Hello, Stellaris community!

The Wilderness Open Beta has been updated again, with fixes to Workforce calculations, advanced and endgame AI plans, a fix to espionage, improvements to district tooltips, and more.

Here is a list of what we've changed:

• Substantially increased the base Command Limit of fleets and most sources of Command Limit. We know you were going to doomstack those fleets anyway. (This is secretly mostly for performance reasons, don't tell anyone.)

• Fixed Workforce calculations.

• Fix to Neural Chips in the Synaptic Lathe not functioning properly.

• Planetary Logistic Deficits slider should now correctly apply.

• Erudite trait now correctly applies to Leaders when gained through Adaptive Evolution

• Fixed certain events not correctly creating buildings when initializing planets or otherwise changing AI controlled worlds.

• Fixes wilderness biomass not being updated when loading an older savegame

• Open Beta Only: Spy Networks should once again grow properly.

• Continued improving the AI's economic plans to be more effective.

• AIs now have distinct advanced and endgame economic plans that focus largely on Research, Naval Capacity, and whatever it is they use to build ships.

• The AI is less enthusiastic about building Storm related buildings.

• Pop Strata with no possible unemployment (like Civilians) hide the Unemployment values in collapsed planet jobs view

• Improved District tooltips:

  • Hovering a district now shows the scaled and separated modifiers

  • Hovering the build button shows the values for a single district (this is what you'll gain)

• Instead of being essentially omnipresent, the orange briefcase in the outliner now indicates that you have 500 or more Civilians + Unemployed pops on the planet. (100+ Unemployed pops should still override it with the red briefcase.)

• OOS fix related to bombardment and ground combat

• Potential OOS fix related to Grand Archives

• Added ship_reactor_power_add/mult modifiers

• The num_empires trigger now correctly counts the number of empires instead of the number of fallen empires. Whoops.

The complete list of previous changes in this branch (excluding the new one) are here:

• Significant quality of life and system changes to Wilderness empires.

  • 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!

• Grown pops now spawn in a default stratum and job (like “Civilian”) instead of being unemployed their parents' stratum

• Planetary Automation no longer actively tries to keep some civilians around.

• The Arc Furnace no longer decreases in Mineral output as it increases Alloy output. The stages are now: 1m, 2m, 2m+1a, 2m+2a.

• Updated the broadside stingers to correctly follow the 24-36-48 small slot-equivalency for their weapon slots. The youngest stage now has more medium slots but fewer large slots, while the adult and elder stages only have large slots.

• The Cipher Mauler has given up two of its small weapon slots in exchange for two point defense slots

• 20% of the habitability ceiling reductions from Shattered Ring blockers have been moved to the more easily cleared Ancient Rubble blockers.

• Shattered Ring Origin now starts with two additional Scrap Mining districts.

• Various guardian space critter factions will now ignore ftl inhibitors.

• The diplomacy tradition "The Federation" now also gives 25% progress in the Federation Code technology

• The Holo-Museums acquired from the Curator enclave now swap Entertainers (or Evaluators) to Curators (or Curator Drones). These jobs produce Unity and Amenities, with each Holo-Museum adding additional job upkeep and output. Holo-Museums can now be constructed in research and resort specializations. Finally, these buildings are improved by the Archaeo-Engineers AP.

• Galactic Curator civics also swap Entertainers (or Evaluators) to Curators (or Curator Drones)

• Fixed the Controlled Evolution achievement checking you had the pre-BioGenesis genetic ascension. Also made it check that the species that granted the achievement did in fact have genes.

• Fix Slaver Guilds constantly reassigning slaves and never enslaving workers

• Updated the ship role handling of the cosmogenesis biological ships

• Cosmogenesis biological ships can now equip the unique components of the equivalent regular biological ships, excluding growth components.

• Fixes building limit calculation that was causing incorrect removal of buildings.

• Fallen Empire trade buildings should no longer self destruct

• The Corporate Embassy now correctly gives trader jobs for Worker Coop empires

• Fix to building limit logic that was destroying things like the Archaeostudies building.

• Land Appropriation once again kicks pops off their planets and makes them into refugees.

• Strategic resource maximum for invalid countries is now calculated as zero

• Fixed edge cases where shipyards could have ships from the old owner in the construction queue after being taken over

• If you change your civics but not your authority the Ruler Chips modifiers should no longer reset.

• Synapse drones job modifier will use the correct icon in the building effect summary.

• Jobs production modifier fix in nested tooltip for Serviles trait

• Maze Harbingers now use the correct amount of naval capacity

• The hive Sensorium building no longer mentions Evaluators

• The effects of the Galactic Curator civic councilors (both regular and corporate) now apply to Entertainers

• Fixed Integrated Preservation still giving modifiers to Evaluator jobs

• Job swaps that require buildings on a planet now require the building to not be disabled.

• Improved consistency with the tooltips for the Galactic Curator civics

• Virtuality Machine Empires on Ringworlds should no longer get regular engineering or physicists jobs, only gestalt ones.

• Behemoth empires that have become Ever Hungry will no longer get "Nice Guy" event options, such as not being allowed to space Reth Unddol.

• Unrest.4200 will no longer generate descriptions that don't describe the planets.

• Improved dead object database

• Science ships can no longer continue progressing archaeological sites without a leader

• Biomass and Neural Chip Processing and Unprocessing jobs now have unique names so it's easier to tell what's going on.

• The AI should no longer occasionally just decide to stop building anything and wait for the sweet release of death.

• Reduced the AI's love of hydroponic farms and other static job resource production buildings, and commercial nexuses.

• AI is more likely to build Engineering, Physics, or Society Research modifying buildings if they have a specialization focusing on that research branch on the planet.

• AI Shattered Ring empires will now actually clear their blockers to make use of their other habitable segments. They also favor the techs that are prerequisites for their shattered ring blockers.

• AI Shattered Ring empires will wait a bit longer and space out their colonization of the other segments.

• AI now has a better opinion of housing buildings and will not blow them up as often.

• AI (and automatic tech selection in general) now more strongly favors techs that unlock District Specializations.

• Reduced the "stickiness" of trade and urban designations on planets

• The AI now has a greater preference for Cruisers and Battleships.

• Adjusted AI priorities regarding research and trade targets.

• The AI is no longer quite as gung-ho about Defense Privatization.

• AI will no longer spam amenity buildings if it doesn't actually need them.

• AI will no longer mix unity or trade district specializations with research or industrial specializations.

• AI will now re-evaluate planet designations once per year.

• Relaxed some restrictions regarding the AI building "flat job" buildings like Research Labs and Foundries.

• The AI will now only build Research Specialization buildings on planets likely to have those types of researchers, but are more likely to do so than before.

• The AI will only build more than two Strongholds on planets with a Fortress District Specialization.

• AI Void Dwellers will now correctly budget alloys towards building Districts.

• Fixed a bug where the AI would order fleets to follow one another, resulting in no fleet movement at all

• Fixed an OOS at reconnect related to the bureaucrat job

• Fix OOS related to Specimens and Exhibits

• Fixed an OOS when a client uses a different language from the host

• Fix CTD related to specimens

• Fixed another OOS at reconnect

• Fixed biomass growth on_monthly being called for non-wilderness empires

• Refactored parts of the Planet UI to improve performance, this likely has the greatest benefit for lower end machines

• Improved Nascent Stage Logic by roughly 75%. Let your favorite gladiatorial beasts flourish!

• The AI will no longer constantly be starting and canceling Arc Furnaces and Dyson Swarms

• Minor improvement to refugee_effect

• Minor improvement to handling modifiers

• Memory leak fix from faulty pattern.

• Update Deposits when a blocker is cleared while Planet view is open

• Centered the army icons to be in the middle on background

• Habitability and Dig site no longer overlap each other in the Planet UI.

• Pop amount in the Current Population does not overlap other elements when it has more than 2 digits anymore in Planet UI.

• Pop Count of Pop Group in the Ressettlement Window does not overlap when it has more than 4 digits.

• New icon for strange wormhole

• Introduced min/max pitch settings for Ship model preview: It will no longer do sharp and unpredictable turns when turning the ship model around.

• Pop Strata with no possible unemployment (like Civilians) hide the Unemployment values in collapsed planet jobs view

• Improved District tooltips:

  • Hovering a district now shows the scaled and separated modifiers

  • Hovering the build button shows the values for a single district (this is what you'll gain)

• Instead of being essentially omnipresent, the orange briefcase in the outliner now indicates that you have 500 or more Civilians + Unemployed pops on the planet. (100+ Unemployed pops should still override it with the red briefcase.)

• Add district_limit to buildings

• Console commands now use country index instead of country ID, making them easier to use

• Add displace_pop_amount effect that simply raises on_pop_displaced

• Add research speed and draw chance modifiers for tech types (rare, dangerous, insight, custom)

• Added a new ignore_ftl_inhibitors flag for the country type. Setting this to true, would enable that country type to ignore FTL Inhibitors.

• It is now possible to override the Icon for the dynamically generated modifiers by adding a \[modifierName]_icon entry in the localization.

• Added on_queued, on_unqueued, on_built effects for district specializations

• Added a capital_tier parameter for capital building and an associated planet scope trigger.

• Refactored the has_x_capital scripted triggers to account for capital building tiers

As mentioned before, these changes are expected to be released on the live branch in August, and your feedback will determine whether or not we keep the Wilderness changes. (Currently we're leaning towards "yes".) Please keep your feedback coming.

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.

Thank you for playing Stellaris!

Over the summer, our Dev Team will be updating the Wilderness Open Beta branch on Steam, with priorities of improving stability, performance, the AI, and bugfixes. Today's update is now available.

Improvement

• Grown pops now immediately join an available job (like “Civilian”) instead of being processed for a month

Balance

• Various guardian space critter factions will now ignore ftl inhibitors.

• The diplomacy tradition "The Federation" now gives 25% progress in the Federation Code technology

• The Holo-Museums acquired from the Curator enclave now swap Entertainers (or Evaluators) to Curators (or Curator Drones). These jobs produce Unity and Amenities, with each Holo-Museum adding additional job upkeep and output. Holo-Museums can now be constructed in research and resort specializations. Finally, these buildings are improved by the Archaeo-Engineers AP.

• Galactic Curator civics also swap Entertainers (or Evaluators) to Curators (or Curator Drones)

Bugfix

• Fix to building limit logic that was destroying things like the Archaeostudies building.

• Land Appropriation once again kicks pops off their planets and makes them into refugees.

• Strategic resource maximum for invalid countries is now calculated as zero

• Fixed edge cases where shipyards could have ships from the old owner in the construction queue after being taken over

• If you change your civics but not your authority the Ruler Chips modifiers should no longer reset.

• Synapse drones job modifier will use the correct icon in the building effect summary.

• Jobs production modifier fix in nested tooltip for Serviles trait

• Maze Harbingers now use the correct amount of naval capacity

• The hive Sensorium building no longer mentions Evaluators

• The effects of the Galactic Curator civic councilors (both regular and corporate) now apply to Entertainers

• Fixed Integrated Preservation still giving modifiers to Evaluator jobs

• Job swaps that require buildings on a planet now require the building to not be disabled.

• Improved consistency with the tooltips for the Galactic Curator civics

• Virtuality Machine Empires on Ringworlds should no longer get regular engineering or physicists jobs, only gestalt ones.

• Behemoth empires that have become Ever Hungry will no longer get "Nice Guy" event options, such as not being allowed to space Reth Unddol.

• Unrest.4200 will no longer generate descriptions that don't describe the planets.

• Improved dead object database

• Science ships can no longer continue progressing archaeological sites without a leader

• Biomass and Neural Chip Processing and Unprocessing jobs now have unique names so it's easier to tell what's going on.

AI

• Fixed a bug where the AI would order fleets to follow one another, resulting in no fleet movement at all

Stability

• Fixed an OOS at reconnect

Performance

• Refactored parts of the Planet UI to improve performance, this likely has the greatest benefit for lower end machines

  • Open Beta Note: This one is a little risky, so if you see weird stuff going on in the Planet UI, please let us know.

• Improved Nascent Stage Logic by roughly 75%. Let your favorite gladiatorial beasts flourish!

• The AI will no longer constantly be starting and canceling Arc Furnaces and Dyson Swarms

• Minor improvement to refugee_effect

• Minor improvement to handling modifiers

• Memory leak fix from faulty pattern.

UI

• Centered the army icons to be in the middle on background

• Habitability and Dig site no longer overlap each other in the Planet UI.

• Pop amount in the Current Population does not overlap other elements when it has more than 2 digits anymore in Planet UI.

• Pop Count of Pop Group in the Ressettlement Window does not overlap when it has more than 4 digits.

• New icon for strange wormhole

• Introduced min/max pitch settings for Ship model preview: It will no longer do sharp and unpredictable turns when turning the ship model around.

Modding

• Console commands now use country index instead of country ID, making them easier to use

• Add displace_pop_amount effect that simply raises on_pop_displaced

• Add research speed and draw chance modifiers for tech types (rare, dangerous, insight, custom)

• Added a new ignore_ftl_inhibitors flag for the country type. Setting this to true, would enable that country type to ignore FTL Inhibitors.

• It is now possible to override the Icon for the dynamically generated modifiers by adding a \[modifierName]_icon entry in the localization.

• Added on_queued, on_unqueued, on_built effects for district specializations

• Added a capital_tier parameter for capital building and an associated planet scope trigger.

• Refactored the has_x_capital scripted triggers to account for capital building tiers

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

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!