Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Today we're going to continue talking about the 2.2 'Le Guin' update, on the topic of the Galactic Market. As said before, we're not yet ready to reveal anything about when Le Guin is coming out, only that it's a long time away and we have many more topics to cover before then. Also as said before, screenshots will contain placeholder art and interfaces and non-final numbers.

The Market
The Market is a new interface accessible from your topbar, where you can buy and sell resources. Resources are bought and sold for Energy Credits, with their prices dependent on a variety of factors such as whether the Galactic Market is founded, supply and demand, and possibly also from various events. On top of the actual price of the resource, there is also a Market Fee which has to be paid for any sale or purchase, equal to 30% of the purchase value. This Market Fee is there so that it will not be possible to make money by purchasing and then immediately re-selling resources at a higher price. Resources can be purchased either in bulk, or by setting up a monthly trade, where you for example specify that you want to sell 20 food and buy 10 minerals per month, and can set a minimum sale/maximum purchase price, if you want to ensure that major fluctuations in price do not disrupt your empire's economy too much.


Internal vs Galactic Market
At the start of the game, empires only have access to the Internal Market, which represents trading with actors inside your empire such as corporations and local governments, or in the case of Gestalt Consciousness empires, resource reprocessing. The prices on the Internal Market are set to always be higher than those on the Galactic Market, so relying too heavily on trading will be disadvantageous in the first few decades of the game. Some empires, such as Devouring Swarms, may only ever have access to the Internal Market (this is something we're still testing and balancing) and so might get better prices there. Once the game has progressed to the point where at least one empire knows about at least 50% of the other empires in the galaxy, the Galactic Market will eventually be founded. One empire that meets the criteria is picked as Market Founder, and their capital system becomes the Market Capital, spawning a special station and map marker to denote it. From then on, any empire (barring possible restrictions for Devouring Swarms and the like) that knows of the Market Capital system has access to the Galactic Market and is able to trade on it. The controller of the Market Capital get a reduction in their Market Fee and increased trade value for their trade routes (more on that in a later DD).


Prices on the Galactic Market are always lower than those on the internal market, though the actual prices will fluctuate based on supply and demand - every time Minerals are sold on the market, prices will drop, and conversely, every time they are bought prices will increase. The purchases and sales you make on the Galactic Market do not just affect your own prices but also those of other empires, so that it is possible to for example massively drive up Food prices by purchasing a huge amount of food, damaging the economy of any empire that is reliant on importing it. It isn't actually possible for a resource to 'run out' on the Market, so you will always be able to purchase critically needed resources, though the cost of doing so may be extremely prohibitive. However, some resources (such as Dark Matter and other rare strategic resources) will not be available until they are actually accessible to empires on the market in large enough quantities, and are not available on the Internal Market at all. The aim of the Galactic Market is to make it so that it is actually a viable strategy to specialize your economy, importing resources that are difficulty for your empire to produce and exporting resources that you can produce easily in large quantities.


Trader Enclaves
Since the Market has much of the same functionality as the Trader Enclaves from Leviathans, we're also changing said Enclaves for those with the Leviathans Story Pack. Instead of trading food, energy and minerals, Trader Enclaves will sell rare resources (Rare Crystals, Volatile Motes and Exotic Gases) in the form of monthly trade deals offered at advantageous prices. Each Trader Enclave will offer only one of these resources. Additionally, once you reach 50+ opinion, Trader Enclaves will sell special Governor-type leaders with unique, trade and commerce related traits. Finally, if you control the home system of a Trader Enclave AND have 50+ opinion with them, you will be able to build a special Starbase building in that system which lowers your Market Fee, allowing for cheaper trading on the Galactic Market.

Finally, just a note to say that we're ignoring the Slave Market tab of the Market screenshots on purpose - this is something that will be covered in a later Dev Diary.

That's all for today! Next week we're continuing to talk about the Le Guin update, on the topic of Sectors and Factions.

Planet Stability
In the Le Guin update, Planetary Stability is the most important factor for determining the productivity and prosperity of your planets. Planetary Stability represents the overall political stability on a planet, and is influenced by a large number of factors such as Pop Happiness, Housing, Amenities, Crime and so on. Planetary Stability ranges from 0 to 100% and has a base level of 50%. A Planet that has at least 50% stability will gain bonuses to resource production and immigration pull, while a planet that drops below 50% stability will experience penalties to resource production and increased emigration push. Below 40% stability, unrest events such as hunger strikes, terrorist bombings and so on may start to occur, which can further lower stability down below the threshold for an armed revolt to start. We're still looking into which parts of the previous Unrest events we want to keep, replace, or convert to the new Crime system, so the exact way in which unrest events and armed revolts will work is not fully decided at this point, and we'll likely cover it more in detail in a future dev diary.


Pop Happiness and Approval Rating
Pop Happiness is a major factor in determining planet stability. Each Planet that contains at least one Pop with free will has a Pop Approval Rating value that is the average happiness of the Pops, modified by their Political Power. Each Pop has a Political Power value that depends on their stratum and living conditions - for example, a Ruler Pop living in a Stratified Economy will have an immense degree of Political Power, and their happiness may be more important than that of even a dozen Worker Pops. However, even Pops with no political power at all can still drag down your Approval Rating, so a planet with a vast mass of angry slaves will need some Rulers to keep them in line. On the individual Pop level, Happiness no longer affects productivity, so to ensure your planets are productive you now only need make sure your Stability level is high, and whether you achieve that stability with a happy populace or ruling with an iron fist is up to your ethics, policies and general playstyle preferences. Individual Pop Happiness is not entirely without effect though, as the happiness of a Pop determines how likely it is to adopt your governing ethics, and also affects how much Crime it generates (see below for further details).


Amenities
As part of trying to consolidate systems relating to happiness we've added a new value called Planet Amenities. Amenities represents infrastructure, facilities and jobs dedicated to fulfilling the day-to-day needs of the population. In order to not suffer penalties, a planet needs at least as many Amenities as it has Infrastructure, and any Amenities above or below that number cause increased/decreased Pop Happiness, respectively. Capital Buildings and many Ruler jobs produce a base amount of Amenities and may be sufficient for a sparsely populated mining world, but urbanized planets will likely need to dedicate part of their infrastructure to Amenities-producing jobs such as Entertainers to keep the population happy. Many of the things that used to directly increase Happiness in the old Tile system (such as Domestic Servants or certain special buildings) now produce Amenities instead, and direct Happiness-buffing modifiers have been made rare, so keeping your entire population perfectly happy is now something that requires dedication and resources, rather than just a matter of throwing down a couple of buildings and calling it a day.


Crime
Something else that we wanted to achieve with the new system was to create the potential for social and political unrest without necessarily having it take the form of a direct penalty or revolt, especially on heavily populated worlds. Crime is a value generated by all virtually all Pops with free will, and can vary between 0 and 100% on a planet. Happy Pops produce less crime, while unhappy Pops produce more crime, but only Pops at a perfect 100% happiness produce no crime at all. Crime has no actual direct penalty, but instead may result in events such as smuggler rings or organized crime taking root on the planet. These events and conditions are generally detrimental, but may also open up certain benficial opportunities and decisions that would not be available on a planet with perfect law and order. Nonetheless, a very high level of Crime is generally something to be avoided, as crime can lower stability and also result in Pops leaving their ordinary jobs and moving into special Crime jobs that appear on the planet and which take resources away from your empire rather than producing them. To combat Crime, you can build buildings such as Precinct Districts that create crime-suppressing Enforcer jobs. In general, empires that rely on repression and inequality to keep their Pops in line will need to employ more Enforcers, but there will also be other ways to manage Crime, possibly including ways to integrate the criminal enterprises as a fixture in your society (the exact details on this is still very much something that's a work in progress).


That's all for today! Next week we'll continue with the final part of the Planetary Rework dev diaries, on the topic of Machine Empires, Hive Minds, Habitats and other mechanics that are changing alongside the Planetary Rework.

Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Today, we're going to start talking about the Planetary Rework coming in the 2.2 'Le Guin' update - the complete redesign of the planetary management system and replacement of planetary tiles. This is going to be a really big topic, so we're spreading it out across four dev diaries, with today's dev diary being about Deposits, Buildings and Districts. Please bear in mind that everything shown is in an early stage of development, and there will be rough-looking interfaces, placeholder art, non final numbers and all those things that people assume are final and complain about anyway no matter how many of these disclaimers we write! ;p

Planetary Rework
Before I start going into details on the actual rework, I just wanted to briefly talk about the reasons and goals that are behind this massive rework, and why we're removing tiles and building a new system instead of iterating on the existing systems. For me, getting away from the constraints of tiles has been my single most desired long-term goal for the game. It's not that I think the tile system is inherently a bad system - it works well to visualize your pops and buildings and for the early game it works well enough in giving the player some interesting economic management decisions. However, the tile system is also very constrictive, in a way I feel is detrimental to the very core concepts of Stellaris. The hard limitation of one pop and one building per tile, as well as the hard limitation of 25 tiles/pops/buildings to a planet, it severely limits the kind of societies and planets that we can present in the game.

Do we want to make city-planets, with enormous numbers of pops concentrated onto a single world? Not possible. Do we want to have a fully automated post-scarcity empire where robots do all the actual work? Can't be done without losing out on valuable building space. Sure, we could fundamentally alter the tile system in a such a way to allow these, by for example making it so each tile could support several sub-tiles with additional pops and buildings, but by doing this we will inevitably lose the easy visual presentation that makes the system attractive to begin with, and even then we would continue to be held back by the limit of one pop per building. In other words, we'd end up with something that superficially might resemble the old tile system but offers none of its main advantages and continues to be held back by most of its drawbacks.

When designing the new planetary management system we set out a number of design goals:

• The new system should be able to simulate a wide variety of different societies, to build on the roleplaying and diversity in play-throughs that is such a fundamental part of the Stellaris experience
  
• The new system needed to offer more interesting choices about how to develop your planets, while simultaneously reducing the amount of uninteresting micromanagement such as mass-upgrading buildings
  
• The new system should make your planets feel like places where Pops actually live their lives, as opposed to just being resource gathering hubs
  
• The new system had to be extremely moddable, to make it easier both for us and modders to create new types of empires and playstyles

We believe that this new system that we have created will not only vastly improve many of the features in the game that we couldn't get working properly with the tile system, but together with the resource rework discussed in the last dev diary will also make it possible for us to create truly weird and alien societies that play entirely differently from anything the game currently has to offer, or would ever have to offer if we had remained constrained by the tile system.

Deposits
Under the old tile system, deposits were simply clumps of resources placed on a tile, which would be gathered by a pop and determined what kind of buildings were most efficient to place there. Under the new system, deposits are more akin to planetary terrain and features. Every habitable planet will have a (semi-randomized) number of deposits, with larger planets usually having more deposits. Deposits represent areas on the planet that can be economically exploited, and most commonly increase the number of a particular District (more on this below) that can be build on the planet. For example, a Fertile Lands deposit represents various regions of fertile farmland, and increases the number of Agriculture Districts that can be built on the planet, and thus its potential Food output.

(Note: All deposit pictures shown here are placeholders, there will be new art for them that isn't done yet)

Not all Deposits affect Districts however - some (such as Crystalline Caverns or Betharian Fields) are rare deposits that allow for the construction of special Buildings (more on this below) on the planet, while others yet may simply provide a passive benefit to the planet, such as a spectacularly beautiful wilderness area that increases happiness for Pops living on the planet. Deposits can have Deposit Blockers that work in a similar way to the Tile Blockers of old, cancelling out the benefits of the Deposit until the Blocker is removed through the expenditure of time and resources. A planet can have multiples of the same Deposit, and there is no hard limit to the number of Deposits that a planet can hold (though there is a cap to how many will be generated under normal circumstances). The types of Deposits that can show up on a planet is affected by the planet class, so where an Ocean World might get its Agriculture from Kelp Forests, an Arctic World would have Fungal Caverns instead.

(Note: All deposit pictures shown here are placeholders, there will be new art for them that isn't done yet)

Districts
Districts are at at the core of how planets are developed in the Le Guin update. Districts represent large areas of development on the planet dedicated towards housing or resource gathering. For most empires, there are four basic types of Districts: City Districts, Mining Districts, Generator Districts and Agriculture Districts. There are exceptions to this (such as Hive Minds having Hive Districts) but more on this in a later DD. The total number of districts you can build on a planet is equal to its size, so a size 16 planet can support 16 districts in any combination of the types available to you. Additionally, the resource-producing districts (Mining, Generator and Agriculture) are further constrained by the Deposits on the planet, so a planet might only be able to support a maximum of 8 Mining Districts due to there simply not being any further opportunities for mining on the planet. City Districts are never limited by the deposits on the planet, so you can choose to forego a planet's natural resources and blanket it entirely in urban development if you so choose.

The effects of each District is as follows:

• City District: Provides a large amount of Housing for Pops, Infrastructure for Buildings and Clerk Jobs that produce Trade Value and Luxury Goods
  
• Mining District: Provides a small amount of Housing/Infrastructure and Mining Jobs that produce Minerals
  
• Agriculture District: Provides a small amount of Housing/Infrastructure and Farming Jobs that produce Food
  
• Generator District: Provides a small amount of Housing/Infrastructure and Technician Jobs that produce Energy Credits

There will be more details on most of the concepts mentioned above coming in the other dev diaries. For now, suffice to say that the way you develop your planets with Districts will shape that planet's role in your empire - a heavily urbanized planet will be densely populated, supporting numerous Buildings and specialist Pop Jobs such as Researchers and providing Trade Value for your empire's trade routes (more on this in a future DD), but at the expense of not being able to produce much of the raw resources that are needed to fuel your empire's growth and manufacturing capacity.

A planet's Deposits and Planetary Modifiers may influence this decision - a large planet with High Quality Minerals and numerous Mining Deposits will certainly make for a lucrative mining world, but what if it also sits in a perfect spot to make a heavily urbanized trade hub? No longer are choices regarding planets simply limited to 'Where do I place the capital for the best adjacency bonuses?' and 'Should I follow the tile resource or not?' but will be fundamental choices that create diverse and distinct planets that each have their own role to fill in your empire.


Buildings
In the Le Guin update, Buildings are specialized Facilities that provide a variety of Jobs and Resources that are not suitable to large-scale resource gathering. For example, instead of having your scientists working in a Physics Lab on a Physics Deposit (whatever that is supposed to be...) you now instead construct a Research Labs building (representing not a single laboratory but rather an allocation of resources towards the sciences across the planet) which provides a number of Pop Researcher Jobs that conduct research for your empire. Buildings are limited by the planet's Infrastructure, with one building 'slot' being unlocked for each 10 Infrastructure on the planet. Some Buildings are also limited in the number you can build on a planet, while others can be built in multiples (for example, a planet can only support a single Autotchton Monument, while you can have as many Alloy Foundries as the slots allow). Buildings can still be upgraded to more advanced versions, but generally there will be far fewer upgrades to do and those upgrades will often require an investment of rare and expensive resources, so it's more of an active choice than something you simply have to click your way through after unlocking a tech.


Infrastructure comes primarily from constructing Districts, with City Districts giving much more Infrastructure than resource gathering districts do (6 as opposed to 2 in the current internal build, though non final numbers and all that). In addition to unlocking additional Building slots, a higher Infrastructure level also makes some Buildings more efficient, as the number of jobs they provide is fully or partially determined by the planet's Infrastructure level. For example, in the current internal build, Research Labs and Alloy Foundries both have the number of jobs they provide determined by the infrastructure level, meaning that concentrating your research and manufacturing to your heavily urbanized planets is generally more efficient than trying to turn your agri-worlds into science hubs. In addition to Buildings that provide resource-producing Jobs, there is also a wide variety of buildings that provide for the material and social needs of your Pops, such as Luxury Housing for your upper class Pops, Entertainment Buildings to make your populace happy and Law Enforcement to quell unrest and crime. Densely populated planets tend to require more such buildings, as the need for Housing and Amenities scales upwards with Pops and Infrastructure.


Whew, that was a lot of words. Still, we're only just getting started on the Planetary Rework and next week we'll continue talking about it, on the topic of Stratas, Pop Jobs, Housing and Migration.

Happy Thursday, everyone!

We've added some necessary hot fixes to the previous patch notes! The version number will not change but the checksum will now be 5bcb:

• Fixed end game crisis not expanding
  
• Modding: "fire once" events no longer report an error if there's an attempt to fire them multiple times (prevents error log spam)

After spending the summer in beta without introducing drastic new issues, version 2.1.2 is now the official live version of Stellaris. Below are the complete patch notes.


Free Features

• Map modes now are able to show claims - diplomatic map mode shows claims of selected empire by default
  
• Added the Kuiper Belt to the Sol system
  
• Added several new event pictures
  
• Ctrl-F9 now also hides system lines and navigation arrows
  
• It is now possible to rename the currently selected faction in faction view by clicking its name

Balance

• Re-enabled pre-sapient discovery Anomalies for the AI
  
• Existing Horde fleets are now removed upon Great Khan's death and replaced by a fixed number of replacements
  
• AI empires are now more likely to find L-Cluster insights after 100 years have passed
  
• Increased levels of precursor anomalies across the board
  
• Balanced anomaly levels according to QA and player feedback
  
• Marauder empires are less likely to spawn close to an empire's starting system
  
• Rogue Servitors & Assimilators can now once again pick World Shaper perk
  
• Reduced frequency of terraforming candidates by about 50%
  
• Reduced min distance at which Fallen Empires can spawn from other empires
  
• Fixed some fallen empire tasks being able to target other fallen empires

UI

• Only ships that are docked in a starbase with upkeep reduction will now show as having a green orbit icon on the outliner, other ships in orbit around something but not receiving an upkeep reduction will show as yellow

Modding

• It is now possible to set anomalies as should_ai_and_humans_use = yes which will allow them to be used by both AI and human empires (overrides should_ai_use)
  
• Added on_added_pop on action for when a pop is added to a planet

Bug Fixes

• Numerous OOS fixes to improve multiplayer stability
  
• Fixed issue where acquiring an L-Gate and the L-Gate activation tech out of order would cause the L-Gate special project to fail to appear
  
• Names for country designs are not duplicated anymore
  
• Marauder raiding fleets are now always deleted a year after they start to withdraw to prevent rare situations where they get stuck
  
• Added missing localization for Great Khan leader titles
  
• Fixed template manager displaying wrong military power
  
• Fixed event trigger preventing Rudimentary Robots chain from continuing once you colonize their planet
  
• Fixed Colossus Tech being reverse-engineerable from debris
  
• Federation requests between two empires belonging to the same species class should now present correct localisation
  
• Fixed Curator cost checks to avoid truncation problems
  
• The AI no longer considers fleets that are running away as support in their current endeavour
  
• Fixed the AI thinking unreachable systems are the closest systems
  
• Fixed Cloud Lightning being hidden and unavailable as a component
  
• Impossible Organism Nivlac Empire should no longer be placed on a Holy World or in a hostile system
  
• Fixed the bug where ships were losing health while merging
  
• Fixed Pacifist Defensive Wars Only demand to trigger properly
  
• Fixed issues with upgrading designs twice in the Template Manager
  
• Fixed issue where ship designer would not show the difference after researching new tech
  
• Fixed issue where players could change components on auto-generated designs
  
• Auto-upgrade is now considered as an update and can be saved
  
• Strategic Resources generated via events will now trigger the Strategic Resource discovery message
  
• It is no longer possible to construct event ships from starbases
  
• L-Cluster strategic resources will no longer appear on terraformed planets or Ring Worlds
  
• Fixed nonsensical requirement to have a free Leader slot in order to buy L-Gate Insight from the Curators
  
• Event text for opening the L-Cluster is now correct if only one L-Gate exists in the galaxy
  
• Fixed typo in Great Khan dialogue
  
• Limbobots can no longer be used to colonize worlds
  
• Limbo can only trigger once per game globally
  
• Fixed errors in Vechtar Zavonia event chain outcome
  
• Fixed on_entering_system event not being fired in your own systems. This fixes bugs like the shrines to the old gods not being completable
  
• Fixed non-sapient robots getting the wrong species rights in a Machine Empire
  
• Fixed certain opinion modifiers from distant stars events not going away over time
  
• Fixed defense platform cost not being correctly calculated
  
• Fixed instances of fleets getting stuck
  
• Fleets that cannot have their leader assigned or removed will now show this in the interface
  
• Resolved an error where Fanatic Purifier style empires could get an alien scientist from an anomaly
  
• Tweaked War in Heaven to generally have more AI empires picking sides among the Awakened Empires rather than staying neutral

Hello everyone,

We're happy to announce that we've now released the 2.1.2 opt-in patch with a couple of fixes listed in the patch notes below!

It's save game compatible with 2.1.1, as usual with minor updates :)

#################################################################
######################### VERSION 2.1.2 ###########################
#################################################################

###################
# Free Features
###################

* Map modes now are able to show claims
* Added the Kuiper Belt to the Sol system
* Added several new event pictures
* Ctrl-F9 now also hides system lines and navigation arrows
* It is now possible to rename the currently selected faction in faction view by clicking its name

###################
# Balance
###################

* Re-enabled pre-sapient discovery Anomalies for the AI
* Existing Horde fleets are now removed upon Great Khan's death and replaced by a fixed number of replacements
* AI empires are now more likely to find L-Cluster insights after 100 years have passed
* Increased levels of precursor anomalies across the board
* Balanced anomaly levels according to QA and player feedback
* Marauder empires are less likely to spawn close to an empire's starting system
* Rogue Servitors & Assimilators can now once again pick World Shaper perk
* Reduced frequency of terraforming candidates by about 50%

###################
# UI
###################

* Only ships that are docked in a starbase with upkeep reduction will now show as having a green orbit icon on the outliner, other ships in orbit around something but not receiving an upkeep reduction will show as yellow

###################
# Modding
###################

* It is now possible to set anomalies as should_ai_and_humans_use = yes which will allow them to be used by both AI and human empires (overrides should_ai_use)
* Added on_added_pop on action for when a pop is added to a planet

###################
# Bugfixes
###################

* Fixed issue where acquiring an L-Gate and the L-Gate activation tech out of order would cause the L-Gate special project to fail to appear
* Names for country designs are not duplicated anymore
* Marauder raiding fleets are now always deleted a year after they start to withdraw to prevent rare situations where they get stuck
* Added missing localization for Great Khan leader titles
* Fixed template manager displaying wrong military power
* Fixed event trigger preventing Rudimentary Robots chain from continuing once you colonize their planet
* Fixed Colossus Tech being reverse-engineerable from debris
* Federation requests between two empires belonging to the same species class should now present correct localisation
* Fixed Curator cost checks to avoid truncation problems
* The AI no longer considers fleets that are running away as support in their current endeavour
* Fixed the AI thinking unreachable systems are the closest systems
* Fixed Cloud Lightning being hidden and unavailable as a component
* Impossible Organism Nivlac Empire should no longer be placed on a Holy World or in a hostile system
* Fixed the bug where ships were losing health while merging
* Fixed Pacifist Defensive Wars Only demand to trigger properly
* Fixed issues with upgrading designs twice in the Template Manager
* Fixed issue where ship designer would not show the difference after researching new tech
* Fixed issue where players could change components on auto-generated designs
* Auto-upgrade is now considered as an update and can be saved
* Strategic Resources generated via events will now trigger the Strategic Resource discovery message
* It is no longer possible to construct event ships from starbases
* L-Cluster strategic resources will no longer appear on terraformed planets or Ring Worlds
* Fixed nonsensical requirement to have a free Leader slot in order to buy L-Gate Insight from the Curators
* Event text for opening the L-Cluster is now correct if only one L-Gate exists in the galaxy
* Fixed typo in Great Khan dialogue
* Limbobots can no longer be used to colonize worlds
* Limbo can only trigger once per game globally
* Fixed errors in Vechtar Zavonia event chain outcome
* Fixed on_entering_system event not being fired in your own systems. This fixes bugs like the shrines to the old gods not being completable
* Fixed non-sapient robots getting the wrong species rights in a Machine Empire
* Fixed certain opinion modifiers from distant stars events not going away over time
* Fixed defense platform cost not being correctly calculated
* Fixed instances of fleets getting stuck
* Fleets that cannot have their leader assigned or removed will now show this in the interface
* Resolved an error where Fanatic Purifier style empires could get an alien scientist from an anomaly
* Tweaked War in Heaven to generally have more AI empires picking sides among the Awakened Empires rather than staying neutral

Test it and tell us what you think. Most of the team will be going on vacation shortly, so we'll leave this up over the Summer.

Please note this is an opt-in patch. You have to choose to activate it.

Steam library -> Right click on Stellaris -> Properties -> Betas tab -> choose "2.1.2_beta"