by Eladrin

Hello everyone!

This week we’re going to look at the upcoming changes to Pops in the Stellaris 4.0 ‘Phoenix’ update.

Last week I said we might also look at the Planet UI, but I’m going to save that until next week since there’s quite a bit to cover here (especially if you’re into the technical details), and I’d rather not split the feedback.

As mentioned in Dev Diary 366, the Pop and Jobs system introduced in Stellaris 2.2 ‘Le Guin’ has always had significant performance implications in the late game, and we’ve been working on incremental improvements ever since. In the Stellaris 4.0 ‘Phoenix’ update, Pops will be grouped into Pop Groups based on species, strata, ethics, and faction, and these Pop Groups will produce Workforce that is used to fill (or partially fill) Jobs. As part of this change, we’re changing the overall scale of Pops - most things that previously affected or manipulated 1 Pop would now affect or manipulate groups of 100. The new systems can manipulate any number of Pops within a Pop Group just as easily as manipulating one, and I’ll go into some of the benefits of the finer resolution below.

Our primary desire with these changes is to improve late-game performance, but while working on it we took the opportunity to streamline some aspects of planetary management and improve the planet UI.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the details.

​
In Stellaris, the core economic loop since 2.2 has been: Pops fill Jobs, and Jobs produce resources.

With the 4.0 ‘Phoenix’ update, we’re making a subtle but important change - Pops will now generate Workforce, which is used to fill Jobs, and planets themselves will produce resources.

At a basic level, this works almost the same way. By default, every Pop generates 1 Workforce, so Jobs are still filled at the same rate. However, this shift is crucial for backend performance improvements, reducing the number of calculations the game needs to make each month.

Example: Then vs. Now​
Before (3.14):

• Take a planet with 100 Pops working Metallurgist Jobs, where 20 of them have a +10% Production Bonus from a Species Trait.
  
• These 100 Pops produce 612 Alloys per month.
  
• Every Pop is individually checked - 80 produce the standard amount, while 20 get a 10% Alloy production bonus from their species trait.

Now (4.0):

• Instead of tracking individual Pops, we track Workforce filling Jobs.
  
• Jobs are now filled by 10,000 Workforce (since Pops are scaled up by 100).
  
• 8,000 Workforce comes from regular Pops, while 2,000 Workforce comes from the bonus-earning Pops.
  
  • The species bonus is now “10% bonus Workforce when working Alloy jobs” - those Pops contribute an extra 200 Workforce, making the total 10,200 Workforce. Bonus Workforce is allowed to go over the required Workforce for a job, yielding extra production.
• If 100 Workforce still produces 6 Alloys, the planet still produces 612 Alloys - same output, different system.

Why This Matters:​
The key benefit is efficiency. Instead of iterating through and calculating production for every individual Pop, the game now only checks once per planet. This makes the system more scalable and improves performance, while still allowing for species based bonuses and modifiers.

Most existing species traits that affect Job production will be converted into Workforce bonuses or planet-based modifiers. As always, the final balancing will be refined through the Open Beta.

There are a few quirks and subtleties about how this interacts with other modifiers - bonus Workforce as a modifier is more powerful than bonus Production due to the two of them stacking multiplicatively rather than additively.

Pop groups are currently split up by Species, Strata, Ethics, and Faction. If you end up in a case where a Pop group is not completely uniform (for example, if 20% of the Pop group are recent refugees and thus happier than the rest), then the differences get averaged across the Pop group.

If none of this feels like it makes sense - it’s okay. It’s mostly a behind-the-scenes change. Jobs require Workforce to fill them, and that’s generated by Pops. We have some ideas about ways to expand upon this in the future, such as replacing part of the Workforce with automation by using a building.

​
With more granular Pop units, we have more ability to support simultaneous growth of Pops on a planet. Each species present on a planet will grow normally, and with the smaller unit size, will grow every month.

This results in several benefits, including multi-species empires not getting their growth dominated by underrepresented species, and also lets us remove the floor on colony Pop growth. This does mean that newly settled colonies will be very reliant on migration to grow their population until they develop to the point where they can support their own Pop growth, and removes a long-running issue where spamming colonies regardless of habitability simply for the minimum flat Pop growth was optimal.

Xeno-Compatibility will pool all species on a multi-species planet together to calculate their growth rate, then split the growth proportionally across the various species.

Assembly works largely the way it did before, except that fractional Assembly will become “microPops” thanks to the finer resolution of Pops. Machine and Organic Assembly will no longer conflict with one another, as the Organic Pops will handle their own growth, while all mechanical assembly will be channeled towards the highest “score” mechanical Pop templates available.

​
Since your new colonies will be extremely reliant on migration from their homeworld until they reach a critical mass of inhabitants where they can begin to support themselves, we’re adding a new population stratum called Civilians (or Residents, for species without full citizenship). These Civilians form the generally content base of your empire, and will trickle out to the colonies, looking for better opportunities. Unemployed Pops will still exist and downgrade through the strata, with unemployed Worker stratum Pops demoting to Civilians over time. This will have an impact on stability, as Civilians are largely content and non-disruptive.

Spoiler: More Technical Details

This is mostly for you modders out there to abuse, but in the new system, “Unemployed Specialist” will technically be a Job - there’ll be one for each stratum. Every Job can have a demotion target assigned to it, and a time.

In our implementation, all of the Specialist stratum Jobs will demote to Unemployed Specialist; Unemployed Specialist will demote to Unemployed Worker, and Unemployed Worker will demote to Civilian as they give up on their dreams of productivity and veg out in front of the holoscreen.

Your homeworld will start with a fairly large pool of Civilians to support your early expansion. We’re a bit worried about early conquest of homeworlds being too easy of a snowball with this increased starting Pop count, so are considering various ways of making it more challenging to take homeworlds in the early to mid game. One idea we have includes having Civilians create impromptu defensive militias to help defend their home, and possibly starting you off with a few Defensive Platforms. Another idea is for aggressively invaded Civilians to take “Resistance” Jobs that they must then “demote” out of over time. The number of Civilians converted to this new Job and how long it takes them to drop out of it would be modified depending on how their people are being treated by their new and old masters.

We welcome your ideas and suggestions.

We’re currently still experimenting with the effects Living Standards have on Civilians (and Pops in general) - it’s likely that more of the Trade generation from Living Standards will be shifted to the Civilian stratum, and production from Unemployed Pops in the old system may also move to the Civilians. This will give them some of the functions of Clerks in the old economic model. In Gestalt empires, they are likely going to be outright named Maintenance Drones rather than “Civilians”.

We’re also renaming the Ruler stratum to “Elites”, so “Ruler” isn’t double-dipping between your Empire’s ruler at the top economic stratum.

​
Next week we’ll be going through the new Planet UI, and how all of this changes things there.

by Eladrin

Hello everyone!

Today we’re going to take a glance at the Trade and Logistics changes coming in the Stellaris 4.0 ‘Phoenix’ update, then check out some new portraits.

​
Trade as a Standard Resource​

The Trade system introduced in the Stellaris 2.2 ‘Le Guin’ update was raised as an especially frequent point of confusion for many players. UX issues around disconnected trade stations combined with some quirks of being a modifier based system (like ignoring habitability) made some of it unintuitive. The system had a major impact on performance as well, so while examining Stellaris for optimizations, we decided that we wanted to revamp the system.

In 4.0, Trade will become a standard advanced resource, generally produced in the same way as before, but will follow all of the standard rules around resource-producing jobs. The Trade Routes system has been removed - any produced Trade will be immediately collected like any other normal resource.


We’ve done some cleanup to the top bar while we were in there.​

Logistical Upkeep​

Hello, Gruntsatwork here, with Eladrin’s UI wizardry done, I shall step in to reveal some of our trade secrets to you.

The majority of your trade upkeep will come from 2 sources in the new system.

First, local planetary deficits will carry a small trade upkeep, a fraction of the missing resources value on the galactic market. This represents the logistical effort required to commandeer freighters to supply a world that is not self-sufficient and therefore requires resources to be transported in from off-world. Mind you, this will occur in addition to normal deficits, if your entire empire is not capable of supplying those needs either.

In short, your planets will either satisfy their own local needs, or require trade to offset the logistics cost.

The second major trade upkeep will come from Fleets. Any fleets currently docked at one of your starbases have no trade upkeep.

Once your fleets start to move they will gain a small Trade Upkeep, representing the logistical efforts required to support them. This small upkeep will increase if your fleets are in hostile territory – that is territory owned by another empire you are at war with, as supplying them becomes so much more dangerous and space insurance coverage is no joke.

In the future, logistical upkeep could potentially be used to counter-act Doomstacking, for example by scaling upkeep with the number of ships in a fleet, dividing by the number of fleets, fleets per system etc, we have no concrete solution yet, but welcome your thoughts.

With these new sources of trade upkeep, it is of course important to mention that we will also introduce a new trade deficit. Like Unity, this will not create a Deficit Situation but a country modifier that persists until the deficit is dealt with. Running a trade deficit will reduce advanced resource production (alloys, consumer goods, unity, and research) and all ship weapons damage.

Stockpiling Trade and Using Trade in the Market​

Our intent is for Trade Policies to continue to exist going forward. Currently, we expect to have half of your net Trade income (after paying Logistical Upkeep) converted to other resources using your Trade Policy, plus any that might otherwise overflow your storage. Some of the current Trade Policies may be tweaked a bit. The rest will go into your resource stockpile as an advanced resource.

In addition, the galactic market has been adjusted so that its primary trading resource is Trade. As such, energy is now available on the market as a standard resource. The energy storage cap has been brought to the same level as minerals and food, while Trade’s storage cap has been set to 50.000 at the base level.

As we are in the middle of implementation, we are adjusting this as we receive internal feedback and will continue to do so when it is time for our open beta.

We will be keeping a close eye on the value of trade as a resource. If necessary, we’ll keep turning the dials to ensure it is an actually interesting resource to focus on.

For modders, the main market resource is set as a define and can be switched to something else.

Gestalt Empires and Trade​

Rejoice, friends of bugs and bolts, for you too will be able to enjoy the benefits of trade starting with 4.0.

As part of the Phoenix update, Gestalt empires will be able to collect trade like normal empires do, from both jobs and deposits.

In contrast to normal empires, Gestalt empires will rarely do so with Traders and Clerks, instead their most basic drones, maintenance drones for example, will create trade in addition to their normal resources and modifiers. In addition, they will also have access to Trade Policies, to enrich their common wallet.

Of course, with benefits come drawbacks, and so Gestalt Empires will also deal with the logistical upkeep for local planetary deficits and Fleets that are not docked and/or within hostile territory. The Galactic Market will of course also accept gestalt trade as its main resource.

In the future, we are also considering Megacorp Gestalt Empires, for your corporate drone needs, but whether we will have time to do that for 4.0 or later remains to be seen.

Corporate Branch Office Updates​

For Branch Offices, we have a plethora of improvements ready for your enjoyment, courtesy of our ever industrious Mr.Cosmogone.

Branch office buildings are now all limited to 1 per planet and now give more appropriate jobs to the host planet. They also increase local trade production based on those jobs and their corporate resource output is in turn increased by local trade.

Most Corporate Civics now also give bonuses to a specific branch office building, increasing its trade value bonus and receiving Merchant jobs on their Capital from it.

Numerous changes have been made to Criminal Syndicates:

• Criminal Empires can now establish commercial pacts. Having a commercial pact with a Criminal Empire will replace all criminal buildings with their "lawful" counterpart. As long as the commercial pact remains, criminal branch offices will not be removed from the planet.
  
• All Criminal branch office buildings have had their crime value set to 25 and give one Criminal Job alongside a regular Job.
  
• We have also added a crime floor to non-criminal branch office buildings on empires they have a trade agreement with, which means there will always be a minimum amount of crime on the branch office planet. Criminal branch offices are also up to 25% more profitable on high crime planets.

Balance-wise, these buildings are more impactful, so branch office buildings now cost influence, and branch offices now take up 5 empire size instead of 2.

Oh, and we have also allowed Megacorps to open branch offices on other Megacorps... The influence cost is doubled when built on a planet owned by another Megacorp.

Mammalian Portraits​

Thanks, Gruntsatwork. Now a message from Content Design Lead CGInglis:

And now my deer friends, one mooo-re surprise for you! The Stellaris 4.0 ‘Phoenix’ update brings ten paws-itively stunning new Mammalian portraits to the base game!


Glass of milk, standing in between extinction in the cold, and explosive radiating growth…


The Gremlin


A regal Hippopotaxeno


My, what big teeth you have.


The secrets of enlightenment are waiting.


​
Next week we’ll start talking about how Pops will change and might pull up the new Planet UI. Since the branch itself is still very full of placeholders, we’ll be using the design mockups while explaining the changes.

See you then!

Hello everyone!

Today we’re going to take a deeper look at some of the ways we’re adjusting game pacing through changes to Galaxy Generation, Message Settings, Events and Anomalies. Then we’ll take a peek at the Focus system, the Empire Timeline, and a few other changes.

Some of this has already been covered in the announcement diary, but I’ll be providing more up-to-date screenshots and more details. As this is from a build that is still in active development, there will be placeholder icons or temporary text in some of these screenshots, and all of these are still subject to change.

Stellaris is a game with many moving parts, each of which interact with other elements to produce a complex whole. Small adjustments in one spot can have significant effects in another, and in the end there can be unexpected impact to the general pacing of the game and overall economy.
As mentioned in Dev Diary #366, we’ve gone through all of the scripted systems and done a normalization pass on the frequency of these systems appearing, as well as preventing many of them from appearing in empire starting clusters. Some other adjustments have been made to generation as a whole, which should distribute non-guaranteed habitable worlds a bit better and reduce the likelihood of massive clusters of them right around your homeworld.

There were comments in the thread asking for the ability to easily change these weights. Since most of them now use scripted variables, they’ll be very easy to change with mods.

As the pool of anomalies and prescripted systems with guaranteed anomalies have also grown over the years, we’ve adjusted the anomaly spawn chance increment a bit to compensate.

A minor change from the original announcement is that we’ve implemented a suggestion from the forum thread to have the trait selection levels on even levels - it’s much cleaner overall. Leaders still begin with a starting trait at level 1.

If you have trait selections to make, the leader level up Notifications will show the green “call to action”. If you don’t, they’ll have a more subdued monochrome icon.

Leader positions will also have a significantly greater effect on which traits will be selected for players without Galactic Paragons or those that prefer automatic trait selection. For those that prefer picking leader traits themselves, this bias is instead reflected in which traits are selected for the pool of possible traits whenever a new trait is available. 

In Settings, we’re also letting you choose what you would like your default automatic trait selection to be. Any time you take over an empire as the primary human player (a distinction that is primarily relevant for co-op gameplay), it will make sure that the Auto Select Leader Traits box is set to your preference.



We’re going through many events, messages, and notifications to reduce the number of popups that disrupt your general gameplay. While major events still appear as popups, those that don’t require an immediate response or are purely informational have been converted into notifications or toasts.










The Artisans and Mirror Dimension can wait until I’ve finished what I’m currently doing.

As we’ve been doing this pass, we’ve updated some of the messages that have been converted into toasts, to make them more informative at a glance.



While designing the Empire Focuses we had several thoughts. 

• Stellaris is a dynamic game full of wonder and possibilities. Our sandbox nature means predefined and structured trees cannot work for us.
  
• Tasks provided by Focuses should help guide newer players through the game, providing suggestions for short and medium term goals.
  
• Behaving in a manner consistent with your Empire Focus should naturally complete the Tasks from that category.
  
  • Empire Focus categories are Conquest, Exploration, and Development. (Names subject to change.)
• Rewards for progress within a Focus category should be intangible.
  
  • Any rewards you get should feel narratively consistent with your empire’s behavior. For instance, acting as an aggressive militarist should naturally guide your researchers to theorizing applicable technologies.
    
  • These rewards should reduce the need to rely on lucky draws from the tech pool if you want to pursue your Focus. 

The Empire Timeline and Focus share a tab in the Situation Log.


The current mockup of the Timeline tab. Some differences will exist between this and the final version.

Tasks come in four different categories - Conquest, Exploration, or Development correspond to the three different Focuses, and there are some very basic Tasks at the beginning that are considered “Core”. Completing a Task grants progress within its associated category; Core tasks grant progress in all three.



Many of the early game tasks are generally straightforward. The tooltips try to give some advice about how to complete them.

At any time your empire will have five tasks offered, weighted toward your selected Focus. Tasks complete automatically and retroactively, so if you’ve already completed an Archaeology Site, it will complete immediately if you draw it. If you have a Task that either feels impossible or isn’t something you want to do, you can discard it for a small Unity cost.

Many of the rewards for progression along a Focus are (currently) research options thematically associated with the Focus. For example, the first Conquest milestone grants Doctrine: Fleet Support as a guaranteed research option, while others in the line include Specialized Combat Computers and Destroyers. You’ll still have to research them, but we’re happy with how your actual actions in game have an impact on the ideas your researchers are coming up with.

The Empire Timeline shows many of the key events of your empire. Beginning with your Origin as the starting point, important milestones will be logged as they happen. Empire firsts feature prominently on the timeline, such as your first colony or the first time you’ve been humiliated by a Fallen Empire, but some other crucial moments are listed as well, such as war declarations, megastructures, when a crisis appeared, or when an accursed rival stole your Galatron.

The timeline has several zoom levels to let you see a general overview of what happened at a glance, or a detailed list of interesting moments.



In the 4.0 ‘Phoenix’ update, we’re adding a new Origin to the Synthetic Dawn story pack called Hard Reset. 

As a warning, this Origin gets pretty dark (even for Stellaris), very quickly.



In this Origin, you begin as the cybernetic battle thralls of an advanced Driven Assimilator that have suddenly lost connection to the gestalt intelligence. Naturally, you were outfitted with some of the finest combat cybernetics available.



Your civilization begins in an immediate fight for your lives. 

Thankfully, as the elite battle thralls of your former masters, you excel at violence. This is good, because you’ll need to fight through rogue barrier fleets that still infest nearby systems.



I’m sure everything on Dream Loop is fine. No need to investigate further, right?

As with Broken Shackles, the exploration of yourselves as a people is a core part of this Origin, with factions forming a little while after you gain your independence.



Your sudden independence has also left your populace with some traits that represent your nature as Assimilator battle thralls. As you discover more about your past, you’ll have opportunities to either mitigate or enhance these traits, either by pursuing de-cyberization or by embracing the power of the machine. An alternate path exists where you can instead accept your conflicted nature and… Well, I won’t spoil what happens on that path.

As part of the development process, we decided to take this opportunity to review some of the rules around gaining achievements. As I think that many of the simpler ones are a great tool for letting you know that you’re playing the game “correctly”, so we’ve made a change.

Ironman mode is no longer required to earn most Stellaris achievements. An unmodified game checksum and being in single-player remain as requirements. 

• The "Victorious" achievement has been updated to "Win the game through any victory condition in Ironman mode."

We’re still working on getting things like the pop and planet changes presentable, so next week we’ll likely be talking about Trade and Logistics.

See you then!

by Eladrin

Greetings, Stellaris Community!

Last week we announced the Stellaris 4.0 ‘Phoenix’ update, today we’re going to start going through some of the changes coming in it. As mentioned before, the changes we’ll be going through in the next few dev diaries are still scorching hot on the development branch, and may change drastically before final release.

That said, the ones I’ll be talking about today have cooled off a little bit and are pretty stable at this point.

Let’s start with a simple one that I already leaked to you back in December.

The Advanced Settings tab when you’re setting up a new game will now have a section that lets you set which Precursors are available in your galaxy.



The galaxy will be split into slices and the available Precursors distributed as they are currently - in the above example, the First League and Cybrex would not appear for anyone in this galaxy.

You are free to set the number of available Precursors to whatever number you desire, even none, but remember that in multiplayer games, each Precursor chain can only be completed by a single player. We recommend having at least four, to keep a sense of uncertainty and wonder in the galaxy, but it’s up to you if you want to force a specific Precursor.

Back in the Stellaris 3.8 ‘Gemini’ update we introduced ‘Concepts’, as our variant of Tooltips-within-Tooltips. We’ve been iterating on how we use them over time, and they’ve become a great asset in helping explain the complexities of Stellaris.

In the Stellaris 4.0 ‘Phoenix’ update, we’re adding a compendium of sorts that contains Concepts in a searchable form, the Stellaris Databank.



Concepts in the Databank are divided into categories, and can themselves include further Concepts. Clicking the icon in the top right searches for the Concept in the Stellaris wiki, for more detailed information.



Searching for “Alloys” gives us every Concept that includes the word, sorting the most relevant to the top.



If you have a Concept open, clicking will open the Databank, if you would like to know more.

We’re interested in seeing how you use the Databank and how it can be improved in the future.

We gave you a quick preview of the Species menu last week, but now we’ll go a little more in depth. The Species screen now provides you with more information about the various species in your empire, including showing the number of trait picks they might have remaining.

The template modification window itself has been remade to provide better sorting of positive and negative traits, and listing them by value, making it easier to find the traits you’re looking for.


My serviles should be delicious, don’t you think?

The new flow removes a few clicks from the process, starting the Special Project immediately.

If time is not of the essence, instead of using a Special Project to modify your species, you can designate a template as the Species Default, and let them integrate over to that default template slowly over time. Certain traditions or buildings might affect the speed of this integration process.


Actually, scratch that. Everybody should be delicious.

Like some of the other UIs we’re exploring today, the Ship Designer has had some quality of life updates.

We’ve taken the Ship Roles that were introduced in the 3.6 ‘Orion’ update and made selecting one part of the basic ship design flow and giving them a better representation than a scrollable text list. Some pain points of ship design, like the Auto-generate changes button blocking saving, have been removed, and in general it’s a faster and easier process to create a general ship design.



We’ve added a “Custom” role for veteran players that want to design the ship from scratch, or you can take one of these generated templates and modify them to suit your needs before saving.

Next week we’ll go over more details regarding the improvements to Message Settings, as well as a selection of other features that are still so hot in development that they’re still glowing placeholder-magenta. If I can’t get you decent screenshots, I’ll post some of the concepts and explain what we’re in the middle of.

See you then!

Hello everyone!

We’re happy to announce that Stellaris is part of Steam’s Real-Time Strategy Fest!



From now until Monday, get up to 75% off Stellaris basegame and up to 50% off Stellaris DLCs. There’s never been a better time to get your friends into the best space grand strategy game, plus if you play with your friends in multiplayer, they can borrow your DLC for that game!



See what's on sale here:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/281990/Stellaris/

by Eladrin

Happy New Year! It’s good to be back!

I want to start by welcoming all of the new Stellaris players who joined us during the Winter Sale, and to our Chinese community, which has grown so much over the last year, 欢迎光临。

Next, I want to draw your attention to several feedback threads that have been running for the past few weeks. These threads have forms you can fill out to share your thoughts.

• War and War Resolution
  
• Pirates and Crime
  
• Espionage
  
• Factions and Politics

Your feedback is essential in shaping Stellaris's future, and I’m extremely grateful for the strong response we’ve received so far.

For some time I’ve been hinting that the Custodian team has been working on something big, so now let’s look at what they’ve been up to and what we’re planning for the first half of 2025.

A long, long time ago, I was asked when we would move on to Stellaris 4.0, and I answered “Definitely not until we get to release Update 3.14”.


Little did I know how prophetic that joke really was.


While designing the plan for the Stellaris 4.0 release, the Custodian team had the following major priorities:

• Performance Improvements
  
• New Player Guidance and Game Pacing
  
• Quality of Life Improvements

As much of this is still very deep in active development, I don’t have too many screenshots to show off yet, so I’ll go over some of what we have planned and provide more in-depth details in future dev diaries. As they get closer to completion, some of these features will likely change as we iterate on them, and it’s possible that some may end up very different from how they were described in this dev diary, be delayed, or even cut altogether - these are some of the risks of sharing plans in an early stage, but I feel that the benefits outweigh any potential drawbacks.

Stellaris has many moving parts, and an incredible number of calculations are performed every month. Many of those calculations rely on others, forcing them to be performed sequentially rather than in parallel. This causes the game to slow down as the number of calculations increases throughout the game and is especially noticeable in large galaxies - more planets and empires means more pops filling more jobs, producing more resources, with more pathfinding for the fleets, and so on.

Pops and Jobs​
The Pop and Jobs system introduced in Stellaris 2.2 ‘Le Guin’ have always had major performance implications in the late game, and we’ve been working on incremental improvements ever since.


The Tech Pope Speaks

Last year I mentioned that we were exploring a Pop Groups prototype, and showed you a horrifying placeholder screenshot in the last dev diary of the year. Our initial experiments have been promising, so in the Stellaris 4.0 ‘Phoenix’ update, we’re changing the way Pops fundamentally work. Pops will be grouped together into Pop Groups based on species, strata, and ethics, and these Pop Groups will produce Workforce that is used to fill (or partially fill) Jobs. As part of this change, we’re changing the overall scale of Pops - most things that previously affected or manipulated 1 Pop would now affect or manipulate 100.

These changes will significantly impact other systems, such as Pop Growth, Migration, and many others. I’ll dedicate a full dev diary to more details before the Open Beta.

Trade​
The current Trade system, with its constant calculations around pathing and pirate generation, is another that has a disproportionately high impact on performance compared to the benefit. We’re simplifying that one significantly and making Trade act as a standard resource. Trade will also be used to represent general logistics capability and as such, will likely become available to gestalt empires for these logistical purposes. Again, we’ll cover this in a future dev diary.

Additional Comments​
Fleets are the remaining system I’d highlight for having a major performance impact. While 4.0 will have some general fixes, we’ve got our hands full with these changes so we’re expecting to focus more on them in a future update.

Much of the feedback we’ve received from newer players indicates that Stellaris has become overwhelming in the early stages of the game, providing a flood of decisions and a seemingly endless barrage of notifications. They have trouble identifying which of these choices are important for long-term growth versus which are primarily flavor, and the constant interruptions make it difficult to form both short-term and long-term goals.

More Meaningful Events​
The Content Design team has been reviewing events and notifications to ensure that any interruptions are meaningful. Events should generally not be purely informative – you should have a choice that has an impact. A substantial number of purely informational events, such as the discovery of Terraforming Candidates or new Strategic Resources, have been converted into toasts or notifications.

As an example, during your first steps to the stars you’ll find evidence that life is surprisingly common out in the galaxy. While this used to simply have an acknowledgment, you’ll now have choices based on the nature of your empire.


Event options should help guide the way your empire grows.

Anomalies are a wonderful content delivery vehicle during the exploration phase, but having a window pop up in your face every time one of your science ships finds anything interesting is decidedly less wonderful. We’re moving the popup to a Toast - you can click it or a notification to open the full anomaly window, or get to it through the Situation Log.


Anomalous readings registered! ​

Certain event chains that are not particularly loved have had (or will have) a bit of adjustment as well.


Radical.​

Message Settings​
Speaking of Toasts and Notifications, the Message Settings system has been expanded to give you more control over how different messages should appear.


We’re doing a pass on the default settings for each as well.​

The new Message Settings should allow you to customize your notifications to suit your preferences – whether you want a popup that automatically pauses the game or to turn certain notifications completely off.

Leader Trait Frequency​
Empire Leaders were cited in your feedback as feeling very needy, like they’re constantly clamoring for attention to select new traits if you owned Galactic Paragons. We’re looking at merging the first two tiers of leader traits and reducing the number of levels that you make trait selections at - this has the net effect of increasing the overall power of leaders a bit (as they’ll start with what was formerly a tier 2 trait, and if you select a new trait at level 3 instead of upgrading their starting trait, you’ll have two formerly tier 2 traits), but makes the experience with them a bit smoother.

Fewer trait selections do put you at greater mercy of the random selection of options, so we’re increasing the number of option draws by 1. This should reduce some of the risk of getting a “dead trait” without diminishing the benefit of +1 Leader Trait Option effects too much.

Galaxy Generation Updates​
As Stellaris has grown, so has the number of pre-scripted systems. Many of these unique systems were set at extremely high weights to appear, causing most of them to appear in every game you play. Since these special systems usually contained one or more habitable worlds, it inflated the number of such worlds well above the expected number, especially since they did not respect the Habitable Worlds slider from your settings.

We’ve done a normalization pass on the weights of these systems - many should still appear in each game, but it shouldn’t try to stuff all of them in. They also now respect the Habitable Worlds and Pre-FTL sliders from galaxy setup if appropriate, and should generally no longer appear in the immediate vicinity of Empire homeworlds.

This change yields general benefits to game pacing and indirectly, an improvement to performance in general.

Empire Focuses​
The Focus Trees in some of our other Grand Strategy Games do a great job of outlining possible ways you could take your country. In Hearts of Iron, for example, you already know the general “plot” - the different factions will behave as you expect until World Tension reaches a certain level, after which the world descends into war. The differences that will occur from game to game are largely due to how the events play out, and your interference in history lets everything spiral out into an alternate resolution. The Focus Trees not only provide a great way to create butterflies that can change history but are fantastic at providing new players with short and medium-term goals.

We decided that static Focus Trees were not appropriate for Stellaris though - our sandbox and 4X nature with a mysterious universe require any such systems to be more adaptable to what’s happening in this galaxy. Instead of trees, we’ve decided to go with suggested tasks that fall into Conquest, Exploration, or Development aspiration categories - these can range from investigating an anomaly to building a Dyson Swarm, or at the highest ranks, even becoming Galactic Custodian. You’ll be able to select your empire’s focused aspiration, which will skew the offered tasks towards your choice.

Completing these tasks gives no immediate reward, but progresses you down Conquest, Exploration, and Development tracks, and if you get a task that you’ve already completed that’s fine - it’ll immediately complete and you can get a new one. We don’t want you to sit there waiting to build your Interstellar Assembly, after all. Reaching certain milestones will grant abilities like Form Federation (which will be moving out of the Diplomatic Traditions), or give guaranteed research options for critical technologies, reducing your reliance on random pulls from the technology deck for techs like Cruisers, Colonial Centralization, or Mega-Engineering.

Veteran players already know how to play the game and are already adept at forming their own goals. We expect that you’ll already be completing these tasks naturally as you play - they’re primarily intended to teach new players how to play like you and guarantee that you’ll be able to force access to those important technologies.

Empire Timeline​
Accessible via a new tab within the Situation Log, the Empire Timeline is a real-time chronicle of your empire’s journey. From humble beginnings on your homeworld to the heights of galactic dominance (or the depths of ignominious defeat), the timeline will automatically document key events and milestones as they occur.

We aim for the Timeline to serve as a practical ledger, allowing you to retrace the pivotal decisions and moments that have shaped your game. It will also provide a rich narrative framework, transforming your gameplay into a story worth remembering.

We look forward to sharing more details on the Empire Timeline in a future diary. For now, we invite you to prepare your empires for posterity – and to ensure that your name echoes across the stars.

Many of the other changes also fall into Quality of Life Improvements, but two I want to highlight in particular include improvements to the Species Modification process and the Colonization flow.

Colonization Process​
Colonizing worlds had a few quirks that we’re smoothing out to make for a better experience, especially if you use Colony Automation. We’re changing the “Colony” designation to a modifier that will exist for some time after initial colonization, and letting you pick a Colony Designation and even turn automation on when you give the colonization order. This should prevent a common situation in the mid to late game where you would colonize a planet, but would have to pick and choose between using automation or losing out on the amenity and stability bonuses of the default designation.

The new flow also helps out Automation significantly since you won’t end up in a situation where Colony is no longer a valid designation and it falls back to an auto-designated selection.

Species Modification and Assimilation Targets​
We’ve gone through the genetic modification process to remove many pain points and make the overall flow much smoother. You’ll also be able to set a template as the species default, and can set sub-species variants to automatically integrate over time into the species default template.


The Species tab is generally more helpful as well.
Note: This branch does not include the pop changes.

Ship Designer​
As we did with Species Modification, we’ve gone through the Ship Designer to improve the general process of creating new ship designs.


And the Auto-generate designs checkbox won’t stop you from saving a new ship design!

There’s a lot more going into this update as well - I’m hoping to challenge Lem for the Patch Note Crown.

Next week we’ll go into more detail about some of the changes coming in the Stellaris 4.0 ‘Phoenix’ update that are possible to show, including some things I didn’t go into above like Precursor Selection and the Stellaris Databank.

See you then!

Hello Stellaris Community!

The devs have started trickling back into the office, and we expect to resume our regularly scheduled dev diaries next week! This means this is our final feedback post of the holiday break, but we’re ending strong with something that we know a lot of you have been wanting for a long time: factions and politics.

Internal politics is such a nebulous term, and it means many different things to different people, and we’ve discussed internally many times just what “Internal Politics” means to us. But this is our opportunity to ask:

What does internal politics mean to you?

Here’s what Eladrin said in DD #364:

Factions and Politics
Governments in Stellaris may hold a grudge against you for centuries for your atrocities but pops and factions are very quick to forgive and forget. There are no revanchist or irredentist factions that make trouble when borders change, nor variety within the factions themselves. I’d also like to see factions have their own tenets and goals and different ways that you can deal with them. There have been a lot of calls for an “internal politics” expansion, but I think that it would really be politics and culture in general, affecting both your empires and those around you.

If we were to do something along those lines, I’d also want to add some variant of factions to Gestalt empires - maybe Instincts for Hives that grow more dominant based on your behavior or Directives that compete for priority in Machine Intelligences. They’d have to feel different from individualistic factions, however. Among individualistic factions, I could see the tenets of an Egalitarian faction from a Shared Burdens empire being very different from the Egalitarian faction in a non-Worker Coop MegaCorp, and these tenets might also be used to define the beliefs of your Spiritualist factions. I’d certainly want to explore spreading my factions into other empires.

As previously mentioned in all of these feedback posts: This is not a guarantee that an internal politics rework will happen at some point in the future. This is us collecting feedback from the community to inform potential future development.
So, Stellaris Community, let us know what you think about the current implementation of Factions, and what internal politics means to you in our final feedback form: Internal Factions and Politics.

Thank you for all your feedback over the holiday season, and we can’t wait to see what you think of what’s coming next for Stellaris!

Hello Stellaris Community!

We hope you’ve all had a great holiday season, and we’re excited to see people starting to trickle back from their well-earned vacations. That means more Stellaris news is just right around the corner, with regularly scheduled dev diaries picking up in the next week or two.

But before we get too hyped over what’s coming next, we have to finish up some bookkeeping from last year. Specifically, we mentioned last year that we would be retiring Stellaris: Season 08 early in the new year. That time is now, specifically, tomorrow.

After tomorrow - around 3 PM CET - Stellaris: Season 08 will no longer be available and the content will be rolled into the Ultimate Bundle in order to make space for a new Season for 2025.


Stellaris: Season 08 contains all the major Stellaris releases from 2024, including The Machine Age, the Cosmic Storms Mechanical Expansion, and Grand Archive Story Pack and the illustrious non-spherical Rick the Cube machine species portrait.

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/46229/Stellaris_Season_08__Expansion_Pass/



The Machine Age contains:

• Individualistic Non-Gestalt Machine Empires
  
• Gestalt Machine Intelligence Empires (also unlocked by the Synthetic Dawn Story Pack)
  
• A new End-Game Crisis - The Synthetic Queen
  
• A new Player Crisis Path - Cosmogenesis
  
• Three new Origins
  
  • Cybernetic Creed
    
  • Synthetic Fertility
    
  • Arc Welders
• Civics
  
  • Guided Sapience
    
  • Natural Design
    
  • Obsessional Directive
    
  • Protocol Droids
    
  • Tactical Cogitators
    
  • Augmentation Bazaars (requires Megacorp)
• Two Mid-Game Structures
  
  • Arc Furnace
    
  • Dyson Swarm
• Three New Ascension Paths
  
  • Virtuality
    
  • Nanotech
    
  • Modularity
• Cybernetic and Synthetic Ascension (also unlocked by Utopia)
  
• Exploration of the effects of the cyberization or synthesization of society, with Advanced Government Forms for those who complete it.
  
• New Species Traits for Cyborgs, Machines and Robots
  
• Cybernetic portraits that change based on advancement through cyberization
  
• Synthetic portraits with both organic and synthetic variants that changed based on synthesization, usable by either organics or machines
  
• Two new Shipsets, Diplomatic Rooms, and City Sets
  
• 7 new music tracks synthetic and cybernetic inspired music tracks

Cosmic Storms Mechanical Expansion contains:

• 8 New Space Storms
  
• Storm Chasers Origin
  
• 3 New Civics
  
  • Planetscapers
    
  • Astrometeorology
    
  • Storm Devotion
• Galactic Weather Control Ascension Perk
  
• Weather Forecasting Map Mode
  
• Two new Precursor narratives, with two new Relics
  
• Events, Anomalies, and Archaeology Sites
  
• Storm-related technologies, Edicts, and Galactic community resolutions

Grand Archive Story Pack includes:

• Space Fauna capture, breeding, and modification systems
  
• 151 Specimens to collect and display across events from Grand Archive and the base game
  
• Over 240 Specimens total including those distributed across other Stellaris content
  
• 15 new Relics
  
• New Megastructure - The Grand Archive
  
• Two new Tradition trees
  
  • Archivism
    
  • Domestication
• Two new Origins
  
  • Primal Calling
    
  • Treasure Hunters
• Two new Civics
  
  • Beastmasters
    
  • Galactic Curators
• Two new forms of spaceborne life
  
  • Cutholoids
    
  • Voidworms
• A new possible mid-game crisis - the Voidworm Plague
  
• Three new music tracks
  
• Events, Anomalies, Archaeology Sites, Technologies, Galactic community resolutions, and more!

Season 08 Bonus Portrait: Rick the Cube

This is your last chance to get all the content above, plus the bonus Rick the Cube portrait at a 20% discount (outside of the Ultimate Bundle)!

by MrFreake_PDX

Hello Stellaris Community!

We hope you’ve all had a great holiday season so far! We’ve collected some excellent feedback so far, with over 8000 responses to the two feedback forms to date.

If you want to leave some feedback on Pirates and Crime, there’s still time! The form will be active until next Monday, after which we will close responses.

The topic for this week’s feedback form is Espionage. We’ve often talked about an espionage rework, and know that many of you find espionage rather lackluster outside of certain circumstances. So here’s your chance to let us know what you think!

Here’s what Eladrin said in Dev Diary #364:

Espionage
Espionage is a related system that isn’t satisfying its promise currently, as Mr. Cosmogone reminds me during every design meeting.

It’s difficult to keep track of spy networks, is generally of low impact, and has no real counterplay. But he’s got schemes.

So, do you think espionage is deserving of a rework? What would you like to see in a reworked espionage system? What do you like about the current Espionage system?

Answer all these questions and more on this week’s Feedback Form: Espionage!

We hope you enjoy the rest of your holiday season, and we’ll be back with our last feedback form next week, after which we will return to our regular Dev Diary schedule.

Hello Stellaris Community!

We hope you all have had/are having a great holiday season! Last week’s War and War Resolution Feedback Form had over 4000 responses, and we’d like to take the time to thank you all for your feedback. There are certainly some insights to be gained from the feedback you offered, and we’re excited to see some trends emerging - and combined with the rather large sample size - we feel we have a solid amount of community feedback that can inform potential future development on War and War resolution in Stellaris.

For those of you who didn’t see last week’s feedback post, we are taking advantage of the break in dev diaries to collect feedback to inform future Stellaris development. This is not a promise or a guarantee that there will be a rework on any of these mechanics at any point, this is to collect community feedback in a centralized place so that if the devs do a rework in a particular area, we have an idea of the community’s expectations and what you like and dislike about the current implementation of features in Stellaris.

Today we’re taking another look at another topic from Dev Diary #364 -Sights Unseen: Pirates and Crime.

This is what Eladrin said in DD# 364:

Pirates and Crime
Space Piracy is a popular fantasy - we touched on it a bit with the Treasure Hunters origin in Grand Archive, but they could mesh well with the Nomads idea mentioned earlier or even a factional political expansion. Crime and Deviancy aren’t terribly engaging systems at the moment either, and might benefit from wider examination.

So, Stellaris Community, what do you like/dislike about Pirates and Crime in Stellaris? Fill out our Piracy and Crime Feedback form and let us know!

From all of us here on Stellaris, thank you for taking the time to offer your feedback, and thanks for playing Stellaris!