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Genre: Real Time Strategy (RTS), Simulator, Strategy

Stellaris

Announcing Steam RTS Fest!

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/

Stellaris Dev Diary #366 - Announcing Stellaris 4.0

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.

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 Moment of Prophecy?​


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.

Announcing Stellaris 4.0​


The Q2 Stellaris release, currently expected sometime around our Anniversary in May, will be the Stellaris 4.0 ‘Phoenix’ update.
It will be released alongside our major expansion for the year.​



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.

Performance Improvements​


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.

[TAG-40]
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.

New Player Guidance and Game Pacing


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.

Quality of Life Improvements​


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!

The Next Few Weeks​


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!

Feedback Requested: Factions and Politics


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!

Stellaris: Season 08 only 24 hours remaining!
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.

What is Stellaris: Season 08?



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)!

Feedback Requested: Espionage

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.

Feedback Requested: Pirates and Crime


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!

Feedback Requested: War and War Resolution

by MrFreake_PDX

Hello Stellaris Community!

With the devs off on holidays, and a rare four Thursdays in a row free, we decided we would commandeer your regularly scheduled Thursday dev diary slot to gather some feedback that may help inform development at some point in the future. Here on Stellaris, we work on rather long timelines, the content for 2025 has been in-development for some time already, and while we can't wait to share those things with you, our objective here is to inform potential future development based off the topics discussed in Stellaris Dev Diary #364 - Sights Unseen.

We are going to spend the next four weeks collecting feedback on what the Community likes and dislikes about the current version of Stellaris, and their expectations for certain features that were discussed.

While having an open conversation worked really well for Dev Diary #364, and we thank you for sharing your thoughts there, a more structured approach is required for something that might sit for a year or two before it gets used, if it gets used at all.

It's important to note that this is not a confirmation or guarantee that any topics discussed here will appear in the game at any point.



Warfare and War Resolution
At some point in the future, I’d like to see us revisit war and war resolution, and enable more of the scenarios that occur in the “Stellaris Cinematic Universe” of our trailers. When the Gamma Aliens attacked the UNE colony of Europa VII, the Commonwealth of Man did not wait patiently for an invitation to war before summoning the Apocalypse. Humanity was threatened, and they acted. More fluid rules around joining and leaving wars are needed, and betrayal is not supported to my satisfaction. (Secret Fealty exists, but I don’t find it enough in its current state - other mechanics currently prevent them from seizing the chance for freedom at what would be the most opportune moments.)



Without further ado, we present the War and War Resolution feedback form. This form will be available to leave feedback on until next Thursday, at which point we will read through the feedback, and prepare a report for the developers that outlines what the community likes/dislikes, and their expectations for a future rework or expansion.

Thank you for taking the time to offer your feedback, and thank you for playing Stellaris!

Stellaris Dev Diary #365 - 2024 in Review

by Eladrin

Happy holidays everyone!

As is tradition, in the last dev diary of the year I like to look over what we’ve done and insert sneaky leaks about next year.

I want for nothing. My purpose is to give.​


We began 2024 with a technology open beta that ran over the holidays, which was released as the 3.11 “Eridanus” Custodian update. Since we’re planning on having another Open Beta next year, I want to point out how successful that Open Beta was, finding critical issues related to the breakthrough technologies and giving us a much better release overall. I’m hoping that next year’s Open Beta will be equally effective.

We had some really cool cinematics too.

In March, we saw the light..


You too will see the light.​

And soon became part of something greater with the release of The Machine Age and Stellaris: Season 08.


Become part of something greater.​

The Machine Age began our remastering of the Ascension Paths, starting with Cybernetic and Synthetic Ascension. It significantly expanded Machine gameplay, and added Cosmogenesis, our technological victory condition.

It also added our first new End-Game Crisis in years, the Synthetic Queen Cetana.


My children, at last I am returned to you.​

In the latter half of the year, we had two releases back to back, starting with Cosmic Storms:


At first, they did not understand.​

Quickly followed by the Grand Archive Story Pack:


Good boy.​

This was also the first time we ever localized one of our story trailers into another language:


好孩子。​

We ended the year with our discussions about the vision of the game and its future, with what I feel were some of the best dev diary responses we’ve ever had.

All in all, it’s been a busy year, and I’m generally pretty happy with where we ended up.

2024 Release Notes​


Speaking of being a busy year, during 2024 Stellaris had 16 releases.

If you have ever had the desire to go through over 1200 lines of release notes, I’ve got you covered.

See You Next Year​


That’s the summary of this year in Stellaris. I hope you all have a wonderful holiday season and I look forward to seeing you all in the coming year.

Want to see a horrific very-in-progress placeholder?





Stellaris Dev Diaries will return on January 16th. Happy holidays!​



Purchase Stellaris: Grand Archive alone or with a discount as part of Stellaris: Season 08!
Stellaris: Season 08 will remain available as a dynamic bundle on Steam until January 9th.

Stellaris Dev Diary #364 - Sights Unseen

by Eladrin

Hello again, Stellaris Community!

Last week we looked back at where we’ve been, and today we’re going to look at possible themes I think we might explore in the future. Like the past few dev diaries, this is one where we’re actively soliciting your thoughts.

If you haven’t had a chance to add your bit of feedback to The Vision, you still have a couple of days left - it’s going to stay active until the end of November.

Today is the 3.14.1592 release day, so before we get to the main diary I’ll start with the final release notes.

3.14.1592 Release Notes​


The 3.14.1592 patch addressed the following issues - I’ve bolded new additions (all under Bugfixes) since last week’s diary:

Balance​

  • Add energy activation cost to Propagandosphere
  • Cloaking strength on Camouflage mutations are now consistent throughout sizes
  • Give -15% cloning cost and -10% fauna upkeep to Beastmasters civics
  • Reduce Space Fauna cloning cost by 10%
  • Reduce Space Fauna energy upkeep by 25%
  • Remove minor artifacts production from Decentralized Research edict
  • Rework Mutated Voidworms fleets content and scaling, aligning them similar to Prethoryn Brood Queen fleets

Bugfix​

  • Clone Soldier Ascendants can now cyberize
  • Fix to AI machine empires spawning as Despicable Neutrals without The Machine Age
  • Necrophages no longer create an endless series of replacement pops when purging on the Synaptic Lathe
  • Accelerate juveniles animation speed
  • Added Insider Trading and Trade Focus traits to each other's opposites block to stop them appearing together since they almost cancel each other out.
  • Added Orbital Ring variants for Beastport/Hatchery/Vivarium descriptions in all supported languages
  • Civics added in Grand Archive can now be swapped from the regular to corporate version and vice versa
  • Clarified the texts of the Cultivated Worldscaping decision and planet modifier
  • Deleting a design now keeps you in current designer type
  • Enclaves and Marauders satisfy Xenoist Contact Demand
  • Extreme Contortionist DNA now gives rare crystals instead of motes to be more consistent with the event that gives it
  • Fix an issue where Cognitive Node should be selected by the Leader Infected event
  • Fix blocked Tiyanki Graveyard event chain when capturing them
  • Fix Boarding Cables capturing literally anything - thanks for the fun screenshots
  • Fix Breeding Status displayed in view that was not always correct
  • Fix Fossilized Endoskeleton specimen localization
  • Fix Mercenary Enclave Stations unable to build ships
  • Fix Cloaked Patternwalker missing string
  • Fix scoped localizations for Memorial For Bubbles specimen
  • Fixed an unlocalized string showing up when you tried to return starbases at times. Also added linebreaks to the same tooltip.
  • Fixed recommended DLC tooltips in multiplayer
  • Fixes a bug with too wide portrait on Empire Design Selection View
  • FX for ship auras are now displayed
  • Improve Cordyceptic Drones fauna damage modifier text in tooltip to make it clearer what it exactly affects
  • Life Tree Protectors now don't move away from their system
  • Lost colony parents using Sol as their system will no longer spawn two Siriuses if the guaranteed habitable worlds slider is set to 1.
  • Mutated Voidworms fleets now don't use naval capacity
  • Mutated Voidworms now don't show they can upgrade anymore
  • Orbital Assembly Complex holding now correctly boost Beastport and Hatchery on Orbital Ring
  • Precursors can no longer be discovered on Astral Scars
  • Prevent duplicate specimens from being found in the same empire
  • Removed the unused h_dna string
  • Stop showing upkeep part of message when leader upkeep is zero in hire leader confirmation dialog
  • The Diplomacy Tradition Finisher now properly refers to Officials and not Envoys.
  • Voidworms now stop bombarding if the Immunity technology is researched (before crisis)
  • Worm-Riddled Gate is now correctly accessible if Voidworms are captured instead of killed

AI​

  • AI won't build infinite science ships when trying to build frigates anymore
  • Fix AI that was not willing to build Shipyards

Stability​

  • Fix a crash when a tooltip references the concept of a tradition that doesn't exist
  • Fix crash when Voidworms try to act on empty fleets
  • Fix OOS when riftworld station is built
  • Fix saves affected by the crash when an AI without a Grand Archive tries to capture a Space Fauna
  • Fix Voidworms CTD
  • Fixed issue with resolving the user home dir on linux that leads to CTD


Unless critical bugs in need of a hotfix arise, this will be the last planned Stellaris release of 2024. I want to avoid potentially destabilizing the game just before the winter holidays.

Now, on to the main dev diary.

Infinite Frontiers​


Over the past few weeks we’ve looked at the basic vision of Stellaris and discussed how Stellaris has changed over the years.

This week I want to talk about things we potentially might want to explore in the future.

This is not intended to read as a timeline or a list of promises, but an open discussion about things I consider possibilities and why.



Biological and Psionic Ascension
First things first, I strongly believe that remastering the remaining Ascension Paths is a top priority. The Machine Age dramatically improved Cybernetic and Synthetic Ascensions, and gave machine empires proper ascension choices, but left the others behind. Biological Ascension isn’t in a good state right now mechanically or as an overall experience. Psionic Ascension is better off as it is affected tangentially by most content releases, but is a bit too reliant on random events and luck. Both of these Ascension Paths will be revamped, though since they are very distinct from one another, I intend on having them focused on in two separate releases.

Warfare and War Resolution
At some point in the future, I’d like to see us revisit war and war resolution, and enable more of the scenarios that occur in the “Stellaris Cinematic Universe” of our trailers. When the Gamma Aliens attacked the UNE colony of Europa VII, the Commonwealth of Man did not wait patiently for an invitation to war before summoning the Apocalypse. Humanity was threatened, and they acted. More fluid rules around joining and leaving wars are needed, and betrayal is not supported to my satisfaction. (Secret Fealty exists, but I don’t find it enough in its current state - other mechanics currently prevent them from seizing the chance for freedom at what would be the most opportune moments.)

Biological Ships
While rearing and mutating space fauna was added to Stellaris in the Grand Archive story pack, I feel that it’s not the same fantasy as true bioships. These are vessels that your people grow and fly around in, or that have more symbiotic relationships with their pilots. I think those systems would probably pair nicely alongside Biological Ascension.

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.

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.

Playable Nomads
Finding different ways of playing the game can be popular - landless adventuring in Crusader Kings III, for example, makes me wonder what we could do with nomadic fleets in Stellaris. The key questions there end up being “why are they nomadic”, and “how do they interact with more standard empires”. Origins could also be opportunities to “table flip” the normal economic or political models of Stellaris.

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.

Species Packs
When it comes to species, I could see us examining what kinds of life could arise on molten or frozen worlds, much like we did with Toxoids. Like Toxoids, they’d likely need some restrictions on what they can do with those worlds (as they’re 10x more abundant than normal habitable worlds), but they’d be interesting to explore. Players often ask for gaseous or energy creatures - the first are already represented to an extent by the Dathnak and the latter by the Unbidden. I feel that energy beings may go too far into fantasy “elementals”, so I’d like to stay away from them if possible. Expanding the existing species phenotypes could also potentially be interesting - Plantoids II, for example.

Scenarios
“Scenarios” are another proposal that I’ve seen a number of times over the years - would it be interesting to have scripted game modes with custom rules, and events already in motion?

They could lean hard into already established universes with asymmetric starts. Perhaps the game starts off with communications from a Xenophile empire that tells you, Pre-FTL Earth:


Hacked together example. Not anything real.​

A system like this could allow for challenges or narratives that can be completed in a relatively short play session compared to a standard Stellaris campaign, or could otherwise completely change the pace or nature of the game. It could also be used to craft competitive experiences - at past PDXCons we’ve featured mods like Survival: Necroid Invasion or Ark of Ascension - I could see things like that fitting into the system.

Alternate game modes tend to be fairly binary though - they’re either not used very much, or they’re incredibly popular - not much in between. What kinds of things would you want to see in these sorts of game modes, if anything?

So What Did I Miss?​


This was a bit of a stream of consciousness dev diary, so I’m sure I’ve only scratched the surface of possibilities.

What do you think I missed? Are any of these especially attractive or repellent? Where do you want us to go?
​

Next Week​


Next week we’ll be reacting to your responses to this one.

The days are getting shorter and the snows are starting here in Stockholm, so I expect I’ll keep this one pinned for the next two weeks.

Changes to Stellaris: Season 08
Hello Stellaris Community!

We hope you’ve been enjoying the content from Stellaris: Season 08! We’re here to let you know that as of today, November 26th, Season 08 will transition from a Steam Package to a Dynamic Bundle.



What does this mean to me?



If you already own Season 08 then these changes won’t affect you or your content, and you can stop reading now and go back to loading pops into your Synaptic Lathe.

If you only purchased one or more DLCs from Stellaris: Season 08, and want to pick up the rest at a discounted price, changing to a Dynamic Bundle now allows you to do that without paying for content that you already own. If you bought them all individually, and are sad that you don’t get the Rick the Cube bonus portrait, you should also be able to claim it as part of the Season 08 Dynamic Bundle after this change.

Early in the New Year, this Dynamic Bundle will be retired and the content added to the Ultimate Bundle, to make way for Season 09. But first, we wanted to give those people who didn’t pick up the Season 08 Expansion Pass - and instead purchased only one or two of the DLCs - a chance to get the rest of the content at the same discount we offered the initial adopters.

We will update you again closer to the retirement date with an exact date.

What is Stellaris: Season 08?



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.

Read on to check out all the content included in this new Dynamic Bundle!
https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/39193



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

You can get all the content above, plus the bonus Rick the Cube portrait at a 20% discount, plus now you don’t pay for content you already own!

Thanks to the Stellaris Community for your support over the past year, we can’t wait to be able to show off what’s coming next year!

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/39193


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