written by Eladrin

Hello!

The team is working on the 3.4.4 patch as I write this - we should have a list of patch notes as next week’s DD. Today we’ll be discussing some less concrete things.

We often find ourselves with a bit of free time during the summer to experiment with different systems that strike our fancy. Previous such experiments yielded the Lithoid traits (which changed the way we make Species Packs forever) and the first trials of Industrial Districts. Often they don’t work out, or need a lot of iteration before turning into something usable, but that’s okay - these are intentionally framed as experiments with lower pressure.

Rather than doing a review of what did and didn’t work after the summer, I want to give a preview of some of the systems we’re looking to experiment with, but with the caveat that these experiments may or may not pan out.

None of this is guaranteed, and I’m not giving timelines for release even if they do work out!


Iggy has asked to look at relics and has written up proposals for a balance pass upon them. In his own words…

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Relics are meant to be fun and game-changing. They are supposed to be powerful and unique items that can change the course of your empire. The issue, however, is that they are not all equal. So with a future update, I hope to at least narrow the gap between the relics a bit. I have mainly split the relics into three sets.

• Event-based ones that are fine to have a niche and semi-powerful effects, think Omnicodex and Blade of the Huntress.
  
• Precursor Relics should be strong and useful for every single empire. I am not promising that the Jovian Pox will be top tier for pacifists or that the Psionic Archive will be the best machine relic. But they will at least have neat effects.
  
• Crisis Relics which are awarded for defeating the crisis should be a bit of a victory lap. You have won! It should not give you 30 society research.

With these in mind, I will be looking at every relic and attempting to bring them in line if needed. There will be a lot of buffs and a few nerfs, but hopefully, they will feel more rewarding!

I expect that we’ll post a list of the changes when we start the dev diaries up again after the summer for feedback.


MonzUn has been leading a drive for improved accessibility options in Stellaris. Some of the things we’re looking at include adding more functionality for mouse side buttons, possible text-to-speech for events, and functionality like hotkeys for zooming in and out.

At his suggestion, some of us have also started playing the game with various color reshaders active to simulate different color vision deficiencies, to help find the worst issues and ways to resolve them.

If you have suggestions or accessibility problems that you face while playing Stellaris, please let us know.


With the flexibility in how empires can choose traditions that we introduced in 3.1 "Lem", Alfray Stryke is planning some experiments looking at introducing new tradition trees.

These are looking at how gating tradition trees behind various triggers might influence the game. There have been some ideas suggested about introducing tradition trees that are locked behind ascension perks or origins, and we're interested to see where these may lead.


Caligula Caesar has been finding places where we could expand our uses of multithreading, and experimenting with the way modifiers are calculated, with a particular eye towards the late game.


Meanwhile, my planned experiments primarily have to do with fleet combat.

Things I’m looking forward to looking at include:

• Providing a late game role for Destroyers and Cruisers, and providing incentives for mixed fleets.
  
• Increasing the length of fleet combats, reducing the dominance of alpha strikes.
  
• Experimenting with existing counters, tracking, evasion, and accuracy mechanics.
  
• This may also end up providing a role for smaller weapons.
  
• Improving ship behavior based on the roles assigned them by combat computers.
  
• Yes, Carrier Battleship, I know you have a point defense laser and you're very proud of it. That doesn’t mean you should charge into melee to use it.

These are likely the experiments most ethereal in nature at this time and are unlikely to bear fruit in the short term.


Our artists had so much fun with the Overlord achievements that they cornered us and demanded that we add some to the species packs.

These aren’t really experiments, but will go live once we figure out what they’ll do and implement them. Here are a few as previews.



And then there's this one, which we've called The Darkest Timeline.




These examples aren't comprehensive, there are many other things being worked on that aren't listed here (like previously mentioned Espionage improvements).

As mentioned earlier, next week will be the 3.4.4 patch notes, after which we’ll be going on a dev diary hiatus for the summer.

See you next week!

written by Tim Wiberg & Lloyd

Hi There,

My Name is Lloyd and I'll be your host for tonight. I am a concept artist working on Stellaris and for this dev diary I'm going to give you a look at how the art team brings an asset to life. Specifically I want to focus on the Salvagers station from the Overlord expansion.

The first step is visdev, which is short for visual development. It’s where we throw ideas at the wall and see what sticks. At this stage everyone is welcome to contribute, and ideas are often borrowed and expanded upon by other artists.


(Salvager station visdev by Avishek Banerjee)

Avishek Banerjee, a concept artist on the team made this piece showing a station that consisted of several circular openings that served as tear-down bays for ships. This is an idea that was borrowed by me and integrated into the final design of the station.


(Salvager station visdev by Lloyd Drake-Brockman)

Here you can see some of my early sketches for the Salvagers station. My thinking was to create something that looked like some kind of hive, an industrial place that was hap-hazard but didn't look too unfriendly.


(Early concept of the Salvagers station)

When I painted this sketch of the station we decided that this was the way forward, and from that point I was assigned to develop the sketch into a full concept. Although it looks quite different to the final, the shape language and some of the texture ideas are already present in this early version.



(More early concepts of the Salvagers station)

I spent some time exploring alternate shapes for the station. Most were scrapped, but that's part of the job of a concept artist. The whole time I wanted to keep the lotus-pod aesthetic of the big dome in the original sketch. I also wanted the station to have some kind of long-axis; that way I could give the station a strong shape, and it wouldn't just be a big blob of parts. It's important to note that for each iteration the whole art team is giving their feedback and occasionally contributing their own sketches. Every stage of this process is a collaborative effort.

[/img[i]](Early 3D concept of the Salvagers station)[/i]

As the design got closer to the final, the changes were more subtle. I chose to model the station in Blender so I could more accurately present the complex curves and intricate details. To be clear, this is not the 3D model that goes into the game. It's terribly un-optimized, and it has enough geometry issues to make a 3D artist cry, but it's good enough to give an impression of what the final result will be.


(Early render of the Salvagers station)

Here's a beauty render of an early version of the station:

[/img[i]](Construction notes for the Salvagers station)[/i]

While it is fun to do beauty renders, the primary goal of the concept phase is to clearly convey ideas. So the final images that I pass along are quite simply presented, with a focus on clarity and structure.


(Final concept for the Salvagers station)

Here's the final concept, complete with a couple of break-out drawings that show some of the details in greater clarity. At this point I hand you over to Tim Wiberg who will take you through the 3D art process of creating the station.

Hello! My name is Tim Wiberg and I am a 3D artist for Stellaris, where I got the chance to work on the Salvager station for the Overlord expansion.

I am going to highlight the process of the in-game models and textures for the station.

I started off by blocking out the model based on the awesome concept made by Lloyd.

It was important to get a good sense of scale right from the start because we wanted to incorporate existing ships into the station. So I picked different ship types from different Phenotypes that could be in the "back-slots" of the station as a good reference. I quickly exported it to the game just to see if the scale made sense.


(The blockout model in Maya and ingame)

When the blockout was set I started working on the highpoly model. One of the reasons why we do highpoly models is that we can include all the cool details from the concept but still have an optimized model for it when baking it onto the lowpoly model. In this case I didn’t have to add that much detail since I knew that the textures later on would do most of the job.

After the highpoly was done I made a simpler version of the station that details from the highpoly can be transferred to. Then it was time to UV map the model.

A lot of the ships in Stellaris are usually symmetrical, to save texture space. This station was not very symmetrical so I put some more time into coming up with solutions to get the highest possible quality with smaller textures.

I used the texturing software Adobe Painter to bake in the details from the highpoly model. Then it was time for me to work on the actual plating materials for the model.

We wanted to have a “scrappy” feel to the whole station, so I used Adobe Designer to create the main plating material. I used small, medium and large shapes for the plating to get a more interesting look.


(Substance Designer WIP screenshot on the main plating material)

This process was a bit iterative, but when I was happy with the materials I jumped back to do the texturing on the model. I used the same texture with a different diffuse and roughness for the darker “secondary” plating parts. Then I could add all the details suchs as lights, windows etc.

When the final modeling and texturing was done I could quickly create a destroyed version of the Salvager station. I used the same model, but I moved, bent and cut some parts to really get that feeling of it being destroyed. For the material I used the same plating textures, but I darkened the base color, changed roughness values and removed the emissive lights so it could have that destroyed look.

(Models and textures for the Salvager station)

I needed to come up with a good solution regarding the ships that were going to be attached in the back of the station. So I attached locators on the model and added the existing ship models in code, and therefore they spawn at the same time the Salvager station spawns in.

And that was basically the whole process of making this station. I was really stoked when I got to see Lloyd’s concept being made for this, and I had a blast the whole process of making this station.

(Final Salvager station models in game)

written by Mirror Universe Eladrin

Hi!

This week is a short one in Sweden due to holidays, so instead of a normal dev diary we've got a transcript of the Stellaris Q&A session we held on the Official Stellaris Discord Server on May 5th.

You can read the full Q&A transcript on the Stellaris forums.

Next week our concept artist Lloyd will take over with an in-depth diary on how to make a station.

We've got a video preview of this dev diary on our YouTube Channel (I didn't read all 108 questions, sorry) if you want to meet Mirror Universe Stephen. You can watch it here:



Have a great week!

To celebrate our 6th Anniversary, Stellaris is free to play during the Paradox Publisher weekend until May 23rd!

Trying out Stellaris and like what you see? Stellaris is 80% off until May 23rd!

Try it here: https://pdxint.at/3MDO17D

But wait, there’s more! We’ve updated our Imgur Wallpaper album with the latest wallpapers from Overlord.

Get them free here: Imgur Wallpapers

To celebrate our 6th Anniversary, Stellaris is free to play during the Paradox Publisher weekend until May 23rd!

Trying out Stellaris and like what you see? Stellaris is 80% off until May 23rd!

Try it here: https://pdxint.at/3MDO17D

But wait, there’s more! We’ve updated our Imgur Wallpaper album with the latest wallpapers from Overlord.

Get them free here: Imgur Wallpapers

Hi all!



I'm happy to announce that the 3.4.3 hotfix should now be live and available on all platforms!



On Monday I said that we were planning to address primary issues as quickly as we could and have a larger patch in a few weeks, but the team was absolutely on fire and was able to bring many of the fixes and changes that were originally scheduled for the later release into this hotfix. As a result, the 3.4.3 hotfix is significantly larger than a hotfix would usually be.



I want to stress exactly how helpful the bug reports we received were during this process - they made it possible for QA to generate a list of the biggest issues affecting the community and helped us prioritize our work, so thank you for submitting them, and please continue doing so if you run into issues.



Without further ado, here are...




#################################################################

######################### VERSION 3.4.3 ############################

#################################################################




When planets revolt, there is now an option to declare war on the new country immediately rather than being subjected to a 10-year truce. The revolting planet counts as the aggressor. (if the planet joins another empire, and you choose war with them, the other country is now considered the aggressor).
Revolt Situations no longer cause escalating stability maluses, as these could make it impossible to stop a revolt. They now give a flat 10 stability malus at all stages.

The modifier a pop gets from its faction's happiness now updates properly (so if you make a faction happier, it will correctly make its pops happier now).

Fixed it being possible for a Revolt Situation to start and immediately cancel. (They will now only start if the planet is calculated to be currently capable of succeeding the revolt)

Planets with Culture Shock can now only start a revolt situation after 8 years of unrest, rather than 1, as it could be quite hard to avoid a revolt on these planets. Otherwise newly-conquered planets have 4-year cooldowns.

Improved AI decision making on Revolt Situations.

Fixed cases where rebels and released empires would have traditions and techs they should not have had access to (e.g. if non-gestalt pops rebelled against a gestalt empire).

Fixed cases where rebels and released empires would use their parent countries scientists for research. I.e. the researcher would be active in both countries, until one country changed their task.

Cleaned up some unclear language in the tooltip for Revolt Situation progress (the one describing what you can do about it).

Void Dwellers now replace the 1 Politician (or Executive) job from Habitat Administration buildings with two Colonist jobs, which should increase their overall stability in the early game.

Doomsday origin starting planets will no longer clamor to revolt. (Revolt Situations are disabled on them.)



To help them to deal with unexpected deficits, Empires can now purchase basic or advanced resources (specifically food or consumer goods) from the internal market if they have expenses of that type, even if they do not produce any themselves.

Fixed never-ending deficits - if you go into a deficit of a resource you do not produce at all, and then stop spending it (i.e. end up with both expenses and income of 0), the deficit will now resolve itself in a few months. This solves issues with machines having inexplicable food and consumer goods deficits, as well as cases where people over-spend rare resources they gained via event.

All resources provided for deficit bailouts now scale with the game year, instead of just those for the situation that completed.

Fixed a case where the situation approach to cut the maintenance of habitats would count double.

Fixed stray reference to Minerals in the Consumer Goods Deficit Situation.



Subjects should no longer flip-flop between regular subject types and protectorate.

Fix issue where a new subject created from a Status Quo would be made up of the wrong systems.

Subjects can no longer sign Defensive Pacts or Guarantee Independence of other empires.

Releasing a sector as a subject or enlightening a pre-ftl civilization now ignores the cooldown on agreement negotiation.

Increased the effects of Relative Power on AI acceptance of agreement negotiation.

Added base acceptance for subsidiary.

Tweaked AI acceptance of resource contribution terms, making them more likely to accept harsher tithes/subsidies.

AI overlords and subjects will now be more likely to accept specialist subject types that disagree with their ethics.

Set minimum Advanced Resources tax for Prospectorium to 15% from 30%

Fixed ACTION_DEMAND_SUBJUGATION_NOTIFICATION and ACTION_ASK_TO_BECOME_SUBJUGATED_NOTIFICATION loc keys.

Fix for trade deals that are accepted and then canceled immediately.

Fixed AI not taking relative power into account when considering subjugation proposals.

You can no longer set the priority of overlord catalytic or metallurgist jobs.

Overlord catalytic jobs no longer have the pre-3.4 penalties for food deficits.

Corporate overlords now have access to the protectorate subject type.

Slaves can now be "employed" as mind-thralls.

Fixed issue when removing/replacing overlord removes the corporate holdings.

The Divided Patronage loyalty penalty is now correctly removed from existing subjects when taking Shared Destiny, Feudal Society or Franchising.

You can no longer immediately see the secret fealty status of sectors released as subjects.

Rebalanced trade weights for specialist subject leaders.

Subjects that are converting to a specialist subject can continue conversion even if they should flip to a protectorate.

Subjects that are converting to a specialist subject cannot flip to a protectorate due to low tech level.

Empires can no longer have negative diplomatic weight.



Fixed crash connected with resettling the last pop of a species.

Fixed a rare crash in the Situations interface.

Fixed crash with modded shipsets.

Fixed a crash that would happen when generating very large galaxies with high hyperlane density.

Fixed a crash related to Federation Laws.



Ship starting experience modifiers now work when provided empire-wide (e.g. Fleet Supremacy edict)

Fixed tracking not countering evasion.

Added missing ship components for Offspring ships.

Mercenary fleets are now buffed by Offspring Auras

Added missing L2 Battleship section for Offspring Battleships.

Fixed ship build and upgrade cost modifiers not being applied correctly when retrofitting ships.

Fixed certain AIs (the ones with Calamitous Birth and Private Colony Ships) never colonizing.

You can no longer found mercenary enclaves using fleets belonging to your federation or the galactic community.



Legacy Human portraits have been re-added as an option in empire creation.

Fixed pops that grow as specialists on Colonies.

Fixed pops which go into a loop of swapping jobs with unemployed specialists constantly resetting strata demotion timers.

Amenity job management is now activated even when there are no resources available for planet automation.

Fixed an issue where planet automation could not use resources from their local sector stockpile.
Planet automation will now check that the unemployed pops can work the jobs that the automation would build, e.g. preventing specialist job creation for slave pops.

Reduced the amount of research given by merc dividends.

Fixed an issue where systems with primitives in them would not be transferred correctly during a status quo war resolution.

Non-Prophet Organization now correctly checks for the Teachers of the Shroud origin.

Fixed the Stellar Performance achievement not being awarded properly.

Subterranean empire are now shown uncapped mining districts on uncolonised worlds.

The Crystalline Bane modifier is now removed if you kill the Crystal Kraken in a dishonorable manner.

Progenitor Nest deposit is no longer removed when terraforming a planet into a hive-world.

Hive worlds now provide an offspring drone for progenitor hives instead of a spawning drones.

Fixed the Cyro Pod warrior event for xenophobes.

Meeting the artist enclave now sets the correct flag.

Added tooltip on create office branch button when players could not open a branch office.

Shroudwalker greeting event now fires only once.

Fixed tooltip for starbase resource silos.


###################


###################



Localization for non-English languages related to these changes will be coming in a future update.
When negotiating an agreement, if the other party does not wish to accept the terms but does not have the influence necessary to decline, the eventual notification says that the deal timed out and auto-declined when in fact it was auto-accepted.





We'll be continuing to keep an eye on things, so keep those bug reports and feedback flowing. Currently our plan is to have a 3.4.4 update in a few weeks, that will contain localization updates for the 3.4.3 hotfix, more fixes and balance adjustments.



A sneak peek of some of the things we're looking at for the planned patch include the following:


The Imperial Fiefdom will start with colonies close to every member of their empire, so nobody will feel left out of the fold. Those who feel particularly loyal will now also be able to remain a vassal of the empire after the civil war has started.

Added Hydroponics Station designation for habitats. This designation removes 2 housing from Habitation Districts in exchange for adding 1 farmer jobs.

Ships now gain 5 exp per day in battle instead of 1.

Doubled the base unity output of telepaths.

Khan should no longer be hostile to mercenaries.

Admirals no longer abandon their post on leased fleets.

Planetary automation will no longer seek to build gene clinics if you are a synthetically-ascended empire.

Planetary automation will now seek to clear blockers as soon as there is any need. It now uses the same formula as the indicator on the outliner: i.e. if it is limiting the number of districts OR if there are buildings that could be built by clearing the blockers OR if planet growth speed is reduced (previous behaviour was to only check the first of those).

Fixed issue where planetary automation would upgrade Necrophage Centers of Elevation (which is often undesirable as it may lead to you running out of necrophytes)

Newly colonized planets will now have their planet automation turned on if they are in an automated sector

Made some clarifications for the Shroudwalkers, so it is clearer what asset you are getting from them and how the planet modifier works.

You can no longer build an orbital ring around a planet with a destroyed orbital ring.

Added is_human_species scripted trigger if you want additional portraits to be considered humans.

Added on_fleet_lease_started/ended on_actions for more friendly mod compatibility

Added is_human_species scripted trigger if you want additional portraits to be considered humans.


Automated Exploration and Automated Research are now available from the start of the game rather than being tech-locked.

Construction ships now have an Automated Construction mode, which will automatically build Research and Mining Stations over appropriate deposits. (It will not automatically build Observation Stations, Hyper Relays, or other constructions.)

written by Eladrin

Hi all! Overlord's released!

Thanks for playing it and providing so much feedback.

As our AI programmer likes to say, "This is pretty good, but it can be even better!" and I want to talk about our short term plans on the Stellaris team.

We're planning a hotfix in the short term that addresses primary issues as quickly as we can, and a larger update with more fixes in a few weeks. (The larger update includes localization, I'll talk more about that one in this week's dev diary.)

A sneak peek of some of the things we're looking at for the hotfix include the following:

Stellaris 3.4.3 Partial Sneak Peek
[expand type=details]

• Tweaked AI acceptance of resource contribution terms, making them more likely to accept harsher tithes/subsidies.
  
• AI overlords and subjects will now be more likely to accept specialist subject types that disagree with their ethics.
  
• Rebalance trade weights for specialist subject leaders.
  
• Legacy Human portraits have been re-added as an option in empire creation.
  
• Fixed a bug with Tracking not countering Evasion properly.
  
• Subjects should no longer flip-flop between regular subject types and protectorate.
  
• Subjects should no longer be able to cause their Overlord to declare war against themselves.
  
• Fix for trade deals that are accepted and then canceled immediately.
  
• Fixed it being possible for a Revolt Situation to start and immediately cancel. (They will now only start if the planet is calculated to be currently capable of succeeding the revolt)
  
• Planets with Culture Shock can now only start a revolt situation after 8 years of unrest, rather than 1, as it could be quite hard to avoid a revolt on these planets.
  
• Cleaned up some unclear language in the tooltip for Revolt Situation progress (the one describing what you can do about it) (This only affects English localization until the next patch.)
  
• Diplomatic weight can no longer go negative.
  
• Fix a crash connected with resettling last pop of species.
  
• Fixed an issue where planet automation could not use resources from their local sector stockpile.
  
• Planet automation will now check that the unemployed pops can work the jobs that the automation would build, e.g. preventing specialist job creation for slave pops.
  
• Amenity job management can now activate even when there are no resources available for planet automation.
  
• Progenitor Nest is no longer removed when terraforming a planet into a hive-world.
  
• All resources provided for deficit bailouts now scale with the game year, instead of just those for the situation that completed.
  
• Adjusted the amount of research given by merc dividends.

[/expand]

This is not an exhaustive list of what will be in it, we've got a bunch of additional changes we're working on and investigating.

It's a pretty long list for a hotfix, and to be completely honest, that's my fault.

In our eagerness to get Overlord out to you in the best shape possible, I approved several changes and additions at the last minute that I really shouldn't have. Some of the threads have mentioned that we have some bugs in the launch version that weren't in the prerelease streams - that's completely accurate.

One example is a change that we made on code freeze day that changed how AI acceptance of tithes and subsidies worked in order to close an exploit that we identified - I should have let the exploit ship, known issued it, and given the change a proper QA and balance pass rather than rushing it in. I'll do so in the future.

Thank you for all the feedback, suggestions and bug reports. Please keep them coming.

We'll get this set of fixes (and more!) out to you as quickly as we reasonably can while minimizing the risk of introducing more problems, and will continue to work on making Overlord the best Stellaris expansion since Utopia.

Stellaris: Overlord is now available!

Realize your Grand Design with Stellaris: Overlord, the newest major expansion for Stellaris! Overlord brings with it many new features designed to unlock the next level of your Empire. Experience new Origins, build new Megastructures, interact with new Enclaves, and Specialize your Vassals’ role within your Empire!


Overlord will allow you to assign a Vassal Specialization to your subjects. Each Vassal Specialization has a specific focus: the Bulwark, which focuses on defense and military strength; the Prospectorium, which focuses on resource collection and production; and the Scholarium, which focuses on scientific advancement.

Each of these specializations will level up over time, unlocking unique new abilities available only for their chosen Vassal Specialization for you and your Vassals.

But beware: vassals now have Loyalty, and disloyal Vassals may swear Secret Fealty to another empire — and if you give them the opportunity, you may find yourself in an Allegiance War.


Holdings are buildings that are owned by the overlord but are established on a Subject’s planet. Overlord comes with a plethora of additional holding building options, as well as the ability to build multiple Holdings in a single Vassal’s space.

Holdings also have the ability to change your subject’s opinion of you, so choose wisely: Whether you become a benevolent overlord, or tightly grip the reigns of power, will be determined by your actions.


There are three new enclaves included in Overlord: the mysterious Shroudwalker enclave, the industrious Salvager Enclave, and the enterprising Mercenary Enclave.

The Shroudwalkers will, for a fee, reach into the Shroud to attempt to determine your fate. The Shroud is fickle, however, and whether this proves to be a boon to your empire is not guaranteed. Should they trust you, they may offer you the ability to purchase a Shroud Beacon, which allows your ships to take a shortcut through the Shroud.



Salvager Enclaves pursue Engineering as their natural calling. They will gladly take your “combat-proven” starships, and will even compensate you for the opportunity. They also regularly have many second-hand vessels for purchase, and can offer you a unique starbase building to speed up repairs, salvage your debris, and more!



The Mercenary Enclave is a change from what we normally know as an Enclave. The Mercenary Enclave is an enclave that you decide to host, as opposed to one you find in the unknowns of space. Rather than sending outdated ships for scrap or dismantling them, with Overlord, you gain the ability to form a Mercenary Enclave, who will take your ships and fight for coin instead of country.


One of the big complaints with Megastructures is that they come so late in the game. Overlord addresses this by adding three new Megastructures, with tech requirements that are lower in the tech tree than Mega Engineering. The Hyper Relay allows fast travel across your empire, the Quantum Catapult can send your fleets on a one-way trip to a portion of the galaxy, and Orbital Rings will allow you to have extra starbase capacity in a system, or provide bonuses to the planet it encircles.

Hyper Relays, when constructed in adjacent systems connected by a hyperlane, will allow fast travel across those systems. No longer will your fleets have to slog across an entire system, now they simply enter the Hyper Relay Network, and jump from Relay to Relay across your empire. You can also construct Hyper Relays in your Vassal’s space and travel through your allies’ Hyper Relay Network.



The Quantum Catapult allows its owner to fire selected fleets across the galaxy. Be warned that this process isn’t guaranteed, and sending multiple fleets can result in your forces spread across a sector — or even in uncharted or closed space — rather than orbiting your enemy’s homeworld as you intended.



Orbital Rings allow you to build taller than ever before. Orbital Ring installations can construct ships, optimize production on the planet below and even increase the living space on the planet they encircle.




In the Imperial Fiefdom Origin, your empire was met and subjugated by an advanced species before it developed faster-than-light travel. Now that you’ve discovered how to break the lightspeed barrier, your overlord will offer you the opportunity to choose your specialization. Will you be a loyal vassal and cater to your overlord’s whims, or throw off the shackles and become the overlord yourself?

With the Teachers of the Shroud Origin, your species has lived under the influence of a Shroudwalker Enclave for many years, developing your species’ latent Psionic potential. Now that you’ve taken your first steps out into the stars, they’ve shown you how to build a Shroud Beacon, offering a way to take a shortcut across the Shroud.

Your ancestors spent eons watching mysterious streaks in the night sky before the lights went dark. In Slingshot to the Stars, you can discover the device that caused these mysterious streaks, and bring to light the story of the empire that left the ruined Quantum Catapult behind.

Subterranean starts you off as a species forced to retreat underground. Whether for protection from predators, shelter from harmful radiation, or safe harbor from atmospheric storms: your species has lived underground for generations. Growing tired of just feasting on the mineral wealth of your home planet, now your species has their eyes set on the stars. Whatever the climate of the planets you find, you’ve spent generations preparing, and your species is ready to face the challenge.

Unlock the power of Offspring Leaders, with the Progenitor Hive Origin. Build unique buildings on your starbases, allowing congregations of Overseers to steer your ships and control the battle. Your leaders have the ability to draw on the collective experiences of the hive mind and incorporate this knowledge into their decision-making, giving them skills and depth of knowledge that single-minded species could only dream of. Progenitor hiveminds can also release sectors as vassals, under the guidance of one of their Offspring Leaders.



Realize your Grand Design with Stellaris: Overlord today!

Hello Stellaris Community!

Only two days till Overlord! If you're still dying to take a look at the new features coming in Overlord and the free 3.4 "Cepheus" update, do we have a treat for you:

Four Feature Highlight videos from our friend Ep3o!

Curb your desire to know more about Overlord, and learn more about Vassalization Contracts, Specialty Vassal types, the new Megastructures, a spoiler-free look at the new Enclaves, and finally the free features coming in the 3.4 "Cepheus" update!









Realize your Grand Design with Stellaris: Overlord on May 12th!

Wishlist Now and find out the minute it releases!

Hello Stellaris Community,

Today we have released the full patch notes for Overlord and the 3.4 “Cepheus” update. You can read them here, also happening today on the Official Stellaris Discord, you can join us for a Developer Q&A, starting at 1700 CEST. Ever wanted to ask a Stellaris Dev a question? Now's your chance!

We thought it would be a good idea to catch up with those members of our community who haven’t been closely following our dev diaries.

Today we’ll talk about some of the free features coming in the 3.4 “Cepheus” patch, releasing alongside Overlord on May 12th. This is not a complete list of features, and some features may still be subject to balancing or other changes.


The biggest change you’ll notice from the 3.3 “Libra” update is the new Situations system. This is a new feature that has been in development for a while, and it’s great to finally get to show it to our community.

Situations will progress in stages, and in some cases, each stage will have different or escalating effects. Some Situation progressions are linear, while others will progress depending on the choices you make in events and in your Approach to the current situation.

Current Active Effects by the Situation and the predicted outcome effects are shown along the right side of the Situations window.



The primary use for Situations at the moment is in Resource Deficits, Planetary Uprisings and Machine Uprisings (requires Synthetic Dawn Story Pack). We have also converted several story events to use the new Situations system. Situations are a versatile platform, that we will likely continue to expand on in the future. Situations are also very modder-friendly, and we can’t wait to see what our modding community comes up with!

There are also some new story events that you may have never encountered before, and the Shroudwalker enclave (requires Overlord) uses Situations after you reach into the Shroud.


Previously, when running out of a resource stockpile and having a negative monthly income, you would be hit with massive penalties to your planetary production. This had several negative effects, from initiating a resource spiral, where one deficit would trigger another deficit, and so on until your empire had major issues with just about every resource. The other issue was one of consistency; the old system was not flexible enough to keep up with some of the new Civics (Catalytic Processing is a prime example of this) and combinations thereof, which would result in empires (under some conditions) making resources out of nothing.

With the introduction of Situations, Resource Deficits will now gradually increase in strength as you advance through the stages of the Deficit Situation. Deficit Situations will start with some progress, and larger deficits will progress faster than smaller deficits. If your stockpile becomes positive again, the Situation will begin to slowly resolve itself. It's important to note that having a positive monthly income will make the Deficit Situation resolve itself faster than just having a stockpile greater than zero.

Once the Situation reaches the end of the last stage, it will result in a Default. Defaulting removes upgrades to buildings and applies modifiers to your empire to make combat less effective and constructions cost more. On the flip side, downgrading your buildings will result in a lump sum payment of the resource(s) you previously had a deficit in, giving you the opportunity to recover your economy and potentially play on.


In the free 3.4 “Cepheus” patch accompanying Overlord, there have been significant changes to not only subjects in the Overlord DLC, but in the base game as well.

For starters, every subject now has a Vassalisation Contract, which can be customized to individual Subject empires. For example, you can choose whether the empire can be Integrated (now disabled by default in most cases), whether they have Diplomatic Freedom, whether they can expand, the level of subsidy they receive or tribute they pay, as well as whether they join in their Overlord’s wars, or whether the Overlord joins their wars.



This is all balanced by Loyalty, which is the measure of how Loyal a Subject feels to their Overlord. More Loyal subjects will be more inclined to agree with less favorable terms than less Loyal subjects. Subjects with low Loyalty may also break away via an Allegiance War if given the opportunity.


Holdings are a new type of building that can be constructed on Subject’s planets. There are currently 27 holdings in total, with 6 Holdings being included in the base game. Holdings can be built on a subject’s planets in addition to Branch Offices, and similar to Branch Offices will provide resources to the Subject, Overlord, or both. Unlike Branch Offices, however, Holdings can also have a positive or negative effect on a Subject’s Loyalty to their Overlord.


In addition to these new features, Overlords who release subjects will now get 100 Intel on their subjects, which will slowly degrade over time to their normal base level. Sectors released as subjects will also now take the Origin of their Overlord, where appropriate. AI Subjects of Player Empires now receive AI bonuses as if the difficulty level of the game were one level lower, rather than losing their bonuses entirely. It is also now possible to build Gateways and Hyper Relays (requires Overlord) in your subject’s space!


AI empires will be less inclined to split their fleets into hundreds of tiny fleets, in the 3.4 “Cepheus” patch, the AI will attempt to use a full fleet as their smallest unit to carry out military objectives. During peacetime, the AI will actively attempt to merge all fleets, and during wars will try to merge two nearby fleets when possible.

We’ve also reduced the likelihood of AI fleets getting stuck in a loop and going back and forth from system to system while attempting to group up their fleets.

The “Take Point” functionality has had some more attention as well, reducing the chances that AI will suddenly stop following player and AI fleets, and they will now try even harder to have all their fleets follow the “Take Point” fleet.

There has also been a new notification added at the point where the 3.3 “Libra” military AI would’ve declared war. This new notification will trigger provided you have enough Intel on the target empire, and while the notification is active the AI will begin gathering their available fleets and moving towards the border. Depending on your level of Intel, you will also get an estimation of when the AI is planning to strike.

The AI will now also better handle conflicts with Crisis-type empires. We’ve added a new war state to the AI, which is activated when the AI or its allies fight a mid or end-game crisis. This means that AI empires will obey players’ “Take Point” commands during crises, as well as help out their other allies if they’re attacked, and will be better at seeking out and destroying systems controlled by crises.


In 3.4, we’ve also done another pass on Sector and Planetary automation. The design philosophy for the new automation system is that “most players will be able to use some parts of it”. So the intention is not that all players will always use this and that it will be able to satisfy all players, we hope everyone will find something that they feel is worth using.

The planet automation will have an additional settings UI where players can toggle components on/off for each planet individually as well as setting default values for newly colonized planets.

The most impactful setting is Designation, which will cause the planet to only build structures associated with its planetary designation. For example, a Mining World designation will only construct Mining Districts and the Mineral Purification plant, and nothing else.

The other settings are:

• Amenities: Build new amenities buildings and also micromanage the priority of amenity-producing jobs to minimize unnecessary amenity jobs
  
• Rare resources: Build new rare resource-producing buildings to target a +3 monthly income of all rare resources.
  
• Pop assembly: Build spawning pools, cloning vats, robot assembly et cetera.
  
• Housing: Construct additional housing, either in districts or buildings when needed.
  
• Building slots: Automatically build a new housing district for the +1 building slot whenever there are no free building slots, especially useful to enable on automated planets like Science designation since they require many building slots.
  
• Crime: Build new crime prevention buildings when crime reaches dangerous levels.
  
• Clear blockers: Automatically clear blockers when it is preventing the construction of new districts.
  
• Posthumous Employment: Builds the Posthumous Employment Center on planets with a raw resource focus.
  
• Psi Corps: Build the Psi Corps building on all planets when possible.

Sector automation is now a system built on top of the planet automation. Setting the sector focus will now change which designations planets will select when they are using the “automatic designation selection” in order to make them respect the sector automation.

We’ve also added an option to set a Unity Focus for a Sector since Unity is far more valuable since 3.3.


For the 3.4 “Cepheus” update, we’ve also addressed some concerns and Quality of Life issues with Auto Resettlement. "Ideal" worlds such as ring worlds, Gaia worlds, Hive worlds and Machine worlds now have a higher score when pops are deciding where to automatically resettle. Capital world planet designations also have a smaller increased score, and freshly founded colonies have 25% from their designation.

Pops will now pick which planet to auto-migrate to based on which planet has the most free jobs, rather than the least. They also now take free housing into account better.

The Outliner will now differentiate between unemployed pops that are migrating and those that are not. A yellow briefcase will be shown for planets that have unemployed pops that are in the process of migrating to another planet. A red briefcase will be shown if your attention is required to resolve the unemployment. On the planet view, the tooltips will now show where the pops are most likely to move to or explain why they are unable to move.


One thing that was pretty immersion-breaking when playing a MegaCorp was the Impose Ideology war. Why a MegaCorp would willingly create competition was always a little confusing.

In 3.4 “Cepheus”, successful Impose Ideology wars launched by empires with the Corporate authority will result in the target (or created) empire having the Oligarchic authority and the Merchant Guilds civic. This is also true for Status Quo resolutions of Establish Hegemony, Subjugation, and the Scion’s Bring into the Fold wargoals with Corporate Aggressors.

Additionally, Corporate subjects can now open branch offices in subjects of their shared overlord, as long as their overlord is not also a MegaCorp.




In 3.4, we’ve also expanded our in-game localisations to include Korean and Japanese. We hope that this results in a more immersive and consistent experience for those communities. Issues, grammatical errors, and literally unplayable typos found in these localizations can be reported here!


We are introducing a series of new emblems that will allow you to customize your Empires even further - 72 new icons, 45 new backgrounds, and 50 more colors.. Including.. Wait for it.. WHITE!






Celebrating the anniversary of Stellaris, we have added a series of new Human phenotypes, new outfits for rulers, governors, admirals, scientists and generals.

Additionally, we have added new human animations, hairstyles, beards, and eye colors allowing you to further customize your Human leaders!



Whew! That was a lot of stuff to get through. You can read the full changelog here (in English only, sorry). Just a reminder that this is not a full list of changes, and some features may undergo balance changes between now and release.

Realize your Grand Design with Stellaris: Overlord and the free 3.4 “Cepheus” and 6th Anniversary update on May 12th!

Wishlist Overlord Now!