Hello everyone!

Yesterday we announced that Aquatics will be released this coming Monday, November 22nd, for USD $9.99/€9.99 or regional equivalent. We’re super excited to bring you this new Species Pack and we’re really happy to sea the positive reactions you all have had to the ships and portraits that we’ve shared over the past few weeks.

And as is the time-honored tradition, here follows the changelog for the Aquatic species pack, with the accompanied 3.2 ‘Herbert’ Update, named after renowned author Frank Herbert, that the Custodian team has been working on 😁

3.2 "Herbert" Patch Notes
[expand type=details]
#################################################################
######################### VERSION 3.2.0 ###########################
#################################################################
###################
# Aquatics Species Pack Features
###################
* Added a new Aquatic pre-scripted Empire.
* Added a new Phenotype with 16 new portraits (15 normal + 1 robot) of fishy looking Aquatics.
* Added a new City Set and room backdrop for Aquatics.
* Added a new bubbly Ship set.
* Added a new Advisor Voice.
* Added a new Civic: Anglers.
* Added a new Species Trait: Aquatic.
* Added two new Origins: Ocean Paradise and Here be Dragons.
* Added a new Ascension Perk: Hydrocentric.
###################
# Humanoids Species Pack Features
###################
* Added a new Civic: Pompous Purists.
######################
# 3.2.0 "Herbert" Features
######################
* Multiplayer hosts that own the DLCs now unlock portraits as well as ship and background sets from the Plantoids and Humanoids Species Packs for clients that do not own them.
* Added the ability to pick your main species' gender during game setup.
* Added over 200 new star names for random galaxy generation.
* Added 13 random events to terraforming to make the feature more engaging.
* Added 4 new asteroid-related anomalies to spice up old anomaly categories.
* Added 4 new Gas Giant anomalies.
* Added 4 new anomalies to existing, uninhabitable worlds anomaly categories.
* Added new options to several old anomaly events which share categories with the newly added ones above.
* Enabled the Ship Browser for all players.
######################
# Improvements
######################
* Reinforcement fleets will now attempt to find a safe but longer path if the shortest path to the target fleet is not considered safe. This will reduce how often reinforcement fleets are spawned at the shipyard at the cost of increasing the MIA time (due to taking a longer path) in these cases.
* Reinforcement fleets now consider systems that have both hostiles and allies in them to be safe for pathfinding purposes.
* Reinforcing fleets using jump drives no longer require a safe hyperlane path to the fleet they are reinforcing.
* Improved how shipyards are selected when constructing reinforcements to better utilize stations with multiple shipyards and mega shipyards.
* Reinforcing fleets that fail to find a safe path to the target fleet will now merge with other fleets orbiting the same shipyard, if both fleets intended to reinforce the same target fleet.
* Plantoids and Fungoids are no longer forced to have no gender, as you can now freely pick species' genders. Instead, every randomly generated species now has a 30% chance of being one of: genderless, female-only or male-only.
* Added an additional option to the Alien Box event chain for Gestalts.
* Added an Industrial colony designation to Ecumenopolis.
* Made it so colony events will not fire on newly terraformed worlds to avoid some Ludonarrative Dissonance.
* The default flag of new empires is now randomized, say goodbye to the red-black triangle flag!
######################
# Balance
######################
* Functional Architecture and Constructobot: Reduced the free building slots granted from 2 to 1.
* Agrarian Idyll empires now get one planet building slot per four Agricultural districts built.
* Reduced the ship upkeep cost modifier for Clone army Admirals variants to 5/10/20% respectively.
* Ruins of Shallash arc site no longer has a chance of giving quite as much unity as defeating an endgame crisis.
* You can no longer use planet killer weapons on primitives inside your borders if you lack the appropriate primitive interference policies.
* Pops working the Livestock job now have 10% less political power.
* A lot of anomalies were rewarding 3 Society Research deposits, there is now more variety.
* Made Awakened Fallen Empires use Traditions.
* Several productivity-improving technologies are now no longer of dubious benefit, as their upkeep (and production) effects now only apply to jobs actually primarily producing resources.
* Nerve Stapled Hivemind pops can no longer perform complex drone jobs.
* Reduced the amount of jobs added by Leisure Arcology Districts to bring them into line with other Ecumenopolis districts.
* Ion cannons are no longer free to maintain, and have an upkeep cost of 8 energy.
* Necro-Hives:
* * Cut Necrophage pop assembly penalty to 50% from 75%
* * Made pop output modifiers (positive and negative) no longer apply to hive minds.
* * Made the -50% organic upkeep also apply to energy, for photosynthesis.
* * Devouring Swarm Necrophages now spawn with extra infrastructure to account for the lack of chambers of elevation.
* Life-Seeded now start with a 30 space planet
######################
# Stability & Performance
######################
* Fixed an OOS caused by using button effects in custom MOD UI, so now you can go back to building that Nicoll-Dyson Beam to "ensure galactic peace and prosperity".
* Improved the performance of pop factions updating their support values - resolved an issue where the game looped over every pop in the Empire for each faction, rather than calculating it once for the whole Empire and referring to that value for each faction.
* Improved the performance of planet_resource_compare trigger, and cut down on its use a bit as it's still quite expensive.
* Improved the performance of a variety of checks by making more extensive use of species happiness caching.
* Cached calculations of pop_has_random_ethics to reduce performance impact of repeatedly checking it, by 50%.
* Optimised Rising Unemployment event's triggers to be only 15% as costly.
* The game will no longer try (and fail) to run Grey Goo event True Masters on every planet, every day.
* Optimised checks for whether a pop can belong to a certain faction by pre-filtering pops by ethics in code (rather than running the script checks on all pops). For modders: this means that a faction will only allow pops which match its "guiding_ethic" in it, unless "use_guiding_ethic_as_pop_filter = no" is specified.
* Optimised several expensive pop faction demands that were checking all pops instead of all species, and similar.
* Improved the efficiency of checking whether a pop faction should exist.
* Optimised checks for jobs' "possible" trigger so that the four most common triggers are now pre-calculated per pop rather repeatedly for each job that a pop can take. (The format looks a bit different now, with possible_precalc, so modders will need to update a bit here - the error log will warn you in most cases, except that you also need to add a check when you use complex_specialist_job_check_trigger).
######################
# UI
######################
* The Music Player controls bar now starts hidden and can be extended by clicking the music icon.
* The title of the Music Player is now localised.
* Pop strata icons no longer overlap in Living Standards' tooltips.
* Tab-key in Console now also lists commands containing entered text.
* Disabled "Delete" and "Update Template" buttons when editing a base species template.
* All languages now list the main menu hotkeys ("N" for New Game, etc).
* Added a description to how migration works to the Transit Hub star base.
######################
# AI
######################
* Improved AI algorithm for picking which building and district to build by fixing an issue where it would not handle buildings or districts which produced multiple resources very well
* Improved AI logic for building starbase modules and buildings. It will no longer spam crew quarters everywhere, and will instead be better at building useful things like resource-producing buildings and titan assembly yards.
* On starbases, AI can now build Ice Mining Stations, if it is hydrocentric
* On starbases, AI can now build Dragon Hatcheries if it got the tech
* On starbases, AI is building less crew quarters in general and in places where it doesn't make sense
* On starbases, AI is building a lot more anchorages
* On starbases, AI is also building a bit more solar arrays if it is a gestalt
* On starbases, AI is also building hydroponics now, since that has been buffed a lot and is way more useful to the economy
* On starbases, AI will now handle starbases after taking over from a player - but it will NOT build lots of defense modules everywhere and tank the economy that way
* Made AI empires more careful about running out of food.
* Rogue Servitors AI (and player default) is now to give their bio-trophies migration rights, rather than to not do so.
* The AI is now able to create Ecumenopolises.
* AI is now better able to budget for repairing the Shattered Ring World that Shattered Ring origin Empires start with.
* The AI is now better able to budget for terraforming, and will more readily terraform planets into classes which are ideal for them.
* Fixed AI sending small fleets to attack starbases without grouping up.
* Fixed AI trying to build starbase buildings and modules it wasn't allowed to be building in certain cases
* Improved AI weights for planet killer weapons, so they will tend to pick the one that benefits them the most. (This also applies to the player's auto-generated ship designs).
* The AI will now consider anti-crime campaigns a valid way of fighting crime. But it will also occasionally make deals with crime lords if it is the victim of a Criminal Syndicate.
* Fixed an issue where AI empires would leave fleets behind in others' space after peace was concluded.
######################
# Modding
######################
* Starbase components can now accept economic output modifiers in station_modifier and system_modifier.
* Added on_queued and on_unqueued in decisions, and fixed a bug in abort_effect. (Also added an example sheet to show what all works: abort_effect and abort_trigger were probably hidden features).
* Added use of [loc] commands in decision descriptions.
* Fixed set_owner not working on Juggernauts.
* In component_templates, valid_for_country is now a trigger rather than a weights block, as that is how it acted. (So if you used it, you will need to update that).
* Added on_destroy_planet_with_<planet_killer_key>_queued/unqueued on_actions.
* Added species_gender trigger, which checks what gender settings a species allows.
* Fixed a mod compatibility issue where has_deposit would not predictably return false if referencing a non-existent deposit.
* Added a create_nebula effect.
* Changed terraforming costs to use the post-Megacorp economy system.
* Removed unused technology parameter terraform_cost_change (use regular cost modifiers instead).
* Removed 'energy' parameter from terraforming links (use 'resources' instead).
* Changed any_planet_army, count_planet_army, random_planet_army, and every_planet_army to no longer be restricted to armies owned by the planet owner. Use 'is_owned_by = planet.owner' as a limit to achieve the same result as previously.
* Fixed issues with inputting prev and from scopes in fire_on_action.
* set_name can now be used on first contact sites.
* Added custom tooltips database for galactic objects with triggers to be executed for every system.
* Added allowed_planet_classes to trait definitions for locking traits behind planet class selection in empire creation.
* Added "show" trigger to ship size empire_limit to control when the limit is shown to the player.
* Added planet_clear_blocker_speed_mult..
* Fixed set_starbase_building/module to use slots starting with 1 rather than 0. This now matches both remove_starbase_building/module effects, and vanilla usage, but modders who compensated for this mismatch will need to adjust for the fix. Also improved error logging for these effects.
* Fixed missing names in tooltips for modifiers granted in triggered modifier sections of starbase building/modules.
* Fixed starbases only refreshing slots on the next day after you use set_level, so set_level and directly followed by set_starbase_module would not work.
* Added ideal_planet_class to traits. It can be used for defining which planet class a habitability trait should apply to.
* The add_trait effect’s tooltip now says what the trait does.
* Fixed the "no" cases of several boolean triggers: is_bottleneck_system, is_idle, has_war_goal, has_valid_ai_personality, is_site_under_excavation, is_site_completed (they previously counted “no” as “yes”).
* Added defines for the thresholds controlling when to accept a longer path for reinforcements when the shortest path is not safe.
* Added REINFORCE_MIA_TIME_MULT and MIA_TIME_MULT for controlling reinforcement and MIA times.
* Replaced define variable SHIPYARD_REINFORCE_MAX_DISTANCE with SHIPYARD_REINFORCE_MAX_JUMPS.
* Replaced define variable SHIPYARD_DISTANCE_DIV_FACTOR with SHIPYARD_REINFORCE_DISTANCE_MULT.
* Removed define variable SHIPYARD_MAX_OVER_CAPACITY.
* Added finish_arc_stage console command for finishing the stage of the archaeological on the selected planet.
* The "possible" trigger of a tradition category's adopt tradition will now print in the tooltip for adopting that category if it fails.
* Added the possibility to get the number of civics for an empire scope with "civics_count" trigger.
* Added the possibility  to remove a civic by index e.g. "force_remove_civic = 2".
* Added on_capital_changed on_action.
* Added on_action on_planet_class_changed.
######################
# Bugfixes
######################
* The notification shown when upgrading a defense platform now only appears when all queued upgrades are complete.
* Fixed the purchasing event of the Ministry of Culture displaying the wrong job for Machine empires.
* Changed the Atmospheric Hallucinogen modifier to more accurately follow the flavor text.
* Surveying from the system map now queues orders correctly and displays the correct tooltips.
* "Crisis" diplomatic greetings now appear when talking to a crisis empire, rather than when being one.
* Fixed the three extradimensional crisis factions occasionally getting reinforcements in each others' dimensional portals.
* Devouring Swarms no longer have access to the Diplomacy Tradition Tree.
* Fixed the effects and shortened the duration of the pop output modifiers granted by the What Separates Us event.
* Fixed Corporate Galactic Imperium not having access to Catalytic Processing and Mastercraft Inc.
* The Flesh is Weak Special Project no longer causes your species to lose their namelist.
* Cracking a non-colony planet no longer rewards Menace.
* Corporate and regular civics that share very similar effects have been made mutually exclusive.
* Fixed it being possible to remove and add traits that shouldn't be possible to change, via species modification.
* Fixed enlightened primitive Lithoids getting farms instead of more mines.
* Ancient Clone Vats can now only assemble Clone Soldier pops.
* Infertile Clone Army pops will no longer be able to reproduce just because they are having a nice night out with the Caravaneers.
* Fixed Nivlacs sometimes not being radiotrophic for owners of Plantoids.
* The Resolution "Right to Work" now no longer slows down organic pop assembly.
* Mastercraft Inc. now have access to their Artificers on Ecumenpoleis.
* Shattered Rings should no longer turn into spheres when the Gray Tempest attempts to turn it into a nanite world.
* Racket Industrial Enterprise will no longer say they will give you 4 pops and then only give you 3. They also realized that while trying to scam you they were giving you a great deal so they increased the cost of the pops.
* Catalytic and Master Crafter habitats colony designations should behave as expected.
* Citadel of Faith, Auto-Curating Vault, and Vault of Acquisition are no longer gated behind the wrong planetary capital building.
* Robots will no longer have 0 upkeep while living a decadent lifestyle.
* After the Reanimators discovered that the Dessanu Consonance armies are made out of nanites they politely stopped reanimating them.
* Made it so subjects can't join federation if federation law states that subjects can not join.
* Made it so that fleets in combat while a star eater destroys a system ends combat and goes MIA.
* Fixed 'newly founded colony' immigration pull accidentally capping out at 15 months after colonisation rather than 15 years. Now correctly set to 15 years or a population of 10 pops, whichever happens first.
* Fixed fleets containing only one ship type and only one ship not being present in the fleet manager.
* Science ship now considers Hostile Intel while planning an evasive route, this fixes a problem where science ships do not flee from hostile fleets.
* Fixed reinforcements arriving at the shipyard if the target fleet was in combat when they finished construction.
* Fixed reinforcement construction miscalculating which shipyards to use when reinforcements were being sent via bypasses.
* Time taken for fleets to reinforce via fleet manager should now be the same as if reinforcing manually.
* Fixed an issue in which during the year 2280, empty Marauder raid fleets could be created.
* Clone Army pops from other empires should now decline even if their new owner has the Clone Army origin. These Pops no longer reduce the main species’ assembly speed.
* Fixed a bug preventing the event which allowed you to acquire relics of other empires when invading their capital.
* You can no longer use your science ship to transport Shard to a separate system.
* The Corporate Dominion civic now unlocks the Trade League Federation type.
* Fixed MIA times sometimes being longer than the estimated travel time between the point of origin and the destination system.
* Fixed an issue with the fleet manager where it was possible to create fleets larger than the allowed command limit.
* Fixed the assimilation process overwriting/resetting species rights in certain circumstances.
* Fixed references to "pc_shattered_ring_habitable_adj" in certain first contact event chains.
* Fixed Policies sometimes showing that they could not be changed until a date that was in the past.
* Fixed the Terraforming button on planets sometimes being unavailable without a reason being stated (e.g. pre-sapients being present).
* Fixed it being possible to start the game using an invalid empire design by abusing confirmation prompts.
* Fixed attack animations spuriously triggering when ships enter into the camera view.
* Fixed clicking the falling intel alert opening the Diplomacy tab instead of the Intel tab.
* Fixed an issue where transport, juggernaut, and colossus ship icons in the fleet view were displayed incorrectly.
* Fixed some habitat colony designations not using habitat icons.
* Fixed the displayed cost sometimes being inaccurate when attempting to apply a species modification.
* Fixed an issue where flak batteries showed the “small guns” 3D model instead of the “point defense” 3D model.
* Privateers will no longer be intimidated by exceedingly large fleets and will still spawn from the Arm Privateers operation.
* Undead Armies resurrected during battle will no longer sometimes disband a month later.
* Fixed cases where the Insufficient Ancient Clone Vats modifier would apply while purging a completely different, non-clone species.
* Fixed a bug where a species wouldn't ever grow on a planet with low habitability, also fixed that nothing would grow if you locked growing only that species
* Ancient Drones will no longer be removing deposits that have benefits.
* Adding Subterranean Liaisons no longer uses a placeholder icon.
* Fixed an issue where "Call In Favor" and "Support" text would overlap in the federation vote UI.
* Fixed void dwellers starting on Sol getting a starting message mentioning a trinary star system.
* Fixed the description of Alloy Foundries when playing Gestalts and Catalytic Processors.
* The Thought Enforcement Edict now correctly mentions the reduction in crime it provides.
* Updated Merchant Guilds tooltip to be more in line with similar civics.
* Updated the Remnant Origin tooltip to be more in line with similar origins.
* Updated the description in Bulwark of Harmony to be more Machine Intelligence friendly.
* Updated the Contingency Core Relic tooltip to mention that it only works on Machine Pop Assembly.
* Fixed that the Planetary FTL Inhibitor technology tooltip incorrectly informed the player that a Stronghold would support an FTL Inhibitor.
* Updated Machine Building Speed Tooltips to mention that they only affect machines.
* Standardized the tooltips of the different slavery types to be more clear about what they offer.
* Prosperous Unification now has a more fitting tooltip for gestalts.
* Fixed a broken macro in the Chinese tooltip for Catalytic Processors.
* Fixed the inconsistent translation of the description for Byzantine Bureaucracy civic in French.
* Removed duplicate message in situation log tooltip for special project.
* Added missing square bracket in German string mod_planet_technician_energy_produces_mult, which had caused the GetTechnicianPlural macro to display in game.
* Shattered Ring Sprawling Slum tooltips now match the regular planet ones.
* Fixed Voidborne Ascension Perk displaying an incorrect tooltip for hiveminds.
* Fixed some Brazilian Portuguese grammatical errors.
* Fixed missing modifier names in certain interfaces from several colony designations, and a few other places.
* Corrected Mistranslation in Polish Tradition Strings
* Clarified tooltip of civics that cannot be manually added or removed after game start to specify that they cannot be added too.
* Fixed Imperial Armada Fleet Size text in the Galactic Imperium view not being localized.
* Fixed broken First Contact tooltip localization refs.
* Fixed poor tooltip for Caravaneers Local Franchise event.
* Added missing effects tooltip for Terraforming Candidate planet modifier.
[/expand]



Have a question about the patch notes or the Aquatics Species Pack? Don’t miss our Dev Q&A, today at 1700 CET (1600 UTC) on the Offishial Shellaris Discod!

Embrace the life of a seafaring civilization with the release of the Aquatics Species Pack on November 22nd for USD $9.99!

Choose to originate on a large Ocean Paradise world, with increased pop happiness, output, and growth. Or choose the Here Be Dragons Origin, and start guarded by a sage-blue - and occasionally very hungry - space dragon, which will protect you from harm, as long as you keep it happy.

Specialize your species with the Aquatics Species Trait, which further optimizes your species for living on Ocean worlds, but penalizes living on Cold and Dry planet types.

Become interstellar seafood harvesters with the Anglers Civic, and harness the bounty of the ocean with fresh seafood and rare pearls as staples of your Empire’s economy.

Ascend into the deep with the Hydrocentric Ascension Perk, and your species becomes more adept at terraforming planets into ocean worlds, as well as the ability to harvest ice asteroids to expand the planetary ocean even further.

The Aquatics Species Pack also includes:

• 15 Aquatic-inspired portraits plus a new Robotic portrait
  
• Aquatics-themed ship set
  
• New Advisor Voice, inspired by high-seas adventure fiction
  
• New prescripted empire, the Sathyrelian Bliss
  
• New diplomacy room
  
• New city set
  
• 4 new Aquatic name list

Wishlist the Aquatics Species Pack today!

Launching alongside the Aquatics Species Pack, the 3.2 Patch, named after renowned Sci-Fi author Frank Herbert, brings along with it many bug fixes, improvements to performance and AI, as well as new features for the Humanoids Species Pack and the base game.

In our latest addition to the Humanoids Species Pack, the Pompous Purists Civic allows for a diplomatic playstyle, but for Xenophobes. The idea is based on an elven fantasy, where they are willing to negotiate with other species, but only on their own terms.

To that end, empires with the Pompous Purists Civic cannot receive diplomatic proposals, but may still send them. They will also get bonus trust growth and extra envoys.

With the focus on Terraforming in the Aquatics Species Pack, the Custodian Team has been hard at work to improve the experience of terraforming as a whole. Terraforming planets now have a chance to randomly trigger events, to add more flavor to the overall process of terraforming. These events vary in power and complexity and will only trigger the first time a planet is terraformed.

But there’s more, we’ve also done some work with the AI budgets to make the AI more likely to terraform planets to optimal planet types, and will be more likely to pick Terraforming technologies and Ascension perks under certain circumstances.

We have added new anomalies for the Gas Giant, Asteroid, and uninhabitable anomaly categories. This will add more depth to some anomalies that previously only had a single outcome (for example the Gigantic Skeleton Anomaly).

We also have revisited some of the older anomaly events and added new options, to add more depth to these older anomalies.

As part of the Custodian Initiative, we have set goals for ourselves, one of which is constantly working on and improving AI empires in Stellaris. The long-term goal is to move towards having a challenging AI, while still keeping the game entertaining to players and making AI empires feel more distinctive.

Previously, AI used to follow an economic plan based on the stage of the game they were in. For the 3.2 Update, we have updated the economic scripts used by the AI. The AI now uses a single base plan but relies more heavily on sub plans, which allow the AI to react more easily to unexpected developments throughout the game. The AI also has the ability to turn these sub plans on and off based on their economic situation, allowing them to react to unexpected resource deficits, and in our testing has lowered the frequency of AI economic collapses.

We also have gone over the Building and District weights for AI empires, which will further improve your AI opponents’ economy. AI starbase construction has also been improved and will now use more varied setups when building their starbases and making use of special buildings where it makes sense. AI empires will now also construct Ecumenopolis, choose better Planet Killer weapons, and are better at fighting Crime.

We have addressed several issues with regards to the Fleet Manager, namely that it was possible to create fleets larger than the command limit, which resulted in large amounts of single-ship fleets when attempting to reinforce those fleets. Fleets containing one ship type and one ship should also now appear in the fleet manager.

The time taken for Fleet reinforcements and MIA fleets will now be more accurate when compared to simply flying the fleets to the target system. Fleet reinforcements will now make better choices when selecting shipyards to reinforce from and should better consider systems with multiple shipyards as well as systems connected by bypasses.

We also have improved the reinforcement pathfinding: reinforcements will now attempt to find a second, longer route if the shortest reinforcement route is considered unsafe. Systems containing both friendly and hostile fleets will no longer be considered unsafe for reinforcement purposes. In addition, Reinforcing fleets that fail to find a safe path to the target fleet will now merge with other fleets orbiting the same shipyard if both fleets intended to reinforce the same target fleet.

The 3.2 update will feature some new Performance Improvements as well. These performance gains were realized by performing optimization on a number of various game systems (specifically Pop Factions and Jobs), to make them more efficient. We also did a deep dive into some of our events and scripts and finding and stopping events from attempting to fire when they shouldn’t be. It is our hope that this work will be felt in the form of a bit less late game slowdown, and we have identified several other places where performance improvements can be realized, either in 3.3 or in a later version.

Back in May, we talked about a Ship Browser Experiment, where roughly half of our players would be getting an improved ship browser in empire creation, that allows viewing all of the ships in a shipset, and that allows viewing all of the ships in a shipset up close and from any angle.

We’re happy to announce that this experiment will be going out to all Stellaris PC players with the free 3.2 “Herbert” update!

Modding improvements, Multiplayer stability improvements, Balance changes, and over 80 bug fixes in total.

We hope you enjoy our latest additions to Stellaris on November 22nd, and don’t forget to Wishlist the Aquatics Species Pack now!

written by Gruntsatwork and Caligula

Hello everyone, today we would like to tease you with some of the upcoming changes coming with the 3.2 "Herbert" patch, named after Sci-Fi author Frank Herbert, which we will release along with the Aquatic Species Pack.

• Functional Architecture and Constructobot: Reduced the free building slots granted from 2 to 1.
  
• Agrarian Idyll empires now get one planet building slot per four Agricultural districts built.
  
• Reduced the ship upkeep cost modifier for clone army admirals to 5/10/20% based on their decisions.
  
• Ruins of Shallash arc site no longer has a chance of giving quite as much unity as defeating an endgame crisis.
  
• You can no longer use planet killer weapons on primitives inside your borders if you lack the appropriate primitive interference policies.
  
• Pops working the Livestock job now have 10% less political power.
  
• A lot of anomalies were rewarding 3 Society Research deposits, there is now more variety.
  
• Made Awakened Fallen Empires use Traditions (but not Ascension Perks).
  
• Several productivity-improving technologies are now no longer of dubious benefit, as their upkeep (and production) effects now only apply to jobs actually primarily producing resources.
  
• Nerve Stapled Hivemind pops can no longer perform complex drone jobs.
  
• Reduced the amount of jobs added by Leisure Arcology Districts to bring them into line with other Ecumenopolis districts.
  
• Ion cannons are no longer free to maintain, and have an upkeep cost of 8 energy.

Necro-Hives:

• Cut Necrophage pop assembly penalty to 50% from 75%
  
• Made pop output modifiers (positive and negative) no longer apply to hive minds.
  
• Made the -50% organic upkeep also apply to energy, for photosynthesis.
  
• Devouring Swarm Necrophages now spawn with extra infrastructure to account for the lack of chambers of elevation.
  
• Of note here is the Functional Architecture change, we are aware that the extra building slot was the main draw of the civic but it was also way over-represented even after the initial release-hype

While not a pre-planned balance pass like we did for the Lem patch, we still found a few places to tweak and adjust and we will continue to do that in future patches.

...and now, handing over to Caligula Caesar for a look at some performance improvements and moddability topic.


Hi! You are probably used to me writing lengthy prose about new moddability and scripting language features. This time, we only have a few things to show off in that regard, but there are nevertheless some cool, technical things I can speak about.

Knowing the script language pretty well, I always found the performance impacts of our scripts to be a big unknown to me. Was what I was adding going to mess with performance? Well, I could do plenty of guessing as to how to script most efficiently, and general concepts of programming such as early outs do apply. But how big was the difference? And how much can we save by identifying inefficient scripts and improving them?

Moah had made some progress on porting the EU4 script profiler over to Stellaris as a pet project some time ago. The only problem was, its information was quite incomplete (since it needs a lot of tags added in many places of the code, basically everywhere where an effect or trigger is called). It was also pretty hard to read the information presented. But now, with the Custodians initiative, the time had come to see what we could do with this.

After a bit of (very tedious) work to make the information all-encompassing, systematic and readable, I let the game run on a Huge galaxy with a few extra boosts to the AI - 0.75 research costs, 1.25 habitable planets - and ran it a year with the script profiler enabled. Then, issues could be found. I’ve attached two versions of this output: one as it was in one of the early runs - so before coverage was comprehensive (notably, triggered modifiers and economic tables are missing), but also before any optimisation work was done - and one as it is now, in the 3.2 beta. (Note that the figures for how long it spent on each object is massively inflated by my having run the game in unoptimised debug mode with the profiler turned on)

Now, I must state in advance that we aren’t able to release the script profiler to the public with the 3.2 update for technical reasons: running the game with it makes the game about 50% slower, so we need to work out a way to be able to turn it - and its full performance impact - on and off at will. (At the moment, it is hidden behind compiler flags that are not available to the public). But we definitely hope that we’ll be able to release it to modders in the future.


The first big finding was that the game is repeatedly recalculating certain game rules a large number of times per pop each day, which was having a disproportionate impact on performance. The biggest culprit was “can_vote_in_democratic_election”, which it turned out was checked on every pop in the country every day for each pop faction while they were calculating their support value. Yes, you are reading this right: the imperialist faction would check whether each pop in the entire country was allowed to vote, then the prosperity faction would do the same, and the imperialist one, and so on… These cases were fixed by making use of daily caching: the pops will now calculate the result once per day (or, in the case of species_has_happiness, once per species in a country each day), and other places in the code can simply refer back to that result. Furthermore, pop factions’ support calculations were optimised so that the total by which they were dividing their support could be calculated once per country, rather than once per faction.

On the script side, by parsing various of the top hits, we noticed a few easily-optimised bits of script. First off, graygoo.500 was trying to fire a surprising number of times for an event that should come into play only when the Gray Goo are active (which they weren’t). It turns out that this was because it was missing “is_triggered_only”, so it was trying to fire on all planets every day! Similarly, a number of test events were scripted in a similar way, but with “always = no” as their trigger so they’d never fire. They made a small but nevertheless noticeable impact on performance, so they had to go.

The opinion modifier triggered_opinion_galactic_community_in_breach was taking up more performance than any other opinion modifier, by a distance, which seemed a bit strange. It turned out this could be fixed by a slight change in order in the triggers: it was checking “is_in_breach_of_any” before verifying Galcom membership - which sounds like it wouldn’t be a big issue, but that trigger then checks the triggers for the breach conditions of all passed resolutions, so it is in effect a lot of triggers in one. Simply swapping the order had very positive results, here.

Finally, the event crime.1 (somehow the second most costly event in the early version) was a similar case, but a lot more complicated. The main problem here was the following piece of script:

This is quite inefficient, and large benefits could be found in applying the principle of early outs. “Count_owned_pop” is a relatively expensive way of calculating anything, because a lot of efficiency is lost in converting script into code and working out the results of this, so on a planet with 80 pops, it is looping through each of those and checking a set of triggers on each of those. Unfortunately, because of the ordering, it would do this twice per day on each planet which did not have 3 unemployed pops on it:

• The event is checking the triggers every day on each inhabited planet. Or at least often. 44,000 times in a year, to be exact.
  
• It does not verify that there are unemployed pops on the planet before working out what kinds of unemployed pops there are. Which means that the OR will return false on both count_owned_pop sections, which consequently means it is checking both. Adding “num_unemployed > 3” near the start had big benefits
  
• It would check the number of unemployed pops relevant to non-gestalts and only after that check the country was not gestalt. By swapping the gestalt check to the start, it means it will only ever be trying one of the count_owned_pop loops.
  

A new, more efficient version of the trigger was therefore this:



This was some cool stuff to fix, but beyond this, simply looking at the list became a bit harder to yield significant savings. Enter spreadsheeting! We pasted the results into a spreadsheet and, a few formulas later, and a nice pivot table to give us some breakdowns along the lines of “what is the total impact of all jobs”, or “what is the impact of the potential trigger of pop factions”


Picture shows values after performance improvements

This allowed us to pinpoint a few more things. Firstly, ai_resource_production was causing an absurdly high performance cost from a rather small number of hits. The culprit, here, turned out to be that the “planet_resource_compare” trigger (used mainly here) was incredibly expensive. The problem was that it was recalculating the resource output of all resources on the planet, basically (including by seeing what each pop was producing!). It turned out to be possible to mitigate this somewhat (to about 75%) by making it selectively recalculate the production of the relevant resource, but this was still quite expensive for a trigger, so we also cut down on its use a bit. I suggest modders not overuse it either.

Another thing we saw was that, not unexpectedly, jobs were quite expensive. Specifically their weights and their “possible” checks. We have some ideas to save time on the weights that we aren’t ready to speak about yet (they emerged too late in 3.2 development to be considered for the patch, because they are relatively likely to need some iteration), but we found a way of making the “possible” triggers cheaper. Basically, every seven days, a pop would recalculate its job cache, at which point it will check whether it is allowed to work each job, and if so, calculate its weight. But most jobs have fairly standard “possible” triggers that check the first part - specifically, there is a shared set of triggers between, respectively, worker, specialist, ruler and drone jobs. It turned out that very significant improvements (to the degree of almost two thirds) were possible by having the pop calculate these four triggers first, then loop through the jobs and simply match the result to the right job.

(Note to modders: the format looks a bit different now. If you used the scripted triggers worker/specialist/complex_specialist/ruler/drone_job_check_trigger, you will now need to define e.g. “possible_precalc = can_fill_ruler_job”. And if you changed them, you will need to change the new versions of them in game_rules)

Finally, although the game rules optimisations had already fixed several performance issues with pop factions, there were a few more spots where they could be improved. The first was whether a faction should exist at all: it turned out that both the script and the code was checking whether there were 5 pops that could join the faction, just that the code wasn’t checking this anymore after the faction was formed. Obviously, this wasn’t ideal, so the script check (being the slower) was removed, and the code check amended to account for shrinking pop factions becoming invalid.

The second was deciding whether a pop should belong to a faction: even though almost all factions only allow pops matching their ethos, the filter by ethos is quite late. By putting it much earlier - in code, before the script is even checked at all (with an override in case this isn’t desired, e.g. for technologist robots) - this massively cut down the costs of this particular calculation.

Finally, a number of their demands - checked each day per faction - were quite exorbitant. By changing the ordering and using equivalent but cheaper checks (e.g. any_owned_species instead of any_owned_pop). This, too, had a significant impact, so that the script footprint of pop factions (excluding game rules they use) was reduced by about two thirds.


It is my hope that this work will be felt in the form of a bit less late game slowdown. My tests would indicate that this was a success, though it’s very hard to quantify by how much. It was however work that was solely focused on the script performance footprint, so there’s plenty of other things for us to look at! The job is never over, when it comes to performance, and hopefully we’ll have time to make further improvements for 3.3.

For example, I have heard a few complaints about UI lag in the late game, which might be improved slightly in a few interfaces as a result of the performance work, but this work didn’t focus on UIs. It is certainly true that some of them are not as fast as we would like them to be. Particular ones in this regard are the planet view, the species view and the colonisation selection menu, and we are looking at options to speed them up. (And, indeed, if anyone can think of any others, it would be useful for you to point them out!)


I can’t really do a dev diary without talking about a few moddability improvements, so here they are. As I said, we don’t have that much this time, but there’s a few things that people might enjoy trying out:

• There’s now a create_nebula effect. Although it’s best used during galaxy generation, since the visual effects on the galaxy map won’t refresh during the game.
  
• Decisions can now have on_queued and on_unqueued effects.
  
• Terraforming now uses the Megacorp economy system. Meaning, the costs are configurable resource tables, and you can make economic_unit modifiers to apply to them.
  
• There’s a species_gender trigger that checks what gender the species’ leaders can be
  
• You can now define custom tooltips for systems that you see when you mouse over them on the galactic map
  
• There’s now on_actions for on_capital_changed and on_planet_class_changed
  
• For Traditions, the “possible” trigger of its adopt tradition will now show in the tooltip for adopting it if it fails. I’m told that you can also now make the tradition categories have a container where you add a gridbox.

There’s also a couple of things that modders will have to update (aside from the terraforming, as mentioned):

• any/count/every/random_planet_army now refers to all armies on the planet, not just all owned by the owner of the planet
  
• Set_starbase_building/module and the remove variants are now consistent in starting at slot 1, rather than “set” starting at 0 and “remove” at 1.
  
• In component_templates, valid_for_country is now a trigger rather than a weights field
  
• Fire_on_action had some issues where you defined scopes with “prev” and “from”, those no longer exist.

As a final moddability note, for anyone who misses the meaty dev diaries with far-reaching moddability changes, not to worry! Anyone that has played around with the script of our newer games will know that there’s a lot more potential in our scripting language. There’s some cool stuff in the works, though I can’t at this stage say what exactly or in which patch it’ll be.

I am also, as last time, attaching the script docs to the dev diary, so that you can see any changes I forgot to mention. Also, any modders who are interested in early access to the 3.2 Update, for the purposes of getting your mods updated, you can sign up here: https://pdxint.at/3bZbVJN

written by Fenni Johansson, Hanna Johansson, and Nicolas Lennman

Hi! My name is Fenni and I’m an Art Producer for Stellaris.

Today, I will talk a bit about our art processes and give you a little behind-the-scenes look at how our amazing team of artists worked when creating the Aquatics species!

When creating a new species, we first start by exploring the theme, story and narrative of the species. When creating a character inspired by an existing animal, we also first explore why this animal looks the way it does and what specific characteristics we can identify. How did the animal evolve to look like this? How has the environment it lives in shaped it’s appearance and behaviour? This helps us understand what elements and why something looks and feels the way it does, and we can use it as inspiration for creating an alien species.

For example, we can start by exploring the deep sea as a source of inspiration. Our team of artists start by looking at what common identifiers can be found in deep sea creatures, and what emotions they convey. This helps us create a strong narrative. We always explore several different narratives and sources of inspiration, and we use these to create unique characters.

Below is an example of one of these narrative explorations, when our artists explored the deep sea:


Here our amazing artists defined some identifiers and shared visuals between deep sea creatures, and what emotions they convey. This helps us understand how we can create unique species that also clearly tells the story of a "deep sea dweller".

After identifying these kinds of themes, materials, and narratives, our team uses it to create individual characters.

While we always make sure to stay true to the overall theme of the species, we also focus on making sure each character is unique and tells their own story, conveying a range of different emotions using their visual language. Small changes in a character's design, shape, silhouette can help convey completely different emotions and characteristics. As an example of how we explore how positions, silhouettes and shapes convey different emotions, let's have a look at the exploration process for creating one of our new aliens!

This is an exploration of an alien which was based on crustaceans:


Made by art director Frida Eriksson and artist Emma Jonsson

As you can see, the artists explored several different uses of poses and silhouettes to convey a range of emotions. This is important to explore at the beginning of the species creation process, to make sure we create a cohesive visual language that’s in line with the emotion and story we want the character to convey.

After our artists have settled on a narrative and direction for a species, they start sketching up some more defined concepts.

During the concepting phase, the artists explore a lot of different directions before settling on a design that conveys the right visuals and story. Let’s look at another example!

Below we have some detailed explorations of a squid-like species.

Like mentioned before, we first decide what narrative and emotions we base our characters on. For our Squidbert here, our artists wanted the species to specifically convey three different emotions; Enigmatic, Friendly and Hyper-intelligent.


Made by art director Frida Eriksson and artist Emma Jonsson

Several different directions are explored before deciding on a final design.Our artists did a fantastic job with exploring how to convey that this species fits the narrative described before - enigmatic, friendly and hyper-intelligent.

After creating the final design, our artists get to work with creating a render and adding some values and more details to the design. During this stage, the artist needs to work out the light and shadows. They also need to add more detailed materials.

Let’s take a look at our Aquatic Machine Portrait for an example of what a final concept design looks like, and what it looks like after the first step in the rendering process!


Made by art director Frida Eriksson and artist Emma Jonsson

To the left, you can see the final design and thumbnail. To the right, you can see the rendered version with added values - showing a lot more detail when it comes to lights, shadows and materials.

After that is done, our artists need to refine the rendering and add some colour variations! Our artists take very careful considerations with what colors to use. It all needs to fit the overall theme and connect to the narrative! The species design needs a narrative red thread through all steps from start to finish, and color variations play an important role in that.


Made by art director Frida Eriksson and artist Emma Jonsson

Our incredibly talented artists spent a lot of time polishing the colours. They used colors and materials found in our oceans as a main source of inspiration, to make sure even the color variations were aligned with our overall theme.

After this, our artists spend some additional time refining the render and making sure it looks good in-game.

Here are some final in-game versions of the portraits I talked about in this diary!




After all that, we’re not quite done yet! We still need to create some clothes for the characters, and most importantly - we need to bring them to life by animating them!

Continue reading and our amazing animator Hanna will walk you through that process..

And portraits and characters aren't the only thing our artists have worked on for the Aquatic Species Pack - they’ve also done quite a bit of other illustrations as well! Nico, our fantastic 2D artist, will show you how he created a new illustration for an event chain in the game further down.

I hope you had fun reading a bit about the process of how species are made! It has been an absolute pleasure to work with this team of incredible artists, and I’m so excited to get to share some of their work with you all.


And now it’s time for some portraits and specifically portrait animations. My name is Hanna Johansson and I did the animations for the aquatic species pack.

So when the portraits land in my lap this is kind of what they look like; a dissected version of the original concept. This is called a paper doll. For me to be able to animate the portrait the artists need to chop the portrait up into smaller pieces that I turn into individual meshes. Sounds brutal I know, but I promise you that they feel no pain and the other part of my job is to patch them up again. Next, I add some nice topology so that the character will deform in a good looking way.


Two different color variations of the shark boy

The next step is to place the meshes so that the character becomes whole again, now shark boy feels much better. Next, I add the skeleton. I place the joints where I want the character to bend or deform to make the character come alive as much as possible. One thing that I do before skinning is placing controls by all the joints. I personally don’t like to animate directly on the joints because they don’t have zero transformation values. By adding controls and constraining them to the joints I have a clean slate to put my keyframes on. Once I’ve added the controls, I skin the meshes to the joints and bada bing, bada boom, the rig is complete!




Mesh placement, joint placement and adding controls

Now it’s time for the fun stuff: Animation. When it came to animating the aquatic portraits I really wanted to capture the feeling of characters being underwater. I added a lot of slow and flowy movements and looked at some cool references, like videos of fabric moving underwater and of course, a lot of fish videos. For the portraits we create about 3-5 idles that the characters can switch between. This is so that the movements don't become too repetitive and it also gives an opportunity to create an idle that’s more reactive or moves a lot more, but doesn’t play as often, so it becomes distracting.

To finish off, I’ll show you my top 3 animations that I did for aquatics. These were the ones I found the most fun to animate and made me feel the most inspired when I saw the design of them.

Slimey Slime Boy

Deep Sea Dweller

Crab People… Crab People

Hi!

My name is Nicolas Lennman and I am a UI/2D artist working on the Aquatic species pack. In this dev diary I will show you a rough process of how we approach the making of event images for Stellaris.

Starting off we (the artists that is) are handed a short brief of what kind of story the event image will try to convey. In this case, we have the new aquatic space dragon which is looming out in space.

The very first step to creating a more elaborate illustration like this is to create a bunch of simple composition sketches. Just to get a good idea of the basic layout of the illustration, where are the major shapes and values placed. Most of the time one would make a bunch of these quick iterations and pick out the best one.



The next step is to draw the illustration. For me personally, spending quite some time here really helps in the next few steps of the painting. Luckily for me in this case I had a lot of great references to work from provided by our great concept artists and 3D-artists



The third step is to make a black&white render. This is to flesh out the shapes and areas of light and shadow. Some artists refer to this workflow as an “occlusion pass”.



In the next, fourth step, I apply the general colors on top of the previous occlusion pass. Here I spend some time making sure to find nice color compositions and colors that compliment each other. Like in this case how the blue/green of the dragon compliments the red/purple of the background.



The final fifth step is by far the step that takes the most time. It's the refining stage where all the details, effects and major lights are added. It seems like quite the large leap from the previous stages, but these were crucial to have an easy transition into this stage. The last step is to adjust the values and colors and make sure the illustration really pops!



Thanks for reading! Wishlist the Aquatics Species Pack on Steam!

written by Pavel Golovii and David Strömblad Lindh

Hello! My name is Pavel Golovii, I am a concept artist from the art team that has worked on the Stellaris Aquatics Species Pack. I am going to highlight the process of developing ship designs from a concept artist perspective. I will talk about the initial ideation process, inspiration, visual language and defining the look of individual ship classes.



The work of a concept artist is to suggest a clear visual interpretation of game aspects often based on initially vague ideas and definitions. At this very first stage our goal was to probe for the style for the aquatic ships, invent a sort of a visual language that we then could use to create the entire aquatic ship set that would also fit the existing Stellaris universe. Our art director, Simon Gunnarson, articulated main pivot points for the concept art team. The ships' style had to convey the aquatic and sentient origin of the species that built them and yet artists should avoid too literal interpretations (e.g. converting sea animals into a spaceship). While striving toward non-traditional organic forms we also had to clearly show they are artificially created. These statements served us as navigation beacons leaving a very broad fairway for our art experiments.

Starting a new concept work can be both exciting and intimidating. As a first step I try to get more information on the topic as it helps to feel myself on solid ground and start off. I had some starting advantage because long before participating in the project the underwater world theme was already part of my interests and passion. Being a seasoned diver and amateur underwater photographer gave me a lot of personal emotional experience and fueled my work. A lot of inspiration I gained from modern architects like Zaha Hadid and Santiago Calatrava. Their works are a great example of organic form interpreted as constructive elements. And of course nature itself is an inexhaustible source of ideas.



Radiolaria drawings by Ernst Haeckel(left) became an inspiration for many ships’ elements, including the titan's bow gun. Modern architecture and design gives great examples of organic form interpretation(right).

Starting from big design entities I try to find what proportions, shapes and patterns would distinguish the ships of aquatic species. Will they be thin and streamlined or bulky and rounded? What associations does that particular form bring up to the viewer? We already have Molluscoid species in the game and they are somewhat related to the aquatic theme. So it was critical that new designs are read as different and do not utilize the same shape language.


Early ship style exploration sketches by Pavel Golovii.


Style exploration sketches by Mattias Larsson.

Once there is an understanding that large shapes and proportions are settled and work well for the theme, smaller elements need to be explored next. This is like enriching the visual vocabulary that will later be used to ‘write the whole story’ - designs of all the ship classes. Many details like windows, engines, and greebles are going to be shared across ship classes. This helps to propagate style and contributes to better scale perception. A detail that is perceived as a viewport should be approximately of the same size both on a battleship and a corvette. Thus another important step is to test how these elements work for different ship sizes.



This sketch sheet by Pavel Golovii shows exploration of various elements like viewports and also an attempt to get the feeling of scale for small, medium and large ships.


Material and color exploration sketches by Pavel Golovii.

And last but not least comes color and material explorations. At this stage I try to figure out the set of materials that is going to be used for the ships. What the primary and secondary plating may look like? How large is the area a specific material is going to cover? What texture is going to be used for that plating and how it looks when adjacent to another material? These kinds of questions I need to give an answer to in my sketches. Here concept artists work in close collaboration with 3D artists. As the look of the materials is quite dependent on the game engine it is good to test the possibilities and limitations both from artistic and technical points.


Material explorations done by 3D artists Anton Hultdin(left) and Tim Wiberg(right).

All the artistic findings during the style development stage are finally wrapped up by the art director into a style guide that becomes primary but not the only reference for the next step.

Once the visual language is defined it is time to ‘write the story’ using that language - build design for each ship class. This is where each class should get its unique look within a given style and where more rules and restrictions apply. Ships consist of several interchangeable modules and each module has its own set of gun mounts. Modules should have seamless joints to each other and gun mounts have their specific fixed size - all that needs to be taken into account now.


Cruiser concept by Pavel Golovii. This is a work in progress showing all module designs. Orange lines represent seams between modules. The corvette drawings(left) are there to keep control over scale perception.

As each ship class has its unique characteristics, it is important to show that in their appearance. Agile corvette differs from heavy titan not only by size, but also proportions, silhouette and unique details. Proportions and silhouettes are something that a viewer reads first, especially when a ship is observed from a distance, which is a common case for Stellaris. So it is important to put distinction at this level. Some elements may help to further differentiate a ship from other classes and tell more about its purpose.


Rotating circular element initially designed by Mattias Larsson for the science ship(center) became a distinguishing feature of other science related structures like the research station(left, by Pavel Golovii) and starbase’s science module(right, by Anna Windseth).

Given the theme, in the design of many elements marine life motifs were used. The hard part of the job is to do that in a subtle, balanced way that would bring a viewer a certain association but would not feel too on the nose. It is good to make a titan ship reminiscent of a big whale shark, but it should not look like a shark and it must keep the sense that ship was manufactured rather than has organic origin. Ideally a viewer should read that on some subconscious level, without explicitly naming the association.



Initial sketches of the titan ship class used whale shark and manta ray motifs. In the process the titan got a different look for the front gun but the ‘manta’ motif was used for the construction ship design(the leftmost image). Sketches by Pavel Golovii.

Work of a concept artist is not only about how things may look, but quite often it is also to answer ‘how it may work’. The aquatic colossus class design is quite ambitious with tentacles as its most prominent feature. A lot of effort has been put into figuring out the mechanics of the tentacles, how they bend and draw out. To prove the mechanics a 3D model was created and animated. Also colossus is supposed to have quite intricate special effects so sketches of them were included in the concept sheet to serve as a starting reference for our VFX artist.



The colossus class ship designed by Mattias Larsson. The concept sheet contains sketches of VFX and a detailed breakdown of the tentacle construction(lower right corner).



Proof of tentacle mechanics in 3D software. Done by Mattias Larsson together with Hanna Johansson.

Arguably, ships are key actors of the Stellaris game, sharing that title with characters. But the inhabited part of the game’s universe is full of static man-made objects - space stations, that also play an important role. Design-wise they can be regarded as ship’s direct descendants as they inherit a lot from their look and share the same style. Yet development of stations has its peculiarities. These are static objects orbiting a planet or a star and that must be reflected in their proportions and shape that tends to be more weighted toward its center and is not pointed to any direction. Also, some of the station types have a layout that changes and gets more complicated by the addition of modules with various functionality.




Star base design made by Anna Windseth. These drawings show the station's structure and how it evolves from an outpost to a formidable citadel. Radial symmetry helps to underline the static nature of this object.



Mining station concept by Pavel Golovii. The silhouette of this station is supposed to bring association with a factory and hint on its industrial appliance.

Once the concept is done and approved by the art director it is then passed on to 3D artists for modelling, texturing and material setup. This could be an artist in an outsourcing company. In that case a concept artist can not communicate directly with a 3D artist and the concept sheet should be as detailed as possible to minimize the chance of misinterpretation and extra feedback. It is a bit different when the ship is planned for production inside Paradox studio. That gives a concept artist a chance to collaborate with a 3D artist directly by providing instant feedback and additional information that he may be asked for. That also means a concept artist can be more loose in rendering and detailing his artwork.



Additional top-down drawing and paintover of the stern area requested from a concept artist for the titan ship. The model is made by Abraham Gomez.

There is a lot more that can be covered about the ship design process but this goes beyond the format of the diary article. I hope the reading was of some interest and most importantly I hope you will enjoy the ship designs in the upcoming Aquatic species pack! Below are some more concepts for you to help pass the time until the pack is released.



Battleship concept by Pavel Golovii.



Juggernaut concept by Mattias Larsson.



Cruiser concept by Pavel Golovii.

My name is David Strömblad Lindh and recently joined the 3D art team for Stellaris after completing my internship at Paradox Development Studio.

My task was initially to re-skin the texture set for our already existing dragon. Instead our art producer came up with the brilliant idea to create a small team to work with the dragon, a kind of strike force, consisting of multiple disciplines within art and game design. Putting people with different skills together to work closely in an early stage, created closer communication and reduced the gap between the roles.



My work started parallel with the concept artist being a part of a mini pre production. Pushing what we think our engine can handle, testing out ideas in game to see what limitations we have with the shading and lightning. Then roughly block out ideas in 3D with the mindset that anything can be scraped to avoid spending any significant time on any part. What works on a flat 2D concept might not work in full 3D.

To come up with an idea of how the dragon should look like we started with what we already know from the Aquatic artstyle and combining it with the lore of the dragon. We wanted to create a godlike dragon that comes from another galaxy. It has to be a central part of the system it lives in.



When the concept is approved it’s safe to spend more time on finalizing the silhouette and continue with adding details. Starting with a blank canvas can sometimes be daunting and 3D sculpting is no exception when trying to add age and weathering to a baby smooth model. To overcome this I roamed around old substance designer files from previous projects looking for heightmaps I could use to project onto the surface of the dragon's shielding. It doesn't have to be perfect but it’s something to continue sculpting more details onto.



(1) Highpoly sculpt with topology ready for more details. (2) Sculpt with medium sized details added. (3) Lowpoly model with baked information from highpoly with added details. (4) Final textured model with placeholder for VFX.

It’s important to get a feeling for how the final product will look and that's why it's important to get a model into the game as soon as possible. Even if it’s only a first draft of a lowpoly model with badly baked textures you will get a feeling of how the lightning in the game will affect the model. From that point it’s easy to iterate on the model continuously exporting and reviewing the changes in the game. That way you avoid spending a lot of time on a model and then in the end realize the model doesn't work.




When working from home it’s more important than ever to break your own vacuum and communicate with the rest of the team. The same way I worked close to the concept artist I want to continue working close to the VFX artist and animator that will continue the work after me. So I don't create something that will make their job harder but instead prepare the model to make their job easier.

This kind of work is what makes working as a 3D artist on Stellaris interesting. I’m not only producing ship after ship but is also being challenged with tasks outside my comfort zone.

----

See you all next week, when we will talk some more about the art process for the aquatic portraits.

written by grekulf

Hello everyone!

Today we’re back to talk a little bit about the recent news that has no doubt sent ripples throughout the community by now, namely the newly announced Aquatics Species Pack!



The Aquatic Species Pack will include:

• 15 new Aquatic Portraits
  
• 1 aquatic-themed Robotic Portrait
  
• Water themed Ship Set
  
• Here Be Dragons Origin
  
• Ocean Paradise Origin
  
• Anglers Civic
  
• Hydrocentric Ascension Perk
  
• Aquatic Species Trait
  
• Aquatic Advisor, inspired by high seas adventure fiction

Remember to w(f)ishlist it on Steam right now!

For many years now, I have been forced to play Stellaris without dolphinoids... but no more! I can proudly say that we’ve made the perhaps greatest additions to Stellaris yet!

Dolphinoids have finally been added to the game, and the future is looking brighter than ever before. Dolphinoids have been used in narrative examples during design meetings for many years, even prior to the release of Stellaris back in 2016, so I am particularly happy to see them finally becoming a reality. I hope you will enjoy playing them as much as I will!


Tidal Wave of awesomeness.

I’m sure you’re all excited to take a look at the gameplay details, so let’s dive right in!


This new Civic will allow you to harvest the bounty of the ocean, by replacing your Farmer jobs with Anglers and Pearl Divers on your Agricultural Districts.


Under the sea, there’s plenty of shinies to see!


One of our first ideas related to the aquatic theme was to be able to mine ice and bring it back to your Ocean Worlds, to make them larger. The idea originally bounced between being a Civic or an Origin, but we realized it would make much more sense as an Ascension Perk. This is the first time we’re adding an Ascension Perk with a species pack, which in itself is also fun.


If you live underwater, raising the sea level can be quite useful.

As you could see in the trailer, the Deluge Colossus Weapon can be unleashed to create a watery grave for your enemies! Ice Mining stations will increase mining station output in a system, as well as enable the Expand Planetary Sea decision, which will increase the planet size by 1.





We’re adding a new (zero point cost) Aquatic species trait. It doesn’t require you to have an Aquatic portrait, but it will require your species to start on an Ocean World. We hope that this covers those of you who want more freedom of choice for your species portraits, while still keeping the aquatic theme intact. The trait also gains additional bonuses whenever the Hydrocentric Ascension Perk has been selected.


From the deep we come!


The ultimate watery start, Ocean Paradise allows you to start on a chonky size 30 planet filled with a plentiful bounty of resources. When combined with the Aquatics Species Trait, and the Hydrocentric Ascension Perk, the Ocean Paradise origin gives significant advantages to starting with an Aquatic species. You will want to keep your friends close, and your anemones closer.

You will also start in a nebula and with ice asteroids in your home system.


Where there is water, there may be life. Where there is lots of water, there may be lots of life.


Perhaps the most unique Origin yet, Here Be Dragons starts you off in a unique symbiotic relationship with an Ether Drake. Without spoiling too much, the drake will essentially protect you while you keep it happy. The drake is not controlled by you, but can rather be seen as a guardian ally, as long as you keep it happy.




Hostile neighbors? No problem, ol’ Hrozgar will scare them off! This unique ether drake features a unique aquatic-inspired appearance.


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That is it for this week! I hope you enjoyed this deep dive into the gameplay features. Next week we’ll submerge ourselves even deeper into the Aquatics Species Pack by taking a look at the art behind the aquatic ships and the unique model for the ether drake.


Isn’t she a beauty? Come back next week to learn more about the art in the Aquatic Species Pack.

Embrace the life of a seafaring civilization as you sail the open expanses of the galaxy with Stellaris' most immersive pack yet: the Aquatics Species Pack!

Dive into the Stellaris galaxy with a sea of new choices, and discover new life where you least expect it. Let a wave of new customisation options wash over your empire, with a treasure trove of new species portraits, ship set, origins, and more. Stay tuned for more updates about the Aquatics Species Pack, as more details will soon surface!

Wishlist the Aquatics Species Pack today!

written by grekulf

Hello everyone!

For today’s dev diary we’ll be talking a little bit about a new wave of changes coming in the upcoming 3.2 update.

3.2 will feature some new content and features, some of which didn’t make it into 3.1, and some of which are new. The reason why I mention that is because I also wanted to shed some light on the process itself. With this new way of working, it’s fine if something isn’t done for a certain update, because it can simply spill into the next update. With our ambition of only having 3 months between the updates, it will not be long before the new piece of content will be out in the public. Speaking of which, the new Pompous Purists Civic is just such an example.


This civic was designed to be added to the Humanoids Species Pack with our Buffing the Backlog initiative, but it didn’t quite make it in time to be released in 3.1. In 3.2 you will be able to try out this new addition to the Humanoids Species Pack.

The Pompous Purists Civic is a civic that allows for a diplomatic playstyle, but for xenophobes. The idea is based on an elven fantasy, where they are willing to negotiate with other species, but only as long as it's on their own terms.


Friends? Maybe if you keep a respectable distance.


Back in dev diary 213 we briefly talked about the improvements to a part of the empire creation process – namely the part of the UI where you select your ship appearance. The experiment meant that only about half of you got to experience those improvements, while the rest kept the ship appearance selection as it has looked like since 2016. The reason why we ran this improvement as an experiment is because we wanted to measure how successful doing these kinds of improvements can be.


The Ship Appearance part of the empire creation screen allows you to browse different ship sizes and appearances.

The improved ship browser will be available to everyone with the release of 3.2.

Now I’ll hand over to Victor who will be talking a little bit about some new content for anomalies.


Hello everyone! I am Victor, a Custodian Content Designer that you might have seen around on the weekly streams these past few months.

Back in 2018, we removed anomaly failure from the game. This meant that every single time you encountered the Gigantic Skeleton anomaly category, you would always get the Gigantic Skeleton anomaly, for it was the only one in the category. No longer! As one of my tasks for this patch, I decided to simply go through every single anomaly category and add new anomalies to orphaned categories that I could for the development cycle.



This is not only limited to new anomalies, but I also revisited some old classics adding options to events that previous designers created before a lot of the resources we now use were added to the game.



While this is not anything that will revolutionize the game, it is a great and interesting direction for a Custodian content designer to explore, which we are still establishing on the team. I do hope you enjoy your (slightly) more exciting and varied early game!


Yes, hello, I am still here. My other task for this patch was to create a few varied random events for terraforming. These events vary in power and complexity and mainly break the monotony of pressing a button and getting a better planet. These bonuses vary from getting more districts of a chosen type to perhaps uncovering a dig site left by a species to enamoured with war.



Before you start thinking, you will sit there and terraform a planet back and forth between two different types and fishing for events. Do know that you can only get events the first time you terraform a world, and it’s never guaranteed. Terraforming is quite the unexplored space for Stellaris events, and these were a lot of fun to create.

Finally, Caligula Caesar has managed to restore the AI’s terraforming hunger! Previously the AI needed to gather an absurd amount of energy credits even to consider terraforming, but that has now been rectified. The AI has been spotted changing and creating optimal planets in our internal testing. They also are more likely to pick terraforming techs and appropriate ascension perks in certain circumstances.

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That is all for this week folks! Next week we’ll be back with some exciting news!

written by Guido

Hello and welcome to a new Dev Diary,

My name is Guido and today I’m here in my role as a Principal Designer on Stellaris to talk about AI in a bit more detail.

You probably have heard about the Custodian Initiative by now which has been created to keep improving the game on a more regular basis and in order to be quicker when reacting to player feedback. A part of this initiative is also to put some more love and attention to the AI of the game going forward - an AI initiative inside the Custodians, basically.

For this, we have set some goals for ourselves going forward:

1. Always work on AI-related topics, regardless of what else is going on
   
2. Move the AI towards being challenging to players in an entertaining way, rather than be optimized to min-max its way to victory
   
3. Move the AI towards being more distinctive, so that not all empires feel strong in the same way
   
4. Support future DLCs from the get-go
   
5. Constantly make small improvements to the AI
   
6. React quicker to player feedback
   
7. Occasionally make a push for more significant improvements

Speaking of which, for the upcoming patch in November, we have some significant updates in store.


First of all, the biggest change you will notice is how we have changed the economic plans script. This script is the core of the economic behavior of our empires. It defines what resources they strive to get when building districts and buildings. How much population growth they should go for and how much research and unity they want.

The functionality of the script hasn’t changed much, but how we are using it has changed.

Previously the script was divided into early-, mid-and late-game. Depending on the phase of the game, empires would prioritize resources differently. For example, focus on research was lower in the early game than in the later stages of the game. However, this approach didn’t take into account the various situations an empire can find itself in. Especially after a war or when a new empire breaks off an existing one. In those cases, even if the game phase was in the late game, for the respective empires it meant that they were in a much more ‘early game’ position.



Instead of having 3 different economic plans, we feature 1 base plan instead. In order to get more flexibility and to react to the empire’s situation, we’re relying much more on the ‘subplans’ inside that base plan.


Subplans can be turned on or off, depending on the situation the empire finds itself in. Our main rationale was to ensure that an empire would be economically stable before it spends resources on ‘bonus’ things like research, population growth, defensive modules on starbases, and unity buildings.
Previously those things were prioritized too early and without enough respect to the basic income of energy and minerals, leading to empires that produced alloys, but had big deficits in energy and mineral production. And this deficit would be the start of an economic death spiral, where the resource debuffs would further reduce production and everything just escalated to the point where an empire was bankrupt on all resources. This became especially problematic after the economic system has been rebalanced to focus resource production more on the districts, rather than the buildings of a planet.

Here’s an example of what the economic situation generally looked for empires in a game that went on for around 80 years:

These are screenshots from Stellaris version 3.0.3

Our updated economic script prioritizes basic income first and takes the new economic rebalance into account. Energy and minerals are most important.

The difference between the ‘income’ and ‘focus’ block is that if the monthly income is below what is defined in the ‘focus’ block - districts and buildings which produce those resources get an extra bonus in weight, when deciding what to build.



Then the first subplan kicks in. If a country uses food (therefore, Machine empires will have this subplan turned off) it will prioritize food production.



The next subplan will check conditions for focusing on consumer goods. Again, checking if the empire actually uses them or not - and then only focus on producing them if the empire has at least a monthly income of minerals of 30.
Based on the fact that in order to create consumer goods you require minerals.



Further down we activate the plans for prioritizing research and all the higher-level resources




So, the script can check for various situations in AI empires - from the fact if they are a Gestalt Empire, using food to monthly income of specific resources.
This gives the AI a lot more flexibility in managing its economy.

As an example, here we have a 100-year old Galaxy with 13 AIs and every empire is able to manage its economy in a decent enough way. Notice the resource tab at the top - almost all empires have positive income in all resources; the ones with a negative income only have a small deficit:



Apart from this, there were some small, but significant code changes that helped the AI in running the show.


The code for the AI has been optimized heavily in the past in order to improve performance a lot. However, this has led to some unforeseen and unintended behaviors which have now been corrected. Some of the districts and buildings weren’t considered at all and city districts were weighted way too high. The AI is also now able to build temples and holo theaters, for example.

Finally, the AI has also been given a bit of support in how it will set up its starbases, especially in conjunction with the hydroponics starbase building, which can play a larger role in how you provide food for your empire. The AIs can now use more varied setups when building their starbases, making use of Curator Think Tanks, Nebula Refineries, and other special buildings where it makes sense.

And all of this was built on the foundation of the last major rework of the economic AI, so kudos to sidestep for making this evolutionary step possible.

With your help, we’re looking forward to giving the AI the attention it deserves and making it even better in the future.

Cheers,

Guido

written by grekulf

Hello everyone!

Today I thought we’d go back and talk a bit about the Custodian Initiative and what the future can hold.

The 3.1 ‘Lem’ Update which we put out about 2 weeks ago contained a lot of good stuff that we'd been working on for some months. We’re really happy with how you have received the Custodian Initiative and the first free update, so it’s really fun to see that things seem to be moving in a clearly positive direction.


With the Custodian Initiative we’re doing a lot of new things at once, and in combination with a lot of internal changes as well, means we’re still learning and adapting. One goal that we haven’t been able to quite deploy a solution for is how to better work together with everyone in the community. We very much appreciate your feedback and we like to have constructive or fun interactions with you, and we want to figure out how to make this process more effective for us. For example, we’ve been thinking about how to have more public-facing bug tracking where you could potentially vote for issues (the voting functionality currently exists in our bug forums, albeit a bit more hidden than would be ideal). None of this has any concrete plans right now, but I thought it was important to mention anyway, so that you can more clearly know that we’re very interested in figuring out how to better make use of community engagement and feedback.

If you have any thoughts, let us know! We are also interested in hearing if you have ideas on how you can organize yourselves in the community to promote ideas, bugs and suggestions for improvements.

Our primary ways of interacting with you are our forums, steam, reddit and discord.


As we’ve mentioned before, we aim to release a new free update about every 3 months. These updates will sometimes be released together with a new DLC. The next update is scheduled for late November.

In the November 3.2 update, our strategy will be to be a bit less ambitious than the Lem Update, and to focus on a bit more safe improvements. Going forwards, we may alternate between safe and more spicy changes for these free updates. Even if we aim to make 3.2 a bit safer, there will still be some interesting changes to look forward to – like pretty significant improvements for the AI. We will talk a bit more about that in detail next week. We will talk more about 3.2 in the coming weeks after that as well.

After 3.2 we will be aiming to release a 3.3 update sometime in February. This update will be a bit more spicy. Among other things, the Unity & Sprawl rework, mentioned earlier in dev diary 215, is likely to be finished and tested by then. Given the spiciness of these changes, we’re also looking into the possibility of an Open Beta for them to help things go as smoothly as possible :) We will be talking more about that in the coming months, mainly after November.

Keep in mind that the Custodian Initiative is still in its infancy and things are prone to change, so try to be patient with what you can expect with future updates. Together we'll be able to make Stellaris even more awesome!

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That is all for this week! Next week we will be back to talk about AI improvements for the upcoming 3.2 update.