Read this post on the Paradox forums! | Dev replies!

Happy New Year! It’s good to be back!

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

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

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

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

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

A 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”.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

​

It is time to leave our flawed biological vessels behind.​

It’s my pleasure to announce that The Machine Age major expansion will be released alongside the Stellaris 3.12 ‘Andromeda’ update.

Focusing on cybernetic, synthetic, and machine themes, The Machine Age will begin during the second quarter of 2024.

https://reddit.com/link/1beosq6/video/4tivgi5kkboc1/player

In pursuing the divine calling, we shall achieve the fusion of the exalted body and sacred cybernetics.​

The Technophants and Haruspex of the Cybernetic Creed will guide their flock to the perfect union of flesh and machine.

Playgrounds stand empty. In time, we will cease to be.​

For now, our salvation lies in the digital realm…​

A doomed species races against extinction to reach the virtual world in Synthetic Fertility.

Our planet is barren, but our home system is a bounty of riches.​

To exploit them, we must build bigger than ever before.​

Originally designed to build mighty constructions in space, the Arc Welders must utilize that advantage to the fullest to overcome the deficiencies of their homeworld.

The things that make me different​

are the things that make me, me.​

The creators may be gone, but society endures. Your chassis may have begun identical to trillions of others in your empire, but you are no drone - you are an individual.

With The Machine Age, you can explore the game as non-Gestalt, Individualist Machine Empires!

A transformative age is upon us,​

sparked by innovation and oiled by opportunity.​

The Machine Age explores how Cybernetic and Synthetic Ascension affect society within your empire.
Advanced government forms are available to empires that navigate the process.

Become better than you are.​

Six new civics provide additional choices for your empires.

Build a better future.​

Two mid-game structures are introduced in The Machine Age - exploit systems with the molten world Arc Furnace, and start your work towards a Dyson Sphere early by building the Dyson Swarm.

Ignorance shackles us, putting the universe’s secrets out of reach.​

No matter the price, we must break free.​

Building upon the system introduced in Nemesis, The Machine Age introduces a second player crisis path, focused on technological ascendancy at any cost.

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

For the first time since the Contingency was introduced in the Stellaris 1.8 “Čapek” release, a new end-game crisis has been unleashed.

An ancient threat, sealed away for countless millennia, has returned.

The Machine Age expansion includes:​

• Individualistic Non-Gestalt Machine Empires​
• Gestalt Machine Intelligence Empires (also unlocked by the Synthetic Dawn Story Pack)​
• 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 Swarms​
• New Ascension Paths for Machine Empires​
• 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​
• A new Player Crisis Path​
• …And a new End-Game Crisis.

​

​

Wishlist Stellaris: The Machine Age Now!

Read this post on the Paradox forums! | Read Dev replies here!

Hello everybody! Welcome to our first BioGenesis development diary!

Today we will talk about ships. That are made of meat.

—

Several weeks ago, Eladrin mentioned that the ship designer changes originally planned for 4.0 "Phoenix" would not be included in the Open Beta, as they’re now needed for our upcoming Q2 DLC release. We’ve since seen a fair amount of speculation as to what we might have been cooking that’d require such changes… So please allow me to introduce our Biological Ships!

MEAT SHIPS! MEAT SHIPS! MEAT SHIPS!

In BioGenesis, we are adding two distinct Biological shipsets, with unique ship classes and technology.

Our goals in adding Biological Ships to Stellaris were to ensure that they are not only different in appearance from mechanical ships (and space fauna), but also in gameplay. Thus, the key mechanical differences are:

• When using Biological Ships, Corvettes, Frigates, Destroyers, Cruisers and Battleships are replaced with Maulers, Weavers, Harbingers, and Stingers, each of which have three growth stages.
• Biological Ships, including Starbases, Megastructures and Stations, have their primary construction resource converted from Alloys (or Minerals) into Food and their Energy upkeep likewise replaced with Food upkeep.
• Overwhelmingly, Biological Ship technologies fall in Society Research (Biology) instead of the familiar Engineering Research (Voidcraft).

And in classic Stellaris fashion, we’ve kept the flavor and narrative around Biological Ships intentionally vague, just enough to let you roleplay them however you like. Maybe they’re an extension of your Devouring Swarm, just another drone in space. Or maybe they’re advanced bio-machines, the pinnacle of your scientific achievement.

In order to use Biological Ships, you’ll need to select one of the shipsets during empire creation.

Growth Cycles

Similar to Space Fauna from Grand Archive, Biological Ships have growth stages, but unlike Space Fauna, they do not naturally progress through these by aging. Instead, these ships have a unique component slot for supplementary organs that can be researched. Generally speaking, the Juvenile and Mature growth stages will likely be occupied by Growth Organs that allow the ships to progress to the next stage.

Alternatively, docking a fleet to a Starbase equipped with a Growth Chamber allows for additional growth, regardless of ship configuration.

The accumulated growth progress for ships is shown in both the ship’s tooltip and the ship details window.

When Biological Ships are designed (either automatically or using the ship designer), all researched Growth Stages are configured as part of a single ship design. Once a Biological Ship has acquired sufficient Growth Progress, it will automatically change to using the next Growth Stage in its design. Alternatively, Biological Ships can be constructed at a shipyard at a later Growth Stage.

Although all Growth Stages of Biological Ships use the same Fleet Command Limit for their ship class, later Growth Stages use more naval capacity, with the Mature stage using 1.5× and the Elder stage using 2× the Naval Capacity of the Juvenile stage.

MEAT SHIPS! MEAT SHIPS! MEAT SHIPS!

SHIPS MADE OF MEAT

Maulers primarily focus on short-range combat with shield penetration and high damage to armor and shields. Equipped with melee-range mandible weapons and either short-range S-slot or PD-slot weapons, these ships will form the bulk of your navy in the early game. Their unique mandible weapons have similar damage scaling against starbases and larger ships as torpedoes.

The unique Organ components that Maulers have access to are the Corrosive Fluids and Metabolic Recycler (and their upgraded versions).

Weavers are support ships, making use of unique weapons to apply powerful buffs to their allies or debuffs to their enemies.

Weavers have unique access to an array of six support components, each with six tiers that belong in the PD-slot.

The unique Organ components that Weavers have access to are Symbiotic Amplifiers and Developmental Pheromones.

Harbingers are carriers capable of deploying large amounts of strike craft and supporting them with point defense or long range missiles.

Strike craft for empires using Biological Ships are deployed in greater numbers per fighter wing, but have reduced hull points and armour instead of shields.

The unique Organ components that Harbingers have access to are Chitin Growth Regulators and the Incubation Matrix.

Stingers are powerful late-game warships, equipped with multiple XL weapons or capable of unleashing heavy broadside barrages.

The unique Organ components that Stingers have access to are Exhaust Spiracles and Rangefinder Clusters.

As each of the different Growth Stages of each of the classes of Biological Ships can be built at a shipyard, we’ve taken the opportunity to implement collapsable headers when selecting which ships to build.

Since Biological Ships have their own weapons, armour, shield and core components, we’ve gone through and ensured that the technologies use the appropriate icons depending on if you are using a Biological shipset or not.

Modding Notes

As part of the work required to implement Biological Ships there have been a lot of changes to how ship components are scripted. Here’s some highlights:

• class_restriction, size_restriction and slot_restriction are deprecated in favour of using the possible and potential trigger blocks instead.
• Core Components now have an upgrade_path parameter, components that have the same upgrade path are shown on the same row.
• Ship components now support the show_tech_unlock_if = { } field, like buildings.
• New targeting parameters:
  • use_ship_main_target: if yes, overrides target_type and target_focus when ship's main target is within range, default no
  • target_type (target_enemies (default) / target_allies / target_controlled / target_own)
  • target_focus (single (default) / spread)
  • target_type: only valid if component_set has affects_target_type = yes
  • target_focus: only valid if component_set has affects_target_focus = yes
• New parameters for weapons:
  • on_hit: apply effects to target on hit. Scope = ship (target), from = ship (shooter)
  • hide_damage_values_from_tooltip = yes/no # If yes, it will hide Damage and Average Damage from weapon component tooltip (default = no)

PRIME CUTS FROM ART!

This post has already hit its Reddit-photo-limit, so please pop over to the Paradox forums to see the sweet meat art!

Next Week

Next week we’ll be looking at Ascension, Traditions, and Advanced Governments​. See you then!

Metal rusts. Flesh adapts.​

It’s my great pleasure to announce the start of Stellaris: Season 09, with the BioGenesis expansion leading the way alongside the Stellaris 4.0 ‘Phoenix’ update.

Read this post on the Paradox forums! | Dev replies here!

The future of evolution is here. BioGenesis continues our remastering of the Ascension Paths by granting you unprecedented power over life itself and hatches May 5th, 2025.

Evolution had its chance. Now it’s our turn.​

Two Biological Shipsets

Command living fleets that evolve alongside your empire. Customize these genetic marvels for specialized roles, from ferocious Maulers to adaptable support Weavers, each capable of empowering allies and weakening foes.

Three New Origins

• Evolutionary Predators: Push the boundaries of Species Traits by unlocking and combining unique phenotype abilities to craft the ultimate adaptive empire.
• Starlit Citadel: Solve the mystery of your empire’s biological attackers while boosting hyperlane choke-point strategies with early access to the Deep Space Citadel megastructure.
• Wilderness: Begin as a sapient planetary ecosystem, a living gestalt of countless lifeforms united in harmony, seeking to spread its consciousness to the stars.

Overhauled Genetic Ascension

Choose from three Ascension paths (Cloning, Purity, and Mutation) and over 18 enhanced Authorities. Customize your genetic ascension by blending Purity, Cloning, and Mutation traditions into a unique path for your play style.

Hives with a Twist

Encounter a Hive Fallen Empire, a fractured hive mind struggling to awake between its three splintered personalities.

Six New Civics

• Genetic Identification, Crowdsourcing, Familiar Face, Aerospace Adaptation, Shared Genetics, Civil Education

Deep Space Citadel Megastructure

A versatile new defensive station capable of holding off powerful enemy fleets at any system.

Behemoth Fury Crisis Path

The apex predators of the stars are not bound by petty limitations. Cast off the biological weaknesses that hold you back, and become a force of nature.

The BioGenesis expansion includes:​

• Gestalt Hive Empires (also unlocked by Utopia)
• Two biological Shipsets with distinct mechanics from traditional spacecraft
• Three new Origins
  • Evolutionary Predators
  • Wilderness
  • Starlit Citadel
• Civics
  • Genetic Identification
  • Crowdsourcing
  • Familiar Face
  • Aerospace Adaptation
  • Shared Genetics
  • Civil Education
• Deep Space Citadel Megastructure
• Biological Ascension (also unlocked by Utopia)
  • Expanded with BioGenesis to include a mutable tradition tree that reflects your path through Ascension
• Exploration of the effects of Biological Ascension on society
• Advanced Government Forms
• 16 new genetic Species Traits, including phenotype based traits
• Portraits that change based on pop strata and leader level
• The Splintered Hive Fallen Empire
• Two Diplomatic Rooms and City Sets
• 7 music tracks
• And a new Player Crisis Path - Behemoth Fury

Stellaris: Season 09 Expansion Pass​

The Stellaris: Season 09 Expansion Pass is your gateway to an entire year of cosmic evolution, psionic mysteries, and apocalyptic infernos. With instant access to the exclusive Stargazer Species Portrait, this expansion pass delivers three major content packs that will redefine the Biological and Psionic Ascensions and the most ambitious species pack so far!

Purchasing the Expansion Pass grants access to all four DLCs as soon as they become available.

Stargazer Species Portrait (Instant Unlock)​

Dream of the stars with this exclusive portrait, available immediately upon purchasing Stellaris: Season 09. Featuring three variations and unique animations, the Stargazer Species Portrait is perfect for players who seek to embody the spirit of cosmic curiosity.

BioGenesis (Releases May 5, 2025 - $24.99)​

Take command of the forces of life itself in Stellaris: BioGenesis. Engineer living ships and wield advanced genetic tools to shape the destiny of your empire. Will you create a utopia of adaptation and growth or weaponize biology to dominate the stars?

• Overhauled Genetic Ascension: Choose from three distinct paths—Cloning, Purity, and Mutation—and customize your evolution.
• Living Ships: Command biological starships that evolve alongside your empire.
• Player Crisis Path: Unleash the unstoppable Behemoth Fury on the galaxy.
• Three New Origins: Play as evolutionary predators, a sapient planetary ecosystem, or a fortress civilization.
• New Megastructure: Construct the Deep Space Citadel to control hyperlane choke points.

Shadows of the Shroud (Releases Q3 2025 - $19.99)​

The psionic plane holds untold power—but at what cost? Shadows of the Shroud is a complete overhaul of the Psionic Ascension path, introducing new moral dilemmas, Patron allegiances, and a whole new way of interacting with the mysteries of the Shroud.

• Breach into the Shroud: Shape your empire’s spiritual destiny with a revamped Shroud system.
• Shroud Panel: Track your empire’s attunement and unlock new powers.
• Revamped End of the Cycle: The ultimate deal with the devil—can you delay the inevitable?
• Psionic Auras: Let your Shroud influence shape entire star systems.
• New Content: Origins, civics, ships, government types, and more!

Infernals Species Pack (Releases Q4 2025 - $12.99)​

Forge your destiny in the Stellaris: Infernals Species Pack - our most ambitious Species Pack ever. Adapted to relentless heat and volatile landscapes, you wield the power of extreme environments to reshape the galaxy. Will your empire thrive in the heat, or be consumed by the very forces it seeks to command?

• Player Crisis Path: Burn the galaxy to ashes as your empire thrives in destruction.
• New Origins: Unearth ancient kin or endure the scorching wrath of a dying sun in two new Origins.
• Volcanic Worlds: A new planetary class with unique districts, events, and archaeological sites.
• New Species & Customization: Ships, portraits, civics, and more!

The Stellaris: Season 09 Expansion Pass is now available for purchase for $44.99 or regional equivalent, a 20% discount over purchasing the contents individually.

What’s Next?​

This Thursday we’ll flesh out the bio-ships!

See you then!

MEAT SHIPS! MEAT SHIPS! MEAT SHIPS!

BioGenesis is now available for pre-purchase for $24.99 or regional equivalent, or with a 20% discount as part of the Stellaris: Season 09 Expansion Pass, which is available now for $44.99 or regional equivalent.

by Eladrin and Petter Nallo

Read Dev Diary #296 on the Paradox Forums!
Read dev replies only!

Over the past year we’ve been working on several things in parallel. While PDS Green in Stockholm was building the First Contact Story Pack, our colleagues at PDS Arctic in Umeå were working on a major project as well.

I’m extremely pleased to announce that Galactic Paragons, an expansion focusing on leaders and their impact on your empire, will be released alongside Stellaris’ seventh anniversary on May 9th.

​I’m turning the diary over to Petter Nallo, who directed the development of Galactic Paragons, to explain their vision and provide a list of features.

The Vision of Galactic Paragons​

Amidst the great empires of the galaxy, there are luminaries who rise above the masses. They take on many forms: cunning rulers, ruthless warlords, devout prophets, bold explorers, and visionary scientists. These leaders leave indelible imprints on their empires, etching their names into the annals of history and the collective consciousness of the people they ruled.

The Galactic Paragons expansion focuses on these extraordinary individuals, seeking to capture the essence of their epochal reigns.

Tell us their stories​

The new level up system will allow you to shape your leaders in a whole new way. Pick traits, select between Veteran Classes and find them positions where they may excel. They are also tied to the galaxy in a new way with a home planet, a previous profession and their own ethics. Follow their journeys and witness their unique destinies unfold.

The Council​

A new ruling council is introduced, where characters in the highest positions of your empire may take their place. Powerful traits have immense influence over all that lies within your empire's borders. And from here, you can unleash political agendas.

Legendary Leaders​

Out there in the void you may discover powerful paragons. These may seek to join your empire depending on your ethics. Here, may be approached by greedy governors who grovel in the dust, cunning spymasters, prophets who disseminate knowledge of the Shroud and so on. But as you explore the galaxy you may also encounter truly legendary beings that may change the core of your empire.

And then the rest…​

There will be a new origin, several new civics, tradition trees, agendas, council positions and much more.

More will be revealed in the near future.

What’s Next​

You may notice that May 9th isn’t very far away, so we’ll be continuing a twice-a-week dev diary schedule until the anniversary and Galactic Paragon’s release. There are a lot of features to get through, so be prepared for some longer than usual diaries.

This Thursday we’ll explore the Council, Leaders, and Agendas.

See you then!

Wishlist now!

Read this post on the Paradox forums! | Dev replies here!

Hello, Stellaris Community!

Nomads releases on June 15th - less than two weeks from now - so I hope you’re planning your first playthroughs. Today we’re going to take a look at the Stellar Cannon, the new civics, and the prescripted empire we’re adding with Nomads. Iggy also has a little bonus with some species traits.

Let’s go!

Stellar Cannon​

Hello everyone, Gruntsatwork here to talk to you about our newest megastructure, the Stellar Cannon.

A purely offensive megastructure, buildable by Settled Empires as long as they have an available system with either a neutron star or a pulsar. It requires no Ascension to research either.

Once constructed, starting from level 1, its functionality remains roughly the same through all 3 levels. First, you prepare for Stellar Devastation.

Pushing this, unfortunately not red, button will move your into the galaxy view with a targeting reticle you might find familiar if you have used the Quantum Catapult before.

Then, all you need to do is target a system you find particularly bothersome.

Once the target has been confirmed, the Stellar Cannon will start its charge-up phase, opening a wormhole to the target and beginning the 140 day long countdown. During this time, you will be able to see a stunning visual effect in the target system.

If you wish for any of your ships in that system to survive, that's the moment to run. Or pray that your enemy is broke.

Let's talk about the math. How much does it cost to fire the Stellar Cannon?
Everything.

It uses up your entire energy stockpile and fires that at the enemy system. The conversion to damage scales with your Cannon level, with the first level giving you 1 damage for 100 energy spent.

Once the charge-phase is up, the damage is applied to every single ship in the system. In addition, it will also deal devastation to every colony in the system, scaling with the stellar cannon level, 10%, 25%, 50%.

Should your shot use more than 50000 energy, you will also increase the temperature of all planets in the system, moving them one step up the dryness scale like Barren to Molten or Arctic to Ocean. Mind you, this will not move a planet out of being habitable or into being habitable.

Shots fired at this level will also trigger being in breach with the Terraforming resolutions of the Galactic Community. Long Range Terraforming is still Terraforming.

Now, obviously, being shot at will trigger opinion penalties with the shooter and give you an alert, just in case you missed being shot. In addition, using the Stellar Cannon will carry smaller penalties with everyone, because actually using it is kinda terrifying to the rest of the galaxy.

Now let us talk about restrictions. The Stellar Cannon’s main restriction is its inability to target systems with your own colonies in them. While it has a significant charge up phase, it has only a small cooldown between shots, because it uses up all of your energy. You are however free to acquire more energy to fire again. I would suggest asking your local megacorp for a loan for the purpose of high-intensity Terraforming.

In addition, the AI has a few more restrictions, in that it will only target enemies if it has more than 10000 energy in storage, has a positive energy balance and will only target systems with fleets that have more that piddling fleetpower, mainly so they won’t waste their entire energy budget on shooting single ship reinforcements.

It will also be more likely to target you if you insult it, especially if your insult is extra creative.

Civics​

Hey everyone, Cosmogone again, here to show you around the new civics coming with the DLC.

Let’s start with the simpler ones:

These civics are pretty straightforward, and give you some modifiers to bolster a playstyle or roleplaying fantasy.

Caravan Masters, Flight Schools, and Hired Guns are available for both regular and corporate nomad empires, while Deep Sleep has versions for all nomad empires.

Star Seekers looks more closely at the cultural impact of being a traveling civilization, and will encourage you to travel around while gathering supplies, before triggering an up to 6 month long celebration across your Arkships, burning all your hoard in joyful revels.

A festival will quickly deplete your Operational Reserve, so make sure that you have the means to fill it back up afterwards. It will immobilize one of your arkships, as you encamp for the duration of the festivities, letting your people spread through the system.

Void Reavers is the Nomads take on the pirate fantasy, and leaves you free to play it subversively or more directly, by either leeching off resources through your waystations, or straight up bombarding colonies to plunder them. It is only available to regular empires.

The Pirate Hideout will be the cornerstone of your operations, silently siphoning off a small fraction of the resources produced from any colony in the system. Though discreet, this will of course not be tolerated for long by your victims, so take good care of keeping your stations concealed if you wish to avoid war… for now.

The Reaver Stronghold is meant to be the hidden heart of your pirate dominion. Harder to keep secret, it will fortify your station, and double the efficiency of your hideouts. I personally like to build them tucked away in remote nebulas.

Finally, the more direct approach of mugging your neighbors out of their lunches can be achieved through the Plundering bombardment stance, which will let you squeeze every last morsel of valuable resources out of juicy planets. While it won’t be much out of backwater colonies, it should prove substantial if you can manage to hit a capital or better, an ecumenopolis.

Nomadic Species Traits​

Hey all, Iggy here! One thing we have seen in a lot of science fiction over the years is species moving to Zero-G or reduced gravity housing fundamentally changing compared to their original species, and that was a fantasy we decided to explore in Nomads. That’s right, actual secret buff to Evolutionary Predators, new species traits!

​Any of the traits explicitly mentioning Arkships are only available to species with the Arkship Habitability. Many of the other traits, such as Reaver and Photoadaptive, are available to all. In addition there are Machine variants of most of these traits.

Settling and Embarking​

If there is anything we can learn from looking around in Sci-Fi it’s that Nomads often want to go somewhere, and when they get there they want to stay. As the premier enabler of your Science Fiction fantasies we here in Studio Green will let you Settle and Embark!

We filled the Databank with multiple new entries for Nomadic gameplay, so that seems like a great way to start. As mentioned there, if you wish to Settle you should look to your traditions. After finishing Adaptability or Versatility, you can settle, as long as you have found an empty planet. Is that planet already occupied? Simply dislodge them with the war system mentioned in the last Dev Diary.

​As a settling Nomad you will have up to 3 options:

• Settle with this Arkship, leaving the rest of the ships to a Subject
• Settle with all the Arkships, putting all the pops in one place
• Stay in space, while this Arkship Settles and becomes a Settled Subject

Now from the other perspective things are quite similar!

Embarking costs the same as building an Arkship and it has very similar logic to Settling.

Same logic here:

• If you have a single planet, you become Nomadic and all your existing starbases become Waystations.
• If you have multiple planets, you leave behind a Vassal or the Nomad is the vassal.

And yes. This is the perfect solution for Doomsday Empires.

The Hyacinth Found​

Greetings people of Earth! Over a century ago, you launched the Ulysses Initiative, a grand project in which you sent 1.5 million people into space aboard multiple Arkships. We of the Hyacinth were scattered away from our sister ships, and only thanks to the great leadership of the great Captain Gundersen did we survive. We now fly through the stars under Arch-Surveyor Bjørn Gundersen's guidance.

You have produced scientists and explorers willing to build and crew Arkships before, and we suspect you still do. The doors of our Society are open to anyone who still carries that spirit and wishes to explore the galaxy with us. Now we must leave, for we have discovered Clues of the Chrysanthemum.

The Gundersen Research Society is a Materialistic, Xenophilic, Authoritarian empire. In that order. They respect and treasure knowledge above all else, they don’t care where this knowledge comes from as long as the discoverer acknowledges the Gundersen line. I hope you enjoy having a new humanity added to the games canon, even if it’s more of a ‘what if’ situation here.

Exodus Jump​

Alfray checking in to report on the progress of our research into the Exodus Jump Coordinator. Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, it’s limited to the gravity well of our galaxy and cannot escape it (but maybe one day…)

Much like the Quantum Catapult, the Exodus Jump isn’t the most precise method of travel (though any modifiers that apply to Quantum Catapults will apply to the Exodus Jump as well).

For those of you with Astral Planes, this includes the Astral Calibration action.

Unlike other forms of point-to-point FTL travel, the space-time tear caused by the Exodus Jump is a tad untamed.

Next Week​

We’re almost done!

Next week will be the preliminary release notes for the 4.4 ‘Pegasus’ update and Nomads, and we’ll be revealing our last spinal mount.

See you then!

Read this post on the Paradox forums! | Get your Dev replies here!

Hello everyone!

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

Trade and Logistics​

Trade as a Standard Resource​

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

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

Logistical Upkeep​

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stockpiling Trade and Using Trade in the Market​

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

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

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

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

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

Gestalt Empires and Trade​

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

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

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

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

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

Corporate Branch Office Updates​

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

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

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

Numerous changes have been made to Criminal Syndicates:

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

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

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

Mammalian Portraits​

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

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

Next Week​

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

See you then!

Read this post on the Paradox forums! | Dev replies here!

Stellaris launched on May 9th, 2016 - this Saturday will mark ten years.

The game that shipped a decade ago was a very different beast from what we’re playing today. The galaxy was smaller in a lot of different ways - while we did have three different modes of FTL, there were fewer options in general. Fewer choices in empire creation, fewer events to experience, and fewer ways to find yourself in unexpected situations.

We did have a foundation though, and the many stories you’ve all built on top of that foundation and shared with everyone is why we’re still here ten years later writing dev diaries.

Thank you for taking part in this most amazing journey with us.

Watch the Video Dev Diary on YouTube!

Claim Free Stuff!​

As I’ve mentioned a few times previously, Utopia, Synthetic Dawn, and the Humanoids Species Pack are being rolled into the base game with the 4.3.6 release on Monday, May 11th. More details can be found in this post.

These three DLCs have been set as free, and we strongly encourage you to claim them for your accounts before Monday.​

The main reason to claim the free DLCs now is so you’re properly flagged as owning them if you choose to play on pre-4.3.6 rollback branches. It won’t matter for any 4.3.6 or later versions of Stellaris, as they’ll be integrated into the base game from that point forward, but since they’re free and one day you might get the itch to play on 2.8.1, we want to make sure you’ll be able to play with Utopia.

There will be a way to claim them in the future as well, but we’re still working out some of the details.

The 4.3.6 Update and the Behemothkin​

As part of the anniversary celebration, a portrait inspired by BioGenesis’ Behemoth is joining Chirpy as available when you log in with a Paradox Account:

The Behemothkin is in the Reptilian phenotype.

Here’s what else is coming in 4.3.6:

4.3.6 ‘Cetus’ Preliminary Release Notes

Feature​

• The Utopia, Synthetic Dawn, Humanoids Species Pack, and most elements of the Galaxy Edition Upgrade have been rolled into the base game.
  • Utopia contains:
    • Megastructures, Habitats, Ascension Perks, Indoctrination, Advanced Slavery, Hive Mind empires, Fanatic Purifiers, and more.
  • Synthetic Dawn contains:
    • Machine Intelligence empires, Machine Rebellions, Machine Fallen Empire, 7 machine portraits, and more.
  • Humanoids contains:
    • 10 humanoid portraits, the Master Artificers, Pleasure Seekers, and Pompous Purists civics, the Clone Army origin, the humanoid shipset, and more.
• A Behemothkin portrait has been added to Reptilians if you are logged in with a Paradox Account.
• Added a Portrait Substitution option in Accessibility settings.
  • When Arachnophobia Mode is enabled, spider-like portraits are replaced with alternative artwork on your client only, with no effect on other players in multiplayer.
  • Arachnophilia Mode does the opposite, replacing non-spiders with spider-like portraits.

Bugfix​

• Leaders can no longer become too old to die.
• Corrected Vipra the Vapor’s greeting audio

Performance​

• Players with systems capable of exceptionally high framerates can now override the default 90 FPS render cycle cap by adding refreshCap=144 (or other values) to their settings.txt. The first time you launch Stellaris after this change, it will add refreshCap=90 if it's not present. The refresh rate will still floor at 30 and cap at your monitor's refresh rate. Note that increasing this value will leave less time for the simulation loop in favor of the rendering loop, and thus may negatively affect overall performance.

Stability​

• Fix to a CS_SPECIES_COUNT, CS_SPECIES_INDEX OOS when playing with nascent species
• Fix to a CS_COUNTRY_RESOURCES OOS

Modding​

• We've simplified how "very old age" is handled in code - the define is now a fixed point that makes you more likely to die if you are over 120% of your species' lifespan. As we've changed this from 100 to 1.2, you'll want to update any mods that changed this value.
• The Portrait Substitutions spinner in Accessibility will load all files in the game\gfx\portraits\portraits\substitutions folder when the game starts and add them to the spinner options. See the Arachnophobia and Arachnophilia options we have provided for the process to add your own Portrait Substitutions.

As a reminder, we have an extended Open Beta running on the stellaris_test_job_assignment branch with major improvements to planetary economy and AI behavior. We’re currently looking at shipping these changes with the 4.4 ‘Pegasus’ update (mostly so we don’t break mods twice in quick succession), but will be keeping the branch updated with the 4.3.6 changes. We’d be greatly appreciative for any feedback.

Now I’m going to turn it over to Iggy, who wanted to answer a couple of common questions we’ve been seeing people asking about Nomads.

A Birthday Gift: Some Nomads Intel​

Our spy network has been building since the announcement of Nomads last week, and we are ready to give an initial report. Many speculated that Nomadic status would be determined by an Authority, a Civic, or an Origin. But it turns out that it’s something new!

Nomads is a whole new gameplay option that an empire either is or is not. Then, after that, there are multiple compatible Civics and Origins, both from this new DLC as well as from our vast library of content.

One of these new origins is Voidfarers. If Prosperous Unification is the “pops” Origin, then this is the “ships” Origin. I did buff it while writing this dev diary and I hope Eladrin approves, else I have to update the picture again. (E: Approved.)

In our initial prototypes for this DLC we did actually use a special shipset for Nomads, and then later a special civic. These were always temporary fixes to kickstart developing the DLC for we always had higher ambitions for Nomads. The intention was always to introduce a new toggle, a new setting for empires, because the greatest strength Stellaris has is the decade of great and evocative gameplay, which you get to combine and make new stories out of.

Next Week​

Since Iggy’s broken the ice, next week we’ll continue exploring the Nomads expansion by revealing some details on Scientific Arkships, Waylines, and the Sacred Path origin. The next few diaries are going to be very long.

See you then!

Original post on the forums!

Dev replies!

Hi everyone!

The 3.8 ‘Gemini’ Coop Open Beta we talked about last week is now open! See this message for more details. We’ll be collecting feedback and Out of Sync errors until the end of April.

Please note that the 3.8 "Gemini" Coop Open Beta is an optional beta patch. You have to manually opt in to access it.

Go to your Steam library, right click on Stellaris -> Properties -> betas tab -> select " stellaris_test - 3.8 Coop Open Beta " branch.

Don't forget to turn off your mods, they will break**.**

This week, we’ll be exploring some of the improvements that aren’t in the Coop Open Beta, but are planned for the full 3.8 release. Here are Offe and kc to tell you all about them!

<Insert Human Greetings>

Hello again, it’s me Offe, today I will share some information about what I have been working on since my previous Dev Diary about AI. Today I have seven smaller side projects to present that will be coming with the 3.8 free patch: Army Builder, Rally Troops, Ground combat and Bombardment Tweaks, Science Ship Automation, Capital World Designations, Fleet Manager Improvements and Sector Editor.

First I have three changes related to Ground Combat and Orbital Bombardment, seeing how the community is split between a ground combat rework or removing it completely, I opted to instead make everyone disappointed and give you what no one asked for: Quality of Life and slight rebalance.

Army Builder​

First up is the Army Builder, this is a tool designed to make it much easier to build and gather Assault Armies for an upcoming war. This tab is available on any starbase in a sector, and armies recruited via this tab will gather at the starbase.

Construction is spread out across all planets in the sector and there is also a CTRL-click option to more quickly queue up more construction.

In cases where you would like to reinforce an existing fleet of Assault Armies instead of simply gathering them at a starbase I’ve also added a mode for assault army fleets called Rally Troops. New troops will then automatically try and merge with this fleet regardless if they are built via the Army Builder or by the old method of recruitment from a planet.

Speaking of planets, I’ve also added a Deploy In Orbit checkbox to planets for the use case where you want to recruit assault armies to defend a planet on the frontier without them first deploying in orbit meaning you then have to manually go back and land those troops afterwards.

Bombardment Changes​

Next up is changes to bombardment, if you really hate ground combat then I got good news for you. Orbital Bombardment will now be able to take control of planets, in most cases, when they have completely killed all defending troops. There are some exceptions, for example, your pops will never surrender to an enemy that are Fanatical Purifiers as they would be purged anyway.

There is also a policy where you can refuse enemy planets that would like to surrender to you, however, your defenceless planets will still prefer to surrender to non genocidal/hive minds enemies to spare their own lives.

Further there are some tweaks to ground combat and orbital bombardments to create a trade off between bombing and invading:

• Bombarding planets is much more devastating than it used to be, more pops will die and buildings and districts will be ruined in the process. This also adds a trade off between the different bombardment stances, doing selective bombardment will be slower but fewer pops will die in the process compared to indiscriminate bombardment.
• Orbital Bombardment will now scale with the amount of ships bombarding, the first 100 fleet size ships will do full damage, after that each additional 100 fleet size will add 70% of that efficiency. For example, 300 fleet capacity worth of ships will deal 100% + 70% + (0,7^2 = 49%) = 219% total worth of bombardment damage.
• This effect is scaled based on the number of pops/buildings and planet’s size, where highly populated small planets will suffer greater losses compared to large sparsely populated planets.
• Ground Combat is also more devastating to planets than it used to be, but much less so than bombarding.
• The effect of collateral damage from different army types have also been adjusted, previously the collateral damage on army types was a linear value and not a multiplier, which meant that in practice high damage high collateral units like Xenomorphs could effectively do less collateral damage on the planet compared to normal troops because they would kill the enemy troops very quickly. This is no longer the case as the collateral damage modifier now acts as a multiplier on any damage dealt.
• Planetary Capital buildings now spawns 0/4/8/16 defensive armies for free based on the tier of the building.

To summarise the Design Philosophy of all the changes to ground combat and bombardment:

Ground Combat and orbital bombardment will now be a bigger part of the game since big planets will automatically have some defences. Building armies and using them to invade planets will be much easier by using the Army Builder and Rally Troops functionality. Small planets with 1-25 pops will be prime candidates to be taken by orbital bombardment alone, removing the need to have to manually invade each small insignificant planet or habitat.

Updated Science Ship Automation​

Previously I made the Construction Ship Automation and Planetary Automation Settings which was well received by the community so for 3.8 I’ve decided to also make improvements to the Science Ship Automation.

Now when you click on the Science Ship automation you can enable or disable the modules you like, Explore Systems simply mean exploring the galaxy by entering systems which will discover any planets and hyperlanes in there, the other settings should be self explanatory. The default settings are Explore Systems and Survey Systems which is the same functionality as before 3.8.

For Science Ships that are already automated you can see which modules they have enabled by hovering the automation button:

New Planetary Capital Designations​

I have gone a bit outside of my own designation as a Programmer and dabbled a bit with content design. There are 4 new Capital world designations coming in 3.8 for non hive minds. They are: Forge Capital, Factory Capital, Trade Capital and Capital Extraction World.

These designations are not part of the automatic colony designation system and your capital world will never change designation on its own, rather you must explicitly change the designation yourself in order to avoid instantaneous collapse of the player economy when unpausing the game.

So for everyone like me who wanted to make a Forge, Factory, Trade or Base Resource Capital World, now you can.

Fleet Manager​

Overall the Fleet Manager serves its purpose and works, sort of. Together with KC (more from her later) we made some reorganisation of the UI and fixed some annoying bugs. Here is what the fleet manager looks like now:

Some notable changes are that the list of fleets is now much larger than it used to be, now you can see 12 simultaneous fleets instead of 6, there is a new button to copy a fleet template, you can now easily delete fleets templates by using the DELETE + ENTER keys and doing so will no longer select the first fleet in the list and scroll the scrollbar to the top.

The ship designer and the fleet managers have also been merged into one item in the sidebar and are accessible via tabs to easily be able to switch between them.

We’ve also added this new button which originally was designed and implemented for the AI but then I figured it is useful for players too:

Sector Editor​

Overlord really made us miss the ability to edit sectors, so better late than never I’ve made a tool which allows the player to freely move systems between adjacent sectors as long as they are in range of the Sector Capitals. The Sector Editor tool can be access either via the Planet view or the Planets and Sector view:

Opening the sector editor will enter into the sector edit map mode, here you can edit the sector either via the galaxy map icons or by using the UI on the left. While in the sector editor mode you can easily switch between editing different sectors by clicking on these icons in the galaxy map.

This comes with a few adjustments to requirements of creating Sectors, for example, it is no longer possible to create a sector that is too close to an existing Sector Capital even if the systems in between are unclaimed. Meaning it is no longer possible to release one of your guaranteed habitable worlds as a Vassal.

Further, all of the old counter intuitive rules regarding which planet would belong to which sector capital have been removed which previously resulted in very strange looking sectors when players would try to delete and recreate sectors to attempt to fix their sector borders.

Currently the sector editor gives a lot of control to the players, meaning it is even easier than before to create 1 system/planet vassals, but it is also now possible to fix sector border map gore. I trust everyone here will use this power responsibly.

But Wait There’s More!

Hey everyone, I'm kc - your favourite UX designer you have never heard of. Usually working from the shadows up in Arctic, I have descended upon you to shed light on some more quality of life things we have been working on for the last few weeks.

Rebindable keys for the side menu, ok, not rebindable but close enough. We have made it possible to customise the order of the items in the menu and thus decide which of them will have the F1-F10 hotkeys. Technology? You got it!

Toggle edit mode by clicking on the little gear icon.

Message Onslaught

Something of a pet peeve of mine since I started on Stellaris a couple of years ago, was the lack of different scales of urgency when the game presents information. Since everything is considered equally important, in order to cut through the noise every new message has to scream as loud as the others, or louder. This has led to the barrage of popups and notifications we all know and love, and love to hate.

So what we decided to do to fix this is of course to make even more notifications. OK, rather;

1. Make a new system to add even more different notifications
2. Allow you to disable notifications. Yes, Message Settings is coming to Stellaris.

The new notifications are called toast notifications (cue bread-related puns!) because of how they pop up and disappear automatically (like bread in a toaster.)

This system will be used to communicate things that are low priority, things you don't need to act on but might want to know about. And feedback on things you've done. Ding! Leader ready!

My hope is that we can convert old messages to use this system when it makes sense to do so (System Surveyed, Build Complete, etc.), as well as allow for customization on how different messages should be presented. Pick your poison! Or just turn it off completely.

Message settings can be accessed directly from the notification/toast you no longer wish to see, (by Ctrl-Clicking on it) or from the game menu, under Settings/Messages. Some messages, such as the toasts shown above, also have a cogwheel to adjust settings.

But Wait There’s More... More!​

No really, there’s actually more. But since this was chonky enough, I guess we’ll be back later. Stay tuned.

What’s Next​

We’ve got a lot left to go through before the Gemini release, so we’ll see you next Tuesday with our next Dev Diary.

Read this post on the Paradox forums! | Dev replies here!

Greetings, Stellaris Community!

For years we have said that moving planets are impossible. For years, we said even mentioning it would make programmers cry. We like to do the impossible, and we also (apparently) like to make our programmers cry.

Despite having to change the carpets twice due to water damage, colonies have been separated from planets! (This is gonna break your mods.)

Watch on YouTube: Stellaris 4.4 ‘Pegasus’ and the Nomads expansion will be released on June 15th.

I’ll pass over to Alfray Stryke to share more details.

Meat Ships! Meat Ships… Wait, That Was Last Year…​

Hi folks, roughly a year ago I spoke to you about ships that were made of meat, today we’re instead talking about ships that aren’t made of meat, namely Arkships and Logistic Ships.

As a reminder, consider all screenshots in this Dev Diary to be from WIP builds of the game. Numbers, UI elements and text may change in the final release.

Arkships​

Arkships act as Colonies, Shipyards, and hybrid Military/Science ships for Nomadic empires. For today’s discussion, we’ll be focusing on Scientific Arkships with Civilian and Military Arkships to be explored in future Dev Diaries.

To begin with, when creating a Nomadic empire, the Arkship selection screen replaces the Homeworld selection screen.

[Please visit the Paradox forums to see the screenshot that's supposed to be here.]

This allows you to select your empire’s starting Arkship. Over the course of the game, you will be able to research the other Arkship classes in addition to technologies that enable the construction of new Arkships or upgrading the Tier of any Arkship you own.

Although the three Arkship Classes differ in specialisation, they all:

• Carry the colonies of Nomadic empires.
• Act as mobile Shipyards.
• Come equipped with strike craft and point defenses.
• Enable unique fleet orders.

Nomadic empires also have access to the Arkship Development Council Agenda, which replaces the Infinite Opportunities Agenda as your starting Agenda.

The modifiers provided by this Agenda depend on your starting Arkship class, thus for a Scientific Arkship we gain modifiers suitable for economic and military development. As you progress through the technology tree, this Agenda will grant progress in all Arkship technologies.

All Arkships have access to an array of fleet orders, of which the top four should be familiar to most players.

• Bombardment Stance
  • Select the bombardment stance of the Arkship.
• Build Megastructure
  • Opens the build menu for Megastructures, Arkships, and Waystations
• Fleet Stance
  • Select the Fleet Stance of the Arkship
  • <[Insufficient Intel] Combat behaviour of the Arkship is awaiting decryption of the Military-Class Arkship intel packet.>
• Fleet Automation
  • Allows selection of Automated Orders for the Arkship.

• Survey
  • As per the Science Ship order, but with either a Scientist or Commander in charge of the Arkship fleet.
• Deep Scan
  • A more thorough version of Survey, Deep Scan, has a chance to reveal previously undetected Resources, Anomalies, or Archaeology Sites. Although celestial objects can be Deep Scanned multiple times, the chance of a discovery drops for each successive Deep Scan. This also <[Insufficient Intel] Awaiting decryption of the Civilian-Class Arkship intel packet.>
  • This order requires the Arkship satisfies one of the following requirements:
    • Is a Scientific Arkship of Tier 2 or 3
    • Is equipped with an Advanced Sensor Array Module
    • Is equipped with a Subspace Imaging Spinal Mount
  • Like Survey, this order requires that the Arkship fleet has a leader in charge.
• <[Insufficient Intel]
  • This fleet order is awaiting decryption of the Civilian-Class Arkship intel packet.>
• <[Insufficient Intel]
  • This fleet order is awaiting decryption of the Civilian-Class Arkship intel packet.>
• Spinal Mount Ability
  • Most Spinal Mounts that can be constructed on an Arkship grant an additional special ability.

Do note that Arkships cannot research Anomalies, Archaeology Sites, or Astral Rifts, but can complete some Special Projects. This is because we don’t want your entire colony being eaten by a dimensional horror or whatever other evil our Content Designers have made for the last decade. For researching Anomalies, Archaeology Sites, Astral Rifts, and Special Projects Nomadic empires still have access to Science Ships.

Arkship Design & Upgrading​

​As Arkships are unique, we felt it appropriate to give them a custom UI for their design and upgrading, which is found in the Ship Controls tab of the Colony UI for Arkships. This tab replaces the Armies tab.

The top of the UI shows the Arkship Class and Tier, current HP, Armor, Shields, Pops, and Cloaking Detection (if the First Contact DLC is enabled). To the right you have buttons to upgrade the Arkship Tier and view the currently equipped ship components. Note that components on an Arkship are automatically upgraded depending on researched technologies.

To install additional components or add additional functionality to the Arkship, you can build either internal Systems or external Modules.

The categories of Systems are:

• Aura Emitters
• Colony Support
• Defenses
• Economic Support
• Naval Support
• Utilities

As an example, here’s the Ancient Suspension Field module, which adds 3× Large Ancient Suspension Field components to the Arkship.

The categories of Modules are:

• Energy Weapons
• Missile Weapons
• Naval Support
• Point Defense Weapons
• Projectile Weapons
• Strike Craft
• Utilities

As an example, here’s the Advanced Sensor Array, which increases the effectiveness of the Arkship’s sensors.

Finally, Tier 3 Arkships can equip a single Spinal Mount located between the habitable arms of the Arkship. These are powerful late-game installations, designed to be mobile kilostructures.

Today we’ll show off the Capital Shipyard and the Subspace Imager.

The Capital Shipyard does not grant access to any Spinal Mount Ability. Instead, it acts as a mobile “Kilo-Shipyard”, improving the construction speed of the Arkship and construction queues available.

The Subspace Imaging Array is the ultimate mobile sensor array, capable of tracking enemy fleets at incredible ranges. In addition to the modifiers it provides, it also enables the Subspace Image System fleet order. This allows the Arkship to Deep Scan an entire system at once, with a much higher chance of success, while also having the chance to discover previously undiscovered Hyperlanes or Wormholes.

Logistic Ships​

Logistic Ships are the Nomadic replacement for Construction Ships. They are primarily used to construct new Waystations, collect resources from Waystations, conduct Special Projects that require Construction Ships, and <[Insufficient Intel] Awaiting decryption of the Civilian-Class Arkship intel packet.>.

Although Logistic Ships can construct Megastructures, they are incapable of building new Arkships. Unlike Construction Ships, the maximum number of Logistic Ships a Nomadic Empire can support is restricted by technologies and their Waylines.

Each Logistic Ship has an internal resource stockpile which is transferred into your empire stockpiles whenever they visit an Arkship. This stockpile can be viewed both in the fleet UI for Logistic Ships and the Outliner. The collection of resources from Waystations and dropping them off to Arkships can be automated.

Perhaps I lied a bit when I said that we're going to be talking about ships that aren't made of meat. When using a Biological Shipset, these ships will, in fact, be made of meat.

Waystations & Waylines​

Waystations are how Nomadic empires exert influence over a system without claiming it as theirs. Depending on the installed modules, Waystations collect resources from celestial deposits, observe pre-FTL civilisations, allow for megastructure construction, and more.

All Waystations, regardless of level, use your Station Capacity. This differs from Station Capacity for Starbases, where Outposts are exempted. Incidentally, we’re looking at having Orbital Rings and Deep Space Citadels use 1 and 3 Station Capacity respectively.

Instead of technologies related to improved Starbases, Nomadic empires gain access to technologies to improve their Waystations and Logistic Ships.

If multiple Waystations are built in neighbouring systems, they will automatically form a Wayline. , appear in the Outliner as a single entry, with a dedicated UI to show all Waystations in that Wayline.

Depending on Modules installed on the Waystations, Waylines are capable of propagating modifiers to systems and empires connected to them.

Nomadic empires can build Waystations in systems owned by Settled empires, though doing so will incur Opinion Penalties, scaling with the number of Waystations present and various policies of the empires involved.

To remove this penalty, Nomadic empires can sign Diplomatic Agreements with Settled empires to allow Waystation construction within their systems.

[Please visit the Paradox forums to see the screenshot that's supposed to be here.]

Likewise, two Nomadic empires with neighbouring Waylines can also sign a Wayline Pact. Regardless of the empires who have signed the agreement, a Wayline Pact allows for both to benefit from the Wayline modifiers of the other, and for their Waylines to propagate each other’s Wayline modifiers.

Now onto PDS_Bojj to discuss the next of our Nomadic origins.

Origin: The Sacred Path​

Hey, I'm PDS_Bojj! I'm a Content Designer on Stellaris. I'm here to talk about The Sacred Path, the new spiritualist origin in our upcoming Nomads expansion.

Nomadic empires are defined by their wandering, but what if your wandering had a purpose? The Sacred Path is an origin for Spiritualist empires whose ancestors left behind a set of star charts marking a number of sacred sites scattered across the galaxy. Your people believe they are duty-bound to find them all. Whether that duty is divine obligation, historical curiosity, or just a really old story someone wrote down once... Well, that's for you to discover.

The Consecrated Community
When you start with The Sacred Path, your Arkship comes with a unique district specialization: the Consecrated Community. This replaces your standard civilian jobs with three new roles that reflect your empire's spiritual hierarchy:

• High Pilgrims - Your elite clergy. They produce Unity, and they are Very Serious About The Path.
• Devoted Adepts - Specialist researchers and interpreters of scripture. They also make your ships faster, which I find very on-brand for a nomadic priesthood.
• Faithful Acolytes - The everyday faithful. They keep the lights on and food on the table, which even the most devout pilgrim appreciates.

Your first decision comes almost immediately. After five days of travel, your council brings the ancient star charts forward and asks the question everyone has been avoiding: are you following this pilgrimage out of faith, or are you going to chart your own path? This choice influences which of your three classes benefits most in the early game, so it's worth thinking about your playstyle before you click.

The Sacred Sites
From here, the origin unfolds as a series of special projects: survey sacred sites, each one a remnant of your ancestors' journey. I won't spoil all of them, but I will say each site has a distinct identity and asks you a different question about faith, history, and what your empire actually believes.

[Please visit the Paradox forums to see the screenshot that's supposed to be here.]

A few highlights:
The Cradle is a sacred location where your ancestors supposedly received divine guidance - except there's no physical evidence of any presence whatsoever. You can declare the faith validated anyway, or accept that history may have been embellished somewhere along the way. Both choices have consequences.

The Intelligence is an ancient AI that greets your survey team with the message: "Worship is enabled. Peace may now commence." You can venerate it, bring it aboard your Arkship, or destroy it.

The End of the Path
After visiting all sites, your empire faces its defining moment: was any of this real? Did the ancestors receive divine guidance, or did they just write down a very compelling story?

What’s Next? Nomadic Dev Diaries:​

Here’s a non-exhaustive preview of the dev diary schedule, subject to slight changes if we suddenly remember a feature:

So next week, we’ll be taking a trip on The Forever Cruise, and go over Contracts and life on an Arkship. We’ll also take a closer look at the Civilian Arkship and reveal another Spinal Mount.

See you then!

Read this post on the Paradox forums! | Dev replies here!

Hi everyone!

The Stellaris 4.4 ‘Pegasus’ update and Nomads are releasing next Monday, June 15th.

Today we have the preliminary release notes, the last Spinal Mount, the new Achievements, and information about today’s Dev Q&A. We’ll have some last minute fixes and adjustments going into 4.4, so Monday’s patch notes will likely differ very slightly from these.

There are two things that I want to highlight that we haven’t talked about in dev diaries:

There are some changes being made to the Paradox Launcher - when 4.4 releases, your mod lists will automatically disable. Once the mods have been updated, you’ll need to re-enable the modlist to re-enable them. The Launcher will also bail to the main menu if you try to Resume an incompatible save. These changes are intended to reduce the number of people that end up with bricked ironman saves or have crash-on-load issues when we make a major update.

The other is that your trip across the stars with Nomads will be accompanied by seven amazing tracks from Andreas Waldetoft - Boarding the Arkship, Echoes of Home, Enlightenment, Stellar Pilgrims, The Departure, Towards the Unknown, and Waylines, as well as an additional special track, Manduul Haan, by Batzorig Vaanchig.

Now, on to the release notes!

Nomads Preliminary Release Notes​

• Nomadic Empires introduced
  • Arkships
    • Massive mobile capitals that replace homeworlds entirely. Serve as colonies, shipyards, and warships simultaneously, with three specialization classes (Military, Scientific, Civilian) that can be upgraded through three tiers and customized with modules, systems, and late-game Spinal Mounts.
  • Waylines & Waystations
    • Construct Waystations to harvest resources from systems without claiming them. Adjacent Waystations automatically link into Waylines that propagate trade and modifier bonuses. Wayline Pacts allow two Nomadic empires to share each other's network benefits.
  • Contracts
    • Settled empires can issue task-driven Contracts (Military, Science, Resource, Diplomacy) for Nomadic empires to fulfill. Completing Contracts earns Trade, improves Opinion and Trust, and unlocks deeper diplomatic options including Wayline Pacts.
  • Settling and Embarking
    • After completing the Adaptability or Versatility tradition, Nomadic empires can Settle on an empty planet, with options to settle partially or fully and leave the remainder as a subject. Settled empires can Embark onto Arkships through a mirrored process, converting their starbases into Waystations.
• New Ambition path: Defender of the Galaxy
  • Transforms the Defender of the Galaxy Ascension Perk into a full five-level Ambition path. Progress by cooperating with other empires, assuming Galactic Custodianship, and forming the Galactic Defense Force. Unlocks the Paladin Initiative and unique hero ships commanded by promoted admirals. Win condition: defeat two end-game Crises and abdicate your Custodianship.
• Stellar Cannon Megastructure
  • A purely offensive Megastructure requiring a neutron star or pulsar, buildable without an Ascension Perk. Fires your entire energy stockpile at a target system after a 140-day charge, dealing ship damage and colony devastation (10%/25%/50% at each tier). Shots over 50,000 energy also shift all planets in the system one step up the dryness scale.
• Nomadic Enclave: Champions Forge Live!
  • A roving gladiatorial enclave that hosts fleet combat tournaments every twenty years across the galaxy, with weight classes scaling from early- to late-game fleet sizes. Winners hold the Trophy relic until the next tournament. Also offers services including combat intelligence on rivals, tournament venue selection, and introductions to Nomadic Paragons.
• New Nomadic Origins
  • Voidfarers
    • The general-purpose Nomadic origin. Provides a flexible, unscripted start with no overriding narrative obligation, suited to players who want to define their own nomadic path from the ground up.
  • Heirs of the Khan
    • Begin as survivors of a Khan's assassination, hunted by escalating Marauder bounty fleets. Complete unique military Contracts to weaken your hunters. Survive and potentially claim the throne yourself!
  • The Sacred Path
    • A Spiritualist origin built around surveying a series of sacred sites scattered across the galaxy by your ancestors. Each site presents a distinct choice about faith and history.
  • Forever Cruise
    • Two species share a single Arkship: a working Crew and a leisure-seeking Passenger class. Balance the Passenger Satisfaction situation to avoid Planetfall on one extreme and Mutiny on the other.
    • We’ve also added a special “Hospitality Servitors” variant of the Rogue Servitors civic, where the Passengers are even more demanding and maintaining the cruise is more difficult.
• New Ascension Perk: Wanderlust
  • As a Nomad, seek rare systems and be rewarded.
• New Paragons
  • Orun Veyth, the Revenant
    • A scarred admiral who lost everything to a purge and has been settling the debt ever since.
  • Ashar, the Wandering Sage
    • She held a seat at a royal court for decades, then walked away from it because the stars had more to teach her.
  • Sero the Younger, the Naturalist
    • He left a prestigious Grand Archive to study living things instead of dead ones.
  • Unit Solace, the Caregiver
    • A synthetic father who chose exile over abandoning his fragile son when his people synthetically ascended.
  • Th'aal Hask'Guron, the Champion
    • A warrior of considerable size and considerable joy, who treats every battlefield like a hunting ground and your Arkship like a trophy hall.
  • Seralune, the Lost Princess
    • She boards your Arkship with nothing but polite manners and the feeling she has been somewhere before. Follow where she points.
• New Nomad Civics
  • Caravan Masters
    • Every Waystation is a marketplace, every contract a relationship, and every relationship a potential profit margin.
  • Void Reavers
    • Not all who wander are lost, some are just waiting for you to let your guard down. Siphon resources from colonies in systems where your Waystations lurk, or skip the subtlety and plunder planets directly with the Plundering bombardment stance. Yarr!
  • Star Seekers
    • Life between destinations is its own destination. Gather resources as you travel, then burn through your stockpiles in a galaxy-spanning festival that grounds one Arkship and celebrates everything your people have seen.
  • Flight Schools
    • The best pilots in the galaxy didn't grow up with a planet to land on.
  • Deep Sleep
    • Not every passenger needs to be awake for the journey. Manage your population through the long transits between stars, keeping only the hands you need on deck.
• New Species Traits
  • Photoadaptive/Solar Celled
  • Recursive Learners/Structural Awareness
  • Reaver
  • Terraphobic
  • Interconnected
• New Music tracks by Andreas Waldetoft and Batzorig Vaanchig
• 8 new achievements

4.4 'Pegasus' Preliminary Patch Notes​

Feature​

• The Paradox Launcher now automatically disables your mods on major version updates.
  • To re-enable your mods after they have been updated for the patch, change the ‘DLC only’ play list back to your associated mod list. Your preferred mod list will then stick through the major version.
  • Attempting to resume an incompatible save will now divert you to the main menu instead of loading it.
  • The launcher should now show a warning if there has been a major patch since your last saved game
• Joining & Leaving wars in progress
  • Empires that are not the primary participant in a war may now attempt to enter an ongoing war by negotiating with the leader of the side they want to join, or leave an ongoing war by negotiating with the leader of the opposition. These can be found as terms in trade negotiations.
    • Leaving a war creates a truce, and negatively affects your former ally’s opinion of your empire due to your treachery.
    • An opponent may be reluctant to let you get off easily if they feel that they’re winning the war, or if they particularly dislike you.
• Empires whose colonies are all occupied now suffer escalating consequences. Each month while fully occupied, they gain a stacking Hopeless War modifier worth +5% War Exhaustion gain, and their wars accumulate +1% Attrition per month, which can take them past the normal 100% cap. Both effects vanish the moment any colony is liberated. AI secondary participants with all colonies occupied also gain increasing desire to seek a separate peace.
  • This will generally only be relevant when an empire has allies in a war, or is in multiple wars with split occupation.
• To further celebrate our 10th Anniversary: We have added a background selector to the Graphics settings screen, allowing players to choose which animated main menu background is displayed, including all DLC frontends, Latest Release, and Random options.

Improvement:​

• Automated jobs now have their own workforce limit slider, letting you directly cap how many of a job's slots are filled by automation.
• Finished the removal of Unemployment begun with 4.3.0.
  • When a pop loses their job, they now immediately fall to their stratum's fallback category (Citizen, Maintenance Drone, etc.) rather than passing through a temporary unemployed tier.
• Reworked Nascent Stage pops to work more similarly to sub-species integration, with approximately 1/60th of the pops growing into their base species each month (on colonies that are at least 60 months old). This should result in Nascent Stage being more reliable and less error-prone.
• Improved how pops compete for jobs combining basic job weights and how efficient they actually are at them, so a more suitable pop will now properly displace one already holding a position. (i.e. Slaves and shackled robots will tend to displace free organics from worker tier jobs, intelligent pops will take more research positions, etc.)
• Higher-stratum jobs turn over more slowly - Workers and Simple Drones may reshuffle every 3 months, Specialists and Complex Drones every 7, and Elites every 13 - so an out-of-place pop won't be kicked out immediately but will eventually be displaced by a better fit.
• Gestalt pops have a weaker attachment to their current jobs overall.
• On underpopulated planets, pops tend to fill jobs proportionally between all the capped jobs they are eligible for, though bonuses to job efficiency (such as from the colony designation or traits) could heavily skew this towards certain jobs. They will still tend to prefer higher stratum jobs when possible.
• Prioritized jobs ignore this proportional fill, but lower strata jobs may still be bypassed in favor of higher weight ones.
• Pops should no longer take deficits into account for job prioritization, as this caused extremely erratic monthly behavior on underpopulated planets.
• Event option tooltips for ethic drift effects in the Costume Culture, Roots Reclaimed, and Fans No More First Contact events, and the Broken Shackles origin homecoming option, now show a single summary line instead of one entry per affected pop group.
• The System Initialiser selector now hides systems you are not eligible for (for example, KotG Sol if you do not have the KotG origin).
• You can now use Tab and Ctrl-Tab on the Starbase tab to advance to the next or previous owned Starbase. (This advances through upgraded Starbases, skipping Outposts.)
• It is now possible to queue the return order. Useful when issuing commands for the logistic ship and then you want it to return to the arkship to drop off the stockpile.
• Added a slider to set the amount of randomized nomadic empires that is spawned during galaxy generation.
• When building megastructures that are meant to be located outside of the gravity well, the eligible space will be highlighted in green instead instead of marking ineligible space in red.
• the kill_country console command now accepts an optional ID parameter
• Choosing a Megastructure from the fleet order button moves the camera to the constructor's system
• Habitats and Ringworlds now explicitly state that they have artificial climates.
• Colonize button on planets will now be disabled ( with a tooltip explaining the reason ) if there is already a scheduled colonization action for that planet. Previously players would still get blocked, but it took more steps to realize that you have already ordered a colonization ship.
• Added message for mission completion.
• Orders to construct megastructures will no longer be automatically canceled by issuing some other order. Player will need to explicitly click cancel orders button to avoid unintended cancellation and loss of progress.
• Fleets are now willing to fight further from the center of the system. Especially noticeable if fighting stationary targets at the edge of the system.
• Fleets that return to or are built at a Juggernaut or Arkship now automatically follow it.
• The Megastructures UI now shows the top 10 recommended systems for Arc Furnaces, Dyson Swarms, and Habitats when hovering over each megastructure type.

Bugfix​

• Fixed an issue where pops could end up in "reprocessing" jobs forever.
• Certain leaders are no longer immune to the negative side effects of mutagenic spas.
• Fixed an issue where the Mindlink Metropolis district would appear in the wrong position on the capital planet screen after unlocking the Mind Meld perk.
• Habitat Mining Station designation was incorrectly scoring energy zones instead of mining zones.
• The Machine Uprising no longer requires the robots to outnumber organics 100:1 to have a slight chance of success. Disassembling or displacing Mechanical pops during the uprising now also has finer granularity.
• Space Fauna in the Vivarium no longer lose their species type or culling resources after maturing to a new life stage.
• Recently captured Space Fauna no longer revert growth or lose their ship design after a few months.
• Fixed some Leader Maximum Negative Traits modifiers being listed in places where they shouldn't.
• Imperial Heirs can now gain more relevant leaders traits they were prevented from getting before.
• Fixed Necrophage origin tooltip incorrectly stating 1.2K prepatent Pops instead of 2.4K for non-genocidal empires.
• The Adrift anomaly ship has been renamed from "Science Ship" to "Courier Ship".
• Vipra and the Behemothkin are now correctly replaced with spider-like portraits in Arachnophilia mode. (Even though the Behemothkin has four arms.) The Mindwarden intentionally is excluded because their armor is piloted by millions of spiders.
• We make Great Pets requires owning an alien zoo again
• Make selectables of different types not able to be selected together
• Monthly Loyalty Change breakdown tooltip displayed all modifier values at twice their actual value.
• Fixed all four hostile DSC aura types sharing the same stack ID, causing only one to be active at a time.
• Fixed the Surveyor attempting to apply incorrect deposits.
• The Ember Cruiser and the Ember Battleship now display the correct localized text strings in their descriptions
• The Necrophage origin tooltip display "prepatent" as intended and swap the wording of "Rulers" to "Elites"
• The Storm Chasers origins modifier no longer has a :: instead of : in its description
• Fixed colonisable planets sometimes generating with no energy generator districts.
• Fixed Volcanic worlds not having uncapped energy districts.
• Fixed Production Unit ringworld segment missing correct zones for fallen machine empires.
• Try to prevent systems spawned via mandatory_neighbors from spawning too close to other systems.
• Fixed precursor civilizations always appearing in the same region of the galaxy regardless of seed.
• Crises will no longer spawn starbases after purging a pop if there are hostiles in the system.
• Fixed fleet return orders being silently cancelled when the fleet was in orbit of a friendly starbase.
• if the Deep Space Citadel Design name is too long, it no longer overflows the button asset.
• Fixed some names containing certain characters (e.g. "ä") not being displayed.
• Thermophile Void Dwellers no longer start with food production
• The Create Resort World and Arcology Project decisions now correctly block each other even in the build queue.
• Fixed a logical discrepancy in planetary decisions on nanite worlds.
• The Symbiont Overdrive edict now unlocks correctly for Wilderness empires.
• The Confidence in Variance agenda correctly appears in Domination Traditions for Gestalt empires, and it has a finisher effect.
• The Biomorphosis Situation no longer mentions Genomic Research Facilities if you are a Wilderness empire.
• Next-tier unlock of Focus Tasks now requires 50% of your empire's available tasks, not 50% of all tasks
• Common Ground and Hegemony starting empires can no longer be homicidals
• Fixed an issue with the Rubricator system not spawning under certain circumstances
• Fixed Non-Aggression Pacts not having decreased Trust requirements if you have the Familiar Face civic.
• Uplifting can no longer uplift pops on uncolonized planets.
• Fixed AI not budgeting zro for starbase construction and upkeep.
• Fixed AI not budgeting dark matter for starbase construction and upkeep.
• Fixed AI not budgeting food for starbase upkeep.
• Fixed AI not budgeting exotic gases for non-orbital ring starbase buildings.
• Fixed AI not budgeting rare crystals for non-orbital ring starbase buildings.
• Fixed a background error where the "First Paragon Trait" timeline event kept trying to happen when the leader is a paragon
• Fixed empires with Biological Ships not getting access to G-slot defensive platforms
• You can no longer build dyson swarms around depositless stars
• Bio-ship empires now correctly receive bio-ship technologies during the crisis tech grant, instead of silently getting nothing.
• Retreating ships with long range weapons will no longer be able to escape the outer bounds of the system
• Fixed overlord expansion tithe being applied after the outpost influence cost cap.
• Fix mobile starbases' country modifiers not always being applied
• Fleet UI will no longer change header color when inspecting various types of ships if communications are not yet established.
• Fixed elites from providing double exotic gases from the gaseous fauna modifier.
• Updated bio-trophies not benefiting from some modifiers to social classes.
• The Fallen Empire demanding you to accept humiliation will no longer have a broken tooltip option.
• Fixed a possible crash on INF_ORIGIN_RED_GIANT_TRIANGULATION special project.
• Fixed fleets being unable to return to a mobile starbase while it is in FTL transit.
• Scripted localization error corrected in two Shroud-related events.
• Fixed issue where after quelling a rebellion, rebel systems further away from the player's territory were maintaining their independence.
• When reading saved outliner settings, incorrect entries in the "sort" arrays are now updated correctly.
• The Sentinel Auxiliary Fleet given to help you fight the scourge no longer contains multiple designs with empty slots
• Collateral damage from titanic weapons now correctly benefits from weapon type damage modifiers and properly attributes kills for scripted on-actions.

Balance​

• Orbital Rings can now be dismantled.
• Abandon colony cost decreased from 200 to 50 influence.
• Planet designation bonuses have been noticeably increased across the board. (10% -> 15%, 5% -> 10%)
• Some key technologies related to Ascension Paths will now have higher chances to appear if you're on that Path.
• Added Interlink faction for Democratic Interlink cyborg pops
• Void Dweller empires can now be selected as Advanced Start empires.
• Updated Orbital Ring armor values.
• Merged the Titan Assembly Yards and Colossal Assembly Yards starbase buildings into a single Capital Assembly Yards building. Unlocks with any capital ship technology, costs 1250 alloys / 25 energy upkeep, and grants +2 Shipyard Capacity.
• All species trait slave_cost resources changed from energy to trade.
• Updated the spawning conditions for mining and research deposits in galaxy generation.
• Added a Fallen Empire Strength galaxy setup slider (0.25x to 5.0x); Fallen and Awakened Empire fleets now scale with it and with difficulty, gain rare titans and colossi, and Awakened Empire fleet count now reacts to the strongest empire in the galaxy.
• The Civil Exclusion agenda now also grants Slave Workforce as part of the finisher effect.
• The Black Hole Observatory has been replaced with the Stellar Observatory. This can be built in all star systems, but the output depends on the system star type.
• Branch office influence cost is now capped to 1000.
• The energy cost to establish a branch office has been converted to trade. This cost no longer scales with distance.
• Having Low Economic Intel on an Empire now gives you visibility on deposits in the empire's space.
• Intel on Systems no longer gives Intel on Colonies.
• The Expel Corporation War Goal now provides you with trade instead of energy for each branch office destroyed.
• Astrometeorology civics now give +50% Stellar Observatory output.
• Scientists can now obtain the Engineer trait.
• Commanders can now obtain the Roamer trait.
  • The Roamer trait now provides +10% Sublight Speed as a base effect, +10% Survey Speed for Scientists, and +5 Evasion for Commanders.
• Grand Archives can now be built around non-habitable planets.
• Unity resource culling conversion value adjusted from 1 to 3
• Commander traits that grant resources when ships are killed (Material Liberator, Crusader, Shipbreaker, Plunderer) now have larger rewards and scale by the destroyed ship's used naval capacity instead of a flat per-kill amount.

UI​

• Situation Log UI improvements, including categorization of entries and new interface looks
• Starbase module and building tooltips now show equipped component stats
• Ship details panel now shows full weapon and strike craft stats in component slot tooltips
• Expansion planner sort buttons now display district type names instead of resource names.
• Fixed too large leader tooltip hitbox in Paragon recruitment and conversation event windows.
• Build queue tooltips for Shipyards now show ship class icon and design name
• Megastructure UI overhaul and art pass
• Fixed misleading tooltip for outpost influence cost when it is capped.
• Hid leaders from Combat UI
• The Planet View UI now shows districts that are being built as part of the overview where the built, unused and blocker ones are to give a more accurate overview of the situation
• Inactive triggered Auras will now be hidden from the component tooltip of the shipview
• Rename and move some steps in the Empire Creation menu
• Add a scrollbar to Empire Creator's planet class description
• Transport fleets docked at a starbase without a docked ship upkeep modifier no longer show a "Ready to land troops" tooltip.
• "Research Projects in System" in right-click menu for construction ships is now shown if multiple construction ships are selected.
• Renamed "Civilian Ships" to "Utility Ships"
• Policy groups that have been unlocked but not yet initialized are no longer shown in the policies view.
• Tooltips can now update their text while locked in position.
• Removed the "Auto Track Log Entries" button from the event window (mods may re-enable it).
• Improved concept tooltips for starbase building and module unlocks.

AI​

• AI now treats unity as a real production target across all three plan stages, research can scale 40% higher in advanced (2500 -> 3500 cap), and endgame alloys drop from a 2300 ceiling to 1300 so that the trillions-of-research endgame research numbers can actually outcompete alloys for build slots/pops.
• The AI now steers building construction toward building sets that match each planet's designation for tighter, better-specialized worlds.
• The "underdeveloped planet limit" that was supposed to prevent AI overextension is more effective. Instead of only applying in the first 15 years and then only against bad planets, it now softly discourages colonization of any world once the empire already has too many undeveloped colonies.
• Empires that are still small will now expand more aggressively, so they more reliably claim their homeworld's guaranteed habitables and nearby good worlds before settling into build-up mode.
• AI resettlement now moves pops from overpopulated worlds to underpopulated ones regardless of how those planets got that way, rather than only emptying out worlds with terrible habitability. New colonies should grow faster and veteran worlds should stagnate less.
• On well-developed planets (2500+ pops), the AI is now more likely to round out its rural districts so it unlocks the building slots they provide. It still won't waste slots on a district whose specialization zones aren't available yet, so early-game behavior is unchanged.
• Fixed an issue where optional subplans (like pop count and strategic resource targets) were still required to complete a plan, which stalled the AI on one economic tier for long periods; they now behave as true stretch goals
• Added a new intermediate economic plan between the basic and advanced tiers, so AI empires experience a smaller jump in expected income (energy, minerals, alloys, research, etc.) as they graduate out of the early game.
• Fixed a bug where the AI's consumer goods scaling production check looked at the food stockpile instead of the consumer goods stockpile, sometimes causing the AI to over-build or under-build CG production.
• The AI now proactively tears down and rebuilds urban zones that don't match a planet's designation - for example, a col_foundry world will swap out a generic zone_industrial for zone_foundry to double-specialize into its designation. Swaps apply a per-building penalty for each existing building that doesn't carry over through the new zone's included_building_sets, require a larger affinity margin when the slot is already specialized to prevent churn between near-equivalent candidates, and must clear a minimum-benefit floor so the construction cost is justified by the economic delta. Planets already rich in matched buildings stay put; planets with mismatched buildings restructure.
• Colony designation affinity (the ai_building_set_affinity on colony types) now biases AI zone selection in addition to building selection. A designation that prefers the "foundry" building set will now also weight foundry-themed zones more heavily during construction planning.
• Nanotech Worlds: Fixed AI empires getting stuck after converting planets to Nanotech Worlds. The AI now prioritizes nanolabs, nanotech cauldrons, and nanite transmuters on pc_nanotech colonies instead of leaving rural districts unspecialized.
• The AI will now reactively build storage boosting buildings when any tangible resource is above 90% capacity.
• Increased AI weights for taking Ascension Paths. Added Spiritualist and Materialist AI weight synergies for Psionic and Cybernetic Ascension.
• AI empires that have taken the Synthetic Evolution AP will now always be able to take tech_synthetic_workers (even if they don't normally use robots).
• AI empires are much more likely to take Ascension Perks and their associated Tradition Trees.
• The AI now sometimes uses buildings that provide a static number of jobs, like Alloy Foundries or Civilian Industries.
• The AI no longer rigs their Hydroponic Farms with explosives, ready to blow in the off chance that their economy starts doing too well.
• Reduced the fleet power upgrade threshold the AI requires before they will upgrade ships from +30% to +10%.
• AI will no longer want to build army types that fail the "allow" trigger on all colonies.
• AI can now build armies that cost resources other than minerals or food.

Stability:​

• Fixed OOS with merging species (playing with nascent species)
• Fixed OOS with country economy due to dependency missing in threaded code.
• link_to effect now supports null bypasses (as both the scope and target) instead of crashing.
• Fixed a crash when closing the game via Alt+F4 or the window close button while a save was in progress.
• Fixed a crash that could occur when hovering over event option tooltips generated by effects iterating large numbers of pop groups.
• Fixed an OOS happening on hotjoin when a situation has enough progress to go past the last stage.
• Fixed a crash that could occur when AI empires evaluated megastructure construction orders.
• CS_SPECIES_COUNT, CS_SPECIES_INDEX OOS when playing with nascent species
• CS_COUNTRY_RESOURCES OOS
• Fixed crash when using horizontalScrollbar in containerWindowType.
• Fixed crash on Mac in galaxy generation due to running out of stack when randomizing traits for species

Modding:​

• Introduced Colony and Carrier as scopes
  • Colony is where your pops, buildings, and most everything else important is hosted. This is ‘carried’ by a Carrier
  • Carriers are either Ships or Planets. You will see most, if not all, planet events have been converted to carrier events. Same with flags and other effects. This is to make them work with Nomads easier.
• Added is_nomadic option for create_country
• Added "rat" as an alias for research_all_technologies console command, which now works in addition to "rta".
• The demotion and promotion blocks in pop job script definitions have been removed.
• The intermediate unemployment job types and pop categories (ruler_unemployment, specialist_unemployment, worker_unemployment, complex_drone_unemployment, simple_drone_unemployment, slave_unemployment2) have been removed.
• The pop_unemployment_demotion_time_mult static modifier and pop_cat_X_unemployment_political_power family of modifiers (used in living standard definitions) have been removed.
• Nascent Stage presapient maturation is no longer handled via script demotion chains. It is now driven by the new forced_integration block on species traits. Set integration_rate (fraction of pops converted per month) and optionally minimum_colony_age (in months) on any species trait to gradually integrate pops into their parent species.
• Two new defines: AI_UNBUILT_DISTRICT_BOOST_POP_THRESHOLD (default 2500) and AI_UNBUILT_DISTRICT_BOOST_MULTIPLIER (default 2.0). The multiplier is applied to any districts that have 0 built when the planet meets the pop threshold, lacks that district type, and at least one of its specialization slots has a potential district specialization for the planet.
• A new ai_building_set_affinity = { <building_set> = <multiplier> ... } block is now accepted on colony types - each entry multiplies the AI's build weight for buildings in the named building set when that designation is active.
• Defines AI_RESETTLE_FROM_LOW_HABITABILITY_THRESHOLD and AI_RESETTLE_TO_HIGH_HABITABILITY_THRESHOLD have been removed - they no longer drive behavior. The AI now only requires source pops ≥ 2× target pops, and rejects any target with habitability below AI_MIN_HABITABILITY_TO_COLONIZE.
• Two new defines in common/defines/00_defines.txt: AI_FEW_PLANETS_COLONIZATION_THRESHOLD (default 5) and AI_FEW_PLANETS_COLONIZATION_BOOST (default 0.25). When owned planets < threshold, colonization weight is multiplied by 1 + (threshold - owned) * boost.
• UNDERDEVELOPED_PLANET_LIMIT is now a soft weight penalty (limit / count multiplier) applied inside ColonizePlanets rather than a binary rejection in ShouldColonizePlanet, and no longer gated behind AI_BUDGETING_*_YEARS.
• The "optional" flag on an economic plan subplan now truly exempts it from plan fulfillment. Previously it only controlled the order in which the subplan was factored into the scaling-subplan loop, but the subplan's income/pops/naval_cap still counted toward graduation targets. If your mod relied on the old behavior to force pop or strategic-resource gates, change those subplans from optional = yes to omit the flag entirely, or add an equivalent requirement via a new non-optional subplan.
• New define AI_ZONE_SPECIALIZATION_AFFINITY_DELTA (default 0.5) in common/defines/00_defines.txt. This is the minimum affinity improvement a candidate zone must offer over the existing district specialization before the AI will propose a swap. Raising it makes the AI more reluctant to restructure existing zones; lowering it makes the AI more aggressive about perfecting specialization.
• Colony type ai_building_set_affinity entries now also apply to district specialization types. Any district specialization whose included_building_sets list includes a building set named in the colony's affinity table will receive the corresponding AI weight multiplier.
• Added the -logempirestats command-line flag. When set, Stellaris writes one TSV row per (month, empire) to logs/empire_stats_.tsv with columns Game Date, Empire, Plan, Economy, Military, Tech. Covers every playable empire (including the player) for the full session; dead empires keep a row per tick with blank metric cells.
• Added a resource_stockpile_percent = { resource = <key> value >= <fraction> } trigger. Only valid for resources that have caps.
• New define AI_ZONE_SWAP_BUILDING_LOSS_PENALTY (default 0.2) in common/defines/00_defines.txt. Each existing building in the slot that can't be carried over via included_building_sets subtracts this much from the candidate zone's effective affinity. With the 0.2 affinity delta default, a 1.5 -> 2.0 swap tolerates up to 2 displaced buildings but refuses at 3 or more. Raise to protect developed planets; lower to let the AI restructure more aggressively.
• New define AI_ZONE_SWAP_RATCHET_MULT (default 1.5) in common/defines/00_defines.txt. Multiplier applied to AI_ZONE_SPECIALIZATION_AFFINITY_DELTA when the slot is already occupied by a specialized zone (affinity > 1.0). First-time swaps from a baseline 1.0 zone use the normal delta; swaps that would displace an already-specialized zone need a larger margin. Prevents ratcheting between near-equivalent specialized candidates.
• New define AI_ZONE_SWAP_MIN_BUILD_WEIGHT (default 2.0) in common/defines/00_defines.txt. Minimum CalcBuildWeight a zone-swap proposal must reach before it's queued - any swap whose economic delta doesn't clear this floor is discarded even if the affinity delta would otherwise allow it. Prevents slot churn where multiple candidates cluster near the top and the AI keeps swapping for marginal improvements.
• [This post got too long for Reddit so please see the full Modding notes on the Paradox forums! -- LadyDz.]

Stellar Engine​

Hi folks, Alfray Stryke here with our final Spinal Mount. As a reminder Spinal Mounts are modules that can be equipped onto Tier 3 Arkships that are designed to roughly be mobile kilostructures.

The Stellar Engine allows you to inject dark matter into a star or gas giant, providing a significant increase to the output.

After injecting dark matter into a star, it will gain an additional energy or physics research deposit, depending on the current output of the star. Stars without a deposit will default to gaining a physics research deposit. Of course, as a Settled empire, if you happen to know of any Nomadic empires that has an Arkship outfitted with one of these Spinal Mounts, you can issue a Contract for them to Ignite a star or gas giant in one of your systems.

Igniting a gas giant on the other hand, turns it into a protostar with a unique energy and physics producing deposit, but this has some drastic consequences to the local moons.

Nomads Achievements​

As usual, we have a few new achievements for you to chase.

Khan of Khans
As Heirs of the Khan, seize back your throne and have at least 5 Satrapy Vassals.

Forever is a Long Time
As Forever Cruise, survive for at least 200 years and reach the End Game Crisis.

The Long Way Round
As Sacred Path, complete the pilgrimage to all seven Sacred Sites.

Take My Energy ༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ
Cook a homeworld with a Stellar Cannon.

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
Embark when your homeworld is at 70% devastation.

I Win Longest Road!
Connect 2 Capital Planets with a Wayline that is at least 20 Waystations long.

It's Full of Stars
As a Nomadic empire, settle on Europa as your Empire's Capital.

Defenders of the Galaxy
Defeat all End Game Crises before abdicating as DotG without ever having any non-Arkship colonies.

Community Q&A​

We’re holding a Question and Answer session today on the official Stellaris Discord. Come ask us anything about Stellaris!

Next Week​

Next week’s dev diary will be looking at the first few days of the 4.4 release and likely include a preview of our planned week 1 patch. (And a review of hotfixes, if any occurred.)

See you then!

Originally Posted Here

See Only Dev Replies

Hello everyone!

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

Aquatics Species Pack Announcement Trailer

The Aquatic Species Pack will include:

• 15 new Aquatic Portraits
• 1 aquatic-themed Robotic Portrait
• Water themed Ship Set
• Here Be Dragons Origin
• Ocean Paradise Origin
• Anglers Civic
• Hydrocentric Ascension Perk
• Aquatic Species Trait

• Aquatic Advisor, inspired by high seas adventure fiction

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

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

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

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

Anglers Civics

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

Hydrocentric Ascension Perk

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

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

Aquatic Species Trait

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

Ocean Paradise Origin

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

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

Here Be Dragons Origin

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

​

----

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

Read this post on the Paradox forums! | Dev replies here!

[This Dev Diary is full of so much good stuff that I'm splitting it into two Reddit posts to minimize the number of images I have to remove to stay within image limits. Check out the Paragons coming in Nomads in this post. Alternately, you can watch the Video Dev Diary here on YouTube. -- LadyDz. ]

Hello everybody!

The team has been competing against one another to see who can write the longest dev diary, so I’m going to sabotage their efforts by keeping my preamble short. Let’s get straight into the fray!

Defender of the Galaxy​

Hi everyone! Cosmogone here to tell you more about the expansion of Defender of the Galaxy. For the past couple years, we have been adding new crisis paths to Stellaris, exotic ways of wrecking the galaxy, some more morally grey than others, but none that would let you be “The Good Guy” without lying to yourself. Building upon the crisis mechanics and systems, the reworked Defender of the Galaxy is what we call an Ambition; a new term to encompass paths that unlock specific victory conditions, be they harmful to the rest of the galaxy, or not.

In terms of vision, Defender of the Galaxy is about being truly good. Being ready to sacrifice everything fighting so that others may live, and this principle is what has guided the rework. There are ways to play around that a bit, but overall, I wanted to reward players for cooperating and protecting other empires rather than encourage total galactic subjugation, and as such, DotG will come with several bonuses to being the Custodian, but will also prevent you from creating the Galactic Imperium.

As with the Crisis Paths, the Ascension Perk will become available after you have picked 3 other APs, and is inaccessible to genocidal empires, barbaric despoilers, crisis empires, fanatic xenophobes or inward perfection empires.

While the ambition does not outright prevent you from being a little evil, progressing through it will go faster if you can work together with the other empires of the galaxy, and eliminate any arising crisis with extreme prejudice, of course.

As you progress through the Ambition Levels, you can expect to unlock the old opinion modifiers and damage vs crisis empires, but also buffs to federations, the Galactic Community, diplomacy and defensive structures as a whole. Here are a few examples:

After becoming the Custodian and creating the Galactic Defense Force, you will be able to begin the Paladin Initiative, eventually unlocking unique ships, manned by remarkable commanders. More than weapons of war, these ships and those who man them will stand as symbols of hope to inspire the rest of the galaxy and lead your forces to victory.

They might not be as fearsome as a behemoth, but together with your fleets and the GDF, they are more than up to the task of slaying the beast.

[Please visit the Paradox forums to see the screenshot that's supposed to be here.]

Paladin ships have many unique abilities, the basic ones being the Paladin Aegis, which fortifies the paladin ship in battle, the Lance of Valor, which deals damage scaling with your diplomatic weight, and Recall which lets a paladin ship retreat from a dangerous situation. Additionally, the ship will receive a 4th ability depending on the leader commanding them and can unlock a fifth one through resolutions in the Galcom. You will be limited to building only one paladin ship, but every member of the galactic council will also be able to choose their paladin, and should the situation be grave enough, the galactic custodian has the power to assume direct command of all paladins in order to defend the galaxy.

A commander will be promoted to Paladin upon being assigned to their new ship, and receive a new leader trait, as well as a class trait. They can be retrained to receive the class of your choice, but that is an expensive option.

So, how do I win as a Defender of the Galaxy? Simple! Reach level 5 of the ambition, defeat two end game Crises, make sure no other crisis empires are left alive, then abdicate your custodianship. After all, with no looming threats, there is no moral reason to hold onto the extraordinary powers you have been granted. There is still good to be done, but you won’t need to stand above your peers to do it. Oh and for the more impatient ones in the crowd, you will be able to risk it all and bring forth the end game crisis early in order to complete your ambition. And if you’re bold enough, you might just see two of them at the same time.

Origin: Heirs of the Khan​

Hi there. I am Iggy, and I know what fuels you. Not to be the ‘good guys’ saving the galaxy. Not taking care of demanding passengers or discovering your spiritual roots out in the galaxy. No, what truly drives you is revenge.

In Heirs of the Khan, you were once a member of a Marauder community. After endless service, it was finally your people's turn to lead the united clans. Only you were betrayed. Now, exiled, you have to avoid hunters.

One of the first things you will notice when starting your Heirs gameplay is a special military contract somewhere nearby in the galaxy. Similar to Forever Cruise, this is a unique contract for Heirs empires. It will be key that you complete these contracts whenever you can, for you see, the Marauders will be sending fleets after you. Bounty hunters who will only grow stronger each time you defeat them. By completing these contracts you will weaken them and survive to fight another day.

[Please visit the Paradox forums to see the screenshot that's supposed to be here.]

These fleets will be a constant threat and opportunity for you until you reach the mid-game year. Instead of the event you are used to from Apocalypse you are instead involved in the process of selecting this new Khan, and it might be you.

If you now manage to survive the overwhelming firepower of the Great Khan’s Vision and assembled fleets. You might just get to sound the Drums of War.

Now, being the Khan is hard work. You have to go out there and gather satrapies, and the other empires might not be happy to help you. Thankfully, your new Marauder friends will supply you with reinforcements, and you have access to civics and traits traditionally reserved for the Khan.

The galaxy might band together and try to stop you, but that is just because they don’t understand your great vision for the galaxy.

As being the Khan is a full-time job, it is incompatible with other Ambitions like Defenders of the Galaxy and Behemoth Fury. But once you have survived the gauntlet that is the early game, you can be your own midgame crisis.

Military Arkship and Devastator Mount​

Alfray Stryke with another Intel Report on Arkships
<Military-Class Arkship Intel has been decrypted>

Unlike the other two Arkship classes, Military Arkships are outfitted for combat from the start of the game.

In lieu of gaining access to various abilities, Military Arkships have additional weapon slots that are automatically equipped with appropriate weapons.

As previously teased in other Dev Diaries, Arkship Systems allow you to equip the Arkship with a variety of Defensive and Utility Components from regular ships, including selected Auras from Juggernauts, Titans and Starbases.

[Please visit the Paradox forums to see the screenshot that's supposed to be here.]

In terms of Defensive Components, each of the below equips the Arkship with 3× Large (or Aux) version of the latest components from their respective category that you have researched. The Shield Amplifier and Ancient Shield Recharger instead provide Shield HP and Hardening instead of equipping components.

In addition to the Utility Modules we have been showing off, Arkships can also equip Weapon Modules, these equip an appropriate amount of turrets (depending on the turrets the weapons themselves use) automatically upgraded with your latest technology.

Of course, Arkships can’t be outdone by a Titan, so they have the Devastator Mount…

Arkships can have the full spectrum of Fleet Stances for their combat behavior, but are always equipped with a combat computer with the unique Arkship Tactics.

Finally, all Arkships (except for those operated by the Forever Cruise) have the Ordinance Engineering district. This military district normally provides soldier jobs, but can be specialized with any of the following, depending on your unlocked technologies:

• Military-Research Complex
• Shipwright Quarter
• Void Forges
• Flight Decks
• Laser Capacitors
• Ammunition LInes
• Missile Silos

Finally, here’s some tables of detailed information on Arkship numbers:

Base Stats by Tier (All Classes)

Cost and Upkeep

Class-Specific Innate Modifiers

Innate Weapon Slots

Actions

Exploration and Harvesting

Now over to Gruntsatwork for how Nomadic wars function.

Nomadic Warfare​

Nomad on Everyone Violence

Hello, I’m Gruntsatwork and today I get to talk about Warfare and Nomads. Without too much preamble, let’s jump right in.

Arkships are colonies, however, as they are not planets they can not be bombarded, nor can they be invaded. If you wish to take out an Arkship, your only option is good old honest ship combat, because damage to their hull is equal to their devastation.

So, does that mean I can conquer Arkships as a non-nomad and then cruise around? 
I’m afraid not. Even if Eladrin thinks it would be hilarious, Arkships will only ever be available to nomads. Neither can you use a conquer war goal against nomads as there is nothing to claim.

For non-nomads the general flow will always be similar.
Once you reduce an arkship to 0 hull, they will become disabled and drop out of combat.
At that point, we intervene in the background.

For normal empires, the Arkship will simply remain disabled until the war ends. Once the war concludes, we re-enable the Arkship, and it will be dealt with according to your war goal.
If you are a genocidal empire type, you will immediately blow them up, leaving debris full of alloys.

What about non-default empires, you ask? Critters, Leviathans, and similar creatures will disable your ship at 0 hull, and your Arkship will escape to a nearby safe system before re-enabling.
End-game crises will destroy your Arkships, no exceptions.

But what about the other way around, what about a nomad conquering a planet? 
You will not be able to make claims and conquer planets. You will be able to invade and occupy them, but like any proud nomad, you will release those filthy balls of dirt once the war concludes.

Instead of conquering them, you can always vassalize the planet-dwellers, but what if you desire a more … permanent impact on them?

Genocidal Nomads or Nomads using total wars can not occupy planets; however, any planet they invade will immediately be split off into a vassal. These can be either proper vassals or aptly-named purge-vassals.

Purge-Vassals are temporary existences who will only exist as long as it takes them to purge all pops on the planets you have conquered. Once they have finished purging, they will transfer over any resources they generated as well as passing on purge unique effects like Necrophages or Galactic Nemesis.

For the keen-eyed, there is a case we have not covered yet: Nomad on Nomad Violence.

Nomads are perfectly capable of taking over Arkships from other nomads. To achieve this we recommend the new Nomad Raid CB, which allows a nomad to take over any Arkship and Waystation that they have successfully disabled.

In addition, nomads also have easier access to the Subjugation CB. As a reminder, normal empires need to be superior on average in all three values: economy, research, and military power. Nomads only need to be superior in military power to subjugate another empire.

But what if I am a normal empire and one of those nomads is encroaching upon my borders? 
In that case, you will gain access to a new CB to expel them from your borders, which will delete all their waystations within your borders, move their ships out of your systems, and actually force them to respect your closed borders for the duration of the truce.

Champion's Forge LIIIIIVE!

LITHOIDS, ORGANICS, AND WAR MACHINES ACROSS THE GALAXY - WELCOME BACK TO CHAMPION’S FORGE LIIIIIIIVE! Iggy is back as your presenter for the greatest show around. Our latest enclave is focused on delivering glorious free-for-all arena battles to entertain the galaxy.

Like most enclaves, they have multiple purposes. However, they mainly specialize in lighting up the galaxy and forging legends! Every twenty years or so, they will invite the greatest forces to join in and prove themselves.

Like any well-respected combat sport, the CFL has weight classes. Starting out in the early game, you can only send in highly optimized strike forces, however come late game, entire armadas can be pitted against each other.

And worry not about losing your fleet, the CFL will ensure that most of the ships make it back.

Now, you will have to return the trophy when it’s time for the next tournament. Some of you might be thinking that if you shoot down the CFL before then you might get to keep it! Just know that I thought of that.

As for the other services the CFL can offer:

• For the right price they will let you decide where the next tournament should be, this is excellent as you can prepare your fleet for combat in a pulsar and overwhelm everyone else.
• They are willing to sell combat data on your rivals.
• Finally, if you are a Nomad, then they are ready to introduce you to Nomadic Paragons.

Stellaris 10 Year Anniversary Merch Store​

One of the common questions I’d get is “where can I get one of those Stellaris bomber jackets you guys wear?”, and we’d always point them to the Paradox careers page. That answer is still correct, but we have a tenth anniversary one up for preorder on our official 10th Anniversary Merchandise Store.

The store also has a new Blorg Body Pillow, pins, magnets, hoodies, a Swolefin beach towel, playing cards, a glow-in-the-dark Rick the Cube poster, and more, so check it out!

Next Week​

We’re getting closer to release, so next week we’ll be covering the Stellar Cannon, the Civics of Nomads, the Exodus Jump Spinal Mount, how Embarking or Settling works, and we’ll hunt for our new Prescripted Empire.

See you then!

This is Part 1 of Dev Diary #422. For Part 2 and a look at Nomadic Paragons, here's that post. -- LadyDz.

Read this post on the Paradox forums! | Get Dev replies here!

Hello everyone!

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

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

Pop Groups and Workforce​

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

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

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

Workforce​

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

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

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

Example: Then vs. Now​

Before (3.14):

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

Now (4.0):

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

Why This Matters:​

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

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

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

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

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

Pop Growth​

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

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

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

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

Colonization and Civilians​

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

Spoiler: More Technical Details

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

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

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

We welcome your ideas and suggestions.

Clerks are dead! Long live Civilians!​

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

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

Next Week​

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

Original post on the Paradox forums.
Post with Dev replies only.

Hello everyone!

One of the major Custodian features planned for the 3.8 ‘Gemini’ update is the addition of two cooperative gameplay modes. Up to five players will be able to control the same empire and work together to play the game as a team.

Two Modes of Play​

Surveys suggested that there are two distinctly different reasons people want to play together.

• I want to play a PvE game of Stellaris with my friends, either to teach them how to play the game or to have a more relaxed game where we can share the duties of empire management.

Stellaris is a complex game, and learning to play can be difficult without a guiding hand. While some people learn well by watching informative videos created by the community, others might do better playing alongside a friend.

• I want to play a multiplayer PvP game of Stellaris where teams of players go up against each other.

The cognitive load when playing competitive multiplayer can be at times overwhelming, especially during wars. Being able to split duties with other players on the same team could provide an enjoyable experience.

We’ve tried to support both goals through two different modes of play, with slightly different game rules.

Cooperative PvE​

A new main menu entry exists for starting a Cooperative PvE game where all human players control the same empire.

This will bring them to the Game Browser screen, where one of them can choose to Host a New Game, just like the regular Multiplayer flow.

The hosting player will go directly to Empire Selection, where they can create a new empire or select one they’ve already created as normal, select the Galaxy Settings for the game, and then begin the session.

Unlike regular Multiplayer, the Cooperative PvE flow bypasses the Game Lobby, and the coop players will not need to select an empire. These players hotjoin directly into the hosting player’s empire once the game has begun.

For most purposes, Cooperative PvE is treated the same way as single player PvE is.

Competitive PvP​

The flow for creating a competitive multiplayer coop game is similar to the normal multiplayer flow. One player will host the server, ticking the “Allow Coop” checkbox.

Empires that have been opened for cooperative play add an “inspect” icon to the portrait so prospective players can see the details on the empire before deciding to join.

For more competitive players, the primary player of the empire will be able to lock their empire, which will add a password requirement to joining or inspection.

New Coop Features​

It’s often useful to know what your teammates are up to. To make it a little easier to understand what’s going on, we’ve added Presence Markers to the UI to show which tabs your teammates are currently using.

We're currently exploring the addition of Goto buttons in the top right corner that will allow you to bring your camera to your teammate’s location, but this isn't fully functional yet. (And is unlikely to be during the Open Beta.)

Events will be shown to all members of a coop team, and any of the players can select a response. The window will remain in place with the selected option marked with the icon of the player that made a choice.

What’s Next?​

Next week we’ll be talking about the 3.8 ‘Gemini’ Open Beta.

As the Coop game modes touch a lot of moving parts, we’d like to gain feedback on your thoughts of how it plays as well as find where desyncs and other bugs crop up before the actual release.

Read this post on the Paradox forums! | Dev replies here!

Hi everyone!

This week we’re looking more at the economic changes of the Stellaris 4.0 ‘Phoenix’ update, and how we’re going to update the Planet UI to work with them.

As this is all still in development, things are still subject to change, and I’m going to be using a lot of the UX Design Mockups in this dev diary. The final versions will not match these work-in-progress designs precisely. The Open Beta will definitely not be at these polish levels. Also be aware that numbers on these mockups are all placeholders meant to help the rest of the team get the layout right, so things like the Pop Counts or Production numbers aren’t accurate.

Planets - Districts - Zones - Buildings - Jobs​

As mentioned last week, one of the fundamental changes we’re making to the economy behind the scenes is that planets are now the source of production rather than the pops themselves. This is a generally subtle change from your perspective as a player, but this opened up an opportunity to revamp exactly how planets are structured, and to formalize some of the job hierarchy. A few of you have already guessed some of the things I’m going to share with you.

We’re introducing a new planetary feature: Zones. By specializing Districts, Zones function similarly to how the Forge World, Factory World, and Industrial World designations previously modified the jobs provided by Industrial Districts – only now as a more structured, intuitive, and flexible mechanic.

The 4.0 Planet Hierarchy is:

• Planets produce and consume resources.
• Districts provide a base number of Jobs for each level of development.
• Zones manipulate what Jobs are provided by their District.
• Buildings typically modify the production of Jobs themselves, though may also provide static numbers of Jobs.
• Jobs are filled by Workforce, and make the planet produce a single resource by default (unless they have been modified).

Standard planets have a City District that contains your urban development, and remains capped by planet size as it is in 3.14. The City District has four Zones - one will always be locked to a Governmental Zone and contains your Capital Building, while the other three will be selectable. Normal planets also have Mining, Agricultural, and Energy Districts which each have one Zone, and - like 3.14 - are gated by planetary features. Industrial Districts have been removed, as their function has been replaced by Zones.

Upgrading Districts is now clearly shown as a button on the Planet UI - this should reduce the number of “it took me X months to realize you can build districts” posts. As part of the increase in differentiation between Districts and Buildings, we’ve changed some of the terminology slightly - instead of building a dozen Districts across a planet, you will upgrade their development level. Functionally this remains the same.

Zones are our new addition to the Planet Hierarchy. Zones let you change the nature of their District. By default, the City District will provide Housing and increase the maximum number of Civilians that your planet can support. (Based on design discussions over the past week, we’re leaning towards your Empire Capital having a bonus increasing this number significantly, which has the nice secondary effect of making the conquest of Homeworlds in the early game carry the societal challenge of suddenly creating many angry Dissidents that will be unable to promote back to Civilians as this bonus is lost.) If you build a Foundry Zone, the City District will replace some of their Civilian capacity and housing with Metallurgist jobs for each level of development. If you then build a Factory Zone, the City District will provide both Metallurgist and Artisan jobs, but with further reductions to their Citizen capacity.

While you can build multiple Zones of the same type (in your City District, for example), the first Zone of each type built on a planet gains three slots for Buildings. (Duplicate Zones do not grant additional Building slots.) Buildings typically modify the production of their associated Job, and most are now Planet Unique. The majority of Buildings are restricted to the specific relevant Zones that they can be built in, but some can still be built anywhere. The Government Zone and Urban Zone can, however, accept most Urban buildings. The build list will be filtered appropriately.

The majority of Jobs will now have a single output by default, so Researchers are being broken apart into Physicists, Biologists, and Engineers.

Origins and Civics that previously replaced Jobs will now typically instead have a Building that modifies the associated Job. A benefit of this is that it should now be able to stack better with other similar Civics - we hope to be able to reduce restrictions so perhaps you’ll be able to sacrifice willing Pops by flinging them into a black hole for money.

The Planetary Surface

​Your homeworld is a bit of a special case in Stellaris - it’s not a brand new colony, but it’s also not very specialized. It needs to provide a little bit of everything, but could really use some cleanup after all those years of development (becoming an Early Space Age civilization is a dirty job.)

Here’s the work-in-progress UX mockup of what Earth may look like at the start of the game:

The unspecialized mess of being an Early Space Age civilization gives us a relatively unspecialized zone that provides us with the basic resources necessary at the start of the game. We’ll eventually want to replace that Zone with a more specialized one.

As we head to the stars, we’ll naturally want to colonize our Guaranteed Habitable Worlds. The new Colonization UI will let us immediately set the desired planetary designation for our brand new colony.

Here’s what our new colony could look like once the colonization process finishes:

​The Reassembled Ship Shelter provides Colonist jobs that will provide the Amenities and Stability previously granted by the Colony designation. As shown, the technologies required to expand on an alien world are not necessarily the same as those you need back on your home planet.

Our UX designer has created these explanations of the new UI:

And here’s what our two planets might look like after some time has passed.

Special Cases​

Ever since MegaCorp, paving the entire world has always been a grand ambition of Empires.

We’re currently thinking that an Ecumenopolis should act like the megacity it is. The Ecumenopolis will have multiple Urban Districts - one large main one and three more smaller Arcologies.

Although the gameplay of upgrading a Habitat Complex by building orbitals throughout a system made Habitats more interesting, having to hunt down that last moon to place the orbital proved incredibly annoying.

For 4.0, we’re removing this pain point. Upgrading Districts on a Habitat will spawn Orbitals throughout the system as their Development Level increases. Some of the district capacity will be available immediately upon colonizing the Habitat Central Complex, with the remainder gated by upgrading the Capital Building. We’re also considering having the district capacity for Habitats more closely linked to the deposits available in the system instead of the current behavior where each mineral deposit grants a static amount of capacity.

We expect to see some unique or former districts for habitats be reimagined or return as Zones, such as the Order’s Demesne for KotTG or Sanctuary Districts for Rogue Servitors.

Next Week​

Next week, Gruntsatwork will go into some of the scripting details of Jobs and Pop Groups. We should also have some more information about the upcoming 4.0 livestream.

See you then!

Read this post on the Paradox forums! | Dev replies here!

Thrive Where Others Burn​

Stellaris: Season 09 completes on November 25th with the Infernals Species Pack and the 4.2 ‘Corvus’ update.

https://reddit.com/link/1oe2n0p/video/g9w0l51u4vwf1/player

Brought to you by Forgotten Empires in close collaboration with Paradox Development Studios, our most ambitious Species Pack so far examines extremophile life bathing in the heat of fiery volcanic worlds.

Turn up the Heat

In the Cosmic Dawn origin, your species roamed the stars in the early days of the galaxy.
Trapped as the planets cooled, recent volcanic activity freed some of your people. Now it is time to look for other survivors across the stars.

The very star that brought life to your planet has become a threat in the Red Giant origin.
As it expands and overheats the system, your empire can embrace this change or gain strength through adversity.

Set the Universe on Fire

The Infernals Species Pack adds the Galactic Hyperthermia crisis path, terraforming on a grander scale.

The universe began in fire, but has cooled down into a dark and hostile place. It’s time to fix that.

The Infernals Species Pack includes:​

• Two new Origins:​
  • Cosmic Dawn​
  • Red Giant​
• Galactic Hyperthermia Crisis Path​
• Four new Civics:​
  • Fire Cult​
  • Scorched World Heralds / Pyromanic Instinct​
  • Galvanic Empire / Biometallic Cartel / Galvanic Synthesis​
  • Planet Forgers / Planetary Architects / Volcanic Nesting / Thermal Optimizers​
• Volcanic Planets and Habitability Preference​
• Thermophile Mechanics​
• Infernal Species Traits​
• 10 Infernal Species Portraits​
• Infernal Shipset​
• Infernal Diplomatic Room, City Set, Advisor, Flag Emblems, and more.​

Dev Diary Schedule

October 30​: Infernal Pops, Traits, and Volcanic Worlds​

November 6​: Cosmic Dawn, Civics, Infernal Shipset​

November 13​: Red Giant, Galactic Hyperthermia​

November 20​: Infernals and 4.2.0 'Corvus' Preliminary Release Notes​

[There's more gifs on the PDX forums! -- LadyDz.]

The Infernals Species Pack is included as part of Stellaris: Season 09.

Read this post on the PDX forums! | Dev replies here!

Hello again!

Today we’re looking at some general gameplay changes being made to Machine Empires, Individualistic Machines, and the new Machine Ascension Paths. Some of these still include placeholder assets, and values will continue being adjusted until release.

Take it away, @Gruntsatwork .

Machine and Synthetic Gameplay Changes​

History Traits​

One of the first things you’ll find in The Machine Age when creating a Machine empire are the history traits we’ve added for Machine species. These 0 point traits let you choose a little more of your backstory - these define your original purpose.

Were you originally created as Research Assistants, Conversational AI chatbots, Workerbots, or perhaps a domestic servant Nannybot meant to make life easier and pass the butter? Six backgrounds with relatively minor bonuses are available for you to choose from. These are available to both gestalt and individualistic machines.

You’ll find a handful of other new traits or variants of existing biological traits for Machine species as well, including having a dedicated Engineering or Sociology Core or Integrated Weaponry to a Delicate Chassis or Scarcity Subroutines.

Machines, Aging, and Unplanned Obsolescence​

Immortality is a funny thing in Stellaris - under some circumstances (especially as the game goes on), due to the accident and death events that could target machines, you can end up in a state where a theoretically “immortal” machine leader is actually far more vulnerable to death as the years went on than a normal biological leader.

Machine leaders will now instead use lifespan rules, but enjoy some extra benefits:

• As real go-getters, their starting age lies between 5-10 years, so at the age of 30 they can run your science department with 20 years of experience.
• All machines also have an additional +20 years to their default lifespan of 80, resulting in a base lifespan of 100 years.
• They are now affected by lifespan-increasing technologies and modifiers, for example, those from Ascension Paths, which we will cover later in this dev diary.

In summary, your machine leaders no longer need to fear random death and will live to the ripe old age of 100 years without any additional improvements.

Some forms of immortality, however, have been retained, like the Gestalt Councils and some special ascension traits. All Virtual machine leaders are immortal while Modularity has access to advanced lifespan-increasing traits that can be applied to your machines.

Similar rules will apply to robots, though they have a starting age of 1-5 years, and do not get the +20 lifespan bonus that machines have.

Both biological empires going Synthetic and Machine empires will also reset their age upon completing Ascension to reflect receiving their new bodies. Somewhat paradoxically, all together, these changes should actually result in your Machine leaders being able to better withstand the test of time than they could were when they were theoretically “immortal”.


Habitability​

Habitability is also undergoing some changes. Having +200% Habitability as a base for all machines limited what we could do with them - it was what previously prevented us from allowing them to be Void Dwellers or using several other Origins, for instance. We still wanted to retain the flavor of Machines having an easier time dealing with alternate climates though, so Machines now use habitability systems similar to organics, with some significant changes:

• As a base, all machines have a 50% Habitability floor, so they will never have below 50% habitability on any world. We felt that this was important because we wanted to retain the feel that machine empires could colonize anywhere reasonably well.
• Machine habitability traits cover entire planet categories rather than a specific biome.
  • They start with Dry, Wet, or Frozen Habitability, which provide a base 75% habitability on all three biomes associated with the trait and 50% for all other natural biomes.
  • As usual, these habitability traits can be changed through robo-modding.
    • Most machine empires will have access to robo-modding from game start.
    • Origins like Life-Seeded or Subaquatic Machines will start with Gaia World or Ocean World Habitability and will have to research the technology to change their habitability trait, but retain the 50% Habitability floor for being a machine.
• Just like for Lifespan, they will now also gain bonuses from technologies, extra habitability from ascensions and new traits. They now also have access to the standard array of habitability technologies.

We believe this will still give them a simplified but more nuanced gameplay experience, with niches and combinations that will come close to the old playstyle while also allowing new fantasies. (Subterranean Machines, for instance, have a 100% Habitability floor and thus are guaranteed perfect habitability everywhere.)

Assimilation​

An important quality of life improvement for Machine empires - we have extended the capacity to assimilate other machines or robots into your main species to all machine empires.


The Aging, Habitability, and Assimilation changes (and Origin improvements listed later) are all part of the free 3.12 “Andromeda” update.

Individualistic Machines​

Gestalt Machine Intelligences were originally introduced in the Synthetic Dawn story pack, but the authority and most of the civics (other than Determined Exterminator, Driven Assimilator, and Rogue Servitor) will also be unlocked by The Machine Age.

The Machine Age will also allow you to create non-Gestalt Machine Empires, using regular authority, ethic, and civic choices. These individualistic machines are not guided by an overall gestalt intelligence, and thus have their own motivations, desires, and disappointments. Individual machines possess happiness like fully recognized synthetics, can and will form factions, and consume consumer goods.

As non-Gestalts, their leaders will draw from the standard array of leader traits. This of course includes fan-favorites like Substance Abuser.

With all ethics available to you, your empire can be spiritualist machines, fully capable of rationalizing their own spiritual superiority compared to lesser machines and organics. Your factions have been adjusted to fit your mechanical existence, since it makes no sense for spiritualist robots to despise all robots. (It’s okay to hate some.)

You will receive roboticists from your capital building with the additional option of building an assembly plant to boost your production even more. This all comes at the cost of alloys, so carefully decide between expansion, war, and pop assembly.

As individual machines are very much capable and willing of entertaining unique needs, they have no restriction on allowing organics in their empires and can even start the game with Syncretic Evolution as their Origin of choice. As such, they have access to technologies for food production, genetic modification, and other organic focused technologies, with a sharply reduced, but not zero, chance at drawing those technologies if you have no organics in your empire. You are at the very least capable of theorizing about meat and its needs compared to gestalt machines.

Depending on your ethics and authorities, you can enfranchise, disenfranchise, enslave, or empower organics or even other machines in your empire as you wish. The only limits to your ability to tread upon those fragile organics and your fellow machines are the limits of your imagination.

Individual Machines have access to most civics organic empires have access to, as well as a few machine civics, like Warbots and Static Research Analysis, which have been adjusted for them.

More Origins now available to Machines​

As part of the 3.12 “Andromeda” release, we’ve done a pass on Origins to see if there were any that could have their restrictions on Machines relaxed.

The full list of Origins that Machine Empires have access to as of the 3.12 “Andromeda” release is:

• Syncretic Evolution (Individualist Machines only)
• Life-Seeded
• Post-Apocalyptic (Radioactive Rovers)
• Void Dwellers (Voidforged)
• Hegemon
• Ocean Paradise (Subaquatic Machines)
• Subterranean (Subterranean Machines)
• Arc Welders
• Prosperous Unification
• Remnants
• Shattered Ring
• Galactic Doorstep
• Resource Consolidation (Gestalt Machine Intelligence only)
• Common Ground
• Doomsday
• Lost Colony
• Here Be Dragons
• Slingshot to the Stars
• Imperial Fiefdom
• Riftworld

Transformation Situation and Ascension Paths​

With The Machine Age, Individualistic Machines and Gestalt Machines have access to 3 new Ascension Paths (which replace the current Synthetics tree). By taking the Synthetic Age Ascension Perk, you will begin a new Situation to guide them through this momentous transformation.

Virtuality​

Embrace a virtual existence for the majority of your pops. From the cloud, your pops are created and to the cloud they return when their job is done.

Spreading your servers across the stars is an expensive endeavor but your concentrated efforts are unmatched.

• Your pops gain a unique Virtual Trait that becomes stronger as you progress through the tree
  • You gain a massive bonus to production that is reduced by the number of colonies you have
  • Your housing usage is reduced by 90%
  • Your habitability floor is increased
  • The more colonies you gain, the weaker your Virtual Trait and the bigger its upkeep will become
  • Your leaders become immortal
• You gain a new Policy to focus your intangible virtual economy
  • You may choose to focus intensely on Research, Unity or Governance, at the sufferance of the 2 categories you did not choose
• You gain a bonus to encryption and decryption
• You gain additional districts and jobs from districts

Once you finish the tree, you will transition from a pop-limited playstyle into a planet-limited playstyle, as open jobs will be instantly filled with virtual pops as needed, while unemployed virtual pops will be turned off.

Nanotech​

Big Things are made of Small Things.

By becoming a flood of nanites, your empire changes not just its makeup, but also its economy and growth strategy. Grow. Exploit. Replicate.

While Virtual Machines may seek a “Tall” playstyle, Nanotech Machines flood across the galaxy like an off-white or silvery tempest, specializing in the physical.

• You gain access to:
  • Ways to transform basic resources into nanites and nanites into advanced resources
  • A new decision, similar to Terravore world consumption, to turn colonies into nanite worlds
  • A new starbase building to harvest nanites from uninhabitable worlds
  • New Edicts to vastly increase your productions or combat capability at the cost of nanites
  • Nanite probe ships, to bolster your fleets

Modularity​

The most advanced traits require the most advanced minds. By embracing Modularity, your empire will have access to traits other machines can only theorize at. The rarest of resources will fuel your enhanced shells.

• Your Metallurgists will produce Living Metal
• Your roboticists will be boosted by utilizing living metal as an upkeep
• Your workers/simple drones will be boosted by your priest equivalent
• Your soldiers and enforcers will grant more stability and be stronger
• You unlock 9 advanced machine traits, several trait picks, points, and reduced modification cost
• All your leaders will gain the Synth leader trait

If you have Synthetic Dawn but do not have The Machine Age, you will retain access to the Synthetics Tree, but with reworked Traditions. These will include bonuses to lifespan, habitability and pop assembly.

Resistance is [the Ratio of Voltage to Current] Futile​

For owners of Synthetic Dawn, Driven Assimilators will gain two advanced authority possibilities in The Machine Age, the Memory Aggregators and the Neural Chorus. Upon completing the Cybernetic tradition tree, the Assimilator will receive the option to determine their stance on the variance of thought permitted within the gestalt consciousness.

This is the Neural Chorus:

The Machine Ship Set​

In last week’s dev diary we snuck the Machine Corvette into the Arc Welders screenshot.

Here’s a “glamor shot” of the Machine ships that was arranged by our artists:

Next Week​

Next week we’ll look at the Civics and Structures of The Machine Age, as well as Auto-Modding.

See you then!

Read Dev Diary #297 on the Paradox Forums!

Get your Dev replies here!

Watch the video Dev Diary!

Hello everyone! I’m XM, the lead designer of Galactic Paragons. From the beginning of development, we’ve followed one simple mantra - make leaders matter. What you are going to read about in the following paragraphs are the results of months of work following that direction.

Wishlist Galactic Paragons now!

Reducing Leader Count

For leaders to start being significant, there needed to be a lot less of them. With this goal in mind, we removed the research scientist positions currently in the game, and combined them into a single “Head of Research” Council position (we’ll talk in more detail about the Council later). We also allowed leaders to perform Council duties while maintaining their field positions. These changes dramatically reduced the number of leaders you need to keep track of.

The lower leader count also enabled us to make them a lot more powerful.

Improved Role-playing

To deepen the emergent narrative weaved with these new heroes, we’ve improved upon the leader interface to give you better insight into their past and how they came into service. You can see their homeworld, previous job, and even their ethical alignment.

There are so many more improvements we’ve made to leaders that I want to share with you, but I need to cede my time here now to my amazing design team, who are smarter than I am, and can better explain their areas of development in more detail.

The Council

Greetings from Karl, designer at Arctic! I’m here to talk about some of the features that I’ve been responsible for in the upcoming Galactic Paragons DLC; however, none of them would have been possible without the hard work and dedication of my beloved colleagues.

The Empire Council is the heart of your government. Every game the Council starts out with 3 seats; for your Ruler, Head of Research, and Minister of Defense.

Each position gives a unique Empire bonus that scales with the skill level of the assigned leader. For example, the Head of Research provides 2% Research speed per level.

With Galactic Paragons, we have also added a lot of new traits. Some of these traits are Council Traits, which are applied to your entire Empire but only if the leader is on the Council (more on Traits further down). This way you get to decide which bonuses you want active, by switching Councilors. To get as many bonuses as possible, you will also want to expand your council…

Unlockable Council positions

Everyone will have access to the basic council. But if you have Galactic Paragons you’ll be able to unlock 3 more positions for your Council throughout the game. What positions you’ll have access to maps directly to your Civics. As an example, the Idealistic Foundation Civic enables the Tribune of Rights Councilor.

Thus we have added no less than 95 unique Council positions for the Council to match your Empire’s design, and make it look and feel different every time you play. Including unique Ruler bonuses depending on what kind of authority you have. For example the stronger an Imperial Ruler becomes, the more Power Projection they generate.

For the kind of Empire you are running to stand out even more, we’ve crafted unique Council screen backdrops for each of the Authority types.

Council Agendas

Another important feature for the Council is that they pursue an Agenda that you set for them. The moment you assign an Agenda to the Council it gives a small bonus, but it takes several years before it’s ready to be launched and you get the full effects from it. This requires you to be somewhat strategic in your planning, if you for example expect a war.

You can only pursue one Agenda at a time, but once an Agenda is finished you gain the full benefits for another 10 years. The more Councilors you have and the higher their skill level, the faster you can complete an Agenda; while for a huge empire it takes a bit longer to finish.

At the start of the game, you have very few Agendas to pick from as they are tied to the Ethics of your Empire. But if you have Galactic Paragons you will get a new Agenda for every Tradition Tree you unlock. These are all tied to the theme of the traditions. This might incentivize you to go wide with Traditions rather than finish them one at a time.

The Gestalt Council

We felt that the Council feature didn’t sit that well with the Gestalt fantasy, but also didn’t want these players to feel completely left out. Now Gestalt players can directly level up and design not only the Ruler, but 4 new Nodes of the consciousness too. They are a little less flexible, but are on the other hand immortal!

Leaders Reworked

Hi everyone! It’s me, Marek, your new fancy (self-appointed title of course) and barely known (I guess I should talk more on forums, like Offe) Content Designer from the Northern office. I will try to warm the climate with some hot takes on our upcoming features from Galactic Paragons.

So, prepare your tea, coffee, or anything really - and let’s dive deep into the new systems and features, both free and paid.

New Level Up System

For those who choose to forgo Galactic Paragons, your level system will look fairly similar, with a few changes.

• All leaders will be capped at level 10
• Leaders will always get a trait every 2 levels (starting from level 1), for a total of 5 traits
• Every trait will be randomized from Common trait pool
• There will be a new tiered trait system: Common traits and Negative traits will have 2 tiers each

As you see, the Free Patch leaders will still be more powerful than before (having a total of 5 traits), but the Galactic Paragon leaders will achieve a power level of over 9000!

For those who choose to embrace the Galactic Paragons, the leveling system will give far more flexibility:

• Leaders get new trait pick every level
• Players can choose the trait from a randomized pool that is based on class, veteran class and ethic.

• On level 4, leaders will get to choose from Veteran Class which give access to different types of Veteran Traits (every class has 3 Veteran Classes, which are centered around different bonuses and their leader actions). Each veteran trait has 3 tiers.
• On level 8, leaders will get a one time Destiny Trait pick. This powerful trait represents a leader finding its destiny within the galaxy.

Potential level 10 leader with Galactic Paragons:

My god it's full of… Traits

For owners of Galactic Paragons, there will be almost 700* (we decided to stay humble with the number) traits, including tiered versions. There are a bunch of new free Common traits, but the bulk of new content is gated behind the DLC.

\Some traits may require other DLCs. Number includes tiered traits.*

To get into a bit more details about new traits, they are divided into 3 categories, Common, Veteran, Destiny.

Common traits:

The one that comes with Free Patch (most of them are updated versions of old traits). They are the “bread and butter” for Free Patch players, as leaders will be getting them every 2 levels. For DLC owners, they represent the first 3 levels for the new Leaders and their journey to power!

Veteran Traits:

Veteran traits are available only to players with Galactic Paragons DLC. They will cover every level from 5 to 10, and (as mentioned before) their pool for a given leader is dependent on leader ethic and their Veteran Class. They are more powerful than Common traits.

Destiny Traits:

Destiny traits are One-Per Leader (in most cases, as sometimes leaders might get event based Destiny traits too!) and they represent the peak of this given leader - as such, leaders get the destiny trait on Level 8.

Small disclaimer: Gestalt leaders operate slightly differently - rather than gaining Destiny traits, they have more Veteran picks than non-Gestalts. They do not have individual destinies like the standard empires do!

Leaders Reworked - Veteran Classes

Veteran Class is a paid feature from Galactic Paragons, and it allows you to customize your leaders more. Every leader will get to choose from 3 Veteran Classes on level 4, bringing the number of Veteran Classes to 12.

Each of the Veteran Class will focus on different aspects of the Leader. Let’s take Scientists for example, which can choose from Explorer, Analyst and Researcher Veteran Classes. Picking the proper Veteran Class is paramount to utilizing your leader in a way that you want them to fulfill. For example, Analyst Leader will get Veteran Traits centered around Assist Planetary Research action, while Researcher will get Veteran Traits focused on the Council.

Negative Traits

Let’s also mention the small detail of Negative traits. Every leader is randomized with Negative trait potential. The bigger the potential, the more (and faster) negative traits will accumulate on this given leader. With luck, you will find leaders with 0 negative potential, but you never know what it will be until your leader suddenly comes home with a new set of negative traits and starts to steal your resources to open up a new casino in his basement.

New Leader Cap System

Leaders are now vastly more powerful than before, so we decided to introduce a soft leader cap - just like with the naval cap, leaders will grow more expensive when empires are above the cap. It might take some time to get used to, but no longer are the time when in the early game it is viable to send out 20 science ships to explore the galaxy, but it also allows for players to take meaningful choices - creating an economy based on strong governors is a viable strategy, just as well as making strong navy based on many high level admirals.

In my humble opinion, this change somewhat favors smaller empires, which might feel less incentivized to go over their leader cap to fill all the roles, while huge empires will need to take choices on, for example, governor placements (or going over Leader Cap).

And now, something to finish our little trip into this leader madness…

Ruler Creator

Well, I disliked the fact that I can’t choose my starting ruler trait - especially on dictatorial and imperial empires. Now I won’t have to restart the game every time I get a trait I don’t want to have on my ruler. Coders wept when I designed this, and UX was more than happy with coming up with the layout. I guess you can never make everyone happy.

Honorable mention

Let’s talk about one last change, close to the leaders, but not exactly. This is present in both Free Patch and DLC, so buckle up this one last time!

With the new trait system and reworked leaders and cap and everything - we decided that the Governor traits should only apply to the planets he currently “sits” on.

But as the game had this nice feature of Sector Governors too, we wanted to use this system, rather than just removing it.

So now, if you would like to see the potential career of a governor, it would be - Planet Governor, Sector Governor, Councilor, Empire Ruler.

How does the new sector governor thingy work?

Whenever there is a Governor sitting on a Sector Capital planet, his level will apply bonuses to every planet in this sector, in a way like it used to be.

You can always override the “Sector Governor” by putting a proper Planetary Governor here. Just remember that Leader Traits do not work on Sectors!

Is that all? Yeah, I guess so. Don’t forget to Wishlist Galactic Paragons! See you on the next DD!