attractiveness of the Trium Atmospheric Deodorizer(tm).

Bugfix​

• Fixed Wilderness issues

  • It should no longer implode randomly.

  • Balanced effects for Innate Design with Wilderness.

  • Turned Wilderness enforcers into Immunosymbionts to differentiate them from soldier Tamersymbionts.

  • The Wilderness Subterranean Cache building can now be placed in urban and trade district specializations

• Fixed Synaptic Lathe issues

  • The Synaptic Lathe now correctly purges pops and produces science. (Special thanks to /u/Little_Elia for investigating. We fixed some of it differently than you did, but your post helped in identifying the issues.)

  • Pops will correctly process in or out of Neural Chip state if they are moved to or from the Lathe. (They will not be visible in the Neural Chip job until the monthly tick passes.)

  • The Synaptic Lathe purge should once again benefit from things that modify purge speed.

  • The Synaptic Lathe will now ask for a refill if it drops below 50 pops instead of letting itself drop all the way to 0. (The Lathe had a "stable state" hack that stopped the purge below 40 pops to prevent it from decolonizing before - this has been removed as it should no longer be necessary. Burn those pops if you want science.)

  • Fixed how Synaptic Lathe is being displayed in the sector view.

• Fixed non-slaves being assigned to jobs before slaves.

• Fixed recent issues introduced to the Synthetic Fertility origin by removing the invisible purge that was being applied (result in no factions being formed and no leaders being recruitable)

• Virtuality Civilians are now also properly deleted if they do exist somehow. Non-Virtual Civilians can still exist for Virtual Empires.

• You may no longer scrap 50% of your virtual pops for alloys.

• Fixed issues where free traders could start with too many buildings

• Fixed issues with fallen empires spawned by the Scion origin having incorrect buildings and districts

• The composer of strands should no longer devolve thousands of pops. 400 is plenty.

• The Pioneer Politics Agenda now has an appropriate icon.

• Enabled the Heartgrove district specialisation for Wilderness empires

• Treasure Curators now have an actual building icon as their workplace instead of a deposit icon.

• Fixed a rare scenario where Driven Assimilators couldn't assimilate.

• Prevent marking some jobs (criminals, civilians, unemployed) as favorite that should never be prioritized.

• Space Fauna ship size selector will correctly display ship model preview.

• Space Fauna designer will show the progress bar when creating a new design.

• Purging a Gestalt Pop Group will no longer instantly kill all of them. Extract resources to your hearts content!

• Conquered Starbases will no longer have text appear on the "Return Starbase" button

• When checking if ship designs are identical, we now ignore the order of components within a section.

• Fixed saving a Deep Space Citadel design creating duplicate designs and instantly changing the design of your DSCs.

• Update Districts display if their swapped appearance changes

• Processing and Forced Labor Purge should now correctly give resources when purging lithoids or machines

• Habitats now get their districts even when not colonized yet

• Added tooltips to the Behemoth mutation option icons

• Reset Starting System when changing Origins when needed during the Empire Creation

• Mechromancy Empires purging organics once again generate cyborg zombies.

• Blocked Fallen Empire resource extraction buildings from the 6 government building slots

• Blocked the Surface Quarry building on ringworlds and habitats

• Nanotech Research buildings now give regular research jobs, but swap engineers to nanotech researchers

• Researchers for machine intelligences now use more appropriate icons

• Updated the effect tooltips for the Trium Atmospheric Deodorizer(tm) and Cyberdome.

• Empires with Genesis Guides civics now start with a food stockpile and some food income.

UI​

• The "Save As New Design" popup now updates the Save button immediately when you edit the name.

• Fixed ship designer not updating the design name when you change it to the currently saved name.

• Improve Buildings tooltips modifiers handling

• Colony naming will now more often use custom names for the default value (colonizing Mars will propose Mars as the default colony name)

• Fixed some planetary modifier icons that were low resolution

• Fixed some modifiers not appearing in the empire size tooltip.

Performance​

• Reduced mil power recalculations done by outliner fleet entry

• Reduced habitability recalculations done by pop growth/decline

• Reduced amount of times planet view tries to update pop group clothing

Stability​

• Fixed crash in accepting peace due to deal containing transfer of non existing starbase

• Fixed cross OS issue with randomized ethics in pop assembly leading to NUM_POP_GROUPS OOS (this is a big one)

• Fixed mismatch in synchronized/unsynchronized nemesis handling in the voidworms AI that might lead to OOS when becoming a crisis.

• Six more Out of Sync fixes

Modding​

• Adds swap_type and swap_type_weight for districts to District Specializations.

• District Specializations now belong to sets, and Zone Slots can now include or exclude entire zone sets

• Migrated zone slots:zone relationships to zone_sets in place of using inline scripts

• Added can_change_category to pop categories.

• Changed various effects using pop amount/size to allow 0

• Added ship_uses_corvette_reactors and ship_uses_destroyer_reactors scripted triggers

• Added planet_is_habitat_equivalent, planet_is_ecu_equivalent, and planet_is_ring_world_equivalent scripted triggers which are used to determine the job numbers for district specialisations instead of checking the planet classes directly.

• Updated scripted triggers for districts

• Updated scripted triggers for zones

• Updated inline scripts for some research district weights

• Updated events for zone assignment upon a planet becoming a hive, machine or nanite world

• Removed unneeded script for ecus transformations since industrial districts no longer exist

This update has a significant number of major changes, including district swaps for special planets like Ecumenopoleis and Ring Worlds, more fixes to Wilderness, the Synaptic Lathe, slavery, and the most common Out of Sync errors (including the cross-platform OOS that has been plaguing us).

We ended up reverting the changes that were made to Fallen Empire buildings - while we believe that they’re too easily acquired and plentiful, we’re going to take things slower and revisit them sometime in the future. (FE resource extraction buildings are being restricted to appropriate districts though.)

Modders should find the new zone_sets useful. It cleans up a lot of the work we were previously doing with inline scripts.

Instead of individually listing every District Specialization that is allowed or excluded using inline scripts, you can now assign one or more zone_sets to them.

Code:

You can then reference these in the zone_slots:

Code:

The intent is for this to make the creation of District Specializations a bit less error-prone, and make it easier for multiple mods to add more without interfering as much with each other.

We’ve seen a lot of erratic behavior with Wilderness empires, especially when your Biomass totals on a planet get too low, where sometimes jobs would go unworked, and you aren’t always able to influence it in any way.

We’re going to update the beta branch on Steam today to test some experimental quality-of-life changes we’ve made to Wilderness. Some of them are impactful and different enough that we want to get some more eyes on them and get feedback before we consider moving them into the release build.

In the Wilderness Beta, jobs are actually worked automatically, using your primary species for traits. After all, you are the empire. This replaces the massive Workforce bonus that Wilderness pops received, and makes it behave closer to the intended design of the origin. This change intends to make Wilderness generally more robust against bugs and less prone to economic crashes when creating buildings that consume most of their Biomass.

Biomass should still chill “unemployed” like before, but the jobs will use 0 pops instead of 1. This should resolve any of those edge-case issues when many of your jobs wouldn’t be producing.

Bad planet!

As part of this, we’ve enabled the workforce sliders for Wilderness jobs like other Empires have. This should give you more control over your economy, so you can disable certain jobs if you’re running a deficit or otherwise optimize your economy by only working the jobs that you need.

Much better.​

We recognize that this makes your Biomass species less important overall. You’ll probably want to optimize them for growth rather than production since they won’t be working the jobs anymore, so we wanted to put this up in an open beta to get your thoughts.

The Open Beta branch will also include the experimental fast save transfer that we’re currently expecting to go live after we can add a toggle to disable it if it’s causing save transfer issues.

Feature​

• Experimental changes to Wilderness:

  • To prevent issues with biomass not being available on planets due to construction, all Wilderness jobs are now automatically worked without requiring biomass. These jobs are worked by your primary species.

  • Jobs for Wilderness are now also properly represented instead of being worked by a single pop with massive workforce bonuses, you now see exactly how the job is worked, and the sliders are also now usable to customize how much of each job will be worked.

  • These changes are intended to prevent situations where some jobs would go unworked, make Wilderness less bug-prone, and are intended to give you more control over your economy in deficit situations. Please provide feedback!

• The experimental fast save transfer for multiplayer is included in this build.

Bugfix​

• Fixed ringworlds colonized by gestalt empires having a mysterious city district that shouldn't exist.

Our intention is to run this Wilderness Open Beta for the rest of the summer so we can gather feedback.

4.0.19 is tentatively scheduled for next week, with more bugfixes and optimizations.

Today I'll be looking at purging, but if there’s one other bug you could demand we fix in it, what would it be?

Since next week is Midsommar week,our next dev diary will be on June 26th. See you then.

Greetings everyone,

We have just released our latest and greatest patch for Stellaris, 4.0.17 should now be available for download.

This version includes plenty of fixes based on your submitted reports and should notably improve the experience playing 4.0 and BioGenesis, including the multiplayer stability aspect.

Please find the patch notes below.

Improvement

• The Hive Fallen Empire ships are now available for Biological Ship Empires if you progress down the Cosmogenesis Crisis Path.

• Changes to ecumenopoleis, ring-, nanite-, hive-, and machine worlds:

• District specialisations now visually swap to the appropriate art and district names for easier differentiation.

• Secondary districts now have double the jobs of the primary districts.

• Reverted the most recent changes to fallen empire building limitations. We'll be looking at a better solution for a future patch.

• Further Improved the Behemoth Fury endings

• Added the Voidspawn Myocardius relic awarded to whomever manages to take down the Elder Voidspawn

• Starbase Capacity tooltip now shows the number of owned systems contributing to Starbase Capacity.

• Habitation districts on knight's habitats now swap to the Order's Demesne.

• The host now gets a tooltip in Multiplayer on the Start Game button with a list of players that are holding up the game

Balance

• Wilderness Empires no longer have to consolidate 2500 biomass on a planet to build a Grand Archive

• Secondary districts on hive worlds and machine worlds should now support targeted research specialisations

• Wilderness empires now start with a Heartgrove specialisation instead of a Threadway specialisation

• The event A Complete Collection will now only take one pop, avoiding depopulating entire planets.

• AI empires will be more likely to declare a Cosmogenesis empire a crisis as they develop more Infinity Theses

• The Synaptic Lathe will now ask for a refill if it drops below 50 pops instead of letting itself drop all the way to 0.

• The Lathe had a "stable state" hack that stopped the purge below 40(00) pops to prevent it from decolonizing before - this has been removed as it should no longer be necessary. Burn those pops if you want science.

• The Control Fragment now waits 2 decades before getting upset about your borders. Expand away!

• Fallen Empire biological ships now equip the reactors of one size category larger, this also applies to Cosmogenesis biological ships.

• Resource Consolidation origin needs to have the ability to make more machine (or nanite) worlds to unlock the full potential of their machine world (this includes the doubled jobs in the above patch note)

• Updated weights for techs that unlock rural district specializations

• Doubled the resettlement attractiveness of the Trium Atmospheric Deodorizer(tm).

• Bugfix

• Fixed Wilderness issues

• It should no longer implode randomly.

• Balanced effects for Innate Design with Wilderness.

• Turned Wilderness enforcers into Immunosymbionts to differentiate them from soldier Tamersymbionts.

• The Wilderness Subterranean Cache building can now be placed in urban and trade district specializations

• Fixed Synaptic Lathe issues

• The Synaptic Lathe now correctly purges pops and produces science. (Special thanks to /u/Little_Elia for investigating. We fixed some of it differently than you did, but your post helped in identifying the issues.)

• Pops will correctly process in or out of Neural Chip state if they are moved to or from the Lathe. (They will not be visible in the Neural Chip job until the monthly tick passes.)

• The Synaptic Lathe purge should once again benefit from things that modify purge speed.

• The Synaptic Lathe will now ask for a refill if it drops below 50 pops instead of letting itself drop all the way to 0. (The Lathe had a "stable state" hack that stopped the purge below 40 pops to prevent it from decolonizing before - this has been removed as it should no longer be necessary. Burn those pops if you want science.)

• Fixed how Synaptic Lathe is being displayed in the sector view.

• Fixed non-slaves being assigned to jobs before slaves.

• Fixed recent issues introduced to the Synthetic Fertility origin by removing the invisible purge that was being applied (result in no factions being formed and no leaders being recruitable)

• Virtuality Civilians are now also properly deleted if they do exist somehow. Non-Virtual Civilians can still exist for Virtual Empires.

• You may no longer scrap 50% of your virtual pops for alloys.

• Fixed issues where free traders could start with too many buildings

• Fixed issues with fallen empires spawned by the Scion origin having incorrect buildings and districts

• The composer of strands should no longer devolve thousands of pops. 400 is plenty.

• The Pioneer Politics Agenda now has an appropriate icon.

• Enabled the Heartgrove district specialisation for Wilderness empires

• Treasure Curators now have an actual building icon as their workplace instead of a deposit icon.

• Fixed a rare scenario where Driven Assimilators couldn't assimilate.

• Prevent marking some jobs (criminals, civilians, unemployed) as favorite that should never be prioritized.

• Space Fauna ship size selector will correctly display ship model preview.

• Space Fauna designer will show the progress bar when creating a new design.

• Purging a Gestalt Pop Group will no longer instantly kill all of them. Extract resources to your hearts content!

• Conquered Starbases will no longer have text appear on the "Return Starbase" button

• When checking if ship designs are identical, we now ignore the order of components within a section.

• Fixed saving a Deep Space Citadel design creating duplicate designs and instantly changing the design of your DSCs.

• Update Districts display if their swapped appearance changes

• Processing and Forced Labor Purge should now correctly give resources when purging lithoids or machines

• Habitats now get their districts even when not colonized yet

• Added tooltips to the Behemoth mutation option icons

• Reset Starting System when changing Origins when needed during the Empire Creation

• Mechromancy Empires purging organics once again generate cyborg zombies.

• Blocked Fallen Empire resource extraction buildings from the 6 government building slots

• Blocked the Surface Quarry building on ringworlds and habitats

• Nanotech Research buildings now give regular research jobs, but swap engineers to nanotech researchers

• Researchers for machine intelligences now use more appropriate icons

• Updated the effect tooltips for the Trium Atmospheric Deodorizer(tm) and Cyberdome.

• Empires with Genesis Guides civics now start with a food stockpile and some food income.

UI

• The "Save As New Design" popup now updates the Save button immediately when you edit the name.

• Fixed ship designer not updating the design name when you change it to the currently saved name.

• Improve Buildings tooltips modifiers handling

• Colony naming will now more often use custom names for the default value (colonizing Mars will propose Mars as the default colony name)

• Fixed some planetary modifier icons that were low resolution

• Fixed some modifiers not appearing in the empire size tooltip.

• Performance

• Reduced mil power recalculations done by outliner fleet entry

• Reduced habitability recalculations done by pop growth/decline

• Reduced amount of times planet view tries to update pop group clothing

Stability

• Fixed crash in accepting peace due to deal containing transfer of non existing starbase

• Fixed cross OS issue with randomized ethics in pop assembly leading to NUM_POP_GROUPS OOS (this is a big one)

• Fixed mismatch in synchronized/unsynchronized nemesis handling in the voidworms AI that might lead to OOS when becoming a crisis.

• Six more Out of Sync fixes

Modding

• Adds swap_type and swap_type_weight for districts to District Specializations.

• District Specializations now belong to sets, and Zone Slots can now include or exclude entire zone sets

• Migrated zone slots:zone relationships to zone_sets in place of using inline scripts

• Added can_change_category to pop categories.

• Changed various effects using pop amount/size to allow 0

• Added ship_uses_corvette_reactors and ship_uses_destroyer_reactors scripted triggers

• Added planet_is_habitat_equivalent, planet_is_ecu_equivalent, and planet_is_ring_world_equivalent scripted triggers which are used to determine the job numbers for district specialisations instead of checking the planet classes directly.

• Updated scripted triggers for districts

• Updated scripted triggers for zones

• Updated inline scripts for some research district weights

• Updated events for zone assignment upon a planet becoming a hive, machine or nanite world

• Removed unneeded script for ecus transformations since industrial districts no longer exist

Thank you for playing! Let us know your thoughts.

---

Hello everyone!

We've deployed a hotfix to today's earlier release, 4.0.18, which applies a few more changes:

Balance

• Reverted all fallen empire building limitation changes from 4.0

Stability

• Two more potential OOS fixes

Thank you for playing Stellaris!

by PDX-Loke

Greetings everyone,

Another patch has been completed, wrapped up, and sent for distribution via your your platform of choice.

4.0.15 should now be available on Steam, and GOG and MS store following shortly.

Please find the patch notes below.

​
Improvement​

• When a species is modified the new version will now automatically be the default
  
• Updated Job Efficiency modifiers from Purity, Cloning and Mutation traditions to only affect Organic pops (this includes lithoids)
  
• Technologies that when researched upset Fallen Empires are now marked as dangerous.
  
• Limiting the pop housing multiplier to never completely remove the housing needs. Added the define MIN_MODIFIER_MULT that allows modders to tweak the minimum value as needed.
  
• The Synthetic Fertility origin has received a little bit of love. The situation now shows the months until the end of the situation, and the situation progress is now representative of the actual steady progress. At the end of the situation the exact pops amount is now also uploaded, instead of losing the last few.

Balance​

• Wilderness Empires that finish the Domination Tradition Tree now have access to the Hegemony Federation Type
  
• The Psionic Storm is slightly less mystical as it should no longer convert black holes back into real stars, The Great Wound is too mighty for a mere storm.
  
• You can no longer smuggle out Biomass from Wilderness Empires
  
• Technologies that grant Fallen Empire buildings now grant +1 to the empire limit of that building. In addition, these technologies are now repeatable. The technologies that unlock the upgraded versions of the Fallen Empire buildings increase the empire limit of the base version, but the upgraded buildings count towards the limit.
  
• Having the Cosmogenesis Perk that grants access to Fallen Empire Buildings multiplies your empire limit for those buildings by 3.
  
• Fallen Empire buildings that Fallen Empires start with are generally slightly more powerful than those that can be constructed and do not count towards empire limits.
  
• Effects that grant access to Fallen Empire buildings, e.g. dumpster diving in minor artifacts, now grant you one level of the relevant technology.
  
• Gestalt empires can now access Fallen Empire trade buildings
  
• Rare Fallen Empire technologies are now correctly affected by all modifiers to draw weight of rare technologies.
  
• The draw chance for Fallen Empire buildings from Enigmatic Engineering has been decreased from 3.75% to 1.5%.
  
• There is now no limit to the number of times you can research Fallen Empire buildings with Enigmatic Engineering.
  
• Removed technology requirements for basic City District Specializations. An upgraded capital building is still required for the second Specialization.

Bugfix​

• The Awakened Control Fragment will no longer denounce itself in the Galcom when it comes to picking a side in the War in Heaven
  
• The Wilderness will no longer be taunted by the Strip Mine Planet decision, it is now hidden.
  
• Refactored Tzynn Tithe to use the new pop system and being much prettier script
  
• You can no longer raid the poor crisis factions for their pops. They aren't supposed to be real!
  
• Storm Chasers now properly have no rare crystal upkeep on their Storm Attraction Centers
  
• Pirates will no longer decide to set up shop in Leviathan controlled systems.
  
• The pirate event will now check that it has a system it can spawn pirates in before firing. So now if you want to ensure that you don't have pirates you have to build outposts everywhere, which kinda makes sense...
  
• Updated the Esteemed Quartermaster trait to mention 100 Soldiers
  
• Promising young officers will no longer show up when piloting civilian craft. Also updated the event to change picture if the officer was on a starbase or a biological ship.
  
• Deep Space Citadel will no longer display duplicated models in certain situations.
  
• Added missing descriptions to Space Fauna tab in Fleet Management.
  
• Added requirement of >=2500 Pops to Megastructure builder tooltip for Grand Archive.
  
• Fix Grand Archive thinking it's still destroyed after being rebuilt
  
• Fixed leaders getting the wrong number of trait selections.
  
• Cloned leaders now copy pending trait selections from the original.
  
• Fixed Xeno-Compatibility growth calculation using the wrong number of pops.
  
• Aligned Genetic Memory tooltip with effects
  
• Fix missing description for the coordinator job
  
• Corrected job information for Justice Complex and Ziggurat of Justice buildings.
  
• Fixed the Metallurgical Research Lab, Distributed Design Center, Data-Driven Theorem Facility and Military Academy not providing some bonuses for gestalt empires.
  
• Fixed Automation buildings not having any upkeep on habitats
  
• Fix Robot species with negative traits costs sum declining
  
• Uplifted presapients now correctly enter the Civilian stratum
  
• The Nanite Interdictor can no longer equip both cruiser and battleship reactors
  
• Fixed Job Efficiency modifiers for species types not working in some cases
  
• Fix Synaptic Lathe view not always updating properly
  
• Colonizing planets will now take damage again from bombardment
  
• Abandoning and resettling the same colony multiple times will no longer grant you multiple Planetary Root Bundles.
  
• Vaults of Knowledge now once again tracks your leaders destiny traits, and will no longer reset if you lose your capital.
  
• Regular colonies will be destroyed of all the pop groups are already dead. Previously a 0 sized sapient pop group would have prevented the destruction of the colony and some other events (like an ongoing colonization) could have introduced some new pops into the planet - leading to a colony, that just would not die.
  
• Idle gestalt drones now demote much faster.
  
• Colony Auto-Designation no longer thinks that job producing buildings like Temples are 100x as awesome as it should consider them.
  
• Adopting Genesis Guides mid game will no longer prevent you from colonizing planets until you researched any new ship tech.
  
• Ecclesiastical Center colony designation now has proper tooltip
  
• Gestalt Lost Colony Empires will no longer be trying to create buildings they can't use.
  
• The planet view's portrait is now correctly displayed after changing planet class
  
• Common Ground federation allies now start with Planetary Administration building.

AI​

• Significant adjustments to AI priorities.
  
• The AI can now sell Energy for Trade.
  
• The AI is more willing to build Districts, and double down on District Specializations. (Or similar Specializations, like Physics and General Research might go together.)
  
• The AI will no longer feel content with itself if it has 10000 Pops.
  
• Job Output modifiers for AIs on Captain difficulty and higher have been changed to Workforce bonuses. Their jobs will now consume more resources than before, but the difficulty bonus now affects all outputs of their jobs, not just resources.
  
• AI (and Planetary Automation) will now prefer to build inside District Specializations than in free building slots.

UI​

• Add tooltips to Focus Card rewards
  
• Fix an empty cost string in the Change Focus confirm popup
  
• Add a pulsing glow to the district pip about to be built when hovering the build district button

Stability​

• Fixed an OOS where a research agreement would go through on the client but not on the host, leading to random desync
  
• Fixed another OOS at reconnect due to espionage modifiers from the Active Reconnaissance fleet order

Modding​

• Changed leader add_trait to have "trait", "consume_selection" and "show_message" parameters; removed add_trait_no_notify.
  
• Fixed traits override for clone_leader.
  
• Added more info about traits to create_leader and clone_leader documentation.
  
• Most Pop effects that use amounts can now have a randomized range
  
• add_building will no longer add districts that can't be built.
  
• Add country modifiers to District Specialization types
  
• District Specializations can now be limited per planet and/or empire, like buildings
  
• We now have an add_variable effect to complement the subtract_variable effect
  
• Add ai_priority field to District Specializations so AI and Planet Automation know better where to build structures

Our patching frequency is slightly lower now due to the more qualified nature of the changes, but do know that the team is still active on all fronts working on out of syncs, performance, AI, and gameplay improvements.

See you again when we're ready to roll out the next package.

-------

Post 4.0.15 release, we identified an issue with the hotfix and the Wilderness origin, as such we've released 4.0.16 into an open beta.

This is an opt-in open beta, to opt-in: Right click Stellaris, Properties, Betas tab, and choose "stellaris_test" from the dropdown.

4.0.16 Open Beta Patch Notes

• Bugfix: Wilderness Empires will no longer destroy themselves when spending biomass
  
• Bugfix: Virtuality will not delete unemployed pops on colonization
  
• Fix numerous instances of OOS issues
  
• Savegame transfer goes brrr

Thank you for playing Stellaris!

Blub blub! Greetings from your favorite aquatic explorer—it's me, Glu Glu! Yes, I know what you're thinking: "A plushie writing a dev diary? Water you talking about?" But trust me, I'm ready to dive right in and spill the kelp!

My journey began when the Stellaris team decided they needed a new plushie. Choosing just one portrait wasn't easy -- there were heated debates, passionate pleas, and more dramatic gestures than you can shake your tail at. Then Dave found the old Offishal Pun Document from the Aquatics Species Pack and that sealed the deal.

I arrived at Paradox HQ a few weeks ago -- some really nice people followed me around and took pictures and videos of my antics around the office. They said they were getting something called B-roll, I don’t know what that was, but on a scale from 0 to fun, it was infinitely fun!




Definitely unedited images of some of the Video Producers, including their 100% absolutely real faces.

Later that same day, I may have accidentally-on-purpose “liberated” Community Manager Aurora's laptop. Have you ever changed someone’s passwords as a prank? She didn’t find it that funny, but I didn’t find it funny that there were no pictures of Glu Glu on the Stellaris social media pages. So I fixed it!


When we first met, Photoshop, I was but the learner. Now, I am the Master.

Before anyone could say "Man overboard!" I had changed all her passwords and taken full control of Stellaris' social media accounts. You might notice that the Stellaris announcements will be extra sofishticated for the next week, that’s me!

We also did a Makeship photoshoot. I perfected my plush gaze, and my pout is betta than ever. Soon, my photos started surfacing on desks around the office. No idea who was putting them there, but whoever keeps putting them there has exquisite taste, and super warm hugs.


Also seen at the offish: waiting for Game Director Eladrin to leave his desk​

I’ve learned a few new terms in the past few weeks of hanging around the Shellaris office. One of them is: merge request. That’s when salmon wants to make a change to the game, they make the change on their local computer, then send a merge request, and - if someone else approves it - it will get added to the game.

Since everyone is off today, I’ve written a few merge requests of my own, if any of them sneak through, let minnow.


Glu Glu’s proposed Portrait rework


Another Glu Glu merge request: These are the Ocean worlds you were looking for.


Glu Glu merge request: added an Easter Egg to the Aquatics battleship​

We’ll have to wait until next week’s patch to see if any of these changes get approved and make it into the game or not!

In the meantime, I’ve been busy on the Stellaris YouTube as well. I put together this totally accurate and definitely not-biased 100% sure to please YouTube short.



I also took the opportunity to extend my own Makeship campaign! You’d be amazed at what you can get done when people wander away and leave their computers unlocked and unattended!

I am proud to announce the end of the Stellaris Aquatic Plushie campaign will be June 5th! Don’t miss this opportunity to take me home, I could be your proud co-pilot for adventures in trouter space, a fintastic gaming buddy, or even just be there for a snuggle if you’re feeling crabby.

So that's my tail, friends -- I'm Glu Glu, the squishiest explorer this side of Blorg Prime, signing off.