by Eladrin

Hello, Stellaris Community!

Throughout the summer, we've been running an Open Beta with changes and adjustments to Stellaris 4.0 - focusing on the Wilderness Origin - addressing player feedback and other actionable areas we identified with internal testing. The Beta has been updated on a weekly or bi-weekly basis, and it currently contains a large number of changes and fixes we developed over the summer. We updated it again today, and it’s getting to be about time to bring it live. 

I want to take a moment to thank everyone who participated in the beta and shared their thoughts - your input has been invaluable when it comes to improving and refining Stellaris 4.0. The 4.0.22 patch is a major step forward, bringing significant gameplay improvements and laying a more stable foundation for the future.

We currently expect to release the update next Thursday, August 21st, and it will include a few more changes than what went up to the beta today.

If you’re on Steam and want to try them out before then, it’s available if you right click on Stellaris -> Properties -> Betas -> select "wilderness- Wilderness Open Beta" branch in the Beta Participation dropdown. You may need to restart Steam to get it to appear.

Since this patch includes some pretty hefty changes, I want to go over some of them that are coming.

As I originally mentioned back in Stellaris Dev Diary #386, we launched an Open Beta to test alternative mechanics for the Wilderness origin and gather feedback. The original implementation included some erratic behavior, especially if your biomass totals got too low, sometimes leaving jobs unworked. With the new systems, all Wilderness jobs are automatically worked by your primary species without requiring biomass assignment, and the economic sliders are now accessible, so you have better control over production.

Being able to control the sliders to reduce your input costs gives you more economic control during deficit situations.

The only Wilderness job with assigned pops is “Pliable Biomass”

General gameplay remains very similar, but the systems should be much more reliable and robust, and there should no longer be instances where you suddenly lose planets (or the game!) when pops are killed.

There are a few other changes in this patch that I wanted to highlight, as they have significant impact to how the game plays:

• The AI should no longer ever stall during certain points of its development, and should continue scaling its growth all the way through the endgame.

• Grown pops are now added directly to Civilians, Maintenance Drones, or Unemployed Slaves. This prevents overspecialized worlds from having a constant trickle of unemployed Specialists stuck in demotion, and speeds up automatic migration from crowded planets.

  • As part of this, we’ve changed the “orange briefcase” on the outliner to show planets with a large number of Civilians or Unemployed pops. The “red briefcase” of extreme unemployment will naturally take precedence.

• Speaking of Unemployed Slaves - Slaves (except for some cases such as Slaver Guilds) will now demote to “Unemployed Slaves”. Unemployed Slaves are present in the Worker stratum, and no longer require special buildings to automatically migrate (if they are permitted to do so by their species rights). Unemployed Slaves are not actually unhappier than employed ones, and do not contribute towards unemployment events, but are clearly visible as wasted resources.

• Amenities have been rebalanced, with the housing buildings now no longer nearly always being the optimal choice.

• Command limits on fleets have been generally increased in order to reduce the number of fleets in the end-game. 

  • Fleets are currently believed to be the largest source of mid to late-game performance issues, and today’s update includes some optimizations to combat targeting and ship upkeep. We’re going to aggressively continue looking for ways to improve this.

• Strategic Resource production in general has been significantly decreased, with new District Specializations added for Mining, Generator, and Agricultural Districts tied to special planetary features.

• Branch Offices have also received a balance pass.

The 4.0.22 release also contains a huge number of bugfixes, optimizations, balance changes, and stability improvements.

Here’s the current list of expected changes coming next week. 

We have a few more changes currently in testing, which I’ve added in a separate section at the bottom of the list:

Improvement

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

  • To prevent issues with biomass not being available on planets due to construction, all Wilderness jobs are now automatically worked without requiring biomass. These jobs are worked by your primary species.

  • Jobs for Wilderness are now also properly represented instead of being worked by a single pop with massive workforce bonuses, you now see exactly how the job is worked, and the sliders are also now usable to customize how much of each job will be worked.

  • These changes are intended to prevent situations where some jobs would go unworked, make Wilderness less bug-prone, and are intended to give you more control over your economy in deficit situations.

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

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

• Improved planet modifier tooltips so they display a better source than "From Buildings”

• The Technological Ascendancy AP now unlocks research policies allowing you to increase the draw weight for technology categories

• Added Research Restriction policies, allowing you to massively reduce the chance of drawing dangerous technologies (for example if you want to use automated research without researching these technologies).

  • Added the Refactored Restrictions to the Ethical Guideline Refactoring GalCom resolution, which increases the draw chance for dangerous and rare technologies.

  • Added demands to the Technologist faction pertaining to Research Restriction policies.

Balance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Substantially increased the base Command Limit of fleets and most sources of Command Limit. We know you were going to doomstack those fleets anyway.

• The Charismatic and Repugnant traits (and their robotic, cybernetic and overtuned equivalents) now additionally provide job efficiency modifiers for elite strata and bio-trophy jobs. Go forth and pamper the galaxy's most adorable creatures!

• Decreased amenities granted by housing buildings

• Reactor Boosters now give a percentage boost to reactor output.

• Later growth stages of biological ships now have an inherent reactor output percentage boost.

• Rebalanced trade policies for regular empires.

  • Wealth Creation: 50% Trade, 50% Energy.

  • Consumer Benefits: 50% Trade, 25% Consumer Goods, 25% Conversion Tax.

  • Marketplace of Ideas: 50% Trade, 25% Unity, 25% Conversion Tax.

  • Trade League: 50% Trade, 15% Energy, 15% Consumer Goods, 15% Unity, 5% Conversion Tax.

  • Holy Covenant: 50% Trade, 37.5% Unity, 12.5% Conversion Tax.

  • Mutual Aid: 25% Trade, 20% Energy, 20% Minerals, 20% Food, 15% Unity.

• Strategic Resource and planetary special feature balancing:

  • Assorted planetary features that gave rare crystals or exotic gases from technicians now apply to miners or farmers respectively

  • Added new District Specializations for strategic resources and some special features:

    • Rare Crystal Extraction district specialization to Mining Districts

    • Volatile Motes Harvesting district specialization to Generator Districts

    • Exotic Gas Capture district specialization to Agricultural Districts

    • Central Spire district specialization for the Urban Districts of certain Relic Worlds

  • The industrial sector planetary feature on relic worlds now gives +6 farming district capacity

  • The Betharian Processing district specialization now gives additional miner jobs to the mining districts.

  • Reduced the strategic resources production of industrial jobs from refineries, chemical plants and crystal plants.

  • Reduced the strategic resources production of industrial jobs from ancient refineries.

  • Increased the minor artifact cost of the ancient refinery.

  • Increased strategic resource cost and upkeep for several research buildings.

• The Charismatic and Repugnant traits (and their robotic, cybernetic and overtuned equivalents) now additionally provide job efficiency modifiers for elite strata and bio-trophy jobs. Go forth and pamper the galaxy's most adorable creatures! (For real this time)

• Increased job weight for genomic researchers

• Knights of the Toxic God balancing:

  • Knight Jobs now receive a 15% base upkeep increase whenever they unlock a quest reward that increases their base unity or research output

  • The impact of knight jobs on the speed of the Quest situation has been reduced from 0.5 to 0.2

  • Squire jobs now also grant a slight increase to the upkeep of Knight jobs

• The Environmental Integration tradition now gives a maximum habitability of 175% for species with the Mutagenic Habitability trait by default (down from 200%).

• Mutation Authorities now allow all Organic species to reach a maximum habitability of 175%.

• Mutation Authorities combined with the Environmental Integration tradition now allow all Organic species to reach a maximum habitability of 250%.

• Halved the effects of Species Genetic Purity for the following: Job Efficiency (Eugenic Hierarchy), Happiness (Phenotypical Autonomy), Trade (Organic Syndicate), Unity (Purity Paradigm), Leader Lifespan and XP Gain (Biotic Dominion and Phenotypical Autonomy), Council Agenda Speed (Eugenic Hierarchy).

• Increased the Trade per 100 Pops from the Spare Organs trait for Organ Usury to 0.5

• Basic Cloaking Field Generator no longer require exotic gases

• Advanced Cloaking Fields technology now requires access to exotic gases

• Some more polish for the Resort World

• Nanotech research facilities now have a planet cap of 6.

• Nanotech researcher job swaps now have innate nanite upkeep.

• Nanotech research facilities now only affect engineering jobs.

• The Situation Progress awarded for Evolutionary Predator Empires when they discover alien genetic material in events now increased the situation progress by 5%, 10% and, 20% rather than static values.

• Slavery Updates for non-Slaver Guild empires: Unemployed Slaves intentionally do not demote into Civilians, but remain as Unemployed pops in the Worker stratum. They do not gain additional happiness penalties beyond those they already have due to being enslaved. Unemployed Slaves can now auto-migrate without requiring a Slave Processing or Transit Hub building. Slaves in Domestic Servitude will continue to take Servant jobs instead of becoming unemployed, but will not auto-migrate.

• Increased the thresholds for "Rising Unemployment" events. Unemployed Slaves do not contribute to "Rising Unemployment" events. (They're not upset at not being forced into the mines.)

• Added Coastal Hamlets district specialization for empires that are both Anglers and Agrarian Idyll. These give Angler, Pearl Diver and Trader jobs (35 jobs of each type) and accept both Agriculture and Urban buildings. The starting Aquaculture district specialization is replaced with this if you have Agrarian Idyll.

• Subterranean Urbanization district specialization now grants 75 miner and 75 trader jobs per district (up from 50 of each)

• Aquaculture district specialization now grants 75 angler and 75 pearl diver jobs per district (was 100 anglers)

• Agrarian Villages district specialization now grants 75 farmers and 75 traders jobs per district (up from 50 of each) all cases

• Harmonised triggers for draw weights for farming technologies

Bugfix

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

• Fix Slaver Guilds constantly reassigning slaves and never enslaving workers

• Updated the ship role handling of the cosmogenesis biological ships

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

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

• Fallen Empire trade buildings should no longer self destruct

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Jobs production modifier fix in nested tooltip for Serviles trait

• Maze Harbingers now use the correct amount of naval capacity

• The hive Sensorium building no longer mentions Evaluators

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

• Fixed Integrated Preservation still giving modifiers to Evaluator jobs

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

• Improved consistency with the tooltips for the Galactic Curator civics

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

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

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

• Improved dead object database

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

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

• Fixed Workforce calculations.

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

• Planetary Logistic Deficits slider should now correctly apply.

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

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

• Fixed unused portraits blocking custom prescripted countries from being considered for spawning

• Fixed Pop group modifiers of Deposits not being handled

• Fixed specimens not filling exhibits when room is made

• Fixed bioships designs with the same name being exploitable

• Fixed GDF alloy cost reduction not working

• The Spare Organs species trait will no longer interfere with Envoy assignment. Death now relieves them from their duties.

• Purging now properly disables regular pop upkeep because we really don't budget for the dead

• Fleet that are fighting are no longer eligible for special project requirements

• Civilians will now be properly used in the Lathe

• Updated Synaptic Reinforcement and Industrial Maintenance edicts to account for 4.0 changes.

• Robots no longer benefit from Cloning Vats

• Fixed the Housing tooltip not correctly showing district modifiers

• Fixed Buildings modifiers not being calculated at game start

• Fixed some duplicated entries of haruspex occurring from spiritualist federations

• Wilderness empires now have a fallback if their capital buildings are deleted during the monthly tick.

• Updated the Chronicle Drones production tooltip to reflect that they no longer produce amenities.

• The Lethal Ecosphere blocker will no longer require a technology to clear, cleaning up the technology view.

• Leviathan Parades should now have the name of the beastie you killed in the title again.

• Fixed a few more cases in which pops that should be bio-trophies weren't be pampered correctly (for example refugees that were insisting that they were being purged)

• Pops resettled to the Synaptic Lathe should no longer retain any belief that they still belong to any social stratum that isn't being part of a computer

• Stasis Wardens no longer scale their own or Civilian workforce into infinity and beyond

• Dramatically increased the weight for Offspring Drones, meaning that your planets are more likely to employ them and avoid the negative modifier.

• Fixed Pirate Events not spawning pirates

• Artisan Drones now have a food upkeep instead of a mineral one if you have a Catalytic Processing Civic. 

• Fixed the space time anomaly saying it converted physicists into dimensional researchers.

• Added volatile mote cost and upkeep for alloy reclamation plant.

• Fixed progenitor hive debuff applying for lacking offspring if the nest is in a district where the workforce automated district

• Colossi equipped with the Devolving Beam can no longer target Contingency Worlds if you lack the Archaeo-Engineers AP.

• Living Metal Mega-Construction Insight empire modifier no longer shows a placeholder icon.

• Fixed AI weights for determining if a job was amenities focused or not.

• When reverse-engineering minor artifacts, the Affluence Emporium, Omnivident Administration, and Robot Manufacturing Nexus are blocked for empires that cannot construct them

• The tooltip for the Shattered Ring origin now explicitly tells the player about the habitability decreasing blockers.

• Fixed issues with industrial job refinery modifiers.

• Fixed Flash Forge Hyper Relay not working.

• Implemented loc fix for Warform recruitment dialogue uses "reparations" instead of "repairs"

• fixed formatting issues in several tooltip text: Stalwart Network civic description, message in outliner for starbase upgrade, removed unnecessary quotation mark for research points

• Fixed edge case with has_active_building Alien Zoo Building checks

• Fixed some GalCom modifiers tooltips

• Technocracy Civic now mentions you start the game with an additional Scientist

• Fixed a case that would let people stack behemoth eggs on top of ruined ones

• Luminary Leaders no longer get Backup Clones as they interfered with the Origin

• Growth modifiers from Traits and Strata don't scale on Pop group size squared anymore

• Multiple auto modding traits will now work together.

• Fix ships with a jump drive being able to use bypasses they shouldn't and getting stuck

• Fixed megastructure resource harvesting not always being shown even though it was happening

• Fixed armor for biological ships displaying the regen values for shields in tooltips

• Added a missing 'a' to a seven-year-old localization string.

• Updated Synaptic Reinforcement and Industrial Maintenance edicts to account for 4.0 changes.

• Fixed awoken Fallen Empires not expanding

• The Nothing to See Here Achievement now requires you to have a cloaked military fleet in your enemies capital, a science ship will not do!

• Fixed titans for biological shipsets sometimes not having ship names.

• Improved AI budgeting of titans for biological shipsets.

• Hard Reset Origin, "Machine of War" event text correctly references planet.

• Fallen Empire robotic assembly techs now take into account your policy on robots

• Fallen Empire robotic assembly techs now require you to have invented robomodding

• Re-introduced the effect description for the Ministry of Acquisition, Energy, and Extraction

• Getting the Genetic Entertainment event multiple times should now properly only generate 3 options.

• Setting Slaves to Livestock should now force them into their new "job".

• Slaves should be less likely to get stick in a "repurposing" job.

• Unemployed Slaves should now appear in the Worker stratum as Unemployed Slaves instead of disappearing entirely.

• The tooltip explaining automatic migration has been updated to the way it works in 4.0.

• Fix Contingency not finishing off Planets after destroying starbases

AI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Adjusted AI priorities regarding research and trade targets.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Further refinements to late game economic plans.

• Reworked how the AI calculates shipyards, if all their shipyards get occupied during a war they will attempt to build a new one when next building a starbase.

Stability and Performance

• Fixed an OOS at reconnect related to the bureaucrat job

• Fix OOS related to Specimens and Exhibits

• Several OOS Fixes including one Num_Pop_Groups OOS

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

• Fix CTD related to specimens

• Fixed another OOS at reconnect

• OOS fix related to bombardment and ground combat

• Potential OOS fix related to Grand Archives

• Fixed undefined behavior in planetary construction (potentially leading to CTD:sCTDS:s and OOS:s) of Districts and Zones as well as replacing/upgrading/repairing Buildings, Districts and Zones.

• Fixed crash when using the "Alerts.ShowAll" console command.

• Fixes OOS due to ship construction time is calculated to 0 on client but correct on server

• Improved the logic that checks for hidden Cutholoids

• Fixed OOS with ship positions due to combat.

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

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

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

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

• Minor improvement to refugee_effect

• Minor improvement to handling modifiers

• Memory leak fix from faulty pattern. 

• Optimized the script side calculations of biomass. Non Wilderness empires will no longer try to tally up their citizens as potential biomass reserves.

• Fixed potential crash when finishing terraforming process

UI

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

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

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

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

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

• New icon for strange wormhole

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

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

• Improved District tooltips: 

  • Hovering a district now shows the scaled and separated modifiers

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

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

• Added alert settings to the settings menu.

• Removed "Filter by Type" from message settings.

• Fixed situation alerts showing the wrong severity based on current stage.

• Fixed some inconsistent highlighting in tooltips of the topbar

• Fix Prev/Next Planet and Move Capital buttons not always updating correctly in the Planet view

• Building Assets are now centered instead of being anchored to the top right corner.

• Improve tooltip for using a bypass when unable to do so

• Fix Armies tooltip missing the actual upkeep and only showing its details

• Fix overlap in Outliner's army entries

• All District Backgrounds assets now share the same height

• Fixed some inconsistent highlighting in tooltips of the topbar

• Large species selection buttons in the species list will no work even when hovering over some other tooltip triggering UI element inside the button.

Modding

• Add district_limit to buildings

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

• Add displace_pop_amount effect that simply raises on_pop_displaced

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

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

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

• Added on_queued, on_unqueued, on_built effects for district specializations

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

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

• Added ship_reactor_power_add/mult modifiers

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

• Added automated_workforce support to the num_assigned_jobs trigger

• Added the habitability_ceil_uncapped_add modifier, allowing species that benefit from the species_has_uncapped_habitability_on_planet game rule to have habitability above the HABITABILITY_CEIL_UNCAPPED define.

• Added overlay_icons for districts which displays sprites overlaid on the district icon.

• Added support overrides for district grid boxes and district backgrounds

• Add <district_type>_max_mult modifiers and rename <district_type>_max to <district_type>_max_add

• Added federation_modifier option to crisis perks.

• Buildings, districts and district specializationss don't need triggered descs for job descriptions, they are now automatically generated

• Fixed create leader effects not adding traits in some cases if randomize_traits is true.

• Create leader effects now correctly add pending trait selections if randomize_traits is false.

• Create leader effects no longer ignore levels in the traits list if randomize_traits is false.

• traits in the create leader effects now support random_negative and random_common.

• No longer check prerequisites for traits in create leader effects (except for random traits).

• Re-added support for "add_trait = <trait>" syntax for leaders.

Balance

• Logistics Drones now give a base output of 6 trade and 500 amenities per 100 jobs (was 4 trade and 250 amenities) however they now have an upkeep of 2 energy (for machine empires) or 2 minerals (for hive empires)

• Increased the jobs granted by Coastal Hamlets

• Increased both the base job weight for Logistics Drones and the job weight when a planet is low in amenities.

• Significantly increased the base amenity production of the Deployment Post (the capital building for newly colonised planets by machine intelligences)

• Further adjustments on strategic resource balancing. Refinery buildings now add +0.25 strategic resource income to industrial jobs at the cost of 1.25 minerals or 2 food. Mote Harvesters, Gas Extractors and Crystal Mines now give +0.5 strategic resource income to rural jobs instead of +1. The Nanite Transmuter and Dimensional Replicator have had their outputs and upkeep roughly doubled.

Bugfix

• Fix commercial pacts saving their last month value incorrectly, leading to them sometimes not giving any trade value

• Removed duplicated entry in clone vats upkeep causing them to cost 45 food per month instead of 30.

• Script profiler no longer collects data for ship logistics if it does not actually do the calculations

• Fix the presapients of Gestalt Genesis Guides not all joining the Conserved Fauna job

• Popgroups will now have portraits other than the default one

• The cap for the number of armies supported by a species is now one per 100 pops instead of one per pop to match the 4.0 pop counts.

Performance

•  Reduced amount of calculations and allocations in ship logistics calculation

Dev diaries will now return to their regular weekly schedule until we switch to twice a week before Shadows of the Shroud.

Next week, I want to discuss our plans for the future and highlight new content developed over the summer in response to your feedback since 4.0 launched.

Abrakam has been helping us by improving the Planet UI. 

This particular change is expected to release alongside Shadows of the Shroud in 4.1.

See you next week!

by Eladrin

Hello everyone!

We've got another update to the Wilderness Open Beta today, which fixes a number of significant multiplayer desynchronization issues, fixes some purging issues, adds yet more lathe fixes, more AI improvements, some economic balancing, and a couple of new Policies relating to Research.

Here's a list of today's changes:

Feature​​

• The Technological Ascendancy AP now unlocks research policies allowing you to increase the draw weight for technology categories

• Added Research Restriction policies, allowing you to massively reduce the chance of drawing dangerous technologies (for example if you want to use automated research without researching these technologies).

• Added the Refactored Restrictions to the Ethical Guideline Refactoring GalCom resolution, which increases the draw chance for dangerous and rare technologies.

• Added demands to the Technologist faction pertaining to Research Restriction policies.

Balance​​

• The Charismatic and Repugnant traits (and their robotic, cybernetic and overtuned equivalents) now additionally provide job efficiency modifiers for elite strata and bio-trophy jobs. Go forth and pamper the galaxy's most adorable creatures! (Edit: Bio Trophies are missing "_bonus_" from the static modifier so it's not applying correctly. This will be fixed in the next update.)

• Decreased amenities granted by housing buildings.

• Reactor Boosters now give a percentage boost to reactor output.

• Later growth stages of biological ships now have an inherent reactor output percentage boost.

• Rebalanced trade policies for regular empires.

  • Wealth Creation: 50% Trade, 50% Energy.

  • Consumer Benefits: 50% Trade, 25% Consumer Goods, 25% Conversion Tax.

  • Marketplace of Ideas: 50% Trade, 25% Unity, 25% Conversion Tax.

  • Trade League: 50% Trade, 15% Energy, 15% Consumer Goods, 15% Unity, 5% Conversion Tax.

  • Holy Covenant: 50% Trade, 37.5% Unity, 12% Conversion Tax.

  • Mutual Aid: 25% Trade, 20% Energy, 20% Minerals, 20% Food, 15% Unity.

• Strategic Resource and planetary special feature balancing:

  • Assorted planetary features that gave rare crystals or exotic gases from technicians now apply to miners or farmers respectively

  • Added new District Specializations for strategic resources and some special features:

    • Rare Crystal Extraction district specialization to Mining Districts

    • Volatile Motes Harvesting district specialization to Generator Districts

    • Exotic Gas Capture district specialization to Agricultural Districts

    • Central Spire district specialization for the Urban Districts of certain Relic Worlds

  • The industrial sector planetary feature on relic worlds now gives +6 farming district capacity

  • The Betharian Processing district specialization now gives additional miner jobs to the mining districts.

  • Reduced the strategic resources production of industrial jobs from refineries, chemical plants and crystal plants.

  • Reduced the strategic resources production of industrial jobs from ancient refineries.

  • Increased the minor artifact cost of the ancient refinery.

  • Increased strategic resource cost and upkeep for several research buildings.

Bugfix​​

• The Spare Organs species trait will no longer interfere with Envoy assignment. Death now relieves them from their duties.

• Purging now properly disables regular pop upkeep because we really don't budget for the dead

• Fleet that are fighting are no longer eligible for special project requirements

• Civilians will now be properly used in the Lathe

• Updated Synaptic Reinforcement and Industrial Maintenance edicts to account for 4.0 changes.

• Robots no longer benefit from Cloning Vats

• Fixed the Housing tooltip not correctly showing district modifiers

• Fixed Buildings modifiers not being calculated at game start

• Fixed some duplicated entries of haruspex occurring from spiritualist federations

• Wilderness empires now have a fallback if their capital buildings are deleted during the monthly tick.

• Updated the Chronicle Drones production tooltip to reflect that they no longer produce amenities.

• The Lethal Ecosphere blocker will no longer require a technology to clear, cleaning up the technology view.

• Leviathan Parades should now have the name of the beastie you killed in the title again.

• Fixed a few more cases in which pops that should be bio-trophies weren't be pampered correctly (for example refugees that were insisting that they were being purged)

• Pops resettled to the Synaptic Lathe should no longer retain any belief that they still belong to any social stratum that isn't being part of a computer

• Stasis Wardens no longer scale their own or Civilian workforce into infinity and beyond

• Dramatically increased the weight for Offspring Drones, meaning that your planets are more likely to employ them and avoid the negative modifier.

• Fixed Pirate Events not spawning pirates

• Artisan Drones now have a food upkeep instead of a mineral one if you have a Catalytic Processing Civic.

• Fixed the space time anomaly saying it converted physicists into dimensional researchers.

• Added volatile mote cost and upkeep for alloy reclamation plant.

Stability/Performance​​

• Fixed undefined behavior in planetary construction (potentially leading to CTDS:s and OOS:s) of Districts and District Specializations as well as replacing/upgrading/repairing Buildings, Districts and District Specializations.

• Fixed crash when using the "Alerts.ShowAll" console command.

• Fixes OOS due to ship construction time is calculated to 0 on client but correct on server

• Improved the logic that checks for hidden Cutholoids

• Fixed OOS with ship positions due to combat.

AI​

• Continued improvements to AI economic plans.

UI​

• Added alert settings to the settings menu.

• Removed "Filter by Type" from message settings.

• Fixed situation alerts showing the wrong severity based on current stage.

For next week, one of our big focuses is looking at Slavery in general. While unemployed slaves intentionally do not demote into Civilians, they should not simply disappear from the economic tab. We're also strongly leaning towards relaxing the current rules on automatic migration and slaves and letting unemployed slaves migrate without the need of special buildings.

We'll also be continuing economic balancing and bugfixing.

Please let us know if this update resolves most multiplayer desyncs, and provide bug reports with saves if you run into any. We're also interested in any other feedback you have, especially around how the AI is doing with this round of changes and what combinations of civics or origins you consider "broken" (either in a good or bad way). We'll try to prioritize some of those for next week's update (especially if you can provide saves).

For the complete list of previous changes in this branch (excluding the new ones), please visit the Paradox Forums.

As mentioned before, these changes are expected to be release into the live branch later on this month. Currently we're strongly leaning towards including the Wilderness changes contained within this branch, as they fix several key issues with the gameplay experience.

To opt into the Wilderness Open Beta, go to your Steam library, right click on Stellaris -> Properties -> Betas -> select "wilderness- Wilderness Open Beta" branch in the Beta Participation dropdown. You may need to restart Steam to get it to appear.

Thank you for playing Stellaris!

Hello Stellaris Community!

#MODJAM2025 is available to play on the Stellaris Steam Workshop and Paradox Mods! Be sure to subscribe and try out the Mod Jam, and vote for your favorite Player Crisis Paths before August 22nd!

But before you run off to play, we have our last selection of Submissions to Highlight! Here again with our final video highlight of this Mod Jam is Michael~:

Thanks again to Michael~ for supporting our Modders this year. Please take a moment to like and subscribe to their channel!

—

Phantom Reality by Exakan pushes you to leave your limited existence behind to bend reality, and break the barriers of time.

When asked about their inspiration, this is what Exakan had to say:
“Civilizations are at the mercy of forces they don't understand. How would they name the unnamable? How can anyone describe the indescribable? To answer this, you have to bend reality and break the barriers of time. While dragging everyone else into the darkness, unleash incomprehensible horrors and corrupt the consciousness of any opponent. Others may see your species as ineffable monsters, but that will never capture what they truly become.”

—

Omnitemporal by Accorata, and BrettlesSr allows your empire to become masters of time, unlocking powerful abilities but not without danger.

—

Coexistence Protocol by SushiDragon gives you the opportunity to bring lasting peace to a galaxy plagued by war, and chaos for millennia.

SushiDragon had this to say about the inspiration for their crisis:
“I wanted a crisis that wasn’t just about blowing things up but was still very crisis-y, and mind control seemed like it made sense for that.”

—

Culture Derouting Weapon by is3mru4ma revolves around the planet Hoanna, and the Hoannarian people struck by a culture derouteing weapon

—

Killing Thought by Lithandril2 focuses on war, and the belief that your species strength comes from the clashing of blade against blade, and to prove you’re allowed to exist you must win.

Lithrandil2 said their submission was inspired by:
“Sword Logic from Destiny and Sekhmet from "Sekhmet Hunts the Dying Gnosis: A Computation"”

—

Post-Baryonic Infusion by Rodahtnov, and Zyralynn is no ordinary player crisis. It is an all-in-one crisis, ascension path, and species pack revolving around eldritch/cosmic horror themes.

They had this to say when asked about their inspiration:
“Recently with BioGenesis a new planetary event of species co-living with dark matter got my attention, so mixing it with a small touch of cosmic horror, transformation themes and a bit of science, we have both attempted to create something fun and dynamic in a way a crisis like Cosmogenesis works, giving the player different options to end the galaxy by their own hand and choice.”

—

Value Extraction UnLimited by MrArcaneGates explores what would happen if you took space mining, dialed it up to 11, and then looked at the galaxy and said “Are you going to finish that?”

MrArcaneGates, when asked about their inspiration, said this:
“I like big planets and i like destroying small planets for performance. I can also recommend the "Beta Testers" Audiobooks.”

—

These next two submissions are going to be late submissions, and may not appear in the #MODJAM2025 mod:

Archean Convergence by Levus77 is a crisis path focused on unlocking the galaxy’s deepest secrets by discovering hidden systems, and reverse engineering a new tier of archeo-technology.

Levus77 had this to say about their inspiration:
“I just think ancient wmd's are really cool”

—

Beyond Aeons Torn by MasterScout is about exploring exotic states of matter, and the implications that can come from it.

MasterScout had this to say about their inspiration:
“Cosmogenesis as a whole. The Machine Age DLC is probably my favorite. I felt that the Cosmogenesis crisis is designed to be played with a vertical empire (such as Virtual). This ends up going out the window with conquering planets and kidnapping pops being very popular. I wanted to make an antithesis that rewards playing defensively, and building up what you have.”

—

That’s it for this week, folks! Thanks for reading, and subscribe to #MODJAM2025 today on Steam and Paradox Mods, and don’t forget to Vote for your favorite Player Crisis Paths!

Hello Stellaris Community!

We’re proud to announce that #MODJAM2025 is available now on the Stellaris Steam Workshop!

Subscribe on Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3504405585

#MODJAM2025 boasts over 15 new player crisis paths for you to explore, with more potentially coming on Thursday.

But that’s not all, you get to vote for your five favorites! Voting closes on August 22nd, so be sure to get your votes in before then!

We will announce the winners of #MODJAM2025 on August 25th, with the top 3 Player Crisis Paths getting some great prizes from our sponsors at Republic of Gamers!

This year our first place Modder will win an ROG Ally X, and our second place Modder will win an Rog Ally, both from our sponsors at Republic of Gamers! Our third place Modder will receive a Stellaris Merchandise Bundle valued at approximately USD$170 from our friends here at Stellaris Marketing.

Want to know more about #MODJAM2025? Michael~ joins us again this summer, to highlight each of the Player Crisis Paths!

Submission #1 Highlight on the Stellaris Forums

Submission #2 Highlight on the Stellaris Forums

Submission #3 Highlight on the Stellaris Forums

Thanks to everyone who signed up, contributed, helped test, and of course thank you for our sponsors for supporting #MODJAM2025!

Subscribe today!

Steam:

https://pdxint.at/mj25steam

Paradox Mods:

https://pdxint.at/mj25pdxmods

Vote:

http://pdxint.at/mj25vote

by MrFreake_PDX

Hello everyone!

We’re now less than a week away from the release of #MODJAM2025 on July 29th! Testing is still ongoing on the Stellaris Official Discord, so if you want to help out, there’s still time!

We want to thank everyone who has shown up and tested so far, having extra eyes on a project is extremely helpful, especially when working with tight deadlines like in a mod jam. This week we have five more crisis paths to highlight today, and there will be one more additional highlight next week. The modders involved have all done fantastic work, and we can’t wait to get their crisis paths into your (obviously benevolent) hands.

—

The Phoenix Protocol involves your empire discovering their heritage as a great power, with the goal of restoring their people to their former glory.

When asked about their inspiration, Bee’s Knees had this to say:

“The idea of restoring the glory of a former empire was a scaled-down version of an original idea I had to allow players to play as a fallen empire.

*Very* loosely, the devolution idea came from a creative repurposing of a Marvel movie quote (""I will burn them out of time"")."

—

Theophany the story of your empire’s slow descent into madness after it finds a weak and fragile deity in the shroud.

When asked about the inspiration for their submission, the derega, Tree and Malthus said:

“We like the idea of the shroud like many others which is why our's is probably shroud crisis #10 or so. In vanilla Stellaris we kind of missed the opportunity for the player to get or create their own customized shroud entity to worship instead of just being a mere follower to the established four big ones.”

—

In the Dreaming Deep crisis path you will work your way into other empire’s dreams while exploring the deeper meaning of your own.

When asked about the inspiration behind Dreaming Deep, the Nuadha said this:

“A combination of the game Cultist Simulator, the idea of finding physical meaning through dreams, and the unpublished works of H P Lovecraft.”

—

Whispers in the Weave is a story-based crisis path revolving around ancient whispers echoing between the stars.

Evereal and Kalisalos had this to say about the inspiration for Whispers in the Weave:

“Whispers in the Weave is a crisis that touches on several themes of eldritch horror - of the great unknown that dwells beyond, of those elements that we do not and could never understand. A whisper in the night could be anything. A threat. A secret. A promise.

Folding in concepts of dreams, thoughts, sound, and obsession, we thus ask you... What, truly, lies beyond our comprehension?”

—

The Architect of Ruin will offer its services to you in exchange for simple requests, granting boons and gifts, while taking the minds of your people.

When asked about the inspiration behind the Architect of Ruin, the MadeinCanada had this to say:

“The first part of the Architect of Ruin that came to me were the mechanics, namely the Satisfaction mechanic, where the crisis objectives mainly focus on completing more and larger tasks to keep the entity's Satisfaction in the positive to gain bonuses and avoid punishments, but of course these would become harder and harder to complete, so you need to strategise what to do and how!

From there, other mechanics like the megastructures, jobs, subject, factions and more came pretty naturally into the base theme of having to satisfy this powerful being. In terms of flavour and lore, leaning into the eldritch aspect of Stellaris was obvious to me, especially since it's not much explored outside of the Shroud, and especially not for Become the Crisis paths!”

—

That’s it for today folks! We'll be back on Thursday of next week with our final submission highlight. #MODJAM2025 will release on Tuesday, July 29th, and you can subscribe to #MODJAM2025 early so you can get it as soon as it becomes available!

by MrFreake_PDX

Hello Stellaris Community!

Today is the end of working time for the modders participating in #MODJAM2025! The modders now have 10 days to test and polish their submissions before the modjam releases on July 29th. We’re expecting between 15 and 20 new modded player crisis paths for you to enjoy. If you’re interested in helping test the modder’s submissions, join us on discord and get the tester role in the #help-test-modjam channel.

We brought in Michael~ to create videos to highlight the modder’s submissions on YouTube as well:

Be sure to subscribe to Michael~ on YouTube to get more content about Stellaris Mods!

Our first highlight is by Greendog, is a diplomatic focused crisis that wishes to take over the galaxy, believing themselves to be as gods compared to the other empires.

When asked about their inspiration, Greendog said this submission was loosely inspired by the Galactic Empire and the Imperium of Man. Can’t say they don’t know their audience.

—-

Our next submission, created by Jin2188 and The_Wandering_Modder, takes you on a journey across Branchial Space, where infinite universes entangle in a vast web of endless possibilities.

When asked about the inspiration behind The Branchial Weaver, they said this:

“After the last ModJam, I joined up with a few other modders to try and create a big "Crisis Expansion" mod, that would have a crisis path for each vanilla ethic, with the crisis for the Pacifist ethic involving time travel and rewriting history. The project never really came to fruition, but the core ideas were still there. When expanding upon this idea for this ModJam, I was heavily inspired by a "theory of everything" making the rounds in physics recently. Stephen Wolfram, Jonathan Gorard, and several others have been working on what they call the Wolfram Physics Project, one of several attempts to find the "fundamental theory of physics". Its validity is debatable, but I found myself fascinated by it anyway. One of the really interesting things I found was the idea that general relativity (our current theory of gravity) and quantum mechanics are actually the same theory played out in different kinds of space. Quantum mechanics, in this framework, plays out in what Wolfram calls "branchial space", which is a sort of "space of spaces" where each element of the "space" represents a single quantum state of the universe. It's a bit complicated, but Wolfram tries to make it as simple as possible when communicating his theory to the public. He has a few "writings" where he describes aspects of his ideas in a somewhat simplified form for those who are interested in physics but don't want to be bombarded with math and technical jargon.

—

Our next submission, by Daniellm is a spiritual crisis path revolving around the Shroud.

When asked about their inspiration, Daniellm said this:

"I have always loved psionics and the shroud in stellaris. The shroud patrons and just generally the idea of this other dimension of pure energy not so far from ours.

Stellaris has never really tapped into the idea of shroud cults, the closest we come to this are the shroudwalkers. The idea of cults, and them spreading to different empires, all with the common goal of wanting to summon their god or gods into the universe is what started project divinity."

—-

Our next submission to highlight is by jam1066, is a mining focused crisis path, which gives you access to more extreme mining techniques as you progress further.

When asked about their inspiration for creating this crisis path, jam1066 had this to say:

“I looked at what ships existed in the game but were inaccessible to the player and found the Mining Drones. This helped me decide the direction of the crisis path in being mining focused.”

—-

Our next submission by .wiirlak (with icons made by Oriya) revolves around terraforming planets into Bloom Worlds, making a haven for your people, and a nightmare for others.

When asked about their inspiration, wiirlak simply said “Unlimited Growth”.

—-

Our final submission this week is by TheRingBearer, whose crisis path aims to create a perfect idyllic utopia, a society previously thought unobtainable.

When asked about their inspiration, this is what TheRingBearer had to say:

“While I can point to a joke in the Modjam Discord to the inspiration of the theme. The driving inspiration was wanting a way to "win" that didn't necessarily involve conquering the galaxy as well as being a "well intentioned" Crisis. Utopia justifies the means.”

—-

Thanks for reading!

If you’re interested in helping the modders playtest their mods, join us on discord and press the button in the #help-test-modjam channel to unlock the testing channels! We’ll be back next week with more highlights from #MODJAM2025!

Hello, Stellaris community!

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

Here is a list of what we've changed:

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

• Fixed Workforce calculations.

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

• Planetary Logistic Deficits slider should now correctly apply.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Improved District tooltips:

  • Hovering a district now shows the scaled and separated modifiers

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

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

• OOS fix related to bombardment and ground combat

• Potential OOS fix related to Grand Archives

• Added ship_reactor_power_add/mult modifiers

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

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

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

  • To prevent issues with biomass not being available on planets due to construction, all Wilderness jobs are now automatically worked without requiring biomass. These jobs are worked by your primary species.

  • Jobs for Wilderness are now also properly represented instead of being worked by a single pop with massive workforce bonuses, you now see exactly how the job is worked, and the sliders are also now usable to customize how much of each job will be worked.

  • These changes are intended to prevent situations where some jobs would go unworked, make Wilderness less bug-prone, and are intended to give you more control over your economy in deficit situations. Please provide feedback!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Fix Slaver Guilds constantly reassigning slaves and never enslaving workers

• Updated the ship role handling of the cosmogenesis biological ships

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

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

• Fallen Empire trade buildings should no longer self destruct

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Jobs production modifier fix in nested tooltip for Serviles trait

• Maze Harbingers now use the correct amount of naval capacity

• The hive Sensorium building no longer mentions Evaluators

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

• Fixed Integrated Preservation still giving modifiers to Evaluator jobs

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

• Improved consistency with the tooltips for the Galactic Curator civics

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

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

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

• Improved dead object database

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Adjusted AI priorities regarding research and trade targets.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Fixed an OOS at reconnect related to the bureaucrat job

• Fix OOS related to Specimens and Exhibits

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

• Fix CTD related to specimens

• Fixed another OOS at reconnect

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

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

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

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

• Minor improvement to refugee_effect

• Minor improvement to handling modifiers

• Memory leak fix from faulty pattern.

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

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

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

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

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

• New icon for strange wormhole

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

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

• Improved District tooltips:

  • Hovering a district now shows the scaled and separated modifiers

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

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

• Add district_limit to buildings

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

• Add displace_pop_amount effect that simply raises on_pop_displaced

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

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

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

• Added on_queued, on_unqueued, on_built effects for district specializations

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

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

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

To opt into the Wilderness Open Beta, go to your Steam library, right click on Stellaris -> Properties -> Betas -> select "wilderness- Wilderness Open Beta" branch in the Beta Participation dropdown. You may need to restart Steam to get it to appear.

Thank you for playing Stellaris!

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

Improvement

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

Balance

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

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

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

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

Bugfix

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Jobs production modifier fix in nested tooltip for Serviles trait

• Maze Harbingers now use the correct amount of naval capacity

• The hive Sensorium building no longer mentions Evaluators

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

• Fixed Integrated Preservation still giving modifiers to Evaluator jobs

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

• Improved consistency with the tooltips for the Galactic Curator civics

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

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

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

• Improved dead object database

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

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

AI

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

Stability

• Fixed an OOS at reconnect

Performance

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

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

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

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

• Minor improvement to refugee_effect

• Minor improvement to handling modifiers

• Memory leak fix from faulty pattern.

UI

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

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

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

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

• New icon for strange wormhole

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

Modding

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

• Add displace_pop_amount effect that simply raises on_pop_displaced

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

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

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

• Added on_queued, on_unqueued, on_built effects for district specializations

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

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

To opt into the Wilderness Open Beta, go to your Steam library, right click on Stellaris -> Properties -> Betas -> select "wilderness- Wilderness Open Beta" branch in the Beta Participation dropdown. You may need to restart Steam to get it to appear.

Our intention is to run this Wilderness Open Beta for the rest of the summer so we can gather feedback on these changes.

by Eladrin

Hello, Stellaris community!

Last week I said the next dev diary would be on the 26th, but I didn’t want to wait that long to discuss our plans moving forward.

This week we released 4.0.21, with the following changes:

Improvement

• Storm Aftermath events will no longer happen in systems where you are constructing megastructures. Meaning that it will no longer randomly spawn an anomaly under your Dyson swarm that was 99% done.

• Save game transfer speed is now increased in multiplayer by default. If you encounter difficulties in transferring saves, the host can change to using the former transfer mode through settings.

Bugfix

• Memorialists now give their priests the ethics modifiers their civic tooltip promises

• Armies that have landed on planets show properly in the outliner

• Reforming the government to Genesis Guides allows building Genesis Arks

• Ringworld districts now correctly spawn on pre-ftl ringworlds

• Fixed ringworlds colonized by gestalt empires having a mysterious city district that shouldn't exist.

• Fixed the leader survived notification text

• Fixed Fear of the Dark random empires being able to get bioships

• The Purity Breach event can no longer destroy colonies

• Fixed an error preventing refugees from behaving properly

• The Fatal Mutations event should no longer destroy colonies

• The Necrophage Purge option will now only be displayed if you can take it, this is to avoid confusion when pops might be getting purged in your empire unintentionally, such as Hive Pops being disconnected from their hive.

• Evolutionary Predator Empires can now once more gain and keep the Psionic Ephase trait

• The Entrepreneur traits once again grant Commercial Pact Efficiency

• Serviles should no longer end up as Specialists or Elites

• Removed an errant plus from some of the mutagenic habitability tooltips

• Fixed the tooltips listing the effects for the Subsume World decision and Xeno-Compatibility AP

• Biologist jobs that aren't zookeepers now have the correct upkeep.

• Fixed an issue that could occur when machine empires colonised ringworlds.

• Fixed an issue where AI empires would respond with generic text when accepting a Status Quo peace deal, instead of dynamic responses.

• Corrected a localization issue where an AI empire accepting peace would incorrectly refer to the player as having "better things to do" instead of themselves.

• Secondary specializations for fortresses and civilian industries on special worlds correctly have doubled jobs.

• Transport ships for eager explorer civics now equip a subspace drive if you haven't researched hyperdrives. They will automatically swap once hyperdrives have been researched.

• Fix a tooltip in the Demographics tab of the Empire view

• Gestalt empires have access to fallen empire trade buildings

Balance

• Necrophage fixes/buffs:

  • Pops with the Necrophage trait can now grow (slowly) even if there are pops being Necrophaged on their planet.

  • Reduced the Pop Growth Speed penalty on the Necrophage trait from -75% to -50%.

  • Necrophages begin with more of their prepatent species (and fewer of their Necrophage species).

  • Necrophages (and other empires that have multiple species present) should no longer sometimes start with unemployment.

• The Resettlement Prohibited policy now grants +100% Automatic Migration. (In other words, banning manual resettlement increases automatic resettlement.)

• Empires with biological ships can now access repeatable technologies for explosive weapon damage and fire rate

• Machine Worlds now always have their maximum number of jobs.

• Resource Consolidation now starts with fewer Generator and Mining Districts, due to these districts providing 600 jobs each.

• Resource Consolidation no longer has the Malfunctioning Replicator Bay blocker

UI

• The Colonize planet button can now be accessed on the management tab as well as the surface tab

Modding

• Add refresh_auto_generated_ship_designs effect

If you want to see the list of all of the things we fixed in the previous releases, here they are.

We’re continuing to investigate the other issues that you have reported.

It’s time to review the last couple of months and look at what we’ve done and where we’re going from here.

Back in Stellaris Dev Diary #383, I committed to continuing to fix things until the 4.0 release is in the state it needs to be in. 

We’ve released a tremendous number of patches since then at a rapid rate - but our patch cadence has become problematic (and even counterproductive) in some ways. Too often in game development, fixing one bug introduces another - and I haven’t been giving our internal QA testers enough time to fully vet and test the changes we’ve been making. Examples from recent patches include a few weeks ago when an unrelated fix to a pop issue caused Wilderness empires to seemingly randomly destroy themselves by killing all of their biomass, or when another fix just after that caused save games to corrupt and become unloadable. 

We remain committed to continuing to fix things until the 4.0 release is in the state it needs to be in.

We need to change how we’re doing this though, taking a more measured and deliberate approach to allow internal testing to catch up while giving you a more stable environment to play the game in. This means that the patching frequency is going to slow down, but with more impactful releases. Our ongoing plan is to make greater use of Open Betas - the first instance of this is the Wilderness Open Beta that we put up last week (which may or may not ever go live based on your feedback).

We will be more careful in vetting changes and merging them into that ongoing Open Beta, continuing to focus on stability, performance, AI, and bugfixing. My intent is for us to update the Open Beta on a weekly to fortnightly basis depending on internal progress throughout the summer. While the Stellaris team will be continuing development during this time, it will soon become difficult for us to arrange for live patches - barring a critical hotfix or a “eureka moment”, I expect the next 4.0.x live release will be sometime in August. (Which as mentioned earlier, may not include the Wilderness changes.) To the Modders that have been waiting for a moment of stability, now’s your time - and if you run into issues updating your mods, please don’t hesitate to let us know.

For more transparency:

I’m personally currently looking at ways to improve the AI’s behavior. Other things currently in active development are OOS investigations, a number of strata issues that affect slavery, purging, and other oddities among pop employment, and more of a design change rather than a bugfix - based on your feedback we’re looking at having newly grown pops go straight into the Civilian stratum or its appropriate equivalent instead of being unemployed members of their parent pop group. While we liked the verisimilitude of top-heavy planets having more stability issues than ones that were more evenly developed, we acknowledge that having a persistent trickle of unemployed pops feels wrong.

We’re also continuously looking for performance improvements. We’ve found one so far where every empire was calculating their Biomass total far too often - even if they weren’t Wilderness, and while it was one of the heavier scripts in the early portion of the game, that’s not where our biggest problems are.

Some of these will likely go to the Open Beta next week, after more rigorous testing.

I will be putting the Stellaris Dev Diaries on hiatus until August, replacing them with the Open Beta updates on that weekly or fortnightly basis as they occur, and we’ll remain in constant communication with you as we continue to update and improve the game.

Please continue bringing up the issues you find, balance issues you encounter, and providing save games and out of sync logs whenever you can. They help a tremendous amount.

Thank you for playing Stellaris!

by PDX-Loke

Dear Stellaris Fans,

Our latest and greatest Stellaris patch has arrived, resolving a number of bugs as well as bringing further balance to the galaxy.

4.0.21 is now available for download. Please find the changelog below.

Improvement​

• Storm Aftermath events will no longer happen in systems where you are constructing megastructures. Meaning that it will no longer randomly spawn an anomaly under your dyson swarm that was 99% done.

• Save game transfer speed is now increased in multiplayer by default. If you encounter difficulties in transferring saves, the host can change to using the former transfer mode through settings.

Bugfix​

• Memorialists now give their priests the ethics modifiers their civic tooltip promises

• Armies that have landed on planets show properly in the outliner

• Reforming the government to Genesis Guides allows building Genesis Arks

• Ringworld districts now correctly spawn on pre-ftl ringworlds

• Fixed ringworlds colonized by gestalt empires having a mysterious city district that shouldn't exist.

• Fixed the leader survived notification text

• Fixed Fear of the Dark random empires being able to get bioships

• The Purity Breach event can no longer destroy colonies

• Fixed an error preventing refugees from behaving properly

• The Fatal Mutations event should no longer destroy colonies

• The Necrophage Purge option will now only be displayed if you can take it, this is to avoid confusion when pops might be getting purged in your empire unintentionally, such as Hive Pops being disconnected from their hive.

• Evolutionary Predator Empires can now once more gain and keep the Psionic Ephase trait

• The Entrepreneur traits once again grant Commercial Pact Efficiency

• Serviles should no longer end up as Specialists or Elites

• Removed an errant plus from some of the mutagenic habitability tooltips

• Fixed the tooltips listing the effects for the Subsume World decision and Xeno-Compatibility AP

• Biologist jobs that aren't zookeepers now have the correct upkeep.

• Fixed an issue that could occur when machine empires colonised ringworlds.

• Fixed an issue where AI empires would respond with generic text when accepting a Status Quo peace deal, instead of dynamic responses.

• Corrected a localization issue where an AI empire accepting peace would incorrectly refer to the player as having "better things to do" instead of themselves.

• Secondary specializations for fortresses and civilian industries on special worlds correctly have doubled jobs.

• Transport ships for eager explorer civics now equip a subspace drive if you haven't researched hyperdrives. They will automatically swap once hyperdrives have been researched.

• Fix a tooltip in the Demographics tab of the Empire view

• Gestalt empires have access to fallen empire trade buildings

Balance​

• Necrophage fixes/buffs:

  • Pops with the Necrophage trait can now grow (slowly) even if there are pops being Necrophaged on their planet.

  • Reduced the Pop Growth Speed penalty on the Necrophage trait from -75% to -50%.

  • Necrophages begin with more of their prepatent species (and fewer of their Necrophage species).

  • Necrophages (and other empires that have multiple species present) should no longer sometimes start with unemployment.

• The Resettlement Prohibited policy now grants +100% Automatic Migration. (In other words, banning manual resettlement increases automatic resettlement.)

• Empires with biological ships can now access repeatable technologies for explosive weapon damage and fire rate

• Machine Worlds now always have their maximum number of jobs.

• Resource Consolidation now starts with fewer Generator and Mining Districts, due to these districts providing 600 jobs each.

• Resource Consolidation no longer has the Malfunctioning Replicator Bay blocker

UI​

• The Colonize planet button can now be accessed on the management tab as well as the surface tab

• Add refresh_auto_generated_ship_designs effect