by EladrinHello everyone!We've updated the Open Beta to 3.99.1, with the following changes: Stellaris 3.99.1 ‘Phoenix’ Open Beta update
Fixes and Improvements

• Fallen Empires are blocked from using the Existential Expulsion casus belli
  
• Negative effects added to the Magnetic Disruption planet modifier
  
• Assembling robots will no longer cause the slow and inevitable decline of your growing pops
  
• Changed auto pick leader traits setting to default to off
  
• Made Species Rights button different for pre-sapients

Pops and Workforce

• Fixed traders not being created from trade zones
  
• Adjusted amenities and housing from luxury housing
  
• Pops now have appropriate Diplomatic Weight
  
• Civilians now grant the benefits associated with culture workers

Planetary View

• Tabs in the Planet view now have correct hotkeys
  
• Urban Zones now show their titles
  
• Moved the build district level button from District Details view into the Planet Summary screen
  
• The Build Queue tooltip no longer says "Previous"
  
• Displaying the District t...

Read more

by EladrinSurprise! An early Stellaris Dev Diary!Last week I mentioned that on Friday we’d evaluate the current build, and I’d see if I could provide a timeline for the Open Beta. Things have been progressing well, so we’ve decided to put a very early version of some of the 4.0 changes to test a few aspects of the new systems.The Stellaris 4.0 update changes a lot of things - you can find a lot of the details in the dev diaries of the last two months. This first build of the 3.99 Open Beta only contains a focused subset of the changes, and many are still in a work-in-progress prototype state. It is not polished, or even done yet.The 3.11 Technology Open Beta very quickly found some performance issues with the Breakthrough Technologies that we were experimenting with, and as the pop systems have advanced far enough to be mostly functional, I want to get some broader gameplay done on that system in particular, even if the rest of the systems have not yet reached a fully playable state. A... Read more

by EladrinHello everyone!We’re still hard at work getting the features we’ve been describing into the game, but this week we’re giving you a bit of a progress update, and I’ll be giving my thoughts on what shape they’ll be in when we begin the Open Beta. As with everything over the past couple of months, all of this is still subject to change.We’ve successfully gotten past the critical milestone of “the game is no longer completely broken”, and things are starting to come together very nicely. DD #367[forum.paradoxplaza.com]: Precursor Selection, Databank, Species Modification, and Ship Designer The first three are fully functional and will be in the Open Beta.The Databank still has some placeholder graphics on some buttons, and we’re planning on adding more entries, but it’s good enough for the Open Beta.The work for the Ship Designer changes was done in the Q2 DLC branch to support that release, and while it is functional it will not be in the Open Beta (but will be in the final rele... Read more

by EladrinHi everyone!This week, Gruntsatwork will discuss the technical details of pop group scripting. This topic is likely to be of most interest to the modding community.The systems we’re implementing now are just scratching the surface of where we want to go with them - we’re looking forward to some of the things we’ll be able to do with these tools over the next few years as well as seeing what you do with them.As with all of these dev diaries, some of this is still subject to change during implementation and during the beta.
Pop Groups and Jobs Hello everyone, Gruntsatwork here! Let us talk about some of the script changes that are coming with 4.0 when it comes to pops and jobs…As Eladrin already mentioned in Dev Diary 370, we are changing the way we look at Pops by grouping them together into Pop Groups. These groups are defined by their species, traits, ethics, and factions but NOT their jobs. It is entirely possible and likely for a pop group to have pops working different jo... Read more

by EladrinHi 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 exac... Read more

by EladrinHello 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[forum.paradoxplaza.com], 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 gro... Read more

by EladrinHello 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 ResourceThe Trade system introduced in the Stellaris 2.2 ‘Le Guin’ update was raised as an especially frequent point of confusion for many players. UX issues around disconnected trade stations combined with some quirks of being a modifier based system (like ignoring habitability) made some of it unintuitive. The system had a major impact on performance as well, so while examining Stellaris for optimizations, we decided that we wanted to revamp the system.In 4.0, Trade will become a standard advanced resource, generally produced in the same way as before, but will follow all of the standard rules around resource-producing jobs. The Trade Routes system has been removed - any produced Trade will be immediately collected like any other normal resource.
We’ve done some cleanup to... Read more

Hello everyone!Today we’re going to take a deeper look at some of the ways we’re adjusting game pacing through changes to Galaxy Generation, Message Settings, Events and Anomalies. Then we’ll take a peek at the Focus system, the Empire Timeline, and a few other changes.Some of this has already been covered in the announcement diary, but I’ll be providing more up-to-date screenshots and more details. As this is from a build that is still in active development, there will be placeholder icons or temporary text in some of these screenshots, and all of these are still subject to change. Pacing Adjustments Stellaris is a game with many moving parts, each of which interact with other elements to produce a complex whole. Small adjustments in one spot can have significant effects in another, and in the end there can be unexpected impact to the general pacing of the game and overall economy.
Galaxy Generation As mentioned in Dev Diary #366[forum.paradoxplaza.com], we’ve gone through all of the ... Read more

by EladrinGreetings, Stellaris Community!Last week we announced the Stellaris 4.0 ‘Phoenix’ update, today we’re going to start going through some of the changes coming in it. As mentioned before, the changes we’ll be going through in the next few dev diaries are still scorching hot on the development branch, and may change drastically before final release.That said, the ones I’ll be talking about today have cooled off a little bit and are pretty stable at this point. Precursor Selection Let’s start with a simple one that I already leaked to you back in December.The Advanced Settings tab when you’re setting up a new game will now have a section that lets you set which Precursors are available in your galaxy.The galaxy will be split into slices and the available Precursors distributed as they are currently - in the above example, the First League and Cybrex would not appear for anyone in this galaxy.You are free to set the number of available Precursors to whatever number you desire, eve... Read more

Hello everyone!We’re happy to announce that Stellaris is part of Steam’s Real-Time Strategy Fest! From now until Monday, get up to 75% off Stellaris basegame and up to 50% off Stellaris DLCs. There’s never been a better time to get your friends into the best space grand strategy game, plus if you play with your friends in multiplayer, they can borrow your DLC for that game! See what's on sale here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/281990/Stellaris/ Read more

by EladrinHappy 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[forum.paradoxplaza.com]
  
• Pirates and Crime[forum.paradoxplaza.com]
  
• Espionage[forum.paradoxplaza.com]
  
• Factions and Politics[forum.paradoxplaza.com]

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 answere... Read more

Hello Stellaris Community!The devs have started trickling back into the office, and we expect to resume our regularly scheduled dev diaries next week! This means this is our final feedback post of the holiday break, but we’re ending strong with something that we know a lot of you have been wanting for a long time: factions and politics.Internal politics is such a nebulous term, and it means many different things to different people, and we’ve discussed internally many times just what “Internal Politics” means to us. But this is our opportunity to ask:What does internal politics mean to you?Here’s what Eladrin said in DD #364[forum.paradoxplaza.com]:

Factions and Politics
Governments in Stellaris may hold a grudge against you for centuries for your atrocities but pops and factions are very quick to forgive and forget. There are no revanchist or irredentist factions that make trouble when borders change, nor variety within the factions themselves. I’d also like to see factions have their o...

Read more

Hello Stellaris Community!We hope you’ve all had a great holiday season, and we’re excited to see people starting to trickle back from their well-earned vacations. That means more Stellaris news is just right around the corner, with regularly scheduled dev diaries picking up in the next week or two.But before we get too hyped over what’s coming next, we have to finish up some bookkeeping from last year. Specifically, we mentioned last year that we would be retiring Stellaris: Season 08 early in the new year. That time is now, specifically, tomorrow. After tomorrow - around 3 PM CET - Stellaris: Season 08 will no longer be available and the content will be rolled into the Ultimate Bundle in order to make space for a new Season for 2025. What is Stellaris: Season 08?
Stellaris: Season 08 contains all the major Stellaris releases from 2024, including The Machine Age, the Cosmic Storms Mechanical Expansion, and Grand Archive Story Pack and the illustrious non-spherical Rick the Cube machi... Read more

by MrFreake_PDXHello Stellaris Community!We hope you’ve all had a great holiday season so far! We’ve collected some excellent feedback so far, with over 8000 responses to the two feedback forms to date.If you want to leave some feedback on Pirates and Crime[docs.google.com], there’s still time! The form will be active until next Monday, after which we will close responses.The topic for this week’s feedback form is Espionage. We’ve often talked about an espionage rework, and know that many of you find espionage rather lackluster outside of certain circumstances. So here’s your chance to let us know what you think!Here’s what Eladrin said in Dev Diary #364[forum.paradoxplaza.com]:

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

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

So, do you think espionage is deserving of a rewo... Read more

Hello Stellaris Community!We hope you all have had/are having a great holiday season! Last week’s War and War Resolution Feedback Form had over 4000 responses, and we’d like to take the time to thank you all for your feedback. There are certainly some insights to be gained from the feedback you offered, and we’re excited to see some trends emerging - and combined with the rather large sample size - we feel we have a solid amount of community feedback that can inform potential future development on War and War resolution in Stellaris.For those of you who didn’t see last week’s feedback post, we are taking advantage of the break in dev diaries to collect feedback to inform future Stellaris development. This is not a promise or a guarantee that there will be a rework on any of these mechanics at any point, this is to collect community feedback in a centralized place so that if the devs do a rework in a particular area, we have an idea of the community’s expectations and what you like and ... Read more

by MrFreake_PDXHello Stellaris Community!With the devs off on holidays, and a rare four Thursdays in a row free, we decided we would commandeer your regularly scheduled Thursday dev diary slot to gather some feedback that may help inform development at some point in the future. Here on Stellaris, we work on rather long timelines, the content for 2025 has been in-development for some time already, and while we can't wait to share those things with you, our objective here is to inform potential future development based off the topics discussed in Stellaris Dev Diary #364 - Sights Unseen[forum.paradoxplaza.com].We are going to spend the next four weeks collecting feedback on what the Community likes and dislikes about the current version of Stellaris, and their expectations for certain features that were discussed.While having an open conversation worked really well for Dev Diary #364, and we thank you for sharing your thoughts there, a more structured approach is required for something t... Read more