by Alfray Stryke Hey folks, I’m taking over for Eladrin this week since he’s swamped with meetings and I got voluntold for Dev Diary Duty. The final 4.5 build isn't ready to ship, but we did push an Open Beta update earlier today, here’s the changelogs for that. Stellaris 4.5 ‘Cy
by Alfray Stryke
Hey folks, I’m taking over for Eladrin this week since he’s swamped with meetings and I got voluntold for Dev Diary Duty.
The final 4.5 build isn't ready to ship, but we did push an Open Beta update earlier today, here’s the changelogs for that.
Stellaris 4.5 ‘Cygnus’ Open Beta Update 8 Preliminary Release Notes
Balance
Pops ethics change is accelerated, by increasing a lot the frequency of change and marginally diminishing the size of the changes.
Pops faction fill is much slower by default, the ethic attraction factor increased to give agency over that and allow for faster change
Pops now leave a faction as soon as it becomes invalid or exceeds its eligible Pops, instead of waiting for the monthly update
Bugfix
The minimum value for the max number of holding buildings is now always 0 (i.e. the minimum is no longer affected by the base define or certain modifiers).
Different modifiers for the max buildings in a branch office are now summed together before being truncated, not after.
`POP_ETHOS_MIN_ATTRACTION` is now ignored when no ethic ever reaches it, instead of suppressing the ethics shift entirely
Driven Assimilator purge vassals no longer get stuck on conquered worlds that contain robotic pops. Those pops are now taken in as machines and handed to the Overlord along with the assimilated ones.
The "Grotesque Rock Formation" special project is now anchored to the planet the anomaly was found on, instead of following the science ship around the galaxy.
Planets colonized by the Contingency or the Prethoryn Scourge now show a complete set of districts, instead of missing their housing districts entirely.
Synthetically ascended founder species can now be released as sector vassals, provided the empire has ascended synthetically or researched Synthetic Leaders.
C.A.R.E's world can now be bombarded from orbit once its defensive protocols have turned hostile.
The Claimant event in the Heirs of the Khan origin now correctly names the rival candidate's species.
Fixed missing species names in several Grand Archive specimen descriptions and in the Grand Archive early-stage testing event.
Contingency worlds now detonate their failsafes if they somehow come under the control of another empire, so the Contingency can no longer be left in a state where it cannot be defeated.
Protostars can now yield physics and engineering deposits from Deep Scanning and The Surveyor relic.
While playing with both the Red Giant origin and Eager Explorers civic, orbital stations can be built on the star as intended.
The Mardak Vol and Vol species names, the Mardak Purger ship names, and the Crystalline Empire ruler title no longer always appear in English.
Fixed Action Action Speed modifiers from jobs not applying
Fixed Starlit Citadel origin failing to spawn its initial Deep Space Citadel.
While using the ship designer on biological ships, the designer window no longer blocks the player from interacting with the edit section buttons.
Fixed some branch office max building modifiers being applied to both the country's colonies and its branch offices.
Tooltip of the Genomic Services Outreach correctly displays the replicators effect.
Opening the holdings buildings tab on a biologic species planet no longer causes the game to freeze
Situation Log entries for contracts, archaeological sites, astral rifts, first contacts and anomalies no longer go stale when one is replaced by a new entry of the same kind.
Ship aura effects are now recalculated when an aura-carrying ship is destroyed and replaced, instead of continuing to apply the destroyed ship's auras.
Several interface lists could keep showing outdated entries after what they listed was replaced. This affected the diplomacy vote and favors screens, envoy selection, the planet population and jobs views, resettlement, the species list, megastructure design selection, fleet home base selection, orbital lists and agreement terms.
Fixed map ping staying visible after right-clicking an event notification.
In coop, dismissing an event window now also removes the corresponding notification.
Fixed Change Federation Type window not updating the federation level text automatically.
Fixed ethics randomization failing for multiple reasons, maybe because of pre-FTL special behaviors
Factions without supporters are no longer hidden from the outliner and the factions tab
The faction approval icon now matches its modifier icon, and faction support no longer reuses the attraction icon
The Arc Furnace Smelting tab now acts on the furnace on screen instead of the first one opened, so its highlighted mode, tooltip prices and retooling all apply to the right furnace.
Event popups are no longer suppressed while the research window is open.
Forced empires are once again displayed correctly in the New Game galaxy setup.
Nomad empires are no longer missing the excavation option in the Infernals event chain.
Added missing localization for several bypass types.
Leaders who are missing in action, including a missing ruler, can no longer stand for election.
Special projects with triggered requirements now show their icon on the galaxy map again.
Megastructure build speed modifiers no longer apply twice to construction ships.
Added the missing Behemoth ship size icon, including its damaged variant.
AI
AI economic plans no longer consider themselves complete based on scaling-only resource targets that were never actually counted, which could leave an empire stalled on an early economic tier indefinitely.
AI empires are less likely to leave Urban Expansion districts on Urban World colonies and now prefer specializing them into Commercial Nexus instead.
AI empires no longer construct the Institute, Supercomputer, or advanced production center buildings on colonies without a matching research or industrial district.
AI should no longer build superfluous colony ships
UI/UX
Fixed layout issues in the Form Federation and Change Federation Type windows.
Factions now display their average attraction and its breakdown in their size tooltip
Faction and ethic entries now show their monthly supporter change, with a per colony breakdown
Reworked the empire ethics header and tooltips to match the faction ones
New icons for faction approval, support, supporters and attraction, and new ethics modifier icons
Improved hitboxes for the factions tab entries
Downgrading a starbase now asks for confirmation first.
Performance
Faction attraction, eligible Pops and monthly Pop changes are now cached instead of being recomputed for every tooltip
Ethics Pop changes are now cached per empire and per colony, and pop ethics country update is only done on the monthly tick
Modding
Removed the unused `ai_update_type` technology parameter.
The holding max building modifiers are now called `branch_office_target_max_buildings_add`, `branch_office_owner_max_buildings_add`, `subject_holding_target_max_buildings_add` and `subject_holding_owner_max_buildings_add`.
Removed unused modifiers `planet_max_buildings_add` and `planet_non_artificial_max_buildings_add`.
Added the `pop_attraction_tag` parameter to pop faction types, listing the factors behind a faction's attraction in its tooltip
Every faction type now declares its attraction tags
Faction icons moved to `gfx/interface/icons/factions/`, with the per faction type icons under `factions/types/`
When a bug is more than a bug
Sometime last month, I started investigating a few player complaints and bugs involving leaders, things like:
“Sometimes my empire spawns with leaders of the wrong ethics”
“My super-gene-modded Overtuned species perfect for leadership doesn’t generate leaders”
I thought these would be simple fixes and be within scope for 4.5.
I was wrong.
What follows is an insight in how our beloved game spirals into complexity and tech debt.
I started out thinking that our leader generation code should be fairly logical and checking for the right species and ethics is likely some calculation or other going wrong.
How Leaders Were Generated: In 4.5 (and earlier) the following occurred:
The leader pool refreshed, causing the leader generation code to generate a fresh batch of leaders. Then for each leader:
A job was selected using a weighted random list.
A random pop group that worked that job was picked.
The colony that the pop group belonged to was picked.
A species was selected. (What do you mean we should consider the species working that job??)
An ethic the pop group held was picked.
We have now generated a leader with a species, home world, background job, and ethic.
So we could have a Blorg leader, from Earth while no Blorg lived on Earth, provided a Blorg pop group existed in the UNE.
So that explains a few things.
How Leaders Will Be Generated: Planned for 4.6, is the following:
The leader pool refreshes, causing the leader generation code to generate a fresh batch of leaders. Then for each leader:
We build a list of every species in the empire that qualifies as a leader (there are slightly different rules for Officials & Scientists vs Commanders).
Each species is weighted by the sum total of the size of all pop groups of that species in the empire.
A species is randomly selected from the list, using the weights to bias the result.
We build a list of every pop group in the empire of the selected species in the empire.
Each pop group is weighted by the size of the pop group multiplied by the weight of their stratum (10 for Elite, 5 for Specialist, 1 for Worker).
A pop group is randomly selected from the list, using the weights to bias the result.
We grab the colony and stratum from the pop group with a simple look up.
For ethic, we randomly select an ethic the pop group holds, weighted by how many pops in the group hold the ethic.
For your empire’s initial ruler, if the empire has a fanatic or absolute ethic, we force their ethic to be the regular version of that ethic.
For leaders in gestalt empires, we skip the ethic assignment.
We build a list of every job worked by the pop group
Each job is weighted by the number of pops working that job multiplied by the job weights (Base of 1 for every job in the game).
A job is randomly selected from the list, using the weights to bias the result.
We have now generated a leader with a species, home world, background stratum, background job, and ethic. All of these values are consistent with what actually exists in your empire.
Well I fixed the bug, but this can be better. Some issues I found along the way:
Stratum and job weights are poorly defined.
Background jobs had issues with job swaps.
Species traits that improve leaders don’t influence leader generation.
So once more into the code mines
Firstly, a leader’s background job will now be frozen at generation after looking up which job swap is valid. So a leader generated from a research world could have their background job displayed as a “Astral Researcher” not “Physicist”.
Next up, I did a complete inventory of ethics. For each ethic, if the empire holds that ethic (or the fanatic or absolute version of that ethic) they increase the weight for the relevant strata or jobs to be selected during leader generation.
Due to how these weights are constructed, the leader class will have far more sway in the background job of a leader than the empire ethic.
Well having all this data about leaders is great, but the leader tooltip is awful, let’s do something about that.
Current leader tooltips from a CoM game (my Commonwealth has necromancers for reasons)
Leader tooltips from the same edited CoM after throwing away most of the leader tooltip and reworking it
Since this investigation kept growing and I had the time available, I figured “Well why not do something about those species traits?”. After an inventory of valid species traits, I decided to add a new “Recruitable Leaders from Species” modifier, which acts as a multiplier on the chance for a species to be selected when the leader generation code runs. Thus if a species has Recruitable Leaders from Species: +50% and a total empire population of 10,000, they’ll count for the purposes of selection odds as a population size of 15,000.
Recruitable Leaders
Species Traits
+25%
Cybernetic, Erudite, Psionic, Virtual
Machine and Mechanical (if the Synthetic Leader trait would be granted)
+20%
Augmentations of the Choir, Augmentations of the Commune, Augmentations of the Fellowship, Augmentations of the Templars, Gene Mentorship, Learning Algorithms (Cybernetic), Ritualistic Implants
Finally, I figured that since I’m fixing up issues with leaders, why not add some additional modding support.
Draft Changelogs for this “Bugfix”
Balance
A Philosopher King may now be assigned to govern their empire capital.
Species traits now influence which species produces leaders. Traits that improve leaders make that species more likely, and traits that impair them make it less likely.
Ethics have been reworked to prefer leader backgrounds that suit them. Authoritarian empires favor the ruling class, Egalitarian empires favor workers and specialists, and every ethic now has a preference.
Bugfix
A leader's background species now matches the population of their home colony. Previously a leader could be one species while their recorded home colony held only another.
Starting leaders no longer hold an ethic their empire does not have. A Spiritualist empire will not produce a Materialist ruler.
The starting ruler of an empire with a fanatic or absolute ethic now always holds the regular form of that ethic.
Leader background jobs can now correctly draw upon job swaps.
UI
Leader tooltips have been restructured and now include alt-verbose mode style tooltips
A leader's Background is now behind ALT along with the per skill level effects, which shortens an idle leader's tooltip considerably.
A ruler's bonus skill from their authority or civics now appears in their skill breakdown whether or not they sit on the council.
Modding
Added species trait modifier leader_species_weight_mult
Added leader_background_stratum_weight to ethics, civics and leader classes
Fanatic and absolute ethics now inherit the leader background weights of their regular form.
Replaced the define LEADER_JOB_BACKGROUND_STRATA_WEIGHTS with leader_background_weight listed in the pop category definitions
Added leader class parameter valid_for_leader_pool
Added country_pool_size_add and country_external_pool_size_add modifiers
*_starting_age_add and *_starting_age_mult modifiers are now correctly generated
Updated documentation for ethics, civics and leader classes. Each database now documents every field once, in a 00_README.txt beside its data.
Added game rules, one per leader post, that lift the block on assigning an empire's ruler to that post.
Added a heir_skill_add country modifier, mirroring ruler_skill_add.
You should be pleased to know that my explorations this week into reported issues on strike craft and fleet combat behaviour are yielding similar results.
What’s Next?
If all goes according to plan, next week Eladrin will be sharing information about the release date for the 4.5 'Cygnus' update.
by Eladrin We have another update to the 4.5 ‘Cygnus’ Open Beta planned for today! 4.5 Update 7 contains fixes for Nascent Stage (again), some AI updates, and more. Stellaris 4.5 ‘Cygnus’ Open Beta Update 7 Preliminary Release Notes Feature : Nomadic empires and settled empires
by Eladrin
We have another update to the 4.5 ‘Cygnus’ Open Beta planned for today! 4.5 Update 7 contains fixes for Nascent Stage (again), some AI updates, and more.
Stellaris 4.5 ‘Cygnus’ Open Beta Update 7 Preliminary Release Notes
Feature:
Nomadic empires and settled empires can negotiate Exclusive Harvesting Rights, letting the nomads harvest the celestial bodies in that empire's space without diplomatic penalties in exchange for a negotiated share of the yield.
The Arc Furnace can now be set to different Smelting Processes from tier 3 onwards, changing whether the deposits it uncovers yield minerals, alloys, or a mix of both (as the current behaviour). Switching costs energy and locks the furnace out of changing mode again for 720 days.
Empires with the Obsessional Directive civic unlock an additional Commodity Fabrication Smelting Process for the Arc Furnace.
Balance:
Autocannons, Disruptors and other short-ranged weapons are no longer equippable on Starbases, Orbital Rings or Deep Space Citadels.
Trade deposits now increase the resources gained from harvesting a planet.
Deep Scanning is less likely to uncover Minor Artifacts if Minor Artifacts have already been found in the system. Shoutout to the Composer of Strands for abusing this.
Reduced the arkship harvesting and action modifiers provided by harvester jobs.
Reduced the weapon damage each Ordnance Engineering weapon zone grants per soldier job from 5% to 1%.
Cybernetic pops now gain 10% Job Efficiency, up from 5%. The Limited Cyberization penalty for hive drones doubles to match.
The Cybernetic Luminary leader experience penalty is reduced from 25% to 10%.
Bugfix:
Nascent Stage pre-sapients mature into their adult species again. (Again.)
When new paragon leaders offers their service, accepting or dismissing them play their respective reaction sounds as expected
Fixed a case of duplicate options to "Observe entangled mass"
Fixed the amount of attunement from the Safeguarding deed.
The Dayside Solar farms can now be re-established after terraforming the planet, if the planet is still tidally locked.
The Developmental Pheromones for Arkships is now restricted to Arkships.
Gestalt capital buildings now properly lists Chronicle Drones when appropriate.
Robotic species are now able to remove the Terraphobic trait.
Fixed a missing loc string for Gray in their ship from.
Fixes several instances of missing loc in specimen descriptions.
The incoming Asteroid should no longer get an event telling about its end as if it was a real empire.
Fixed Combustible Atmosphere spawning an incorrect deposit of volatile motes.
Imperial Heirs can no longer receive the Scout trait through events.
Fixed the AdAkkaria's secrets event tooltip description.
Fixed Synaptic Lathe collapse warning not triggering for Nomadic Empires.
Harvest automation no longer sends Logistic Ships to planets whose deposits can only be worked by a Research Station.
Fixed the Unaligned Shield Projectors planet modifier showing the resource harvesting cooldown instead.
Fixed `set_fleet_settings` effect causing incorrect fleet behavior (such as Cetana's titan not entering combat).
Crystal asteroids can now contain Rare Crystal deposits. Previously they could never hold any mining deposit.
The Viridescent Lightbringer can now be granted Exotic Gas and Volatile Mote deposits by the Surveyor relic and by Arkship Deep Scanning.
Fixed a broken subject icon and an intermittent crash on Negotiate Terms when a Nomad empire inherited a Scholarium or other specialist subject by winning a subjugation war.
Female council members now use the female form of their title where one exists.
Restoring a culled Gestalt node no longer strips the extra starting trait granted by the Aptitude tradition tree or Optimized Neurology.
Renowned and Legendary leaders no longer gain an extra trait when the Aptitude tradition tree is finished.
Fixed the Cosmogenesis exodus ending in a defeat instead of the intended victory when the empire's capital had moved to the Synaptic Lathe.
_Apply Genetic Modification_ window now checks if the chosen template traits are valid in the template species instead of the original species.
The ideology behind a planetary revolt is now weighted by how many pops on the planet actually hold that ethic, instead of every ideology being equally likely.
An archaeological dig no longer offers a second Find the Curators objective when the event chain is already running.
The Imitator anomaly now reliably records that it has already appeared for an empire, including when it rolls in an unowned system.
Fixed an error when an astral rift exploration fleet was destroyed before its leader's death protection was cleared.
Construction ships now automatically move on to Special Projects if more than one automation option is selected and they have finished everything else
Hid the follow-up event from the tooltip of The Drums of War
Re-enabled Distribute Luxury Goods for Nomads. Let the people have their free smart phones!
Leaders of a Cybernetic Creed empire now reliably hold the Ritualistic Implants trait. Previously a leader could miss it depending on how they joined the empire.
Deposits whose output depends on a condition, such as Zro deposits before the relevant technology is researched, no longer show a blank entry in the Planetary Features list while their tooltip shows the correct value.
Fixed a crash that could occur when reopening the Situation Log after a situation ended and a new one began.
Fixed Nomadic Machine Uprisings not getting all of the technologies they should
Fixed an empire losing all of its fleets when one of its colonies was destroyed while it still owned other colonies.
The Veiled Planet can no longer be colonized while it is phase-shifting; it must be phase-locked first.
Nomadic empires that are not Storm Chasers can now get Storm technologies too.
Bureaucrat job modifiers now correctly affect the Unity produced by Synapse Drones.
Gestalt council nodes are now labeled with their position, instead of with a separate node name.
A gestalt node's description no longer names the node differently depending on where you hover.
The Synaptic Lathe no longer gains extra districts from empire-wide modifiers, such as the Instrument of Desire blessing or the Corridor astral rift.
Separatists from a Nomad empire are now created as Nomad empires, with Operational Reserves and a Logistic Ship, instead of settled empires.
Nomad separatists no longer become gestalt consciousnesses far more often than intended.
Fixed multiple instances checking for the wrong version of the DotG AP.
Fixed the Franchising civic granting no additional Subject Holding slot.
Fixed the Feudal Society Chief Herald of Arms councilor granting no Unity from subjects.
Fixed specialized subjects never granting the tier 2 leader traits that allow a leader to be traded to the overlord.
Fixed gestalt empires patroned by the Instrument of Desire receiving no Psionic Choir policy.
Fixed Machine Intelligence, Shattered Ring and Anglers empires almost never drawing food technologies.
Fixed strike craft losing their target before completing an attack run, so they dealt no damage.
Fixed Augmentor Drones producing no research before the third Cybernetic stage.
Fixed the machine Bath Attendant job efficiency bonuses never applying to any empire.
Fixed the Resort World decision allowing a second resort while the first was still queued.
Fixed Cosmogenesis worlds being eligible to become treasure planets.
Fixed the Incubator trait combining with clone soldier infertility.
Fixed the Sector as Vassal deed being offered to Nomad empires.
Fixed a Nomadic Princess option revealing a second wreck.
Corrected tooltips for Agrarian Idyll and Anglers Amenities, Gaia Preference, Acidic Vascularity, Spare Organs, Resort Worlds,
Auto-designed ion cannons now equip their default weapon even if you can't afford the rare crystals.
Fix Gestalt Nodes that were sometimes displaying as portraits
AI:
The AI will no longer upgrade and destroy Gene Clinics in a loop because that specific Gene Clinic is increasing stability and amenities to the point where they think they no longer need it.
Nomad AI empires now upgrade an Arkship they already own before building another one. Previously they saved for a new Arkship while an upgrade they could afford went unbought.
Nomad AI empires now set aside resources for the districts and buildings of every Arkship they own, instead of budgeting as though they had one.
Nomad AI empires no longer stall their economic plan because they hold energy and minerals as Operational Reserves rather than as a stockpile.
Fixed the alloy production hint for tier 2 Coordinated Fulfillment Centers being lower than intended.
Automatically generated defense platform designs no longer use autocannons, disruptors, psionic disruptors or mining lasers. Unlike the corresponding change to starbases, these can still be manually equipped in the ship designer.
Nomad harvest target selection accounts for harvesting agreements, including a new Harvesting Rights harvest automation option.
An AI empire is readier to grant Exclusive Harvesting Rights when it has an embassy with the nomads, or when it has adopted the Diplomatic Networking tradition.
Joining and Leaving War changes:
AI empires are considerably less willing to join ongoing wars. They now weigh the size of the war, whether they are already fighting other wars, whether they have any quarrel with the opposing war leader, and how they feel about the empire that is asking.
When deciding whether or not to join a war, an empire's opinion of each side is now averaged across that side rather than summed, so a war is no longer more tempting to join just because there are many empires in it.
Bribing a reluctant empire into a war costs substantially more, and each reason they would rather stay out raises the price further. Empires are more easily talked into defending than into attacking.
AI empires no longer offer to join wars they do not actually want to fight.
Coalitions against a galactic crisis are unaffected by the new reluctance, and still form as readily as before.
AI Empires now choose megastructure overclock modes based on designer supplied weights.
UI/UX:
Added missing authority tooltip in several UIs.
Fixed missing tooltip for ethic icon in some leader portraits.
Gestalt nodes no longer carry a separate name, and are renamed by their title alone.
Trade actions with a negotiated value now show that value on the offer and on the ongoing deal, and a trade action that cannot currently be offered stays visible with an explanation instead of disappearing.
The trade acceptance breakdown now lists a trade agreement even when it comes to zero, and names the reasons behind any acceptance bonus.
Further polish on the policy pop ups in the Research and Fleet Management UIs
We now notify you when another empire joins or leaves a war you are fighting in, including which side they joined. Clicking the notification opens the war overview.
Megastructure effects are now grouped and labelled by what they apply to, separating empire wide effects from effects on the solar system and on the megastructure itself.
Modding:
Colony designations are now split across six files by group.
AI budget files are now numbered by resource types.
Added the has_upgradable_arkship and owns_arkship_fleets_at_least triggers.
Added `can_be_capital` planet_class flag.
Planet classes now support inherit_country_district_modifiers, which blocks the general max district modifiers and leaves only the planet class-specific ones.
Tradable actions support a negotiated value (has_negotiable_value and the negotiable_value_* properties), a new trade_action_value trigger to read it, and a possible block that blocks an action with a player-facing reason.
Tradable actions support an ai_acceptance block, a flat bonus to how far an AI will go to accept the deal the action is in.
Megastructure overclock modes support conditions for being unavailable as well as hidden, modifiers that apply to the whole solar system or to the megastructure itself, effects when a mode starts and stops, AI weighting, and custom tooltips. See common/megastructure_overclock_types/99_README_OVERCLOCKS.txt for documentation.
Megastructures can rename the Overclocking tab and its strings, declare a cooldown between mode changes, apply a modifier to their whole solar system, and replace their listed modifiers with a custom tooltip.
Added a trigger to check which overclock mode a megastructure is using, and the effect to set one now optionally skips the switching cooldown.
Megastructure overclock modes can be grouped. An upgrade to a level with a different set of modes keeps the mode the player selected.
Let’s look into the Join War changes with more detail.
Why Are All These Empires In My War?
If you’ve been enjoying the games where it felt like every minor border skirmish escalated into War in Heaven-like grand campaigns, I’m sorry to say that we’re exploring a few changes to the behavior of the Join War feature.
We have two sets of changes coming that should make this feature feel better. First, informing you what happened. Second, making it happen less.
In the original implementation, Join messages were only being sent to a limited number of participants - they’ll now go to everyone involved in the war. The messages will name the empire, the war, and which side they’re joining. It’ll be colored as positive or negative depending on whether they’re joining your side of the war or the opposition. (If an entire federation jumps in at once, or an overlord with a passel of vassals, it’ll be one message - the primary plus x allies.)
Join us in glorious combat!
Leaving a war was worse - nobody was getting any messages at all. We’ll now share a similar message when cowards leave a war that you’re in.
Viewed from the other side.
The deeper issue was related to why everyone kept ganging up into gigantic wars. When you asked another empire whether they wanted to join your war, we worked out the price for their involvement. An AI with no interest in the war would have a higher price, but anyone could be bought, while an AI that liked your side would enthusiastically join for no cost at all.
The catch was that they considered every member on each side of the war, which meant that opinion swamped any other portion of the calculation - if several empires an AI liked were beating up someone they didn’t, they’d gleefully join into the dogpile. This caused the snowball effect that many of us saw - it was baked into the basic arithmetic.
Opinion still matters a great deal, but is now averaged across each side rather than being a sum, with the actual war leader on each side counting twice because it’s fundamentally their war. Adding five empires to a side that an AI has no strong feelings about will dilute their eagerness to join the war instead of increasing it. The AI will now also consider:
The size of the war. Being asked to step into a seven-empire war is a bigger commitment than a minor border skirmish, and the AI will price it that way.
Whether they’re already fighting. An empire already at war will be much less interested in getting involved in another.
Whether they have a grudge against the opposing war leader. Previously, they’d count this as satisfied as long as there were any hated empires on the other side.
How they feel about the allied war leader specifically. If an empire would rather see you weakened, it’ll cost you to get them to join you as an ally.
Their willingness to join and their price tag are both modified multiplicatively based on the number of tests failed. You can still buy your way out of trouble, but bribing a disinterested empire is more of a significant diplomatic (and economic) ordeal, rather than just a rounding error of your energy stockpile.
We have a couple of exceptions, though. Defensive wars are considered cheaper than attacking - helping a friend survive is an easier ask than helping them conquer someone. Crisis wars are also exempt from the size penalty entirely. A galactic crisis is supposed to be ganged up on, and these are not intended to make it harder to assemble that galactic coalition.
The AI should no longer offer to join wars it has little interest in, which means that if they come to you offering to join your war, they legitimately want in. You should still be able to ask them at any time, but if they’re not interested, they’ll make that clear with their pricing.
What’s Next?
We’re currently focusing on the stabilization of 4.5, but we’re also currently still looking at AI and a handful of other high-priority issues.
Next week will likely remain a short dev diary on the status of the Open Beta, but depending on how that stabilization goes, we may share an expected release date for the 4.5 ‘Cygnus’ update.
by Eladrin Hello everyone! With summer coming to an end, the Stellaris dev diaries are back on the schedule. We’ve updated the 4.5 Open Beta a couple of times now, and have some more changes coming soon with Update 6. Stellaris 4.5 'Cygnus' Open Beta Update 6 Release Notes Balanc
by Eladrin
Hello everyone!
With summer coming to an end, the Stellaris dev diaries are back on the schedule. We’ve updated the 4.5 Open Beta a couple of times now, and have some more changes coming soon with Update 6.
Stellaris 4.5 'Cygnus' Open Beta Update 6 Release Notes
Balance
Pop Growth from Hedonists now requires the Colony to have free Housing and Amenities, and is lost entirely while the empire has a Consumer Goods deficit.
Hedonists now produce Unity and consume a small amount of Consumer Goods regardless of their Living Standard, where previously the Unity came only from Decadent Lifestyle.
Pleasure Seekers empires now begin with a Civilian Industries building instead of Holo-Theatres.
Offspring bio-ships now use the same Naval Capacity as the bio-ships they are grown from.
The Calling of Arms now asks for a total Naval Capacity in line with current ship sizes, rather than a target reachable with a handful of Corvettes.
Bugfix
Building Branch Offices now costs 75 Influence plus a distance penalty of 5 per jump (down from +75 per jump).
Terravores will now correctly transfer 100% of the drones they left on a planet they were eating home instead of just 100 of them.
The Behemoth will no longer have a 5% chance to kill 5 guys with its super mega breath attack. It's a percentage just like the other options in the random_list.
Restored the button that brings you from an Orbital Ring back to its planet.
Science Ships will no longer cluster with Arkships when auto-surveying.
Nomadic empires with purging banned in their policies no longer create purge vassals when conquering planets.
Hedonists no longer produce ever-increasing Pop Growth and Pop Assembly. Their contribution now scales with the percentage of a Colony's population that are Hedonists, reaching a maximum of +30% rather than climbing without limit as the Colony fills.
Amenities Usage from Hedonists is now listed under its own heading instead of appearing as a second Decadent Lifestyle entry.
The Matriarch's Flagella now grants its pop growth to the planet as a whole, instead of granting the full amount separately to every pop group living there.
Splinter Hive holdings now grant their pop growth to the overlord's capital as a whole, instead of granting the full amount separately to every pop group there. Each Splinter Hive adds its own Symbiotic Link planetary feature to the capital.
Assuming the host does have access to the relevant DLC, it will now again be possible force spawn an ai empire using a portrait that normally is not allowed to be chosen randomly.
Fixed intel visibility at Low intel levels
An automated fleet that runs out of available tasks now notifies you that it is awaiting tasks, which previously never appeared, and the notification is sent once per idle period rather than repeating. The obsolete Fleet Order Canceled (Auto-Exploration) notification has been removed.
Colony ships are correctly destroyed or transferred when Embarking
Queuing multiple outpost constructions will cost the correct amount of influence. The game will consider the changes to the borders as the queued orders are being processed.
Fix climate preference selection in the species modification window
It now possible to extort Supremacist faction without the Crowdsourcing civic. Crowdsourcing will not be getting multiple different extortion buttons.
Crowdsourcing will only provide extra resources if the civic is valid.
Fixed instances of the Synaptic Lathe receiving additional districts.
The triggers of the Horizon Needle ship action have been cleaned up
The Luxury Goods planetary decision now stays visible after enacting, following the standard set by other decisions.
Fixed Defender of the Galaxy special projects not spawning the second crisis.
Fixed issues with the Crisis Defeated counter in Defender of the Galaxy.
Cybernetic Creed will start with less regular buildings to make room for special buildings when combined with some civics.
Cleaned up the tooltip of "The Arrival" event.
Cleaned up the tooltip of the Genomic Services Outreach.
The Invisible Planet event should less frequently spawn a planet that clips with another planet.
The Stray Communiqué event now properly demotes Elite pops instead of killing them.
Homicidal Nomad empires now have a valid Total War Behavior policy option.
Psionic Lightning's Terrify effect now scales correctly against current ship sizes. Smaller ships are once again far more likely to be terrified, and larger ships are no longer all equally resistant.
The Weaver's Confuse weapons can now reach their advertised maximum chance against the smallest ships.
Behemoth crisis objectives no longer grant five times the intended progress when destroying, breeding or capturing space fauna and bio-ships.
The Voidworm Plague situation and the energy reward for destroying enemy ships no longer scale five times higher than intended.
Retargeted the Build Megastructure concept in the Databank to avoid the green action text
Nomadic Evolutionary Predators should now get situation progress from their temporary total war purge vassals.
AI
Nomad AI no longer builds a redundant Logistics Hub on nearly every Waystation. The build check now looks at the whole connected wayline network for remote collection instead of only directly neighboring systems, so the AI builds at most one hub per network and stops paying stacked upkeep for hubs that did nothing.
The AI will no longer spam unspecialized districts. The first district of a type is never penalized, and it will consider all available district specializations in case they dramatically change the production of the district. This was most visible on Nomadic Arkships, where Habitation Districts cost Alloys but provided only Housing until specialized - but it spent all of its Alloys on Habitation Districts and could no longer afford the Specialization that would make it beneficial.
Housing, amenity and crime needs no longer outweigh every production candidate for the AI.
AI colonies now aim for a small Housing and Amenity surplus instead of trying to break exactly even.
The AI will build pop growth buildings on a colony regardless of how much spare Housing it has, since automigration will move the pops somewhere useful.
The AI will no longer hoard Unity if it can afford a new Tradition.
Nomad AI now recognizes the strategic resources it gathers through harvesting. Previously it assumed it had no income of these resources and refused to build most military and advanced Arkship districts and buildings. It will now build them when its strategic resources stockpile can sustain the upkeep, and hold off when stockpiles run low.
Improved Nomad AI Waystation placement. It now steers its network toward high value destinations such as inhabited worlds, resource rich systems and gateways, and favors extending long connected lines instead of scattering disconnected stubs. It also develops the Waystations it already owns before founding new low value ones, while still grabbing genuinely high value systems before rivals can.
Nomad AI now builds new Arkships and upgrades them. Arkship construction was being starved of the single per week megastructure build slot by Waystation construction and now has its own slot. Tier upgrades were never triggered for mobile Arkships and now fire once the enabling technology is researched, spending the resources the AI budget already reserved for them.
Nomad AI now develops secondary Arkship districts such as Reactor Arrays and Ordnance instead of building almost only Habitation Districts.
Nomad AI no longer locks Influence and Alloys into the Arkship construction budget after it has built its full complement of Arkships, so the reservation releases at the cap instead of permanently starving the empire's Influence for decisions.
Nomad AI now correctly saves for Arkship tier upgrades and the Exodus Jump module. These reservations never applied, which was preventing the AI from upgrading its Arkships even with a large Alloy surplus. It also no longer sets aside for the tier 2 and tier 3 upgrade at the same time, since it can only buy one of them. The Exodus Jump reservation is now made only when the empire has the technology and owns an Arkship with a free spinal mount slot, and is released once the module can no longer be built.
Nomadic AI empires will no longer excavate Archaeological Sites in player owned space, even if you have a Research Agreement. (Note: If they were excavating a site before you claim the system, they will not abort the excavation. They were there first.) This does not prevent player Nomads with a Research Agreement or Archivism traditions from doing so.
UI/UX
The Outliner now has options to group Arkship components together or break them out separately into Arkship Colonies, Arkship Controls, and Arkship Fleets.
The Empire Timeline background now changes to match your empire's current focus.
Origin entries on the Empire Timeline now show your empire's origin icon, at every zoom level.
The empire origin's name now also appears at the medium zoom level.
The empire origin on the timeline now shrinks to the smallest zoom level like other entries.
Fixed a dotted line that wasn't showing at one of the timeline zoom levels.
Performance
Fixed bad performance in opinion map mode
Completing a technology no longer rebuilds every ship design immediately. The rebuild is deferred to the next daily update, and AI empires' rebuilds are staggered so they no longer all land on the same tick.
Automated fleets with nothing to do no longer search for a new order every tick. Retries are now spaced out by a cooldown and staggered between fleets.
Stability
Fixed a crash when clicking the locked Nomad toggle in Empire Creation without the Nomads DLC.
Fixes CTD when displaying the tooltip for a weapon component type
Modding
The `focus` field on AI economic plans is now functional. A focused resource raises the build weight of anything producing it until the empire's income reaches the focus value. A plan's focus no longer has to be encompassed by its income goals.
Removed AI_PLANET_LOWER_THRESHOLD_AMENITY_CONSTRUCTION, AI_PLANET_UPPER_THRESHOLD_AMENITY_CONSTRUCTION and AI_PLANET_STABILITY_THRESHOLD_AMENITY_CONSTRUCTION, superseded by the new AI_PLANET_AMENITY_TARGET. Added AI_UNZONED_DISTRICT_WEIGHT_MULT, AI_PLANET_HOUSING_TARGET_BUFFER_FACTOR and AI_NOMAD_RARE_RESOURCE_UPKEEP_BUFFER_MONTHS.
Added the has_decadent_hedonist_growth scripted trigger.
A special note of interest is that macOS builds can now run natively on Apple Silicon as a universal (arm64 + x86_64) binary, no longer requiring Rosetta 2 translation. Preliminary results thus far from the Open Beta suggest that this is an absolutely massive performance improvement for Macs, but we’d love to get more feedback.
We expect another update to the Open Beta next week. With 4.5 in active development, we’re focusing a significant amount of the Custodian designer resources on Bugfixes and AI Improvements.
Summer Experiments
Everything shown below
is not guaranteed to make it
into the game and even if it does,
we don’t have a timeline
at this point.
Handing over to Alfray Stryke to fill you in on how our Summer Experiments and Custodian work is shaping up.
Hey folks, as is tradition, over the Summer the team has had the chance to experiment with ideas that may or may not make it into the game. Although these are being shown off now, as always there is no promise that they’ll make it into the game, even if features below look fairly polished, everything is a rough draft and none of this has been reviewed, playtested or verified by QA.
Harvesting Rights
A frequent request following the release of Nomads was further diplomatic improvements for Harvesting, to that end we’ve been exploring adding Harvesting Rights as a trade deal.
Under this arrangement, the Nomadic empire will be allowed to freely harvest resources within the borders of the Settled empire for the duration of the agreement. However this has some costs:
The Settled empire cannot issue any Harvesting contracts.
The Settled empire cannot negotiate Harvesting Rights with any other Nomadic empires.
The Nomadic empire however can sign multiple Harvesting Rights agreements.
The Nomadic empire gives the Settled empire an agreed upon percentage of any resources harvested within the borders of the Settled empire.
Arc Furnace Smelting Processes
Using the megastructure overclocking added for Galactic Hyperthermia in Infernals, we’ve been looking at improvements that can be made to existing megastructures and the obvious test candidate was the Arc Furnace. In this, when an Arc Furnace is upgraded to Tier 3, instead of only unlocking alloy production, it unlocks a variety of Smelting Processes, allowing tuning of the Arc Furnace production.
Smelting Processes for a fully upgraded Arc Furnace
The hope is that the code changes that enable these improvements will let both us developers and our modding community to make megastructures more interesting in future patches.
Alongside this we’ve been exploring bundling Starbase/Waystation capacity and megastructure limits into a single “Structure Capacity”, which seems fruitful, but there’s not much to show off in screenshots for this.
Mercenary Improvements
While exploring the empire flag improvements detailed below, we discovered that the flag emblem for mercenary enclaves wasn’t being used correctly. As part of the flag work, mercenary enclaves will always use their flag emblem, but inherit their flag colours from their current patron.
Following on from the auto-designer policies introduced in 4.5, we felt that allowing your to direct how your mercenary enclaves built their fleets was a natural extension.
Nanite Swarms
Back in 4.3 we reduced ship counts across the board by increasing the amount of naval capacity used for ships, with the exception of nanite swarmers These presented a problem, we didn’t want to remove the player fantasy blotting out an entire star system with your swarm, but we did want to reduce the number of ships you have.
The solution: +500% Ship per Ship!
With some creative reimagining of how ship sections were supposed to work and some exploration by one of our animators, we’ve made a prototype in which each ship section/growth stage of the nanite swarm is visually two ships but is considered a single ship for calculations.
Empire Randomization
Hi, pthooie here. Some players (me) like to play Stellaris with randomly generated empires, rather than making a custom design. We have a “Random” option in empire selection, but there are some problems with that. For instance, it generates the entire empire design when starting the game, so you can’t, say, choose a specific origin while randomizing everything else.
So far, the only thing you could randomize separately in empire creation was some names. Now I’ve added some new buttons:
Each of these buttons randomly chooses between all valid options for the corresponding variables. Unlike in-game randomization, this doesn’t use scripted weights, so all valid options have an equal chance of being picked.
The randomizers for ethics, civics, species traits and ruler traits randomize a full set (spending all points if possible). However, if you already have some items selected, these randomizers will not remove them. This way, you can e.g. manually pick some traits while randomizing the rest.
(Note: Layouts aren’t final; UX may move some stuff around.)
Hopefully this will help make your random empire designs more customizable!
Flag Improvements
We’ve been experimenting with making use of the flag shaders to recolor flag emblems using the existing flag colors.
NOTE: Previews below were created by using python to composite the layers and recolour them. These differ slightly from the in-game appearance.
Currently randomised flags used by AI empires are limited in the color combinations that they are allowed to use, with the allowed combinations defined many, many years ago when our color palette was much more limited (~20 colors vs. the ~70 we have now). We’re looking at broadening the allowed combinations to remove some of the restrictions, if we allow AI empires to make use of the emblem coloration above.
Flag Editor
After we showed off the above flag emblem work to our UX Designer, she felt that the flag designer in empire creation needed a bit of polish.
One thing lead to another and then Iggy came up with the idea “what if you can edit your flag in game”
This then led to conversions in the design team of “what if you could edit your subjects’ flags or the flags of those you’ve humiliated in war?”
Empire Selection and Summary
Finally from our UX Designer: Here are some experimentation/changes I have made to the empire creation UI to see if I can improve the layout to use the space more efficiently. Here is what it looks like on empire selection so far, but is still in progress:
Now the UI shows the bigger City and Room view to show off your empire, with the details rearranged below.
And here is what it looks like while editing/making an empire, now you get to see a summary on the top corner as you build your empire.
I also explored collapsible categories for the many many empires we have to select from. So far it is divided between player made vs prescripted but there are more categorizations and filtrations or possible player made categories that could be done, starting from pinning similarly to Situation Log.
Espionage
Heya! Cosmogone here. Some of you might already know that I have wanted to improve our Espionage system ever since I was hired, five years ago. Over the years, every summer, I have slowly chipped at it, and this year is the year where it all coalesced into something that’s looking about ready to test.
Espionage has been considered underpowered since it came out. It takes a long time to setup, and a lot of clicks to perform operations that yield lackluster rewards. The original thought process behind that choice was that it could easily become frustrating for players to get ganged up by several other empires, and so, this would be the first issue to solve to lay healthier foundations for the system.
Vigilance is meant to sort this out. It is a new value that every empire has, that tracks how alert they are to hostile spycraft in their territory. Every time an operation is completed, vigilance increases. It then slowly decays back down to its base value as things return to normal. Starting at 20 vigilance, empires start gaining passive bonuses to their encryption, the cost and difficulty of hostile operations, and at higher levels, Asset Capacity (more on this below). Vigilance usually does not increase in big leaps and ticks down fast enough that if you are the only active spy, it should not climb too fast, but as more players target the same empire, it will be harder to offset.
The other effect of vigilance is that while it is above certain values, it enables Vigilance Events to trigger. There are a variety of them, some offer bonuses to the defending country, but most will have negative consequences on active spy networks, reducing infiltration, destroying assets, taking out envoys, or outright destroying the network as a whole at the highest level of vigilance.
Vigilance should give us the opportunity to create more impactful operations, despite the risk, so naturally my next step was to buff existing operations. The list is long, but it’s things like letting Sabotage Starbase actually deal damage to starbases, giving you a precise choice of target for Smear Campaign, and enabling Asset sacrificing for extra effects in the operations that were missing them.
Next up was a general rebalance of the system. Some sources of infiltration speed that were a bit overtuned have been reduced, the base infiltration cap has been lowered, the max has been increased above 100, but the most impactful change I’d say is the broadening of the relative encryption/codebreaking gap. It previously capped out at a difference of 4, it now goes up to 6, rewarding you more for outpacing the encryption of your target. Each point rewards you with 10 Max Infiltration, 20% infiltration speed and -1 Operation difficulty, for a current max of +60 Infiltration, 120% Infiltration speed and -6 Operation difficulty.
These massive advantages are hard to offset, even with the new vigilance system, and the game has way more sources of codebreaking than it does encryption, so naturally, I had to look at adding ways of protecting yourself. This took the form of a series of leader traits, an edict, and various modifiers spread across existing civics, traditions and ascension perks. I will not go into full details here, but there are close to 50 lines of balance changes in the changelog.
A lot of work has also happened on the backend, fixing issues, edge cases, and opening the door for new things, even if I haven’t had the time to use all of it yet. For instance, operations should now be able to target leaders and colonies directly, there are new triggers and effects related to assets, some operations can be made to require an asset to start, and assets can now carry custom tooltips.
A lot of this was immediately put to nefarious use with the new Upgrade Assets. I have always wanted ways for spy networks to generate passive benefits and not force me to constantly make sure they are running operations. I’ve envisioned it in the form of “network buildings”, but ultimately fell back on the existing (and underused) Asset system. Assets are already quite powerful, raising your infiltration cap passively, and then reducing operation difficulty by up to 8 if you have the right asset on hand. The ten new Upgrade assets represent more structural upgrades to your network rather than lone operatives. They have powerful passive effects but are not meant to be used in the field, and will slowly increase their target’s vigilance. As long as there aren’t too many of them, everything should be fine, but it is definitely possible to outpace base vigilance decay, especially with several countries trying to leech off technology from a single victim. They are acquired through the new Upgrade Network operation that will sacrifice an existing asset and an investment of trade to set up the Upgrade.
But, with no limit on the amount of assets you could have, we ran into the issue of the only choice being “when” rather than “what”, so naturally, I had to implement an Asset cap. You start with a comfortable 6 assets max, but this can be further increased through civics, traditions, or the new Web Weavers ascension perk. Notably, it is also reduced by the target’s vigilance, so you might have to sacrifice valuable upgrades if the heat gets too high! This being said, the cap is technically soft and you can go over it, but will be unable to conduct any operation for as long as you exceed it.
But wait, there is more! While this covers the systemic changes, I also took this opportunity to look at some espionage QoL like:
Sub category icons for operations!
Spy Networks in the outliner, listing the target name and flag, the infiltration progress and cap, the target infiltration, and the absence of a spymaster!
Counter Intelligence in the top bar!
This one is likely to change, but there was previously no way for you to know exactly how much encryption and codebreaking you had, let alone vigilance!
That’s all I have today. Hopefully, these changes will set us up to do cooler espionage things in the future, but regardless, it will all need more testing and tweaking before it is ready to play.
What’s Next?
In next week’s dev diary we’re going to continue exploring the 4.5 update.
by Eladrin Hello everyone! We've updated the 4.5 Open Beta branch with some improvements. Stellaris 4.5 'Cygnus' Open Beta Update 5 Release Notes Feature Flag emblems are now correctly centered within the Empire's Flag hexagon frame Improvement Starbase, Orbital Ring, and Way
by Eladrin
Hello everyone!
We've updated the 4.5 Open Beta branch with some improvements.
Stellaris 4.5 'Cygnus' Open Beta Update 5 Release Notes
Feature
Flag emblems are now correctly centered within the Empire's Flag hexagon frame
Improvement
Starbase, Orbital Ring, and Waystation weapon modules are now weapon-type-specific (lasers, mass drivers, swarmer missiles, particle launchers, psionic torpedoes, scourge missiles, and several strike-craft hangars), each gated by the matching weapon technology and automatically upgrading to your latest tier.
The Starbase Weapon Preference policy now includes Explosive and Strike Craft options, and automated station designs build the weapon modules matching the chosen preference (or follow the fleet's Weapon Preference when set to Match Fleet).
Nomad empires can now benefit from the Composer of Strands, Whisperers in the Void, and End of the Cycle Greatest Patron accords, with Arkship-appropriate rewards.
Adaptive Evolution approach effect will be displayed as an active situation effect instead of just in the tooltip over the approach selection button.
Overall pass to faction and ethic attractions, improving behaviors for small pop groups and concurrent factions
Promoting or suppressing a faction has an impact on its attraction
Factions with the same ethics can be promoted and suppressed separately
Balance
The Cradle of Souls maximum-intensity aura surge has been reworked. It no longer builds defence platforms; instead every empire with systems in the aura gains Trust and a chance at a Favor, subjects gain Loyalty, Federation members gain Cohesion, and the patron's own colonies gain a crime or deviancy reducing "Cradle's Serenity". The passive starbase fire-rate bonus is removed.
The Instrument and Cradle Chosen psionic leader traits now grant applicable bonuses to Gestalt and Nomad empires instead of slave-workforce, faction, and friendly-territory bonuses they could not use.
All ships and cloned space fauna that have a mineral cost can no longer be built if your Operational Reserves are critical
The Synthetic Awareness luminary trait now grants +15% Job Efficiency for Mechanical and Machine Pops instead of +25% Resources from Jobs.
Each faction now gains attraction in empires holding the secondary ethic it is associated with
Pops no longer favor their current faction when evaluating which faction to join
Pops of another species can now join the Supremacists, at a reduced attraction
A faction losing its potential members is now destroyed after a delay instead of immediately
Progressive, Prosperity and Totalitarian attraction now depends on citizenship rights instead of the Pop's species
The Dimensional Manipulator now grants a fixed number of 5 districts instead of a 33%
Bugfix
Spell checked localization files
Corrected an error that crept into the Seddom system in Chinese localization (Once again 复合子个体的演示)
Fixed hostility between countries sometimes not updating immediately when it is set in script.
Nomads can now annihilate each other in Machine Uprising wars.
Automated and auto-completed ship designs that lack reactor power now reduce their strike craft alongside weapons, instead of leaving hangars untouched and stripping shields and armor to pay for them.
A component swapped in while an automated design was balancing its power is no longer charged to the power budget twice, so fewer utilities are given up than the shortfall requires.
Fixing Nomadic Grand Archives being destroyed when taking control of a Settled Empire's Starbase.
Fixed the "Distribute Luxury Goods" colony decision not going on cooldown, which let it be re-used repeatedly to refresh its effect. It is now unavailable for the 10-year duration of the Luxuries Distributed modifier.
Fixed metallurgist jobs on the Foundry Arkship zone always paying their extra upkeep in minerals. Empires with Catalytic Processing now correctly pay it in food instead.
Fixed orbital ring weapon modules all reporting the wrong sabotaged component after an enemy Sabotage Starbase operation.
Nomadic Empires can now be reborn as an exiled colony after failing the "End of the Cycle" situation.
The Gravitational Centrifuge that was non-functional on Deep Space Citadels and Orbital Rings can no longer be built on these structures
The Calling of Arms now properly considers ship size when building ships
Defeating the Mutant Hordes before they could take over your colony no longer flag the planets for purging
Fixed a case of Treasure Hunters being blocked if they were in the process of researching Gateway Activation after defeating the voidworms guarding Ness's gate
Forever Cruise Gestalts can now properly upgrade their service districts
Fixed Defender of the Galaxy crisis defeated counter not properly updating when a crisis was vanquished before ambition level 5 was reached.
Adjusted tooltip for unavailable mercenary enclave fleets.
Contracts that time out from no fault of the issuer, now display a clearer notification about it.
The second level of the Scout trait no longer refers to military fleets.
Arkships no longer automatically benefit from the "Foreign Occupation" Planetary Revolt situation modifier when crossing another empire's border.
The Great Pyramid event chain no longer displays a broken tooltip.
Simplified the list of available Tyanki sizes.
The Machine Uprising event will now trigger a Nomadic Machine Empire to spawn for Nomadic Empires.
Restored the missing scrollbar in the starbase Shipyard, Army Hub, Defenses, and Critters lists.
Nomad Vassals now correctly inherit Operational Reserves
Added 5 missing dlc locks to focus tasks
The Eater of Worlds Digest now counts Nomad Arkship colonies in its tally.
The End of the Cycle Creation Accord no longer grants Nomad empires a colonized planet they cannot hold. Nomads now receive a newly materialized Arkship of a type they have researched.
Fixed some planets being impossible to consecrate.
Fixed the adSalivul habitat having a broken string instead of the correct name.
Fix occasional crash when hovering over a leader to view their traits
The Supremacists no longer appear at all in Pacifist empires, instead of existing without being joinable
Persistent factions now survive without members and ignore the potential member thresholds as intended
The Manifesti now accepts only Egalitarian, Pacifist and Xenophile Pops as intended
Factions no longer suffer an attraction penalty for lacking a leader
Existing faction types that do not use their guiding ethic as a Pop filter no longer use it as a growth factor
The ethic growth factor no longer applies while a faction is losing Pops
Negative Pop Ethics Shift Speed modifiers are no longer ignored, and -100% or lower now fully suppresses ethics shift
Fixed Tomb World Environment art.
Adjusted assets for Humanoid City Set.
Arkhships should no longer get deleted by Cetana's storm
Arkships should no longer be targeted instead of the proper planet in the Phaseshift even chain
Fixed an instance of No Category pops stemming from Virtuality and Gia'Zumon interacting strangely
Fixed Hunker Down decision and Storm Manipulation buildings being broken for Storm Chasers
Nomadic Driven Assimilator purge vassals now Assimilate Hive-Minded pops when their Overlord has taken Inevitable Assimilation (or another tradition that unlocks Hive-Minded Assimilation), instead of being forced to purge them.
The bonus Unity, Society Research, and Engineering Research from the Driven Assimilator's Cybernetic Advantage tradition is now gained when a purge vassal carries out the Assimilation.
Galactic Nemesis empires now gain Menace from the "Purge or Assimilate Pops" objective for pops Assimilated by their purge vassals, matching the credit already granted for pops they purge.
Cyber Hive purge vassals now Assimilate pops into the gestalt consciousness as their Overlord would, and receive the associated Cyber Hive Assimilation bonuses.
Purge vassals now handle pops as their Overlord would when the Overlord has the Mechromancy or Galactic Nemesis ascension perks, instead of defaulting to a plain purge.
Fixed size of the Weapon Slots Text Icons
Blocked Sacred Sites from spawning in Sanctuary Systems
Fixed a bug where starbase building queues remain locked after controller flip at the end of a war
Fixed Commercial Pact trade value growing out of control in federations (especially with the automatic Commercial Pact law), where it swung between near-zero and enormous values each month.
Automated science ships once again spread out to survey different systems instead of all converging on the same one.
The Anomaly, Archaeological Site, and Astral Rift views now show the assigned scientist while a science ship carries out that task on automation.
Fixed a case where newly built arkships could get colony events. No you don't have subterraneans living in your soil.
Fixed numerous events, decisions, and buildings silently failing or producing error log spam for Nomad empires.
Fixed a Megacorp becoming Galactic Emperor wiping the Trader jobs from its capital.
Fleets returning from MIA will no longer queue a movement order if they already have other orders.
Suppressing a faction will not also suppress the ones with the same ethic
The Nomadic Gameplay toggle now grays out immediately for multiplayer clients when the host has the Nomads DLC disabled, without needing to reopen the Government & Ethics tab.
Fixed an issue preventing nomadic empires from joining wars
Fixed the auto-pause setting being ignored when the research complete popup opened.
Fixed the Shroud policy offering two options that shared the same key, which could select the wrong option and cause save game errors.
Fixed the terraforming special project resolving against the wrong target instead of the planet being terraformed.
Fixed army build costs not being shown when building armies at a starbase, along with a related crash.
Disabled Arkships no longer appear as colonization sources.
Fixed the species editor button not working if it had already been used on a previously edited empire.
Fixed special projects on Arkship colonies resolving to the wrong planet scope.
The species editor now takes opposing traits into account when working out which planet classes a species can live on.
Fleet settings are now respected by ship upgrade actions and their UI display, and the ship designer no longer opens for ships that have no design template.
Triggered modifier tooltips now show the correct value. The displayed number ignored the modifier's multiplier, though the applied value was always correct.
The Gundersen Research Society now shows its custom start text instead of generic Lost Colony text.
AI
Fleet composition is now driven by the empire's active fleet doctrine and weapon preference, replacing the previous fixed personality- and civic-based ship ratios.
Crisis and ascension hulls are now favored in fleet composition once unlocked.
UI/UX
Fixed Contract notification toasts (accepted, completed, abandoned, failed) showing a redundant empire name and a stray line break in their titles.
Fixed the Technologist faction's "AI Allowed" demand description being cut off; it now reads as a complete sentence.
Pop group entries now display every faction of the empire, graying out the ones the group cannot join
New faction tooltips explaining membership, attraction, join conditions and why a Pop Group cannot join
Clarified the ethic and faction membership recap wording
Reorder guiding ethic tooltip to always display the secondary ethic after
Subject agreement terms no longer show empty category headers.
Added the missing War status filter to the galaxy map.
Fixed the Decisions tooltip on the planet view.
The fleet upgrade icon is no longer hidden in fleet summary entries when many fleets are listed.
Volcanic Planets now showcase correct sky assets
Performance
Daily faction update now evaluates Pop Group pre-triggers, faction potential triggers and join rules once per update
Reduced save game size by no longer storing designed empires that are not needed.
Galactic Community resolutions are now cached rather than recollected during every country modifier update.
Stability
Fixes an OOS caused by different ordering of focus category tiers.
Fixed a crash that could occur during galaxy generation.
Audio
Portrait/Paragon remastering - consistent well-balanced volume, all stereo, consistent reverb, minor quality issues fixed.
Events - Volume made consistent and well-balanced.
Archaeology / Special Events - Volume made consistent and well-balanced.
Advisors - Volume made consistent and well-balanced.
Audio credits updated from First Contact through Nomads.
Replaced 16 missing Machine Age portrait and Galactic Paragons voice files and corrected their volume.
Modding
Added has_aquatic_trait scripted trigger.
Specifying the same event pre-trigger more than once now logs an error
Event pre-trigger failures can now be localized through PRE_TRIGGER_FAIL__ keys
Added the `custom_tooltip_icon` trigger, a `custom_tooltip` variant that always displays pass/fail icons
Added `pop_ethics_filter`, `use_guiding_ethic_as_growth_factor` and `skip_creation_cooldown` to pop faction types
Hidden factions are no longer exempt from POP_FACTION_CREATION_COOLDOWN, use `skip_creation_cooldown` instead
Removed the unused `attraction_custom_title` and `attraction_custom_desc` pop faction type parameters
Added the `POP_FACTION_DESTRUCTION_DELAY` define, removed `POP_CURRENT_FACTION_WEIGHT`
Faction attraction scope cleanup and improvements
set_planet_flag, remove_planet_flag, set_timed_planet_flag and has_planet_flag now also work in colony, carrier, and ship scope (previously planet scope only), operating on the same flag store as the carrier_flag family.
Faction `on_destroy` now has the destroyed faction in the `From` scope
The rollback branch has also been updated to have 4.5 Open Beta Update 4.
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This VIR spent millions of playthroughs helping empires rise — and decided Earth was worth the trip.
No demands, no housing needed, no secret bid for power.
by Eladrin Hello everyone! We've got a couple more fixes in today's 4.5 Open Beta update: Stellaris 4.5 'Cygnus' Open Beta Update 4 Bugfix Fixed Precursor dig sites (Vultaum, Yuht, First League, Irassian, Cybrex) not appearing when surveying, and the Fear of the Dark origin's h
by Eladrin
Hello everyone!
We've got a couple more fixes in today's 4.5 Open Beta update:
Stellaris 4.5 'Cygnus' Open Beta Update 4
Bugfix
Fixed Precursor dig sites (Vultaum, Yuht, First League, Irassian, Cybrex) not appearing when surveying, and the Fear of the Dark origin's hostile empire failing to spawn.
Fixed numerous other events, decisions, and buildings silently failing or producing error log spam for Nomad empires.
The Anomaly, Archaeological Site, and Astral Rift views now show the assigned scientist while a science ship carries out that task on automation.
Fixed Commercial Pact trade value growing out of control in federations (especially with the automatic Commercial Pact law), where it swung between near-zero and enormous values each month.
Fixed a bug where starbase building queues remained locked after a controller flip at the end of a war.
Existing saves with starbase build queues stuck after a controller flip are now repaired on load.
Automated science ships now spread out again, instead of all clustering in the same highest weight system.
Modding
set_planet_flag, remove_planet_flag, set_timed_planet_flag and has_planet_flag now also work in colony, carrier, and ship scope (previously planet scope only), operating on the same flag store as the carrier_flag family.
This should resolve any remaining scoping issues with random events, fixes commercial pacts compounding infinitely, and makes science ships spread out when automating exploration again.
Here's the compiled list from the previous Open Beta releases:
Previous 4.5 Open Beta Release Notes
Feature
Pop groups are no longer divided by Ethics or Factions, instead each pop group will have a given percentage that belongs to each faction or ethic as appropriate. This means that:
THIS IS A BREAKING CHANGE AND WILL NOT PRESERVE SAVE GAME COMPATIBILITY.
Ethics and factions are now shown on the pop group entries in the planetary management UI, with tooltips showing the attraction to ethics and factions. Verbose tooltips are enabled by holding Alt, to show a breakdown of all modifiers for these attractions.
Pops shift ethics and factions more frequently
Pop group faction conversion happens more frequently
Ethic attraction now impacts faction growth
Simplify factions randomization logic
Updated Cyberization policies to account for the changes to pop groups and ethics. The Limited Cybernetic species trait has been removed, instead if the Limited Cyberization policy is in effect, Cybernetic Spiritualist pops do not benefit from Cybernetic Job Efficiency. The Limited Cyborg leader trait still functions as previously. This will also decrease the Approval penalty from regular spiritualist factions from the demand The Flesh is Strong.
Unlocked Knights of the Toxic God for nomads
Added policies to provide better control over the auto-designer for both players and AI:
Added a Fleet Doctrine policy with six doctrines that determine the tactical roles each ship class is designed to fill, affecting automated ship designs and ship-designer auto-complete.
Added Weapon Preference and Defense Preference policies that steer automated ship designs and technology research.
Added Starbase Weapon Preference and Starbase Defense Preference policies so station loadouts can diverge from the fleet.
Federations can now enact laws to grant members free, automatic Commercial Pacts (and, with the Nomads DLC, Wayline Pacts) or Research Agreements. Each law is unavailable to the federation type that already grants the benefit through its perk (Trade League / Research Cooperative).
Trade League federations now provide free, automatic Commercial Pacts between all member empires.
Trade League federations now also provide free, automatic Wayline Pacts between all members. (Requires Nomads)
Cosmogenesis is now available for Nomads
Added a nomad compatible version of Storm Chasers
Storm Attraction is now fully functional for mobile arkships
Empires now have more control over their colors:
Added a toggle and selectors in empire creation so you can select your map border and fill colours independently of your flag color.
Ship Color can now be selected independently from flag colors in Empire Creation.
Color swatches in the species creator's flag editor and ship-set selector now show the name of the selected color on hover.
Improvement
Regular Empires can now cancel accepted contracts after 20 years, with a notification sent to the operator.
The Dyson Swarm "best systems" list will now always show a variety of systems with different resources, so if you have a dozen physics deposits, they won't hide all of your energy systems. All "best systems" finders now show up to 12 systems.
Added new event options to the Forever Cruise situation stage events, allowing players to accept temporary economic penalties to affect the situation's direction.
Balance
Strike craft and missile defensive modifiers now also affect strike craft and missiles launched from starbases and defense platforms.
The Cybernetic species trait now provides an additional +5% Job Efficiency.
Hive minds which encounter genetic defects during cyberization can now choose a cyberisation policy.
Scientific Arkships now have +5% Deep Scanning Success Chance per Tier
Your Trade Policy now converts the trade value gained from Commercial Pacts and Branch Offices, just like the rest of your trade value (previously this trade was not run through your policy).
The "The Collective Self" technology now grants +1 Envoy.
The "Federation Code" technology now reduces Diplomacy influence upkeep by 25%.
Increased base knights upkeep by .15 alloys and .15 consumer goods
Increased soldier alloy upkeep for arkship military zones by 0.1
Rogue Servitor Forever Cruise Passengers now provide an additional +1% Complex Drone Job Efficiency on top of the base Gestalt bonus.
Consecrate World changes:
Consecrate World can now be declared on a curated set of worlds tied to your empire's origin and traits (such as Gaia and relic worlds, and origin-specific worlds like toxic, shrouded, rift, or arc-furnace worlds).
Reworked the Consecrated Worlds reward — consecrating worlds now grants a deterministic, empire-wide bonus to Unity, Amenities, and Spiritualist Ethics Attraction that scales with the number of Consecrated Worlds (+10% / +20% / +40% at 1 / 2 / 3), replacing the previous randomized per-world outcome.
The Paladin Ship now has a dedicated combat computer with Line tactics, giving it proper combat positioning while staying directable in combat, instead of ignoring attackers and holding position.
Scientific Arkships now have +5% Deep Scanning Success Chance per Tier
Your Trade Policy now converts the trade value gained from Commercial Pacts and Branch Offices, just like the rest of your trade value (previously this trade was not run through your policy).
The "The Collective Self" technology now grants +1 Envoy.
The "Federation Code" technology now reduces Diplomacy influence upkeep by 25%.
The Stellar Cannon is now a Tier 3 tech, and requires Wormhole Stabilization and UV Lasers.
Bugfix
AI and auto-complete ship designs no longer leave weapon or strike craft slots empty after upgrades or power rebalancing.
Fixed auto-generated ships occasionally receiving two sections in a single section slot.
Role-based section selection always resolves a valid section, so screen and point-defense ships receive the correct section.
Harbinger Crystalline Growth Regulators can no longer grow crystals on strike craft that have been launched, and modifiers that increase the armor and/or shields of strike craft no longer render strike craft functionally immune to damage.
Missile and torpedo armor and shields are now correctly applied in combat, so point-defense no longer ignores them.
Fixed Gospel of the Masses additional trade value not applying to your branch offices.
The Branching Out modifier from the Cyberization situation now gives +10% Trader Job Efficiency.
Automated starbase, waystation, and orbital ring designs now fit armor instead of shields in systems or on stations where shields are negated (pulsars, X-ray binaries, turbulent nebulae, and cloaking modules).
Fixed Deep Scan uncovering anomalies and archaeology sites far less often than the intended 7% and 3% chances.
Sero the Younger's Habitable Deep Scan can now uncover resource deposits, anomalies, and archaeology sites instead of only pre-sapients.
The success chance of Sero the Younger's Habitable Deep Scan now correctly diminishes with repeated scans of the same world.
Deep Scan resource caches now correctly scale with the Advanced Xenostudies resolution instead of A Voice for All.
Federation members can now form Commercial Pacts with one another, matching Research Agreements.
Free and automatic Research Agreements between Federation members now correctly benefit from Research Sharing from Agreements modifiers and satisfy faction demands for having Research Agreements.
Fixed federation members losing their existing Commercial Pacts with one another when forming or joining a federation. Members of non-trade federations now keep their pacts, while Trade Leagues replace them with the free federation pact (This only applies to Commercial Pacts between federation members).
Fixed pop and country ethics being permanently and progressively wiped across the galaxy during play.
What makes a man turn neutral? A lust for gold? Power? Or an error in the pop ethics randomizer?
Fixed Protostars not counting towards having energy deposits.
Extended swapping logic for soldiers into knights. All sources of soldier jobs should now be covered
Knight swaps should now work properly for nomads
The Joyous Warrior trait now specifies that its effect can only trigger with the relevant leader leading planetary invasions
If a system's starbase is unoccupied while all its planets are occupied, the system is no longer considered fully occupied.
Fixed the crime events (among others) not firing on arkships
Cryo-Sleepers no longer produce Crime/Deviancy
Clarified the Creativity Exhibition Vault's tooltip for Forever Cruise Rogue Servitors: its production and upkeep effects reach all passengers, not just first-class Bio-Trophies.
Fixed the Machine Uprising resolution notification showing "Unidentified Empire" instead of the names of the empires involved when an uprising was quelled or won.
Synthetic Fertility Nomads are no longer able to build arkships until they have researched droids
Fixed edge cases where Cetana would not properly turn hostile upon war declaration
Added a missing nomad Archaeology notification string
Fixed the Ness treasure system not spawning for non nomad empires
Fixed the Gaia world from Starlit Citadel being impossible to colonize
Fixed a missing icon in the Order's Keep concept tooltip
The Crystalline Bane modifier should now get properly removed
Adjusted the number of ships produced when using the Prethoryn Queen relic
Wilderness and Synthetic Fertility now start with homeworlds of the proper size
Fixed a case of double notification after a machine uprising ends
The Dyson Swarm "best systems" finder will now be based exclusively on raw star resources, and will be unaffected by modifiers like techs or cosmic storms.
The Arc Furnace "best systems" finder will now only show systems that have a Molten World.
Fixed numerous issues with Total Wars:
Nomadic Empires will now gain ownership of defeated Arkships and Waystations after Total War status quo victory.
Nomadic Empires will now steal a percentage of the population from planets they destroy during Total Wars.
Arkships defeated by Settled Empires are now destroyed after Total War status quo victory.
Nomadic Empires can now be defeated in Total Wars.
Taking planets in a Total War will now occupy them until the system is fully occupied, then annex them all at once. This prevents a bug where a system without a starbase didn't rebuild it if only some planets were taken.
The leader tooltip is now shown in all places where it should be shown
'Delicious Titans' planet modifier tooltip now correctly says 'Farmers are Converted in Titan Hunters' and doesn't show a broken icon.
savefiles with pending first contact event no longer fail to pick an event sound
Graphical crashfix related to Storm Forecast
Entertainer jobs on Forever Cruise Arkships now correctly come from the Entertainment Hub specialization instead of the Operations Center.
Fix for Nomadic Grand Archives being destroyed when a Settled Empire's system is destroyed.
Fix for Nomadic Grand Archive not being destroyed when a Waystation is lost or downgraded below Tier 2.
Added the bottom border line to the research dropdown in the top Resource Bar
Mandatory Pampering now reduces First Class Passenger Consumer Goods upkeep to 1 (from 1.5) for Rogue Servitors, matching the living standard's description.
Permanent Employment in Forever Cruise now only zombifies the crew, not the passengers
AI nomads no longer accept and ignore Build Waystation contracts when at capacity
The Build Waystation contract is now longer automatically abandoned for players when at double station capacity, only for AI nomads
Fixed several Cosmic Storms anomalies appearing more than once per game when they should be unique.
Removed the habitability requirement for the various Shore Leave internal Forever Cruise contracts.
Fixed ships that are waiting to be killed being counted for ship size-specific caps and special project requirements.
Bio-trophies now give 10 Political Power when playing as Rogue Servitor with the Forever Cruise Origin
AI empires with stealth fleet doctrines now correctly install cloaking devices on auto-designed ships.
Psionic shields are no longer equipped on stealth ships that lack psionic cloaking.
Machine Intelligence and Individualist Machine Forever Cruises with machine passengers now alternate assembly every month.
Cruise crew and passengers no longer incorrectly assigned Grid Amalgamation or Livestock living standards and slavery types.
Species being assimilated no longer incorrectly assigned Grid Amalgamation living standard.
Individualistic Machine Forever Cruise no longer gets an error from placing Robot Assembly Plants at game start.
Species being integrated are no longer eligible for assembly.
The Package Deal living standard in Forever Cruise now grants political power to employed Economy Class Passengers.
Fixed megastructure overclock buttons being unresponsive.
Added missing event sounds to the Forever Cruise situation
Fixed issues when dismantling Beastports on Arkships.
Carrier-computer ships now position themselves using the longer of their weapon or strike craft range, so a carrier with no strike craft no longer charges into close range.
Arkships without equipped weapons no longer charge into melee.
Fixed fleets set to flee when overpowered evaluating their flee condition correctly on an Evasive stance, rather than always evading regardless of the threat.
Fixed Deep Scan uncovering anomalies and archaeology sites far less often than the intended 7% and 3% chances.
Sero the Younger's Habitable Deep Scan can now uncover resource deposits, anomalies, and archaeology sites instead of only pre-sapients.
The success chance of Sero the Younger's Habitable Deep Scan now correctly diminishes with repeated scans of the same world.
Deep Scan resource caches now correctly scale with the Advanced Xenostudies resolution instead of A Voice for All.
Federation members can now form Commercial Pacts with one another, matching Research Agreements.
Free and automatic Research Agreements between Federation members now correctly benefit from Research Sharing from Agreements modifiers and satisfy faction demands for having Research Agreements.
Fixed federation members losing their existing Commercial Pacts with one another when forming or joining a federation. Members of non-trade federations now keep their pacts, while Trade Leagues replace them with the free federation pact (This only applies to Commercial Pacts between federation members).
Fixed issue with district indicators in the planet view
Fixed Stellar Cannon opinion modifier overflow
Fixed the Prospectorium's description incorrectly referring to the Scholarium.
Joining an ongoing war is now considered offensive from the perspective of subject agreement terms, regardless of which side is joined
Federation voting laws now apply when joining and leaving ongoing wars
Fixed manually issued system-wide Harvest orders queueing when there were no valid targets.
Fixed Arkships sometimes giving up on surveying.
Fixed the Declare War button tooltip being incorrect after leaving a federation.
Fixed waylines persisting on the galaxy map after a waystation was removed.
Fixed the Logistic Growth Scaling galaxy setting being truncated to one digit.
Nomadic Purge Vassals are now a special subject type that provide resources to their Overlord through subject taxes. Any remaining pops and resources are handed up to the overlord when the subject finishes its work, instead of being lost when the subject's colony was abandoned. A Purging Complete notification lists the pops and resources handed over to the Overlord when a Purge Vassal finishes its work, including any incidental resources that the planet may have produced during their stay.
Fixed Nomad Overlords not receiving the Unity (Fanatic Purifiers, Determined Exterminators, and Necrophages) or Society Research (Devouring Swarms) generated when their temporary purge subjects purged pops - the reward now goes to the Overlord instead of being lost with the subject.
Nomad purge subjects of assimilating empires (such as Driven Assimilators) now assimilate the pops they can rather than purging them, only exterminating pops that cannot be assimilated. The assimilated pops are handed up to the Overlord when the subject disbands, instead of the subject exterminating everyone or lingering forever as a separate empire.
Nomadic Purge Vassals no longer establish Embassies, and other empires can no longer propose Embassies to them.
Empires now correctly lower their opinion of a Nomad Overlord when its Purge Vassal Necrophages pops of their species
Fixed Necropurge not always creating pops.
The Judicial Execution leader trait now correctly grants bonuses when purging Thermophiles
Fixed the Necrophage Elevation Ceremony failing on Arkships. Elevated pops now adapt to Arkship Habitability, and the Pops Necrophaged notification is now shown, highlighting the Arkship fleet
Nomadic empires attempting to invade the first pre-FTL encounter are now correctly told that they need to survey the planet, not that their pre-ftl interference policy is preventing them from invading the planet.
Fixed a wide-ranging regression that caused many anomalies, events, and origin features to silently stop working - most visibly the classic Precursor dig sites no longer appearing when surveying, and the Fear of the Dark origin's hostile empire failing to spawn.
Empires are no longer allowed to join ongoing wars against their subjects/overlords.
Arkship weapon and reactor specializations now clearly indicate in their tooltip that they add Strategic Resource upkeep, with a link to the Strategic Resources concept explaining what that means.
The game will no longer tell the player to kill their own Behemoth to get rid of the Elder Voidspawn.
4.4.6 Fix: Fixed science ships being lost permanently when set to automatically explore Astral Rifts. Previously an automated science ship would vanish upon reaching a rift and never return, leaving its scientist stranded and cluttering the Outliner with ships stuck Missing In Action.
4.4.6 Fix: Automated ships no longer switch off automation and abandon their current task (constructing a station or megastructure, researching an anomaly or special project, exploring an Astral Rift, or carrying out a special order) when avoiding hostile fleets.
Fixed several minor artifact and anomaly research projects (including the Precursor "Delve into the Secrets" actions, Master's Writings, and numerous other special projects) granting no reward when completed as a Nomad empire.
Fixed an issue where a Nomad waystation disabled by hostile space fauna during a raid could remain disabled after the fauna left the system.
Fixed the "Gather Information" operation sometimes failing to deliver its intelligence report when the target empire no longer existed.
Fixed a script error in the genetic mutation event that could occur for Spiritualist empires.
The "Assault Armies" and "Shipyard" buttons on the Arkship Ship Controls tab are now properly localized in all languages
Fixed the Drums of War event "The Claimant" displaying an incorrect species insult when referring to the rival claimant
Synaptic Lathes with many pop groups on them no longer sometimes stop purging.
Fixed Synaptic Lathes not purging pops. Existing saves with broken lathes will repair at some point over the course of a year.
Nomads can now reactivate and own gateway megastructures
Nomad AI empires now build contract-required Waystations even when over their Starbase Capacity, instead of leaving those contracts unfulfilled.
Scan Debris Contracts now automatically cancel when the target debris decays before it can be scanned, instead of remaining active indefinitely.
The Prosperous Unification origin now displays correct, Arkship-specific effects and flavor text for Nomadic empires, instead of planet-based districts and "Homeworld" terminology
Wars declared with the Nomadic Raid, Plunder, or Wipe Them Out war goals now include the war type in their name, consistent with other war goals
The Anomalous Cube archaeology site now refers to the correct empire (or if communications haven't been established yet, then to "this empire")
AI
AI empires adopt a fleet doctrine and weapon/defense preferences matching their personality.
Auto-generated ship designs are now fully regenerated when new technology is researched, allowing them to adopt newly unlocked weapons and switch weapon families.
AI empires research weapon technologies matching their preferred weapon type more eagerly.
AI empires research armor or shield technologies in line with their defensive preference.
Sneak-attacker empires are more likely to research cloaking technology.
The AI no longer selects battleship, ember, or Stinger XL sections before it has a usable XL weapon.
The Stinger artillery section is no longer unconditionally preferred over its line section.
AI empires now fit psionic shields when they can afford the zro, instead of always avoiding them.
A shortage of one rare or strategic resource no longer blocks the AI from using weapons and components that rely on other rare resources.
AI empires with stealth fleet doctrines now correctly install cloaking devices on auto-designed ships.
Psionic shields are no longer equipped on stealth ships that lack psionic cloaking.
Fixed AI not handling events if they don't have an idle science ship with a leader.
Fixed AI not declaring war if their naval capacity is too high.
AI empires will no longer fire the Stellar Cannon into the territory of empires they are at peace with (unless recently insulted), and will now prioritize static targets like upgraded starbases and defense platforms when at war.
UI/UX
Waystations now show the amount of resources collected every month.
Improved Waystation stockpile tooltips.
Overlapping list boxes are now properly centered
Policies are now grouped into collapsible categories (Military, Diplomacy, Economy, Research, Society), with a traffic-light header on each category indicating whether all, some, or none of its policies can currently be changed.
Added a button to collapse or expand all policy categories at once.
Military policies can now be reviewed and changed from the Fleet Manager, and research policies from the Technology view.
Hints nomad players that they can excavate owned dig sites if they have the Frontier Archaeology tradition
Building slots are highlighted when they are selected
Fixed too large hitboxes for overclocking buttons.
In species trait tooltips in empire creation, the portrait requirements are now listed in the correct order.
Fixed the Open Orbital Ring button being hardcoded in planet_view.gui
Notification Icons fix, general centralization
Performance
macOS builds can now run natively on Apple Silicon as a universal (arm64 + x86_64) binary, no longer requiring Rosetta 2 translation.
Improved mid- and late-game performance by optimizing how pop faction attraction is calculated.
Reduced the CPU and memory overhead of per-fleet order checks, improving performance in large late-game galaxies with many fleets.
Stability
Fixed a crash that could occur when hovering over certain leader traits.
Fixed a potential crash when generating empire name labels on the galaxy map.
Fixed some more multiplayer out-of-sync issues.
Fixed a crash when quitting the game on macOS.
Modding
Remove obsolete faction parameters
Added missile armor, shield, and hull point modifiers (flat and percentage variants).
Fix `pop_force_add_ethic` and `pop_change_ethic` triggers
Remove deprecated triggers `pop_has_ethic` and `pop_group_has_ethic`
Added the can_spawn_random_anomaly, can_spawn_random_archaeological_site, and can_add_random_non_blocker_deposit triggers, and a surveyor parameter to the spawn_random_anomaly effect.
Exposed defines for allowing the AI to ignore the penalties for being over naval cap or over naval cap. The current state of these defines is no change from previous behaviour.
Added pretriggers to ships
Added home_colony and background_colony scopes (similar to home_planet and background_planet, but scope to a colony on any carrier type).
Removed min_navy_for_wars from country types.
Scripted actions support a new automation = {} block with an options sub-block, plus a new fleet-scoped has_automation_flag trigger to gate automation weights.
Scripted action automation = {} blocks now support a parent field that nests an action's row beneath another action in the settings menu.
Added the weapon_and_strike_craft range_components option for ship behaviors.
Added the can_spawn_random_anomaly, can_spawn_random_archaeological_site, and can_add_random_non_blocker_deposit triggers, and a surveyor parameter to the spawn_random_anomaly effect.
Exposed defines for allowing the AI to ignore the penalties for being over naval cap or over naval cap. The current state of these defines is no change from previous behaviour.
Updated the documentation for the `create_country` effect.
Added the transfer_resources_to_empire effect, which transfers a country's stockpile of each listed resource
Added the transfer_resources_to_empire effect, which transfers a country's stockpile of each listed resource (optionally a percentage of it) to another country in a single call
create_message now supports a "resources" variable type that prints a country's current stockpile of the listed resources as one string of icon + amount pairs
Resource Regions can now be created and weighted using scripting.
You can now visualize precursors using the debug
The stellaris_test_4.5_rollback branch has also been updated with Open Beta Update 3.
by Eladrin Happy Friday! We've updated the stellaris_test_4.5 branch again today, and added a rollback branch (stellaris_test_4.5_rollback) just in case, since this one modified a few hundred events. Stellaris 4.5 'Cygnus' Open Beta Update 3 Release Notes Balance The Stellar Ca
by Eladrin
Happy Friday!
We've updated the stellaris_test_4.5 branch again today, and added a rollback branch (stellaris_test_4.5_rollback) just in case, since this one modified a few hundred events.
Stellaris 4.5 'Cygnus' Open Beta Update 3 Release Notes
Balance
The Stellar Cannon is now a Tier 3 tech, and requires Wormhole Stabilization and UV Lasers.
Bugfix
Fixed a wide-ranging regression that caused many anomalies, events, and origin features to silently stop working - most visibly the classic Precursor dig sites no longer appearing when surveying, and the Fear of the Dark origin's hostile empire failing to spawn.
Empires are no longer allowed to join ongoing wars against their subjects/overlords.
Arkship weapon and reactor specializations now clearly indicate in their tooltip that they add Strategic Resource upkeep, with a link to the Strategic Resources concept explaining what that means.
The game will no longer tell the player to kill their own Behemoth to get rid of the Elder Voidspawn.
4.4.6 Fix: Fixed science ships being lost permanently when set to automatically explore Astral Rifts. Previously an automated science ship would vanish upon reaching a rift and never return, leaving its scientist stranded and cluttering the Outliner with ships stuck Missing In Action.
4.4.6 Fix: Automated ships no longer switch off automation and abandon their current task (constructing a station or megastructure, researching an anomaly or special project, exploring an Astral Rift, or carrying out a special order) when avoiding hostile fleets.
Fixed several minor artifact and anomaly research projects (including the Precursor "Delve into the Secrets" actions, Master's Writings, and numerous other special projects) granting no reward when completed as a Nomad empire.
Fixed an issue where a Nomad waystation disabled by hostile space fauna during a raid could remain disabled after the fauna left the system.
Fixed the "Gather Information" operation sometimes failing to deliver its intelligence report when the target empire no longer existed.
Fixed a script error in the genetic mutation event that could occur for Spiritualist empires.
The "Assault Armies" and "Shipyard" buttons on the Arkship Ship Controls tab are now properly localized in all languages
Fixed the Drums of War event "The Claimant" displaying an incorrect species insult when referring to the rival claimant
Synaptic Lathes with many pop groups on them no longer sometimes stop purging.
Fixed Synaptic Lathes not purging pops. Existing saves with broken lathes will repair at some point over the course of a year.
Nomads can now reactivate and own gateway megastructures
Nomad AI empires now build contract-required Waystations even when over their Starbase Capacity, instead of leaving those contracts unfulfilled.
Scan Debris Contracts now automatically cancel when the target debris decays before it can be scanned, instead of remaining active indefinitely.
The Prosperous Unification origin now displays correct, Arkship-specific effects and flavor text for Nomadic empires, instead of planet-based districts and "Homeworld" terminology
Wars declared with the Nomadic Raid, Plunder, or Wipe Them Out war goals now include the war type in their name, consistent with other war goals
The Anomalous Cube archaeology site now refers to the correct empire (or if communications haven't been established yet, then to "this empire")
AI
AI empires will no longer fire the Stellar Cannon into the territory of empires they are at peace with (unless recently insulted), and will now prioritize static targets like upgraded starbases and defense platforms when at war.
UI/UX
Notification Icons fix, general centralization
Stability
Fixed a crash when quitting the game on macOS.
Modding
Resource Regions can now be created and weighted using scripting.
You can now visualize precursors using the debug
Here's the compiled list from the previous Open Beta releases:
Previous 4.5 Open Beta Release Notes
Feature
Pop groups are no longer divided by Ethics or Factions, instead each pop group will have a given percentage that belongs to each faction or ethic as appropriate. This means that:
THIS IS A BREAKING CHANGE AND WILL NOT PRESERVE SAVE GAME COMPATIBILITY.
Ethics and factions are now shown on the pop group entries in the planetary management UI, with tooltips showing the attraction to ethics and factions. Verbose tooltips are enabled by holding Alt, to show a breakdown of all modifiers for these attractions.
Pops shift ethics and factions more frequently
Pop group faction conversion happens more frequently
Ethic attraction now impacts faction growth
Simplify factions randomization logic
Updated Cyberization policies to account for the changes to pop groups and ethics. The Limited Cybernetic species trait has been removed, instead if the Limited Cyberization policy is in effect, Cybernetic Spiritualist pops do not benefit from Cybernetic Job Efficiency. The Limited Cyborg leader trait still functions as previously. This will also decrease the Approval penalty from regular spiritualist factions from the demand The Flesh is Strong.
Unlocked Knights of the Toxic God for nomads
Added policies to provide better control over the auto-designer for both players and AI:
Added a Fleet Doctrine policy with six doctrines that determine the tactical roles each ship class is designed to fill, affecting automated ship designs and ship-designer auto-complete.
Added Weapon Preference and Defense Preference policies that steer automated ship designs and technology research.
Added Starbase Weapon Preference and Starbase Defense Preference policies so station loadouts can diverge from the fleet.
Federations can now enact laws to grant members free, automatic Commercial Pacts (and, with the Nomads DLC, Wayline Pacts) or Research Agreements. Each law is unavailable to the federation type that already grants the benefit through its perk (Trade League / Research Cooperative).
Trade League federations now provide free, automatic Commercial Pacts between all member empires.
Trade League federations now also provide free, automatic Wayline Pacts between all members. (Requires Nomads)
Cosmogenesis is now available for Nomads
Added a nomad compatible version of Storm Chasers
Storm Attraction is now fully functional for mobile arkships
Empires now have more control over their colors:
Added a toggle and selectors in empire creation so you can select your map border and fill colours independently of your flag color.
Ship Color can now be selected independently from flag colors in Empire Creation.
Color swatches in the species creator's flag editor and ship-set selector now show the name of the selected color on hover.
Improvement
Regular Empires can now cancel accepted contracts after 20 years, with a notification sent to the operator.
The Dyson Swarm "best systems" list will now always show a variety of systems with different resources, so if you have a dozen physics deposits, they won't hide all of your energy systems. All "best systems" finders now show up to 12 systems.
Added new event options to the Forever Cruise situation stage events, allowing players to accept temporary economic penalties to affect the situation's direction.
Balance
Strike craft and missile defensive modifiers now also affect strike craft and missiles launched from starbases and defense platforms.
The Cybernetic species trait now provides an additional +5% Job Efficiency.
Hive minds which encounter genetic defects during cyberization can now choose a cyberisation policy.
Scientific Arkships now have +5% Deep Scanning Success Chance per Tier
Your Trade Policy now converts the trade value gained from Commercial Pacts and Branch Offices, just like the rest of your trade value (previously this trade was not run through your policy).
The "The Collective Self" technology now grants +1 Envoy.
The "Federation Code" technology now reduces Diplomacy influence upkeep by 25%.
Increased base knights upkeep by .15 alloys and .15 consumer goods
Increased soldier alloy upkeep for arkship military zones by 0.1
Rogue Servitor Forever Cruise Passengers now provide an additional +1% Complex Drone Job Efficiency on top of the base Gestalt bonus.
Consecrate World changes:
Consecrate World can now be declared on a curated set of worlds tied to your empire's origin and traits (such as Gaia and relic worlds, and origin-specific worlds like toxic, shrouded, rift, or arc-furnace worlds).
Reworked the Consecrated Worlds reward — consecrating worlds now grants a deterministic, empire-wide bonus to Unity, Amenities, and Spiritualist Ethics Attraction that scales with the number of Consecrated Worlds (+10% / +20% / +40% at 1 / 2 / 3), replacing the previous randomized per-world outcome.
The Paladin Ship now has a dedicated combat computer with Line tactics, giving it proper combat positioning while staying directable in combat, instead of ignoring attackers and holding position.
Scientific Arkships now have +5% Deep Scanning Success Chance per Tier
Your Trade Policy now converts the trade value gained from Commercial Pacts and Branch Offices, just like the rest of your trade value (previously this trade was not run through your policy).
The "The Collective Self" technology now grants +1 Envoy.
The "Federation Code" technology now reduces Diplomacy influence upkeep by 25%.
Bugfix
AI and auto-complete ship designs no longer leave weapon or strike craft slots empty after upgrades or power rebalancing.
Fixed auto-generated ships occasionally receiving two sections in a single section slot.
Role-based section selection always resolves a valid section, so screen and point-defense ships receive the correct section.
Harbinger Crystalline Growth Regulators can no longer grow crystals on strike craft that have been launched, and modifiers that increase the armor and/or shields of strike craft no longer render strike craft functionally immune to damage.
Missile and torpedo armor and shields are now correctly applied in combat, so point-defense no longer ignores them.
Fixed Gospel of the Masses additional trade value not applying to your branch offices.
The Branching Out modifier from the Cyberization situation now gives +10% Trader Job Efficiency.
Automated starbase, waystation, and orbital ring designs now fit armor instead of shields in systems or on stations where shields are negated (pulsars, X-ray binaries, turbulent nebulae, and cloaking modules).
Fixed Deep Scan uncovering anomalies and archaeology sites far less often than the intended 7% and 3% chances.
Sero the Younger's Habitable Deep Scan can now uncover resource deposits, anomalies, and archaeology sites instead of only pre-sapients.
The success chance of Sero the Younger's Habitable Deep Scan now correctly diminishes with repeated scans of the same world.
Deep Scan resource caches now correctly scale with the Advanced Xenostudies resolution instead of A Voice for All.
Federation members can now form Commercial Pacts with one another, matching Research Agreements.
Free and automatic Research Agreements between Federation members now correctly benefit from Research Sharing from Agreements modifiers and satisfy faction demands for having Research Agreements.
Fixed federation members losing their existing Commercial Pacts with one another when forming or joining a federation. Members of non-trade federations now keep their pacts, while Trade Leagues replace them with the free federation pact (This only applies to Commercial Pacts between federation members).
Fixed pop and country ethics being permanently and progressively wiped across the galaxy during play.
What makes a man turn neutral? A lust for gold? Power? Or an error in the pop ethics randomizer?
Fixed Protostars not counting towards having energy deposits.
Extended swapping logic for soldiers into knights. All sources of soldier jobs should now be covered
Knight swaps should now work properly for nomads
The Joyous Warrior trait now specifies that its effect can only trigger with the relevant leader leading planetary invasions
If a system's starbase is unoccupied while all its planets are occupied, the system is no longer considered fully occupied.
Fixed the crime events (among others) not firing on arkships
Cryo-Sleepers no longer produce Crime/Deviancy
Clarified the Creativity Exhibition Vault's tooltip for Forever Cruise Rogue Servitors: its production and upkeep effects reach all passengers, not just first-class Bio-Trophies.
Fixed the Machine Uprising resolution notification showing "Unidentified Empire" instead of the names of the empires involved when an uprising was quelled or won.
Synthetic Fertility Nomads are no longer able to build arkships until they have researched droids
Fixed edge cases where Cetana would not properly turn hostile upon war declaration
Added a missing nomad Archaeology notification string
Fixed the Ness treasure system not spawning for non nomad empires
Fixed the Gaia world from Starlit Citadel being impossible to colonize
Fixed a missing icon in the Order's Keep concept tooltip
The Crystalline Bane modifier should now get properly removed
Adjusted the number of ships produced when using the Prethoryn Queen relic
Wilderness and Synthetic Fertility now start with homeworlds of the proper size
Fixed a case of double notification after a machine uprising ends
The Dyson Swarm "best systems" finder will now be based exclusively on raw star resources, and will be unaffected by modifiers like techs or cosmic storms.
The Arc Furnace "best systems" finder will now only show systems that have a Molten World.
Fixed numerous issues with Total Wars:
Nomadic Empires will now gain ownership of defeated Arkships and Waystations after Total War status quo victory.
Nomadic Empires will now steal a percentage of the population from planets they destroy during Total Wars.
Arkships defeated by Settled Empires are now destroyed after Total War status quo victory.
Nomadic Empires can now be defeated in Total Wars.
Taking planets in a Total War will now occupy them until the system is fully occupied, then annex them all at once. This prevents a bug where a system without a starbase didn't rebuild it if only some planets were taken.
The leader tooltip is now shown in all places where it should be shown
'Delicious Titans' planet modifier tooltip now correctly says 'Farmers are Converted in Titan Hunters' and doesn't show a broken icon.
savefiles with pending first contact event no longer fail to pick an event sound
Graphical crashfix related to Storm Forecast
Entertainer jobs on Forever Cruise Arkships now correctly come from the Entertainment Hub specialization instead of the Operations Center.
Fix for Nomadic Grand Archives being destroyed when a Settled Empire's system is destroyed.
Fix for Nomadic Grand Archive not being destroyed when a Waystation is lost or downgraded below Tier 2.
Added the bottom border line to the research dropdown in the top Resource Bar
Mandatory Pampering now reduces First Class Passenger Consumer Goods upkeep to 1 (from 1.5) for Rogue Servitors, matching the living standard's description.
Permanent Employment in Forever Cruise now only zombifies the crew, not the passengers
AI nomads no longer accept and ignore Build Waystation contracts when at capacity
The Build Waystation contract is now longer automatically abandoned for players when at double station capacity, only for AI nomads
Fixed several Cosmic Storms anomalies appearing more than once per game when they should be unique.
Removed the habitability requirement for the various Shore Leave internal Forever Cruise contracts.
Fixed ships that are waiting to be killed being counted for ship size-specific caps and special project requirements.
Bio-trophies now give 10 Political Power when playing as Rogue Servitor with the Forever Cruise Origin
AI empires with stealth fleet doctrines now correctly install cloaking devices on auto-designed ships.
Psionic shields are no longer equipped on stealth ships that lack psionic cloaking.
Machine Intelligence and Individualist Machine Forever Cruises with machine passengers now alternate assembly every month.
Cruise crew and passengers no longer incorrectly assigned Grid Amalgamation or Livestock living standards and slavery types.
Species being assimilated no longer incorrectly assigned Grid Amalgamation living standard.
Individualistic Machine Forever Cruise no longer gets an error from placing Robot Assembly Plants at game start.
Species being integrated are no longer eligible for assembly.
The Package Deal living standard in Forever Cruise now grants political power to employed Economy Class Passengers.
Fixed megastructure overclock buttons being unresponsive.
Added missing event sounds to the Forever Cruise situation
Fixed issues when dismantling Beastports on Arkships.
Carrier-computer ships now position themselves using the longer of their weapon or strike craft range, so a carrier with no strike craft no longer charges into close range.
Arkships without equipped weapons no longer charge into melee.
Fixed fleets set to flee when overpowered evaluating their flee condition correctly on an Evasive stance, rather than always evading regardless of the threat.
Fixed Deep Scan uncovering anomalies and archaeology sites far less often than the intended 7% and 3% chances.
Sero the Younger's Habitable Deep Scan can now uncover resource deposits, anomalies, and archaeology sites instead of only pre-sapients.
The success chance of Sero the Younger's Habitable Deep Scan now correctly diminishes with repeated scans of the same world.
Deep Scan resource caches now correctly scale with the Advanced Xenostudies resolution instead of A Voice for All.
Federation members can now form Commercial Pacts with one another, matching Research Agreements.
Free and automatic Research Agreements between Federation members now correctly benefit from Research Sharing from Agreements modifiers and satisfy faction demands for having Research Agreements.
Fixed federation members losing their existing Commercial Pacts with one another when forming or joining a federation. Members of non-trade federations now keep their pacts, while Trade Leagues replace them with the free federation pact (This only applies to Commercial Pacts between federation members).
Fixed issue with district indicators in the planet view
Fixed Stellar Cannon opinion modifier overflow
Fixed the Prospectorium's description incorrectly referring to the Scholarium.
Joining an ongoing war is now considered offensive from the perspective of subject agreement terms, regardless of which side is joined
Federation voting laws now apply when joining and leaving ongoing wars
Fixed manually issued system-wide Harvest orders queueing when there were no valid targets.
Fixed Arkships sometimes giving up on surveying.
Fixed the Declare War button tooltip being incorrect after leaving a federation.
Fixed waylines persisting on the galaxy map after a waystation was removed.
Fixed the Logistic Growth Scaling galaxy setting being truncated to one digit.
Nomadic Purge Vassals are now a special subject type that provide resources to their Overlord through subject taxes. Any remaining pops and resources are handed up to the overlord when the subject finishes its work, instead of being lost when the subject's colony was abandoned. A Purging Complete notification lists the pops and resources handed over to the Overlord when a Purge Vassal finishes its work, including any incidental resources that the planet may have produced during their stay.
Fixed Nomad Overlords not receiving the Unity (Fanatic Purifiers, Determined Exterminators, and Necrophages) or Society Research (Devouring Swarms) generated when their temporary purge subjects purged pops - the reward now goes to the Overlord instead of being lost with the subject.
Nomad purge subjects of assimilating empires (such as Driven Assimilators) now assimilate the pops they can rather than purging them, only exterminating pops that cannot be assimilated. The assimilated pops are handed up to the Overlord when the subject disbands, instead of the subject exterminating everyone or lingering forever as a separate empire.
Nomadic Purge Vassals no longer establish Embassies, and other empires can no longer propose Embassies to them.
Empires now correctly lower their opinion of a Nomad Overlord when its Purge Vassal Necrophages pops of their species
Fixed Necropurge not always creating pops.
The Judicial Execution leader trait now correctly grants bonuses when purging Thermophiles
Fixed the Necrophage Elevation Ceremony failing on Arkships. Elevated pops now adapt to Arkship Habitability, and the Pops Necrophaged notification is now shown, highlighting the Arkship fleet
Nomadic empires attempting to invade the first pre-FTL encounter are now correctly told that they need to survey the planet, not that their pre-ftl interference policy is preventing them from invading the planet.
AI
AI empires adopt a fleet doctrine and weapon/defense preferences matching their personality.
Auto-generated ship designs are now fully regenerated when new technology is researched, allowing them to adopt newly unlocked weapons and switch weapon families.
AI empires research weapon technologies matching their preferred weapon type more eagerly.
AI empires research armor or shield technologies in line with their defensive preference.
Sneak-attacker empires are more likely to research cloaking technology.
The AI no longer selects battleship, ember, or Stinger XL sections before it has a usable XL weapon.
The Stinger artillery section is no longer unconditionally preferred over its line section.
AI empires now fit psionic shields when they can afford the zro, instead of always avoiding them.
A shortage of one rare or strategic resource no longer blocks the AI from using weapons and components that rely on other rare resources.
AI empires with stealth fleet doctrines now correctly install cloaking devices on auto-designed ships.
Psionic shields are no longer equipped on stealth ships that lack psionic cloaking.
Fixed AI not handling events if they don't have an idle science ship with a leader.
Fixed AI not declaring war if their naval capacity is too high.
UI/UX
Waystations now show the amount of resources collected every month.
Improved Waystation stockpile tooltips.
Overlapping list boxes are now properly centered
Policies are now grouped into collapsible categories (Military, Diplomacy, Economy, Research, Society), with a traffic-light header on each category indicating whether all, some, or none of its policies can currently be changed.
Added a button to collapse or expand all policy categories at once.
Military policies can now be reviewed and changed from the Fleet Manager, and research policies from the Technology view.
Hints nomad players that they can excavate owned dig sites if they have the Frontier Archaeology tradition
Building slots are highlighted when they are selected
Fixed too large hitboxes for overclocking buttons.
In species trait tooltips in empire creation, the portrait requirements are now listed in the correct order.
Fixed the Open Orbital Ring button being hardcoded in planet_view.gui
Performance
macOS builds can now run natively on Apple Silicon as a universal (arm64 + x86_64) binary, no longer requiring Rosetta 2 translation.
Improved mid- and late-game performance by optimizing how pop faction attraction is calculated.
Reduced the CPU and memory overhead of per-fleet order checks, improving performance in large late-game galaxies with many fleets.
Stability
Fixed a crash that could occur when hovering over certain leader traits.
Fixed a potential crash when generating empire name labels on the galaxy map.
Fixed some more multiplayer out-of-sync issues.
Modding
Remove obsolete faction parameters
Added missile armor, shield, and hull point modifiers (flat and percentage variants).
Fix `pop_force_add_ethic` and `pop_change_ethic` triggers
Remove deprecated triggers `pop_has_ethic` and `pop_group_has_ethic`
Added the can_spawn_random_anomaly, can_spawn_random_archaeological_site, and can_add_random_non_blocker_deposit triggers, and a surveyor parameter to the spawn_random_anomaly effect.
Exposed defines for allowing the AI to ignore the penalties for being over naval cap or over naval cap. The current state of these defines is no change from previous behaviour.
Added pretriggers to ships
Added home_colony and background_colony scopes (similar to home_planet and background_planet, but scope to a colony on any carrier type).
Removed min_navy_for_wars from country types.
Scripted actions support a new automation = {} block with an options sub-block, plus a new fleet-scoped has_automation_flag trigger to gate automation weights.
Scripted action automation = {} blocks now support a parent field that nests an action's row beneath another action in the settings menu.
Added the weapon_and_strike_craft range_components option for ship behaviors.
Added the can_spawn_random_anomaly, can_spawn_random_archaeological_site, and can_add_random_non_blocker_deposit triggers, and a surveyor parameter to the spawn_random_anomaly effect.
Exposed defines for allowing the AI to ignore the penalties for being over naval cap or over naval cap. The current state of these defines is no change from previous behaviour.
Updated the documentation for the `create_country` effect.
Added the transfer_resources_to_empire effect, which transfers a country's stockpile of each listed resource
Added the transfer_resources_to_empire effect, which transfers a country's stockpile of each listed resource (optionally a percentage of it) to another country in a single call
create_message now supports a "resources" variable type that prints a country's current stockpile of the listed resources as one string of icon + amount pairs
by Eladrin We've just deployed a hotfix that resolves an issue introduced in 4.4.5 where Science Ships using automation would get lost forever when exploring Astral Rifts. It should now be available on Steam, GOG, and MS Store. 4.4.6 ‘Pegasus’ Hotfix Release Notes Bugfix Fixed
by Eladrin
We've just deployed a hotfix that resolves an issue introduced in 4.4.5 where Science Ships using automation would get lost forever when exploring Astral Rifts. It should now be available on Steam, GOG, and MS Store.
4.4.6 ‘Pegasus’ Hotfix Release Notes
Bugfix
Fixed science ships being lost permanently when set to automatically explore Astral Rifts. Previously an automated science ship would vanish upon reaching a rift and never return, leaving its scientist stranded and cluttering the Outliner with ships stuck Missing In Action.
Automated ships no longer switch off automation and abandon their current task (constructing a station or megastructure, researching an anomaly or special project, exploring an Astral Rift, or carrying out a special order) when avoiding hostile fleets.
Here are the 4.4.5 release notes from Tuesday:
4.4.5 ‘Pegasus’ Patch Release Notes
Feature
Added a Resource Abundance slider in galaxy settings.
This slider ranges from “Scarce” to x5 in 0.25 increments, where x1 is approximately the resource abundance of v4.3 and x5 is essentially 4.4’s “resources everywhere”.
The default is x2. We do recognize that this is a little confusing, but it gives you more control of getting it where you want.
Added Waystation Voidlure modules
Added Arkship Voidlure Array module that allows you to right-click on a system to lure space fauna.
Fleet automation menus now offer per-action options.
Nomad Arkships and Logistic Ships can fine-tune Harvest, Strip Mine, and Deep Scan automation, including whether to Harvest unsurveyed, depositless, waystation, friendly, or hostile-owned worlds, and whether to rescan when Deep Scanning.
Fleet automation settings can be saved as the default for a ship type and applied to all ships of that type at once, and each fleet remembers the settings it was last given.
Construction Automation now has options for Mining Stations, Research Stations, Observation Posts and Special Projects.
Added the Explore automation order to Arkships. Note: Arkships with the Explore order will attempt to navigate to Points of Interest if possible.
Improvement
Space Fauna now disable waystations instead of destroying them. They will be re-enabled once the fauna leaves or is destroyed.
Added a fallback event for the CFL if the tournament goes on for more than 3 years, this will ensure that you don't end up with fleets that can never repair
Details map mode now toggles between 3 states: Normal -> Detailed -> Hidden -> Normal.
Clarified the map mode tooltips.
Logistic Ship automation now defaults to on for Harvest Resources and off for Waystation collection.
The game will now recalculate species rights on loading a save game.
Upgrading fleet will reissue upgrade order if one got interrupted because of the mobile starbase jumping away to another system.
Hive Mind Forever Cruise empires with machine passengers can research machine assembly technologies to upgrade their passengers
Regular Forever Cruise empires with machine passengers start with the Robot Assembly Plants building
Completed Archaeological Sites and Astral Rifts will now be hidden in a non detailed galaxy map mode.
Added new event options to the Forever Cruise situation stage events, allowing players to accept temporary economic penalties to affect the situation's direction.
Balance
Operational Reserves Changes:
Operational Reserves now track Energy and Minerals 1:1 (previously 3:1).
Maximum Operational Reserves now scale with the number and tier of owned Arkships (base 15,000, plus 5,000 / 7,500 / 10,000 per Tier I / II / III Arkship) instead of a fixed cap.
Civilian Arkships grant an additional 2,500 Operational Reserve capacity per Tier.
Resource Silos, Fallen Empire Resource Silos, Arkship Resource Silos, and Waystation Logistics Silos now raise a Nomadic empire's maximum Operational Reserves.
Added a Critical stage to the Operational Reserves track with severe research, Unity, and Alloy penalties; the Festival, Conserve, and Burn approaches now gate on reserve stage rather than fixed thresholds.
The Critical Operational Reserves stage now also penalizes the populations the reserves sustain: Lithoid pops lose Happiness, pop growth, and Job Efficiency, and Mechanical and Machine pops lose Job Efficiency.
Wanderlust now gives some of its bonuses immediately, and the second half after completing 4 categories, not all of them. Category bonuses and progression remain unchanged.
Rewards from the Arkship Readiness Checklist now last 20 years.
Rebalanced the Ranger Paladin trait.
Reduced the opinion penalties empires hold against Nomadic Empires for strip-mining, reprocessing planets, and Exodus Jumps, and made these penalties decay more quickly.
Nomadic Primal Calling now starts with a Voidlure Array equipped on the Arkship
Removed the nomadic tradition swap for Domestication tradition finisher
Rebalanced the Passenger Satisfaction situation for Forever Cruise to allow staying in the middle stage longer
The Champion's forge now waits 20 years before firing instead of 10, this should give the galaxy a bit longer to find each other before all getting introduced at the tournament.
Star Seeker Celebrations now provide +100% all Job Efficiency, +100% Resources from Jobs, +100% Pop Growth Speed, and -75% Diplomatic Weight from Economy.
Arkship District Specializations that increase weapon damage (Laser Capacitors, Flight Decks, Ammunition Lines, or Missile Silos) now also add +0.15 strategic resource upkeep to Soldiers.
Species with Mutagenic Habitability living on Arkships will now gain 50% habitability (like Regular Arkship Habitability and Habitat Auto-modded habitability) instead of 30%
Rogue Servitor Forever Cruise Passengers now provide an additional +1% Complex Drone Job Efficiency on top of the base Gestalt bonus.
Bugfix
Arkships now have a 10 year cooldown after benefiting from a Max Aura effect, meaning you can't chain them to get a level 10 ascension Arkship super early.
Nomads can now build Megastructures in a system containing one of their Waystations even if the system has not been surveyed.
Fixed that Tombworld Earth was spawning way too often, so often that it would spawn instead of the UNE when playing the GRS or CoM.
Fixed an issue where pre-FTL earths couldn't have defensive armies (sorry this does not fix the issue of not having the cool unique armies :frowning2: )
Assault Armies will no longer split into separate Transport Fleets after leaving the planet surface.
Harvest Resources Contracts will now be cancelled if a different empire harvests the resources first.
Fixed a very rare case where if you settled and left the event open for too long another empire could claim the system. The fix is delaying them from claiming the system for 300 days. Please make a decision before then.
The CFL should no longer accept Orbital Rings as contestants (even though that’s why they call it a Championship Ring, right?)
Added a fallback if your arkship was in a hyperjump when progressing through the adAkkaria event chains
Due to legacy script your capital arkship was never able to find precursors
Stopped Scan Debris Contract from auto-cancelling on accept
Blocked the Sectors Map Mode for Nomads.
Fixed habitats not using the correct entity from your chosen shipset.
Fixed some scripted issues with refugee modifiers.
Fixed issues with Payback and Broken Shackles district specializations.
Fixed farming colony designation not applying to agri-drones.
Bio-Repurposing tradition now provides the nomadic effects for nomadic necromancers instead of the necromancer effects.
Brought the cost and upkeep of the Nanite Hub waystation module in line with the equivalent starbase building.
Fixed the Realign Shields decision not recognising some pulsar systems.
Living and Grid Amalgamated species now have bespoke living standards so they don't use consumer goods.
Fixed Astro Harvester job modifiers not applying in some cases.
Harvesting a celestial body that has no deposit no longer incurs a diplomatic opinion penalty.
The Creativity Exhibition Vault now boosts Cruise Passengers for Forever Cruise empires, instead of applying its bonus to Bio-Trophies they do not have.
Buildings that can be built on a planet or its orbital ring (Psi Corps, Planetary Shield Generator, Galactic Stock Exchange, Embassy, Noble Estates, Slave Processing Facility) can no longer be built as both a colony building and an Arkship starbase building at the same time.
The Galactic Stock Exchange can no longer be built on both a planet and its orbital ring at the same time.
Fixed pops sometimes being stuck in the Assimilation citizenship or stratum.
Pops that already have the cybernetic or psionic trait are no longer flagged for assimilation they do not need.
Negative arkship modifiers from Grand Refurbishment and Operational Checklist are removed when another empire conquers the arkship, so you aren't stuck with a bunch of negative modifiers and no way to remove them.
Arkship can now issue a survey command by clicking the survey button and clicking on the system in galaxy map
Fixed the tooltip information where the survey single planet vs surveying the whole system information was mixed up
Fixed Waystations, Arkships and modded starbases that have forced components from starbase modules and buildings regressing their designs and losing components.
If you are too slow and don't stop the Khan Aspirant from becoming the Khan they now properly despawn, avoiding a scenario where there are two Khans.
If you play with 0 marauders enabled and as a Heirs of the Khan empire, then the backup Marauder empire will avoid Fallen Empire systems so that they don't get killed in the first few weeks, making you the Khan while others are still figuring out Blue Lasers.
Fixed a crash when updating waystation networks
Ranger Lodge now correctly informs that Biologists are converted into Rangers, instead of saying Rangers are converted into Rangers
Arkship construction notification now mentions an arkship, not a starbase
Missions counters can now be infinite
Fixed missing localization for message descriptions
Fixed the End-Bringers' shrouded world failing to spawn in games featuring Nomadic empires.
Fixed Arkships unintentionally syncing to the same auto-generated design. Building or upgrading one Arkship will no longer sometimes overwrite armaments or utilities on others of the same type.
Fleets that are repairing or upgrading now correctly sync their FTL, Jump Drive, and Catapult actions.
Fixed an issue with generated empire adjectives.
Inetian trader special project bound to planet, meaning that if your science ship were to blow up you can still progress
"Secrets of the Past" event from "Biomorphosis" Ascension Situation blocked for Nomads
Harvest Resources Contracts will now be cancelled if a different empire harvests the resources first.
Nomads will no longer get double the benefit from their own resource producing megastructures. Megastructures will no longer be giving resources directly and a waystation will always be needed to collect those resources.
Planets can now be bombarded during first contact war
Contact view now properly closes if diplomacy window is opened
Fixed some megastructure effects showing incorrect modifier icons and “+100%”.
Rogue Servitors can no longer take a machine species as their secondary species when playing as a Forever Cruise. The machine can not be pampered.
(Beta only) Increased the Shrinkspace Depot and Extra-Dimensional Depot effects on Operation Reserves from 500 to 2500 and 1000 to 5000.
Pops can now migrate from Arkships
Hive Mind Forever Cruise empires with machine passengers start with the Machine Assembly Plants building
Hive Mind Forever Cruise empires start with the passenger Population Controls set to No, which allows the species to grow or be assembled
When starting a new game as a Forever Cruise Origin, crew species will correctly get assigned "cruise_founding_crew" flag. Various effects depends on it being set properly.
Fixed custom empires set to Force Spawn not spawning when using certain portraits.
Fixed custom Spawn Allowed empires with DLC portraits being excluded from the random empire pool.
Added tooltip saying that Nomadic Empires require a waystation in the system to open the L-Gate
Added tooltip saying that Nomadic Empires require a waystation in, or adjacent to, a system to exchange minor artifacts for precursor insight
Added tooltip that highlights that resources need to be harvested with the Arkship in the "Arkship Readiness" situation
Fixed Faculty of Archaeostudies Relic World bonus modifier
Decreased font size in the Empire Creation setup so it would not overlap with the numbers
Spelling error in the "Eager" trait description
Fixed the food upkeep in Phototrophic trait not being disabled when the Radiotrophic trait is active
Nomadic Hive Minds will no longer have access to the Evolutionary Predators decision make planets into hive worlds
Fixed an issue where the Heirs of the Khan claimant could be wiped out by the raider fleets spawned from the same marauder. No infighting!
You will no longer be told that your Khan died from old age when they are in fact immortal
Fixes contracts that had no issuer correctly set
Abort contracts if the issuer ceases to exist
Pre-Sapient species are now allowed to leave Pre-Sapient strata after they have been uplifted.
Fixed Nomadic empires being blocked from excavating their story-locked dig sites that sat in foreign owned systems.
Fixed Arkships sometimes giving up on Surveying.
Empire preview will correctly display forced spawned empires with certain restricted portraits.
Fixed some buildings (e.g. Psi-Corps) being unbuildable on planets.
Arkship habitability preference can now be applied by species modification if your empire is nomadic.
Prospectorium description does not refers to scholarium description
Bio-trophies now give 10 Political Power when playing as Rogue Servitor with the Forever Cruise Origin
The anomaly “The Imitator” will no longer sometimes appear multiple times. The Imitator cannot be imitated.
Removed the habitability requirement for the various Shore Leave internal Forever Cruise contracts.
Machine Intelligence and Individualist Machine Forever Cruises with machine passengers now alternate assembly every month.
Cruise crew and passengers no longer incorrectly assigned Grid Amalgamation or Livestock living standards and slavery types.
Species being assimilated no longer incorrectly assigned Grid Amalgamation living standard.
Individualistic Machine Forever Cruise no longer gets an error from placing Robot Assembly Plants at game start.
Species being integrated are no longer eligible for assembly.
The Package Deal living standard in Forever Cruise now grants political power to employed Economy Class Passengers.
Added missing event sounds to the Forever Cruise situation
Fixed megastructure overclock buttons being unresponsive.
Fixed several Cosmic Storms anomalies appearing more than once per game when they should be unique.
Fixed Stellar Cannon opinion modifier overflow
The Build Waystation contract is now longer automatically abandoned for players when at double station capacity, only for AI nomads
Joining an ongoing war is now considered offensive from the perspective of subject agreement terms, regardless of which side is joined
Fixed ships that are waiting to be killed being counted for ship size-specific caps and special project requirements.
Permanent Employment in Forever Cruise now only zombifies the crew, not the passengers
Fixed issues when dismantling Beastports on Arkships.
Added the bottom border line to the research dropdown in the top Resource Bar
Reduced the Consumer Good upkeep of First Class Passenger Mandatory Pampering to 1 (from 1.5) for Rogue Servitors, matching the living standard's description.
Fix waylines persisting on galaxy map after waystation removal
AI
Fixed AI being disabled after a resync in MP.
The AI will now once again assign leaders to sector capitals as well as newly built arkships.
Fixed AI not handling events if they don't have an idle science ship with a leader.
UI/UX
The Operational Reserves situation now shows its capacity breakdown and stored/total readout in the Situation Log instead of an empty Finisher Effects panel.
The Operational Reserves topbar tooltip now shows a predicted monthly change with per-resource Energy and Minerals contributions, each with a resource icon and coloured +/- value, and a Hold-ALT hint to expand the produced/consumed breakdown.
When enabling nomads in empire creation, the civilian arkship is now selected by default.
Arkships no longer show false clearable-blocker icons in the outliner.
Fixed incorrect Arkship button texts in the planet view.
Anomaly window now also shows the name of the anomaly
Fixed a target visibility bug when switching between situation log entries.
Fix Remove Contract button hover hitbox in Situation Log
Science Ships, Construction Ships, and Nomad fleets now share one automation settings window, with options nested under each action in a scrollable list.
The automation settings window now groups actions into collapsible categories, with Survey nested under Exploration so you can automate exploring with or without surveying, and adds a Reset button that restores a fleet's default automation settings.
In species trait tooltips in empire creation, the portrait requirements are now listed in the correct order.
Fixed too large hitboxes for overclocking buttons.
Performance
Fixed science ship Excavate and Astral Rift automation causing a recurring daily stutter when no reachable target was available.
Reduced the CPU and memory overhead of per-fleet order checks, improving performance in large late-game galaxies with many fleets.
Stability
Added some safeguards to avoid crashing related to pop groups.
Modding
Situations can define total_progress with per-stage section_weight for progress bars whose length and stage bands scale at runtime, with auto-generated _max_progress_add/_mult country modifiers and a situation_progress_percent trigger.
Situations, stages, and approaches support custom_tooltip and custom_tooltip_with_modifiers (replacing the approach-only active_tooltip), and situations can override their Situation Log Active Effects and Finisher Effects panel titles and bodies.
Added the orbital_ring_and_arkship_equivalent_absent scripted trigger.
Starbase modules now also support `scripted_effect_cooldown`, `scripted_effect_cooldown_flag`, and `scripted_effect_cooldown_flag_desc`
and are now optional for is_point_of_interest.
Scripted actions support a new automation = {} block with an options sub-block, plus a new fleet-scoped has_automation_flag trigger to gate automation weights.
Scripted action automation = {} blocks now support a parent field that nests an action's row beneath another action in the settings menu.
Added home_colony and background_colony scopes (similar to home_planet and background_planet, but scope to a colony on any carrier type).
by Eladrin Hello everyone! Earlier this week we released the Stellaris 4.4.5 ‘Pegasus’ Update with the following changes: 4.4.5 ‘Pegasus’ Patch Release Notes Feature Added a Resource Abundance slider in galaxy settings. This slider ranges from “Scarce” to x5 in 0.25 increments, w
by Eladrin
Hello everyone!
Earlier this week we released the Stellaris 4.4.5 ‘Pegasus’ Update with the following changes:
4.4.5 ‘Pegasus’ Patch Release Notes
Feature
Added a Resource Abundance slider in galaxy settings.
This slider ranges from “Scarce” to x5 in 0.25 increments, where x1 is approximately the resource abundance of v4.3 and x5 is essentially 4.4’s “resources everywhere”.
The default is x2. We do recognize that this is a little confusing, but it gives you more control of getting it where you want.
Added Waystation Voidlure modules
Added Arkship Voidlure Array module that allows you to right-click on a system to lure space fauna.
Fleet automation menus now offer per-action options.
Nomad Arkships and Logistic Ships can fine-tune Harvest, Strip Mine, and Deep Scan automation, including whether to Harvest unsurveyed, depositless, waystation, friendly, or hostile-owned worlds, and whether to rescan when Deep Scanning.
Fleet automation settings can be saved as the default for a ship type and applied to all ships of that type at once, and each fleet remembers the settings it was last given.
Construction Automation now has options for Mining Stations, Research Stations, Observation Posts and Special Projects.
Added the Explore automation order to Arkships. Note: Arkships with the Explore order will attempt to navigate to Points of Interest if possible.
Improvement
Space Fauna now disable waystations instead of destroying them. They will be re-enabled once the fauna leaves or is destroyed.
Added a fallback event for the CFL if the tournament goes on for more than 3 years, this will ensure that you don't end up with fleets that can never repair
Details map mode now toggles between 3 states: Normal -> Detailed -> Hidden -> Normal.
Clarified the map mode tooltips.
Logistic Ship automation now defaults to on for Harvest Resources and off for Waystation collection.
The game will now recalculate species rights on loading a save game.
Upgrading fleet will reissue upgrade order if one got interrupted because of the mobile starbase jumping away to another system.
Hive Mind Forever Cruise empires with machine passengers can research machine assembly technologies to upgrade their passengers
Regular Forever Cruise empires with machine passengers start with the Robot Assembly Plants building
Completed Archaeological Sites and Astral Rifts will now be hidden in a non detailed galaxy map mode.
Added new event options to the Forever Cruise situation stage events, allowing players to accept temporary economic penalties to affect the situation's direction.
Balance
Operational Reserves Changes:
Operational Reserves now track Energy and Minerals 1:1 (previously 3:1).
Maximum Operational Reserves now scale with the number and tier of owned Arkships (base 15,000, plus 5,000 / 7,500 / 10,000 per Tier I / II / III Arkship) instead of a fixed cap.
Civilian Arkships grant an additional 2,500 Operational Reserve capacity per Tier.
Resource Silos, Fallen Empire Resource Silos, Arkship Resource Silos, and Waystation Logistics Silos now raise a Nomadic empire's maximum Operational Reserves.
Added a Critical stage to the Operational Reserves track with severe research, Unity, and Alloy penalties; the Festival, Conserve, and Burn approaches now gate on reserve stage rather than fixed thresholds.
The Critical Operational Reserves stage now also penalizes the populations the reserves sustain: Lithoid pops lose Happiness, pop growth, and Job Efficiency, and Mechanical and Machine pops lose Job Efficiency.
Wanderlust now gives some of its bonuses immediately, and the second half after completing 4 categories, not all of them. Category bonuses and progression remain unchanged.
Rewards from the Arkship Readiness Checklist now last 20 years.
Rebalanced the Ranger Paladin trait.
Reduced the opinion penalties empires hold against Nomadic Empires for strip-mining, reprocessing planets, and Exodus Jumps, and made these penalties decay more quickly.
Nomadic Primal Calling now starts with a Voidlure Array equipped on the Arkship
Removed the nomadic tradition swap for Domestication tradition finisher
Rebalanced the Passenger Satisfaction situation for Forever Cruise to allow staying in the middle stage longer
The Champion's forge now waits 20 years before firing instead of 10, this should give the galaxy a bit longer to find each other before all getting introduced at the tournament.
Star Seeker Celebrations now provide +100% all Job Efficiency, +100% Resources from Jobs, +100% Pop Growth Speed, and -75% Diplomatic Weight from Economy.
Arkship District Specializations that increase weapon damage (Laser Capacitors, Flight Decks, Ammunition Lines, or Missile Silos) now also add +0.15 strategic resource upkeep to Soldiers.
Species with Mutagenic Habitability living on Arkships will now gain 50% habitability (like Regular Arkship Habitability and Habitat Auto-modded habitability) instead of 30%
Rogue Servitor Forever Cruise Passengers now provide an additional +1% Complex Drone Job Efficiency on top of the base Gestalt bonus.
Bugfix
Arkships now have a 10 year cooldown after benefiting from a Max Aura effect, meaning you can't chain them to get a level 10 ascension Arkship super early.
Nomads can now build Megastructures in a system containing one of their Waystations even if the system has not been surveyed.
Fixed that Tombworld Earth was spawning way too often, so often that it would spawn instead of the UNE when playing the GRS or CoM.
Fixed an issue where pre-FTL earths couldn't have defensive armies (sorry this does not fix the issue of not having the cool unique armies :frowning2: )
Assault Armies will no longer split into separate Transport Fleets after leaving the planet surface.
Harvest Resources Contracts will now be cancelled if a different empire harvests the resources first.
Fixed a very rare case where if you settled and left the event open for too long another empire could claim the system. The fix is delaying them from claiming the system for 300 days. Please make a decision before then.
The CFL should no longer accept Orbital Rings as contestants (even though that’s why they call it a Championship Ring, right?)
Added a fallback if your arkship was in a hyperjump when progressing through the adAkkaria event chains
Due to legacy script your capital arkship was never able to find precursors
Stopped Scan Debris Contract from auto-cancelling on accept
Blocked the Sectors Map Mode for Nomads.
Fixed habitats not using the correct entity from your chosen shipset.
Fixed some scripted issues with refugee modifiers.
Fixed issues with Payback and Broken Shackles district specializations.
Fixed farming colony designation not applying to agri-drones.
Bio-Repurposing tradition now provides the nomadic effects for nomadic necromancers instead of the necromancer effects.
Brought the cost and upkeep of the Nanite Hub waystation module in line with the equivalent starbase building.
Fixed the Realign Shields decision not recognising some pulsar systems.
Living and Grid Amalgamated species now have bespoke living standards so they don't use consumer goods.
Fixed Astro Harvester job modifiers not applying in some cases.
Harvesting a celestial body that has no deposit no longer incurs a diplomatic opinion penalty.
The Creativity Exhibition Vault now boosts Cruise Passengers for Forever Cruise empires, instead of applying its bonus to Bio-Trophies they do not have.
Buildings that can be built on a planet or its orbital ring (Psi Corps, Planetary Shield Generator, Galactic Stock Exchange, Embassy, Noble Estates, Slave Processing Facility) can no longer be built as both a colony building and an Arkship starbase building at the same time.
The Galactic Stock Exchange can no longer be built on both a planet and its orbital ring at the same time.
Fixed pops sometimes being stuck in the Assimilation citizenship or stratum.
Pops that already have the cybernetic or psionic trait are no longer flagged for assimilation they do not need.
Negative arkship modifiers from Grand Refurbishment and Operational Checklist are removed when another empire conquers the arkship, so you aren't stuck with a bunch of negative modifiers and no way to remove them.
Arkship can now issue a survey command by clicking the survey button and clicking on the system in galaxy map
Fixed the tooltip information where the survey single planet vs surveying the whole system information was mixed up
Fixed Waystations, Arkships and modded starbases that have forced components from starbase modules and buildings regressing their designs and losing components.
If you are too slow and don't stop the Khan Aspirant from becoming the Khan they now properly despawn, avoiding a scenario where there are two Khans.
If you play with 0 marauders enabled and as a Heirs of the Khan empire, then the backup Marauder empire will avoid Fallen Empire systems so that they don't get killed in the first few weeks, making you the Khan while others are still figuring out Blue Lasers.
Fixed a crash when updating waystation networks
Ranger Lodge now correctly informs that Biologists are converted into Rangers, instead of saying Rangers are converted into Rangers
Arkship construction notification now mentions an arkship, not a starbase
Missions counters can now be infinite
Fixed missing localization for message descriptions
Fixed the End-Bringers' shrouded world failing to spawn in games featuring Nomadic empires.
Fixed Arkships unintentionally syncing to the same auto-generated design. Building or upgrading one Arkship will no longer sometimes overwrite armaments or utilities on others of the same type.
Fleets that are repairing or upgrading now correctly sync their FTL, Jump Drive, and Catapult actions.
Fixed an issue with generated empire adjectives.
Inetian trader special project bound to planet, meaning that if your science ship were to blow up you can still progress
"Secrets of the Past" event from "Biomorphosis" Ascension Situation blocked for Nomads
Nomads will no longer get double the benefit from their own resource producing megastructures. Megastructures will no longer be giving resources directly and a waystation will always be needed to collect those resources.
Planets can now be bombarded during first contact war
Contact view now properly closes if diplomacy window is opened
Fixed some megastructure effects showing incorrect modifier icons and “+100%”.
Rogue Servitors can no longer take a machine species as their secondary species when playing as a Forever Cruise. The machine can not be pampered.
(Beta only) Increased the Shrinkspace Depot and Extra-Dimensional Depot effects on Operation Reserves from 500 to 2500 and 1000 to 5000.
Pops can now migrate from Arkships
Hive Mind Forever Cruise empires with machine passengers start with the Machine Assembly Plants building
Hive Mind Forever Cruise empires start with the passenger Population Controls set to No, which allows the species to grow or be assembled
When starting a new game as a Forever Cruise Origin, crew species will correctly get assigned "cruise_founding_crew" flag. Various effects depends on it being set properly.
Fixed custom empires set to Force Spawn not spawning when using certain portraits.
Fixed custom Spawn Allowed empires with DLC portraits being excluded from the random empire pool.
Added tooltip saying that Nomadic Empires require a waystation in the system to open the L-Gate
Added tooltip saying that Nomadic Empires require a waystation in, or adjacent to, a system to exchange minor artifacts for precursor insight
Added tooltip that highlights that resources need to be harvested with the Arkship in the "Arkship Readiness" situation
Fixed Faculty of Archaeostudies Relic World bonus modifier
Decreased font size in the Empire Creation setup so it would not overlap with the numbers
Spelling error in the "Eager" trait description
Fixed the food upkeep in Phototrophic trait not being disabled when the Radiotrophic trait is active
Nomadic Hive Minds will no longer have access to the Evolutionary Predators decision make planets into hive worlds
Fixed an issue where the Heirs of the Khan claimant could be wiped out by the raider fleets spawned from the same marauder. No infighting!
You will no longer be told that your Khan died from old age when they are in fact immortal
Fixes contracts that had no issuer correctly set
Abort contracts if the issuer ceases to exist
Pre-Sapient species are now allowed to leave Pre-Sapient strata after they have been uplifted.
Fixed Nomadic empires being blocked from excavating their story-locked dig sites that sat in foreign owned systems.
Fixed Arkships sometimes giving up on Surveying.
Empire preview will correctly display forced spawned empires with certain restricted portraits.
Fixed some buildings (e.g. Psi-Corps) being unbuildable on planets.
Arkship habitability preference can now be applied by species modification if your empire is nomadic.
Prospectorium description does not refers to scholarium description
Bio-trophies now give 10 Political Power when playing as Rogue Servitor with the Forever Cruise Origin
The anomaly “The Imitator” will no longer sometimes appear multiple times. The Imitator cannot be imitated.
Removed the habitability requirement for the various Shore Leave internal Forever Cruise contracts.
Machine Intelligence and Individualist Machine Forever Cruises with machine passengers now alternate assembly every month.
Cruise crew and passengers no longer incorrectly assigned Grid Amalgamation or Livestock living standards and slavery types.
Species being assimilated no longer incorrectly assigned Grid Amalgamation living standard.
Individualistic Machine Forever Cruise no longer gets an error from placing Robot Assembly Plants at game start.
Species being integrated are no longer eligible for assembly.
The Package Deal living standard in Forever Cruise now grants political power to employed Economy Class Passengers.
Added missing event sounds to the Forever Cruise situation
Fixed megastructure overclock buttons being unresponsive.
Fixed several Cosmic Storms anomalies appearing more than once per game when they should be unique.
Fixed Stellar Cannon opinion modifier overflow
The Build Waystation contract is now longer automatically abandoned for players when at double station capacity, only for AI nomads
Joining an ongoing war is now considered offensive from the perspective of subject agreement terms, regardless of which side is joined
Fixed ships that are waiting to be killed being counted for ship size-specific caps and special project requirements.
Permanent Employment in Forever Cruise now only zombifies the crew, not the passengers
Fixed issues when dismantling Beastports on Arkships.
Added the bottom border line to the research dropdown in the top Resource Bar
Reduced the Consumer Good upkeep of First Class Passenger Mandatory Pampering to 1 (from 1.5) for Rogue Servitors, matching the living standard's description.
Fix waylines persisting on galaxy map after waystation removal
AI
Fixed AI being disabled after a resync in MP.
The AI will now once again assign leaders to sector capitals as well as newly built arkships.
Fixed AI not handling events if they don't have an idle science ship with a leader.
UI/UX
The Operational Reserves situation now shows its capacity breakdown and stored/total readout in the Situation Log instead of an empty Finisher Effects panel.
The Operational Reserves topbar tooltip now shows a predicted monthly change with per-resource Energy and Minerals contributions, each with a resource icon and coloured +/- value, and a Hold-ALT hint to expand the produced/consumed breakdown.
When enabling nomads in empire creation, the civilian arkship is now selected by default.
Arkships no longer show false clearable-blocker icons in the outliner.
Fixed incorrect Arkship button texts in the planet view.
Anomaly window now also shows the name of the anomaly
Fixed a target visibility bug when switching between situation log entries.
Fix Remove Contract button hover hitbox in Situation Log
Science Ships, Construction Ships, and Nomad fleets now share one automation settings window, with options nested under each action in a scrollable list.
The automation settings window now groups actions into collapsible categories, with Survey nested under Exploration so you can automate exploring with or without surveying, and adds a Reset button that restores a fleet's default automation settings.
In species trait tooltips in empire creation, the portrait requirements are now listed in the correct order.
Fixed too large hitboxes for overclocking buttons.
Performance
Fixed science ship Excavate and Astral Rift automation causing a recurring daily stutter when no reachable target was available.
Reduced the CPU and memory overhead of per-fleet order checks, improving performance in large late-game galaxies with many fleets.
Stability
Added some safeguards to avoid crashing related to pop groups.
Modding
Situations can define total_progress with per-stage section_weight for progress bars whose length and stage bands scale at runtime, with auto-generated _max_progress_add/_mult country modifiers and a situation_progress_percent trigger.
Situations, stages, and approaches support custom_tooltip and custom_tooltip_with_modifiers (replacing the approach-only active_tooltip), and situations can override their Situation Log Active Effects and Finisher Effects panel titles and bodies.
Added the orbital_ring_and_arkship_equivalent_absent scripted trigger.
Starbase modules now also support `scripted_effect_cooldown`, `scripted_effect_cooldown_flag`, and `scripted_effect_cooldown_flag_desc`
and are now optional for is_point_of_interest.
Scripted actions support a new automation = {} block with an options sub-block, plus a new fleet-scoped has_automation_flag trigger to gate automation weights.
Scripted action automation = {} blocks now support a parent field that nests an action's row beneath another action in the settings menu.
Added home_colony and background_colony scopes (similar to home_planet and background_planet, but scope to a colony on any carrier type).
Most further changes are being made on the 4.5 ‘Cygnus’ branch, which is currently up as an open beta on the stellaris_test_4.5 branch. We’re looking at doing a 4.4.6 hotfix today or tomorrow to fix an issue where automated science ships get stuck forever in Astral Rifts (manually assigned science ships don’t get sent MIA for all eternity), but other than that we expect this to be the last release of the 4.4 ‘Pegasus’ cycle.
We also updated the ‘Cygnus’ Open Beta this week. This week’s updates include early versions of Cosmogenesis and Storm Chasers for Nomadic empires, and made a few updates to the Knights of the Toxic God.
4.5 ‘Cygnus’ Open Beta Release Notes
New additions since last week are in italics.
The 4.5 Open Beta now also includes all changes from 4.4.5.
Feature
Pop groups are no longer divided by Ethics or Factions, instead each pop group will have a given percentage that belongs to each faction or ethic as appropriate. This means that:
THIS IS A BREAKING CHANGE AND WILL NOT PRESERVE SAVE GAME COMPATIBILITY.
Ethics and factions are now shown on the pop group entries in the planetary management UI, with tooltips showing the attraction to ethics and factions. Verbose tooltips are enabled by holding Alt, to show a breakdown of all modifiers for these attractions.
Pops shift ethics and factions more frequently
Pop group faction conversion happens more frequently
Ethic attraction now impacts faction growth
Simplify factions randomization logic
Updated Cyberization policies to account for the changes to pop groups and ethics. The Limited Cybernetic species trait has been removed, instead if the Limited Cyberization policy is in effect, Cybernetic Spiritualist pops do not benefit from Cybernetic Job Efficiency. The Limited Cyborg leader trait still functions as previously. This will also decrease the Approval penalty from regular spiritualist factions from the demand The Flesh is Strong.
Unlocked Knights of the Toxic God for nomads
Added policies to provide better control over the auto-designer for both players and AI:
Added a Fleet Doctrine policy with six doctrines that determine the tactical roles each ship class is designed to fill, affecting automated ship designs and ship-designer auto-complete.
Added Weapon Preference and Defense Preference policies that steer automated ship designs and technology research.
Added Starbase Weapon Preference and Starbase Defense Preference policies so station loadouts can diverge from the fleet.
Federations can now enact laws to grant members free, automatic Commercial Pacts (and, with the Nomads DLC, Wayline Pacts) or Research Agreements. Each law is unavailable to the federation type that already grants the benefit through its perk (Trade League / Research Cooperative).
Trade League federations now provide free, automatic Commercial Pacts between all member empires.
Trade League federations now also provide free, automatic Wayline Pacts between all members. (Requires Nomads)
Cosmogenesis is now available for Nomads
Added a nomad compatible version of Storm Chasers
Storm Attraction is now fully functional for mobile arkships
Empires now have more control over their colors:
Added a toggle and selectors in empire creation so you can select your map border and fill colours independently of your flag color.
Ship Color can now be selected independently from flag colors in Empire Creation.
Color swatches in the species creator's flag editor and ship-set selector now show the name of the selected color on hover.
Improvement
Regular Empires can now cancel accepted contracts after 20 years, with a notification sent to the operator.
The Dyson Swarm "best systems" list will now always show a variety of systems with different resources, so if you have a dozen physics deposits, they won't hide all of your energy systems. All "best systems" finders now show up to 12 systems.
Added new event options to the Forever Cruise situation stage events, allowing players to accept temporary economic penalties to affect the situation's direction.
Balance
Strike craft and missile defensive modifiers now also affect strike craft and missiles launched from starbases and defense platforms.
The Cybernetic species trait now provides an additional +5% Job Efficiency.
Hive minds which encounter genetic defects during cyberization can now choose a cyberisation policy.
Scientific Arkships now have +5% Deep Scanning Success Chance per Tier
Your Trade Policy now converts the trade value gained from Commercial Pacts and Branch Offices, just like the rest of your trade value (previously this trade was not run through your policy).
The "The Collective Self" technology now grants +1 Envoy.
The "Federation Code" technology now reduces Diplomacy influence upkeep by 25%.
Increased base knights upkeep by .15 alloys and .15 consumer goods
Increased soldier alloy upkeep for arkship military zones by 0.1
Rogue Servitor Forever Cruise Passengers now provide an additional +1% Complex Drone Job Efficiency on top of the base Gestalt bonus.
Consecrate World changes:
Consecrate World can now be declared on a curated set of worlds tied to your empire's origin and traits (such as Gaia and relic worlds, and origin-specific worlds like toxic, shrouded, rift, or arc-furnace worlds).
Reworked the Consecrated Worlds reward — consecrating worlds now grants a deterministic, empire-wide bonus to Unity, Amenities, and Spiritualist Ethics Attraction that scales with the number of Consecrated Worlds (+10% / +20% / +40% at 1 / 2 / 3), replacing the previous randomized per-world outcome.
The Paladin Ship now has a dedicated combat computer with Line tactics, giving it proper combat positioning while staying directable in combat, instead of ignoring attackers and holding position.
Scientific Arkships now have +5% Deep Scanning Success Chance per Tier
Your Trade Policy now converts the trade value gained from Commercial Pacts and Branch Offices, just like the rest of your trade value (previously this trade was not run through your policy).
The "The Collective Self" technology now grants +1 Envoy.
The "Federation Code" technology now reduces Diplomacy influence upkeep by 25%.
Bugfix
AI and auto-complete ship designs no longer leave weapon or strike craft slots empty after upgrades or power rebalancing.
Fixed auto-generated ships occasionally receiving two sections in a single section slot.
Role-based section selection always resolves a valid section, so screen and point-defense ships receive the correct section.
Harbinger Crystalline Growth Regulators can no longer grow crystals on strike craft that have been launched, and modifiers that increase the armor and/or shields of strike craft no longer render strike craft functionally immune to damage.
Missile and torpedo armor and shields are now correctly applied in combat, so point-defense no longer ignores them.
Fixed Gospel of the Masses additional trade value not applying to your branch offices.
The Branching Out modifier from the Cyberization situation now gives +10% Trader Job Efficiency.
Automated starbase, waystation, and orbital ring designs now fit armor instead of shields in systems or on stations where shields are negated (pulsars, X-ray binaries, turbulent nebulae, and cloaking modules).
Fixed Deep Scan uncovering anomalies and archaeology sites far less often than the intended 7% and 3% chances.
Sero the Younger's Habitable Deep Scan can now uncover resource deposits, anomalies, and archaeology sites instead of only pre-sapients.
The success chance of Sero the Younger's Habitable Deep Scan now correctly diminishes with repeated scans of the same world.
Deep Scan resource caches now correctly scale with the Advanced Xenostudies resolution instead of A Voice for All.
Federation members can now form Commercial Pacts with one another, matching Research Agreements.
Free and automatic Research Agreements between Federation members now correctly benefit from Research Sharing from Agreements modifiers and satisfy faction demands for having Research Agreements.
Fixed federation members losing their existing Commercial Pacts with one another when forming or joining a federation. Members of non-trade federations now keep their pacts, while Trade Leagues replace them with the free federation pact (This only applies to Commercial Pacts between federation members).
Fixed pop and country ethics being permanently and progressively wiped across the galaxy during play.
What makes a man turn neutral? A lust for gold? Power? Or an error in the pop ethics randomizer?
Fixed Protostars not counting towards having energy deposits.
Extended swapping logic for soldiers into knights. All sources of soldier jobs should now be covered
Knight swaps should now work properly for nomads
The Joyous Warrior trait now specifies that its effect can only trigger with the relevant leader leading planetary invasions
If a system's starbase is unoccupied while all its planets are occupied, the system is no longer considered fully occupied.
Fixed the crime events (among others) not firing on arkships
Cryo-Sleepers no longer produce Crime/Deviancy
Clarified the Creativity Exhibition Vault's tooltip for Forever Cruise Rogue Servitors: its production and upkeep effects reach all passengers, not just first-class Bio-Trophies.
Fixed the Machine Uprising resolution notification showing "Unidentified Empire" instead of the names of the empires involved when an uprising was quelled or won.
Synthetic Fertility Nomads are no longer able to build arkships until they have researched droids
Fixed edge cases where Cetana would not properly turn hostile upon war declaration
Added a missing nomad Archaeology notification string
Fixed the Ness treasure system not spawning for non nomad empires
Fixed the Gaia world from Starlit Citadel being impossible to colonize
Fixed a missing icon in the Order's Keep concept tooltip
The Crystalline Bane modifier should now get properly removed
Adjusted the number of ships produced when using the Prethoryn Queen relic
Wilderness and Synthetic Fertility now start with homeworlds of the proper size
Fixed a case of double notification after a machine uprising ends
The Dyson Swarm "best systems" finder will now be based exclusively on raw star resources, and will be unaffected by modifiers like techs or cosmic storms.
The Arc Furnace "best systems" finder will now only show systems that have a Molten World.
Fixed numerous issues with Total Wars:
Nomadic Empires will now gain ownership of defeated Arkships and Waystations after Total War status quo victory.
Nomadic Empires will now steal a percentage of the population from planets they destroy during Total Wars.
Arkships defeated by Settled Empires are now destroyed after Total War status quo victory.
Nomadic Empires can now be defeated in Total Wars.
Taking planets in a Total War will now occupy them until the system is fully occupied, then annex them all at once. This prevents a bug where a system without a starbase didn't rebuild it if only some planets were taken.
The leader tooltip is now shown in all places where it should be shown
'Delicious Titans' planet modifier tooltip now correctly says 'Farmers are Converted in Titan Hunters' and doesn't show a broken icon.
savefiles with pending first contact event no longer fail to pick an event sound
Graphical crashfix related to Storm Forecast
Entertainer jobs on Forever Cruise Arkships now correctly come from the Entertainment Hub specialization instead of the Operations Center.
Fix for Nomadic Grand Archives being destroyed when a Settled Empire's system is destroyed.
Fix for Nomadic Grand Archive not being destroyed when a Waystation is lost or downgraded below Tier 2.
Added the bottom border line to the research dropdown in the top Resource Bar
Mandatory Pampering now reduces First Class Passenger Consumer Goods upkeep to 1 (from 1.5) for Rogue Servitors, matching the living standard's description.
Permanent Employment in Forever Cruise now only zombifies the crew, not the passengers
AI nomads no longer accept and ignore Build Waystation contracts when at capacity
The Build Waystation contract is now longer automatically abandoned for players when at double station capacity, only for AI nomads
Fixed several Cosmic Storms anomalies appearing more than once per game when they should be unique.
Removed the habitability requirement for the various Shore Leave internal Forever Cruise contracts.
Fixed ships that are waiting to be killed being counted for ship size-specific caps and special project requirements.
Bio-trophies now give 10 Political Power when playing as Rogue Servitor with the Forever Cruise Origin
AI empires with stealth fleet doctrines now correctly install cloaking devices on auto-designed ships.
Psionic shields are no longer equipped on stealth ships that lack psionic cloaking.
Machine Intelligence and Individualist Machine Forever Cruises with machine passengers now alternate assembly every month.
Cruise crew and passengers no longer incorrectly assigned Grid Amalgamation or Livestock living standards and slavery types.
Species being assimilated no longer incorrectly assigned Grid Amalgamation living standard.
Individualistic Machine Forever Cruise no longer gets an error from placing Robot Assembly Plants at game start.
Species being integrated are no longer eligible for assembly.
The Package Deal living standard in Forever Cruise now grants political power to employed Economy Class Passengers.
Fixed megastructure overclock buttons being unresponsive.
Added missing event sounds to the Forever Cruise situation
Fixed issues when dismantling Beastports on Arkships.
Carrier-computer ships now position themselves using the longer of their weapon or strike craft range, so a carrier with no strike craft no longer charges into close range.
Arkships without equipped weapons no longer charge into melee.
Fixed fleets set to flee when overpowered evaluating their flee condition correctly on an Evasive stance, rather than always evading regardless of the threat.
Fixed Deep Scan uncovering anomalies and archaeology sites far less often than the intended 7% and 3% chances.
Sero the Younger's Habitable Deep Scan can now uncover resource deposits, anomalies, and archaeology sites instead of only pre-sapients.
The success chance of Sero the Younger's Habitable Deep Scan now correctly diminishes with repeated scans of the same world.
Deep Scan resource caches now correctly scale with the Advanced Xenostudies resolution instead of A Voice for All.
Federation members can now form Commercial Pacts with one another, matching Research Agreements.
Free and automatic Research Agreements between Federation members now correctly benefit from Research Sharing from Agreements modifiers and satisfy faction demands for having Research Agreements.
Fixed federation members losing their existing Commercial Pacts with one another when forming or joining a federation. Members of non-trade federations now keep their pacts, while Trade Leagues replace them with the free federation pact (This only applies to Commercial Pacts between federation members).
Fixed issue with district indicators in the planet view
Fixed Stellar Cannon opinion modifier overflow
Fixed the Prospectorium's description incorrectly referring to the Scholarium.
Joining an ongoing war is now considered offensive from the perspective of subject agreement terms, regardless of which side is joined
Federation voting laws now apply when joining and leaving ongoing wars
Fixed manually issued system-wide Harvest orders queueing when there were no valid targets.
Fixed Arkships sometimes giving up on surveying.
Fixed the Declare War button tooltip being incorrect after leaving a federation.
Fixed waylines persisting on the galaxy map after a waystation was removed.
Fixed the Logistic Growth Scaling galaxy setting being truncated to one digit.
Nomadic Purge Vassals are now a special subject type that provide resources to their Overlord through subject taxes. Any remaining pops and resources are handed up to the overlord when the subject finishes its work, instead of being lost when the subject's colony was abandoned. A Purging Complete notification lists the pops and resources handed over to the Overlord when a Purge Vassal finishes its work, including any incidental resources that the planet may have produced during their stay.
Fixed Nomad Overlords not receiving the Unity (Fanatic Purifiers, Determined Exterminators, and Necrophages) or Society Research (Devouring Swarms) generated when their temporary purge subjects purged pops - the reward now goes to the Overlord instead of being lost with the subject.
Nomad purge subjects of assimilating empires (such as Driven Assimilators) now assimilate the pops they can rather than purging them, only exterminating pops that cannot be assimilated. The assimilated pops are handed up to the Overlord when the subject disbands, instead of the subject exterminating everyone or lingering forever as a separate empire.
Nomadic Purge Vassals no longer establish Embassies, and other empires can no longer propose Embassies to them.
Empires now correctly lower their opinion of a Nomad Overlord when its Purge Vassal Necrophages pops of their species
Fixed Necropurge not always creating pops.
The Judicial Execution leader trait now correctly grants bonuses when purging Thermophiles
Fixed the Necrophage Elevation Ceremony failing on Arkships. Elevated pops now adapt to Arkship Habitability, and the Pops Necrophaged notification is now shown, highlighting the Arkship fleet
Nomadic empires attempting to invade the first pre-FTL encounter are now correctly told that they need to survey the planet, not that their pre-ftl interference policy is preventing them from invading the planet.
AI
AI empires adopt a fleet doctrine and weapon/defense preferences matching their personality.
Auto-generated ship designs are now fully regenerated when new technology is researched, allowing them to adopt newly unlocked weapons and switch weapon families.
AI empires research weapon technologies matching their preferred weapon type more eagerly.
AI empires research armor or shield technologies in line with their defensive preference.
Sneak-attacker empires are more likely to research cloaking technology.
The AI no longer selects battleship, ember, or Stinger XL sections before it has a usable XL weapon.
The Stinger artillery section is no longer unconditionally preferred over its line section.
AI empires now fit psionic shields when they can afford the zro, instead of always avoiding them.
A shortage of one rare or strategic resource no longer blocks the AI from using weapons and components that rely on other rare resources.
AI empires with stealth fleet doctrines now correctly install cloaking devices on auto-designed ships.
Psionic shields are no longer equipped on stealth ships that lack psionic cloaking.
Fixed AI not handling events if they don't have an idle science ship with a leader.
Fixed AI not declaring war if their naval capacity is too high.
UI/UX
Waystations now show the amount of resources collected every month.
Improved Waystation stockpile tooltips.
Overlapping list boxes are now properly centered
Policies are now grouped into collapsible categories (Military, Diplomacy, Economy, Research, Society), with a traffic-light header on each category indicating whether all, some, or none of its policies can currently be changed.
Added a button to collapse or expand all policy categories at once.
Military policies can now be reviewed and changed from the Fleet Manager, and research policies from the Technology view.
Hints nomad players that they can excavate owned dig sites if they have the Frontier Archaeology tradition
Building slots are highlighted when they are selected
Fixed too large hitboxes for overclocking buttons.
In species trait tooltips in empire creation, the portrait requirements are now listed in the correct order.
Fixed the Open Orbital Ring button being hardcoded in planet_view.gui
Performance
macOS builds can now run natively on Apple Silicon as a universal (arm64 + x86_64) binary, no longer requiring Rosetta 2 translation.
Improved mid- and late-game performance by optimizing how pop faction attraction is calculated.
Reduced the CPU and memory overhead of per-fleet order checks, improving performance in large late-game galaxies with many fleets.
Stability
Fixed a crash that could occur when hovering over certain leader traits.
Fixed a potential crash when generating empire name labels on the galaxy map.
Fixed some more multiplayer out-of-sync issues.
Modding
Remove obsolete faction parameters
Added missile armor, shield, and hull point modifiers (flat and percentage variants).
Fix `pop_force_add_ethic` and `pop_change_ethic` triggers
Remove deprecated triggers `pop_has_ethic` and `pop_group_has_ethic`
Added the can_spawn_random_anomaly, can_spawn_random_archaeological_site, and can_add_random_non_blocker_deposit triggers, and a surveyor parameter to the spawn_random_anomaly effect.
Exposed defines for allowing the AI to ignore the penalties for being over naval cap or over naval cap. The current state of these defines is no change from previous behaviour.
Added pretriggers to ships
Added home_colony and background_colony scopes (similar to home_planet and background_planet, but scope to a colony on any carrier type).
Removed min_navy_for_wars from country types.
Scripted actions support a new automation = {} block with an options sub-block, plus a new fleet-scoped has_automation_flag trigger to gate automation weights.
Scripted action automation = {} blocks now support a parent field that nests an action's row beneath another action in the settings menu.
Added the weapon_and_strike_craft range_components option for ship behaviors.
Added the can_spawn_random_anomaly, can_spawn_random_archaeological_site, and can_add_random_non_blocker_deposit triggers, and a surveyor parameter to the spawn_random_anomaly effect.
Exposed defines for allowing the AI to ignore the penalties for being over naval cap or over naval cap. The current state of these defines is no change from previous behaviour.
Updated the documentation for the `create_country` effect.
Added the transfer_resources_to_empire effect, which transfers a country's stockpile of each listed resource
Added the transfer_resources_to_empire effect, which transfers a country's stockpile of each listed resource (optionally a percentage of it) to another country in a single call
create_message now supports a "resources" variable type that prints a country's current stockpile of the listed resources as one string of icon + amount pairs
We’ve also added more color customization to empires:
The Flag and Ship tabs in Empire Creation will now allow you to pick colors for your map borders and fill and ship colors independently from your Empire Flag. These selections also include tooltips that show the RGB value of the selected color.
Beautiful. (?)
Stellaris Wallpapers Updated
One more update!
The Stellaris Wallpaper Album has been updated with more than 40 images from Nomads, BioGenesis, Shadows of the Shroud, and the Infernals Species Pack.
What’s Next?
While work will continue on the 4.5 branch throughout the summer, this will be the last scheduled dev diary until August 20th, when we’ll likely continue discussing the changes in the Cygnus update.
Hello everyone! QA's tests on the 4.5 'Cygnus' Open Beta 2 update went faster than expected, and we felt that we had no real reason to hold the update until tomorrow. We've updated the stellaris_test_4.5 branch with the following changes: 4.5 ‘Cygnus’ Open Beta 2 Release Notes Th
Hello everyone!
QA's tests on the 4.5 'Cygnus' Open Beta 2 update went faster than expected, and we felt that we had no real reason to hold the update until tomorrow.
We've updated the stellaris_test_4.5 branch with the following changes:
4.5 ‘Cygnus’ Open Beta 2 Release Notes
The 4.5 Open Beta now also includes all changes from 4.4.5.
Feature
Pop groups are no longer divided by Ethics or Factions, instead each pop group will have a given percentage that belongs to each faction or ethic as appropriate. This means that:
THIS IS A BREAKING CHANGE AND WILL NOT PRESERVE SAVE GAME COMPATIBILITY.
Ethics and factions are now shown on the pop group entries in the planetary management UI, with tooltips showing the attraction to ethics and factions. Verbose tooltips are enabled by holding Alt, to show a breakdown of all modifiers for these attractions.
Pops shift ethics and factions more frequently
Pop group faction conversion happens more frequently
Ethic attraction now impacts faction growth
Simplify factions randomization logic
Updated Cyberization policies to account for the changes to pop groups and ethics. The Limited Cybernetic species trait has been removed, instead if the Limited Cyberization policy is in effect, Cybernetic Spiritualist pops do not benefit from Cybernetic Job Efficiency. The Limited Cyborg leader trait still functions as previously. This will also decrease the Approval penalty from regular spiritualist factions from the demand The Flesh is Strong.
Unlocked Knights of the Toxic God for nomads
Added policies to provide better control over the auto-designer for both players and AI:
Added a Fleet Doctrine policy with six doctrines that determine the tactical roles each ship class is designed to fill, affecting automated ship designs and ship-designer auto-complete.
Added Weapon Preference and Defense Preference policies that steer automated ship designs and technology research.
Added Starbase Weapon Preference and Starbase Defense Preference policies so station loadouts can diverge from the fleet.
Federations can now enact laws to grant members free, automatic Commercial Pacts (and, with the Nomads DLC, Wayline Pacts) or Research Agreements. Each law is unavailable to the federation type that already grants the benefit through its perk (Trade League / Research Cooperative).
Trade League federations now provide free, automatic Commercial Pacts between all member empires.
Trade League federations now also provide free, automatic Wayline Pacts between all members. (Requires Nomads)
Cosmogenesis is now available for Nomads
Added a nomad compatible version of Storm Chasers
Storm Attraction is now fully functional for mobile arkships
Empires now have more control over their colors:
Added a toggle and selectors in empire creation so you can select your map border and fill colours independently of your flag color.
Ship Color can now be selected independently from flag colors in Empire Creation.
Color swatches in the species creator's flag editor and ship-set selector now show the name of the selected color on hover.
Improvement
Regular Empires can now cancel accepted contracts after 20 years, with a notification sent to the operator.
The Dyson Swarm "best systems" list will now always show a variety of systems with different resources, so if you have a dozen physics deposits, they won't hide all of your energy systems. All "best systems" finders now show up to 12 systems.
Added new event options to the Forever Cruise situation stage events, allowing players to accept temporary economic penalties to affect the situation's direction.
Balance
Strike craft and missile defensive modifiers now also affect strike craft and missiles launched from starbases and defense platforms.
The Cybernetic species trait now provides an additional +5% Job Efficiency.
Hive minds which encounter genetic defects during cyberization can now choose a cyberisation policy.
Scientific Arkships now have +5% Deep Scanning Success Chance per Tier
Your Trade Policy now converts the trade value gained from Commercial Pacts and Branch Offices, just like the rest of your trade value (previously this trade was not run through your policy).
The "The Collective Self" technology now grants +1 Envoy.
The "Federation Code" technology now reduces Diplomacy influence upkeep by 25%.
Increased base knights upkeep by .15 alloys and .15 consumer goods
Increased soldier alloy upkeep for arkship military zones by 0.1
Rogue Servitor Forever Cruise Passengers now provide an additional +1% Complex Drone Job Efficiency on top of the base Gestalt bonus.
Consecrate World changes:
Consecrate World can now be declared on a curated set of worlds tied to your empire's origin and traits (such as Gaia and relic worlds, and origin-specific worlds like toxic, shrouded, rift, or arc-furnace worlds).
Reworked the Consecrated Worlds reward — consecrating worlds now grants a deterministic, empire-wide bonus to Unity, Amenities, and Spiritualist Ethics Attraction that scales with the number of Consecrated Worlds (+10% / +20% / +40% at 1 / 2 / 3), replacing the previous randomized per-world outcome.
The Paladin Ship now has a dedicated combat computer with Line tactics, giving it proper combat positioning while staying directable in combat, instead of ignoring attackers and holding position.
Scientific Arkships now have +5% Deep Scanning Success Chance per Tier
Your Trade Policy now converts the trade value gained from Commercial Pacts and Branch Offices, just like the rest of your trade value (previously this trade was not run through your policy).
The "The Collective Self" technology now grants +1 Envoy.
The "Federation Code" technology now reduces Diplomacy influence upkeep by 25%.
Bugfix
AI and auto-complete ship designs no longer leave weapon or strike craft slots empty after upgrades or power rebalancing.
Fixed auto-generated ships occasionally receiving two sections in a single section slot.
Role-based section selection always resolves a valid section, so screen and point-defense ships receive the correct section.
Harbinger Crystalline Growth Regulators can no longer grow crystals on strike craft that have been launched, and modifiers that increase the armor and/or shields of strike craft no longer render strike craft functionally immune to damage.
Missile and torpedo armor and shields are now correctly applied in combat, so point-defense no longer ignores them.
Fixed Gospel of the Masses additional trade value not applying to your branch offices.
The Branching Out modifier from the Cyberization situation now gives +10% Trader Job Efficiency.
Automated starbase, waystation, and orbital ring designs now fit armor instead of shields in systems or on stations where shields are negated (pulsars, X-ray binaries, turbulent nebulae, and cloaking modules).
Fixed Deep Scan uncovering anomalies and archaeology sites far less often than the intended 7% and 3% chances.
Sero the Younger's Habitable Deep Scan can now uncover resource deposits, anomalies, and archaeology sites instead of only pre-sapients.
The success chance of Sero the Younger's Habitable Deep Scan now correctly diminishes with repeated scans of the same world.
Deep Scan resource caches now correctly scale with the Advanced Xenostudies resolution instead of A Voice for All.
Federation members can now form Commercial Pacts with one another, matching Research Agreements.
Free and automatic Research Agreements between Federation members now correctly benefit from Research Sharing from Agreements modifiers and satisfy faction demands for having Research Agreements.
Fixed federation members losing their existing Commercial Pacts with one another when forming or joining a federation. Members of non-trade federations now keep their pacts, while Trade Leagues replace them with the free federation pact (This only applies to Commercial Pacts between federation members).
Fixed pop and country ethics being permanently and progressively wiped across the galaxy during play.
What makes a man turn neutral? A lust for gold? Power? Or an error in the pop ethics randomizer?
Fixed Protostars not counting towards having energy deposits.
Extended swapping logic for soldiers into knights. All sources of soldier jobs should now be covered
Knight swaps should now work properly for nomads
The Joyous Warrior trait now specifies that its effect can only trigger with the relevant leader leading planetary invasions
If a system's starbase is unoccupied while all its planets are occupied, the system is no longer considered fully occupied.
Fixed the crime events (among others) not firing on arkships
Cryo-Sleepers no longer produce Crime/Deviancy
Clarified the Creativity Exhibition Vault's tooltip for Forever Cruise Rogue Servitors: its production and upkeep effects reach all passengers, not just first-class Bio-Trophies.
Fixed the Machine Uprising resolution notification showing "Unidentified Empire" instead of the names of the empires involved when an uprising was quelled or won.
Synthetic Fertility Nomads are no longer able to build arkships until they have researched droids
Fixed edge cases where Cetana would not properly turn hostile upon war declaration
Added a missing nomad Archaeology notification string
Fixed the Ness treasure system not spawning for non nomad empires
Fixed the Gaia world from Starlit Citadel being impossible to colonize
Fixed a missing icon in the Order's Keep concept tooltip
The Crystalline Bane modifier should now get properly removed
Adjusted the number of ships produced when using the Prethoryn Queen relic
Wilderness and Synthetic Fertility now start with homeworlds of the proper size
Fixed a case of double notification after a machine uprising ends
The Dyson Swarm "best systems" finder will now be based exclusively on raw star resources, and will be unaffected by modifiers like techs or cosmic storms.
The Arc Furnace "best systems" finder will now only show systems that have a Molten World.
Fixed numerous issues with Total Wars:
Nomadic Empires will now gain ownership of defeated Arkships and Waystations after Total War status quo victory.
Nomadic Empires will now steal a percentage of the population from planets they destroy during Total Wars.
Arkships defeated by Settled Empires are now destroyed after Total War status quo victory.
Nomadic Empires can now be defeated in Total Wars.
Taking planets in a Total War will now occupy them until the system is fully occupied, then annex them all at once. This prevents a bug where a system without a starbase didn't rebuild it if only some planets were taken.
The leader tooltip is now shown in all places where it should be shown
'Delicious Titans' planet modifier tooltip now correctly says 'Farmers are Converted in Titan Hunters' and doesn't show a broken icon.
savefiles with pending first contact event no longer fail to pick an event sound
Graphical crashfix related to Storm Forecast
Entertainer jobs on Forever Cruise Arkships now correctly come from the Entertainment Hub specialization instead of the Operations Center.
Fix for Nomadic Grand Archives being destroyed when a Settled Empire's system is destroyed.
Fix for Nomadic Grand Archive not being destroyed when a Waystation is lost or downgraded below Tier 2.
Added the bottom border line to the research dropdown in the top Resource Bar
Mandatory Pampering now reduces First Class Passenger Consumer Goods upkeep to 1 (from 1.5) for Rogue Servitors, matching the living standard's description.
Permanent Employment in Forever Cruise now only zombifies the crew, not the passengers
AI nomads no longer accept and ignore Build Waystation contracts when at capacity
The Build Waystation contract is now longer automatically abandoned for players when at double station capacity, only for AI nomads
Fixed several Cosmic Storms anomalies appearing more than once per game when they should be unique.
Removed the habitability requirement for the various Shore Leave internal Forever Cruise contracts.
Fixed ships that are waiting to be killed being counted for ship size-specific caps and special project requirements.
Bio-trophies now give 10 Political Power when playing as Rogue Servitor with the Forever Cruise Origin
AI empires with stealth fleet doctrines now correctly install cloaking devices on auto-designed ships.
Psionic shields are no longer equipped on stealth ships that lack psionic cloaking.
Machine Intelligence and Individualist Machine Forever Cruises with machine passengers now alternate assembly every month.
Cruise crew and passengers no longer incorrectly assigned Grid Amalgamation or Livestock living standards and slavery types.
Species being assimilated no longer incorrectly assigned Grid Amalgamation living standard.
Individualistic Machine Forever Cruise no longer gets an error from placing Robot Assembly Plants at game start.
Species being integrated are no longer eligible for assembly.
The Package Deal living standard in Forever Cruise now grants political power to employed Economy Class Passengers.
Fixed megastructure overclock buttons being unresponsive.
Added missing event sounds to the Forever Cruise situation
Fixed issues when dismantling Beastports on Arkships.
Carrier-computer ships now position themselves using the longer of their weapon or strike craft range, so a carrier with no strike craft no longer charges into close range.
Arkships without equipped weapons no longer charge into melee.
Fixed fleets set to flee when overpowered evaluating their flee condition correctly on an Evasive stance, rather than always evading regardless of the threat.
Fixed Deep Scan uncovering anomalies and archaeology sites far less often than the intended 7% and 3% chances.
Sero the Younger's Habitable Deep Scan can now uncover resource deposits, anomalies, and archaeology sites instead of only pre-sapients.
The success chance of Sero the Younger's Habitable Deep Scan now correctly diminishes with repeated scans of the same world.
Deep Scan resource caches now correctly scale with the Advanced Xenostudies resolution instead of A Voice for All.
Federation members can now form Commercial Pacts with one another, matching Research Agreements.
Free and automatic Research Agreements between Federation members now correctly benefit from Research Sharing from Agreements modifiers and satisfy faction demands for having Research Agreements.
Fixed federation members losing their existing Commercial Pacts with one another when forming or joining a federation. Members of non-trade federations now keep their pacts, while Trade Leagues replace them with the free federation pact (This only applies to Commercial Pacts between federation members).
Fixed issue with district indicators in the planet view
Fixed Stellar Cannon opinion modifier overflow
Fixed the Prospectorium's description incorrectly referring to the Scholarium.
Joining an ongoing war is now considered offensive from the perspective of subject agreement terms, regardless of which side is joined
Federation voting laws now apply when joining and leaving ongoing wars
Fixed manually issued system-wide Harvest orders queueing when there were no valid targets.
Fixed Arkships sometimes giving up on surveying.
Fixed the Declare War button tooltip being incorrect after leaving a federation.
Fixed waylines persisting on the galaxy map after a waystation was removed.
Fixed the Logistic Growth Scaling galaxy setting being truncated to one digit.
Nomadic Purge Vassals are now a special subject type that provide resources to their Overlord through subject taxes. Any remaining pops and resources are handed up to the overlord when the subject finishes its work, instead of being lost when the subject's colony was abandoned. A Purging Complete notification lists the pops and resources handed over to the Overlord when a Purge Vassal finishes its work, including any incidental resources that the planet may have produced during their stay.
Fixed Nomad Overlords not receiving the Unity (Fanatic Purifiers, Determined Exterminators, and Necrophages) or Society Research (Devouring Swarms) generated when their temporary purge subjects purged pops - the reward now goes to the Overlord instead of being lost with the subject.
Nomad purge subjects of assimilating empires (such as Driven Assimilators) now assimilate the pops they can rather than purging them, only exterminating pops that cannot be assimilated. The assimilated pops are handed up to the Overlord when the subject disbands, instead of the subject exterminating everyone or lingering forever as a separate empire.
Nomadic Purge Vassals no longer establish Embassies, and other empires can no longer propose Embassies to them.
Empires now correctly lower their opinion of a Nomad Overlord when its Purge Vassal Necrophages pops of their species
Fixed Necropurge not always creating pops.
The Judicial Execution leader trait now correctly grants bonuses when purging Thermophiles
Fixed the Necrophage Elevation Ceremony failing on Arkships. Elevated pops now adapt to Arkship Habitability, and the Pops Necrophaged notification is now shown, highlighting the Arkship fleet
Nomadic empires attempting to invade the first pre-FTL encounter are now correctly told that they need to survey the planet, not that their pre-ftl interference policy is preventing them from invading the planet.
AI
AI empires adopt a fleet doctrine and weapon/defense preferences matching their personality.
Auto-generated ship designs are now fully regenerated when new technology is researched, allowing them to adopt newly unlocked weapons and switch weapon families.
AI empires research weapon technologies matching their preferred weapon type more eagerly.
AI empires research armor or shield technologies in line with their defensive preference.
Sneak-attacker empires are more likely to research cloaking technology.
The AI no longer selects battleship, ember, or Stinger XL sections before it has a usable XL weapon.
The Stinger artillery section is no longer unconditionally preferred over its line section.
AI empires now fit psionic shields when they can afford the zro, instead of always avoiding them.
A shortage of one rare or strategic resource no longer blocks the AI from using weapons and components that rely on other rare resources.
AI empires with stealth fleet doctrines now correctly install cloaking devices on auto-designed ships.
Psionic shields are no longer equipped on stealth ships that lack psionic cloaking.
Fixed AI not handling events if they don't have an idle science ship with a leader.
Fixed AI not declaring war if their naval capacity is too high.
UI/UX
Waystations now show the amount of resources collected every month.
Improved Waystation stockpile tooltips.
Overlapping list boxes are now properly centered
Policies are now grouped into collapsible categories (Military, Diplomacy, Economy, Research, Society), with a traffic-light header on each category indicating whether all, some, or none of its policies can currently be changed.
Added a button to collapse or expand all policy categories at once.
Military policies can now be reviewed and changed from the Fleet Manager, and research policies from the Technology view.
Hints nomad players that they can excavate owned dig sites if they have the Frontier Archaeology tradition
Building slots are highlighted when they are selected
Fixed too large hitboxes for overclocking buttons.
In species trait tooltips in empire creation, the portrait requirements are now listed in the correct order.
Fixed the Open Orbital Ring button being hardcoded in planet_view.gui
Performance
macOS builds can now run natively on Apple Silicon as a universal (arm64 + x86_64) binary, no longer requiring Rosetta 2 translation.
Improved mid- and late-game performance by optimizing how pop faction attraction is calculated.
Reduced the CPU and memory overhead of per-fleet order checks, improving performance in large late-game galaxies with many fleets.
Stability
Fixed a crash that could occur when hovering over certain leader traits.
Fixed a potential crash when generating empire name labels on the galaxy map.
Fixed some more multiplayer out-of-sync issues.
Modding
Remove obsolete faction parameters
Added missile armor, shield, and hull point modifiers (flat and percentage variants).
Fix `pop_force_add_ethic` and `pop_change_ethic` triggers
Remove deprecated triggers `pop_has_ethic` and `pop_group_has_ethic`
Added the can_spawn_random_anomaly, can_spawn_random_archaeological_site, and can_add_random_non_blocker_deposit triggers, and a surveyor parameter to the spawn_random_anomaly effect.
Exposed defines for allowing the AI to ignore the penalties for being over naval cap or over naval cap. The current state of these defines is no change from previous behaviour.
Added pretriggers to ships
Added home_colony and background_colony scopes (similar to home_planet and background_planet, but scope to a colony on any carrier type).
Removed min_navy_for_wars from country types.
Scripted actions support a new automation = {} block with an options sub-block, plus a new fleet-scoped has_automation_flag trigger to gate automation weights.
Scripted action automation = {} blocks now support a parent field that nests an action's row beneath another action in the settings menu.
Added the weapon_and_strike_craft range_components option for ship behaviors.
Added the can_spawn_random_anomaly, can_spawn_random_archaeological_site, and can_add_random_non_blocker_deposit triggers, and a surveyor parameter to the spawn_random_anomaly effect.
Exposed defines for allowing the AI to ignore the penalties for being over naval cap or over naval cap. The current state of these defines is no change from previous behaviour.
Updated the documentation for the `create_country` effect.
Added the transfer_resources_to_empire effect, which transfers a country's stockpile of each listed resource
Added the transfer_resources_to_empire effect, which transfers a country's stockpile of each listed resource (optionally a percentage of it) to another country in a single call
create_message now supports a "resources" variable type that prints a country's current stockpile of the listed resources as one string of icon + amount pairs
QA found one known issue to add among the new changes:
Nomadic Cosmogenesis empires can build the Synaptic Lathe as expected, but since it appears under "Planets" in the Outliner and they usually have that off by default, it will not be listed until you turn it on.
To access the Stellaris beta, go to your Steam Library, right-click the game, and select "Properties". From there, choose the "Betas" tab, and in the "Beta Participation" dropdown menu, select the "stellaris_test_4.5" beta branch from the list.
Hello everybody! The Stellaris 4.4.5 'Pegasus' update should now be ready for download via Steam, GOG, and MS Store. Please find the patch notes below. 4.4.5 ‘Pegasus’ Patch Release Notes Feature Added a Resource Abundance slider in galaxy settings. This slider ranges from “Sc
Hello everybody!
The Stellaris 4.4.5 'Pegasus' update should now be ready for download via Steam, GOG, and MS Store.
Please find the patch notes below.
4.4.5 ‘Pegasus’ Patch Release Notes
Feature
Added a Resource Abundance slider in galaxy settings.
This slider ranges from “Scarce” to x5 in 0.25 increments, where x1 is approximately the resource abundance of v4.3 and x5 is essentially 4.4’s “resources everywhere”.
The default is x2. We do recognize that this is a little confusing, but it gives you more control of getting it where you want.
Added Waystation Voidlure modules
Added Arkship Voidlure Array module that allows you to right-click on a system to lure space fauna.
Fleet automation menus now offer per-action options.
Nomad Arkships and Logistic Ships can fine-tune Harvest, Strip Mine, and Deep Scan automation, including whether to Harvest unsurveyed, depositless, waystation, friendly, or hostile-owned worlds, and whether to rescan when Deep Scanning.
Fleet automation settings can be saved as the default for a ship type and applied to all ships of that type at once, and each fleet remembers the settings it was last given.
Construction Automation now has options for Mining Stations, Research Stations, Observation Posts and Special Projects.
Added the Explore automation order to Arkships. Note: Arkships with the Explore order will attempt to navigate to Points of Interest if possible.
Improvement
Space Fauna now disable waystations instead of destroying them. They will be re-enabled once the fauna leaves or is destroyed.
Added a fallback event for the CFL if the tournament goes on for more than 3 years, this will ensure that you don't end up with fleets that can never repair
Details map mode now toggles between 3 states: Normal -> Detailed -> Hidden -> Normal.
Clarified the map mode tooltips.
Logistic Ship automation now defaults to on for Harvest Resources and off for Waystation collection.
The game will now recalculate species rights on loading a save game.
Upgrading fleet will reissue upgrade order if one got interrupted because of the mobile starbase jumping away to another system.
Hive Mind Forever Cruise empires with machine passengers can research machine assembly technologies to upgrade their passengers
Regular Forever Cruise empires with machine passengers start with the Robot Assembly Plants building
Completed Archaeological Sites and Astral Rifts will now be hidden in a non detailed galaxy map mode.
Added new event options to the Forever Cruise situation stage events, allowing players to accept temporary economic penalties to affect the situation's direction.
Balance
Operational Reserves Changes:
Operational Reserves now track Energy and Minerals 1:1 (previously 3:1).
Maximum Operational Reserves now scale with the number and tier of owned Arkships (base 15,000, plus 5,000 / 7,500 / 10,000 per Tier I / II / III Arkship) instead of a fixed cap.
Civilian Arkships grant an additional 2,500 Operational Reserve capacity per Tier.
Resource Silos, Fallen Empire Resource Silos, Arkship Resource Silos, and Waystation Logistics Silos now raise a Nomadic empire's maximum Operational Reserves.
Added a Critical stage to the Operational Reserves track with severe research, Unity, and Alloy penalties; the Festival, Conserve, and Burn approaches now gate on reserve stage rather than fixed thresholds.
The Critical Operational Reserves stage now also penalizes the populations the reserves sustain: Lithoid pops lose Happiness, pop growth, and Job Efficiency, and Mechanical and Machine pops lose Job Efficiency.
Wanderlust now gives some of its bonuses immediately, and the second half after completing 4 categories, not all of them. Category bonuses and progression remain unchanged.
Rewards from the Arkship Readiness Checklist now last 20 years.
Rebalanced the Ranger Paladin trait.
Reduced the opinion penalties empires hold against Nomadic Empires for strip-mining, reprocessing planets, and Exodus Jumps, and made these penalties decay more quickly.
Nomadic Primal Calling now starts with a Voidlure Array equipped on the Arkship
Removed the nomadic tradition swap for Domestication tradition finisher
Rebalanced the Passenger Satisfaction situation for Forever Cruise to allow staying in the middle stage longer
The Champion's forge now waits 20 years before firing instead of 10, this should give the galaxy a bit longer to find each other before all getting introduced at the tournament.
Star Seeker Celebrations now provide +100% all Job Efficiency, +100% Resources from Jobs, +100% Pop Growth Speed, and -75% Diplomatic Weight from Economy.
Arkship District Specializations that increase weapon damage (Laser Capacitors, Flight Decks, Ammunition Lines, or Missile Silos) now also add +0.15 strategic resource upkeep to Soldiers.
Species with Mutagenic Habitability living on Arkships will now gain 50% habitability (like Regular Arkship Habitability and Habitat Auto-modded habitability) instead of 30%
Rogue Servitor Forever Cruise Passengers now provide an additional +1% Complex Drone Job Efficiency on top of the base Gestalt bonus.
Bugfix
Arkships now have a 10 year cooldown after benefiting from a Max Aura effect, meaning you can't chain them to get a level 10 ascension Arkship super early.
Nomads can now build Megastructures in a system containing one of their Waystations even if the system has not been surveyed.
Fixed that Tombworld Earth was spawning way too often, so often that it would spawn instead of the UNE when playing the GRS or CoM.
Fixed an issue where pre-FTL earths couldn't have defensive armies (sorry this does not fix the issue of not having the cool unique armies :frowning2: )
Assault Armies will no longer split into separate Transport Fleets after leaving the planet surface.
Harvest Resources Contracts will now be cancelled if a different empire harvests the resources first.
Fixed a very rare case where if you settled and left the event open for too long another empire could claim the system. The fix is delaying them from claiming the system for 300 days. Please make a decision before then.
The CFL should no longer accept Orbital Rings as contestants (even though that’s why they call it a Championship Ring, right?)
Added a fallback if your arkship was in a hyperjump when progressing through the adAkkaria event chains
Due to legacy script your capital arkship was never able to find precursors
Stopped Scan Debris Contract from auto-cancelling on accept
Blocked the Sectors Map Mode for Nomads.
Fixed habitats not using the correct entity from your chosen shipset.
Fixed some scripted issues with refugee modifiers.
Fixed issues with Payback and Broken Shackles district specializations.
Fixed farming colony designation not applying to agri-drones.
Bio-Repurposing tradition now provides the nomadic effects for nomadic necromancers instead of the necromancer effects.
Brought the cost and upkeep of the Nanite Hub waystation module in line with the equivalent starbase building.
Fixed the Realign Shields decision not recognising some pulsar systems.
Living and Grid Amalgamated species now have bespoke living standards so they don't use consumer goods.
Fixed Astro Harvester job modifiers not applying in some cases.
Harvesting a celestial body that has no deposit no longer incurs a diplomatic opinion penalty.
The Creativity Exhibition Vault now boosts Cruise Passengers for Forever Cruise empires, instead of applying its bonus to Bio-Trophies they do not have.
Buildings that can be built on a planet or its orbital ring (Psi Corps, Planetary Shield Generator, Galactic Stock Exchange, Embassy, Noble Estates, Slave Processing Facility) can no longer be built as both a colony building and an Arkship starbase building at the same time.
The Galactic Stock Exchange can no longer be built on both a planet and its orbital ring at the same time.
Fixed pops sometimes being stuck in the Assimilation citizenship or stratum.
Pops that already have the cybernetic or psionic trait are no longer flagged for assimilation they do not need.
Negative arkship modifiers from Grand Refurbishment and Operational Checklist are removed when another empire conquers the arkship, so you aren't stuck with a bunch of negative modifiers and no way to remove them.
Arkship can now issue a survey command by clicking the survey button and clicking on the system in galaxy map
Fixed the tooltip information where the survey single planet vs surveying the whole system information was mixed up
Fixed Waystations, Arkships and modded starbases that have forced components from starbase modules and buildings regressing their designs and losing components.
If you are too slow and don't stop the Khan Aspirant from becoming the Khan they now properly despawn, avoiding a scenario where there are two Khans.
If you play with 0 marauders enabled and as a Heirs of the Khan empire, then the backup Marauder empire will avoid Fallen Empire systems so that they don't get killed in the first few weeks, making you the Khan while others are still figuring out Blue Lasers.
Fixed a crash when updating waystation networks
Ranger Lodge now correctly informs that Biologists are converted into Rangers, instead of saying Rangers are converted into Rangers
Arkship construction notification now mentions an arkship, not a starbase
Missions counters can now be infinite
Fixed missing localization for message descriptions
Fixed the End-Bringers' shrouded world failing to spawn in games featuring Nomadic empires.
Fixed Arkships unintentionally syncing to the same auto-generated design. Building or upgrading one Arkship will no longer sometimes overwrite armaments or utilities on others of the same type.
Fleets that are repairing or upgrading now correctly sync their FTL, Jump Drive, and Catapult actions.
Fixed an issue with generated empire adjectives.
Inetian trader special project bound to planet, meaning that if your science ship were to blow up you can still progress
"Secrets of the Past" event from "Biomorphosis" Ascension Situation blocked for Nomads
Harvest Resources Contracts will now be cancelled if a different empire harvests the resources first.
Nomads will no longer get double the benefit from their own resource producing megastructures. Megastructures will no longer be giving resources directly and a waystation will always be needed to collect those resources.
Planets can now be bombarded during first contact war
Contact view now properly closes if diplomacy window is opened
Fixed some megastructure effects showing incorrect modifier icons and “+100%”.
Rogue Servitors can no longer take a machine species as their secondary species when playing as a Forever Cruise. The machine can not be pampered.
(Beta only) Increased the Shrinkspace Depot and Extra-Dimensional Depot effects on Operation Reserves from 500 to 2500 and 1000 to 5000.
Pops can now migrate from Arkships
Hive Mind Forever Cruise empires with machine passengers start with the Machine Assembly Plants building
Hive Mind Forever Cruise empires start with the passenger Population Controls set to No, which allows the species to grow or be assembled
When starting a new game as a Forever Cruise Origin, crew species will correctly get assigned "cruise_founding_crew" flag. Various effects depends on it being set properly.
Fixed custom empires set to Force Spawn not spawning when using certain portraits.
Fixed custom Spawn Allowed empires with DLC portraits being excluded from the random empire pool.
Added tooltip saying that Nomadic Empires require a waystation in the system to open the L-Gate
Added tooltip saying that Nomadic Empires require a waystation in, or adjacent to, a system to exchange minor artifacts for precursor insight
Added tooltip that highlights that resources need to be harvested with the Arkship in the "Arkship Readiness" situation
Fixed Faculty of Archaeostudies Relic World bonus modifier
Decreased font size in the Empire Creation setup so it would not overlap with the numbers
Spelling error in the "Eager" trait description
Fixed the food upkeep in Phototrophic trait not being disabled when the Radiotrophic trait is active
Nomadic Hive Minds will no longer have access to the Evolutionary Predators decision make planets into hive worlds
Fixed an issue where the Heirs of the Khan claimant could be wiped out by the raider fleets spawned from the same marauder. No infighting!
You will no longer be told that your Khan died from old age when they are in fact immortal
Fixes contracts that had no issuer correctly set
Abort contracts if the issuer ceases to exist
Pre-Sapient species are now allowed to leave Pre-Sapient strata after they have been uplifted.
Fixed Nomadic empires being blocked from excavating their story-locked dig sites that sat in foreign owned systems.
Fixed Arkships sometimes giving up on Surveying.
Empire preview will correctly display forced spawned empires with certain restricted portraits.
Fixed some buildings (e.g. Psi-Corps) being unbuildable on planets.
Arkship habitability preference can now be applied by species modification if your empire is nomadic.
Prospectorium description does not refers to scholarium description
Bio-trophies now give 10 Political Power when playing as Rogue Servitor with the Forever Cruise Origin
The anomaly “The Imitator” will no longer sometimes appear multiple times. The Imitator cannot be imitated.
Removed the habitability requirement for the various Shore Leave internal Forever Cruise contracts.
Machine Intelligence and Individualist Machine Forever Cruises with machine passengers now alternate assembly every month.
Cruise crew and passengers no longer incorrectly assigned Grid Amalgamation or Livestock living standards and slavery types.
Species being assimilated no longer incorrectly assigned Grid Amalgamation living standard.
Individualistic Machine Forever Cruise no longer gets an error from placing Robot Assembly Plants at game start.
Species being integrated are no longer eligible for assembly.
The Package Deal living standard in Forever Cruise now grants political power to employed Economy Class Passengers.
Added missing event sounds to the Forever Cruise situation
Fixed megastructure overclock buttons being unresponsive.
Fixed several Cosmic Storms anomalies appearing more than once per game when they should be unique.
Fixed Stellar Cannon opinion modifier overflow
The Build Waystation contract is now longer automatically abandoned for players when at double station capacity, only for AI nomads
Joining an ongoing war is now considered offensive from the perspective of subject agreement terms, regardless of which side is joined
Fixed ships that are waiting to be killed being counted for ship size-specific caps and special project requirements.
Permanent Employment in Forever Cruise now only zombifies the crew, not the passengers
Fixed issues when dismantling Beastports on Arkships.
Added the bottom border line to the research dropdown in the top Resource Bar
Reduced the Consumer Good upkeep of First Class Passenger Mandatory Pampering to 1 (from 1.5) for Rogue Servitors, matching the living standard's description.
Fix waylines persisting on galaxy map after waystation removal
AI
Fixed AI being disabled after a resync in MP.
The AI will now once again assign leaders to sector capitals as well as newly built arkships.
Fixed AI not handling events if they don't have an idle science ship with a leader.
UI/UX
The Operational Reserves situation now shows its capacity breakdown and stored/total readout in the Situation Log instead of an empty Finisher Effects panel.
The Operational Reserves topbar tooltip now shows a predicted monthly change with per-resource Energy and Minerals contributions, each with a resource icon and coloured +/- value, and a Hold-ALT hint to expand the produced/consumed breakdown.
When enabling nomads in empire creation, the civilian arkship is now selected by default.
Arkships no longer show false clearable-blocker icons in the outliner.
Fixed incorrect Arkship button texts in the planet view.
Anomaly window now also shows the name of the anomaly
Fixed a target visibility bug when switching between situation log entries.
Fix Remove Contract button hover hitbox in Situation Log
Science Ships, Construction Ships, and Nomad fleets now share one automation settings window, with options nested under each action in a scrollable list.
The automation settings window now groups actions into collapsible categories, with Survey nested under Exploration so you can automate exploring with or without surveying, and adds a Reset button that restores a fleet's default automation settings.
In species trait tooltips in empire creation, the portrait requirements are now listed in the correct order.
Fixed too large hitboxes for overclocking buttons.
Performance
Fixed science ship Excavate and Astral Rift automation causing a recurring daily stutter when no reachable target was available.
Reduced the CPU and memory overhead of per-fleet order checks, improving performance in large late-game galaxies with many fleets.
Stability
Added some safeguards to avoid crashing related to pop groups.
Modding
Situations can define total_progress with per-stage section_weight for progress bars whose length and stage bands scale at runtime, with auto-generated _max_progress_add/_mult country modifiers and a situation_progress_percent trigger.
Situations, stages, and approaches support custom_tooltip and custom_tooltip_with_modifiers (replacing the approach-only active_tooltip), and situations can override their Situation Log Active Effects and Finisher Effects panel titles and bodies.
Added the orbital_ring_and_arkship_equivalent_absent scripted trigger.
Starbase modules now also support `scripted_effect_cooldown`, `scripted_effect_cooldown_flag`, and `scripted_effect_cooldown_flag_desc`
and are now optional for is_point_of_interest.
Scripted actions support a new automation = {} block with an options sub-block, plus a new fleet-scoped has_automation_flag trigger to gate automation weights.
Scripted action automation = {} blocks now support a parent field that nests an action's row beneath another action in the settings menu.
Added home_colony and background_colony scopes (similar to home_planet and background_planet, but scope to a colony on any carrier type).
If you're using UI mods, you'll need to update them to access some of the new options. (Some have a "beta" version that is already updated for these changes.)
by Eladrin Hello, Stellaris Community! Europe swelters under the summer’s first heatwave, and yesterday we updated the 4.4.5 ‘Pegasus’ Open Beta on the stellaris_test branch with some more changes. Stellaris 4.4.5 ‘Pegasus’ Open Beta Release Notes New changes are in italics. Feat
by Eladrin
Hello, Stellaris Community!
Europe swelters under the summer’s first heatwave, and yesterday we updated the 4.4.5 ‘Pegasus’ Open Beta on the stellaris_test branch with some more changes.
Stellaris 4.4.5 ‘Pegasus’ Open Beta Release Notes
New changes are in italics.
Feature
Added a Resource Abundance slider in galaxy settings.
This slider ranges from “Scarce” to x5 in 0.25 increments, where x1 is approximately the resource abundance of v4.3 and x5 is essentially 4.4’s “resources everywhere”.
The default is x2. We do recognize that this is a little confusing, but it gives you more control of getting it where you want.
Added Waystation Voidlure modules
Added Arkship Voidlure Array module that allows you to right-click on a system to lure space fauna.
Fleet automation menus now offer per-action options.
Nomad Arkships and Logistic Ships can fine-tune Harvest, Strip Mine, and Deep Scan automation, including whether to Harvest unsurveyed, depositless, waystation, friendly, or hostile-owned worlds, and whether to rescan when Deep Scanning.
Fleet automation settings can be saved as the default for a ship type and applied to all ships of that type at once, and each fleet remembers the settings it was last given.
Construction Automation now has options for Mining Stations, Research Stations, Observation Posts and Special Projects.
Added the Explore automation order to Arkships. Note: Arkships with the Explore order will attempt to navigate to Points of Interest if possible.
Improvement
Space Fauna now disables waystations instead of destroying them. They will be re-enabled once the fauna leaves or is destroyed.
Added a fallback event for the CFL if the tournament goes on for more than 3 years, this will ensure that you don't end up with fleets that can never repair
Details map mode now toggles between 3 states: Normal -> Detailed -> Hidden -> Normal.
Clarified the map mode tooltips.
Logistic Ship automation now defaults to on for Harvest Resources and off for Waystation collection.
The game will now recalculate species rights on loading a save game.
Upgrading fleet will reissue upgrade order if one got interrupted because of the mobile starbase jumping away to another system.
Hive Mind Forever Cruise empires with machine passengers can research machine assembly technologies to upgrade their passengers
Regular Forever Cruise empires with machine passengers start with the Robot Assembly Plants building
Completed Archaeological Sites and Astral Rifts will now be hidden in a non detailed galaxy map mode.
Added new event options to the Forever Cruise situation stage events, allowing players to accept temporary economic penalties to affect the situation's direction.
Balance
Operational Reserves Changes:
Operational Reserves now track Energy and Minerals 1:1 (previously 3:1).
Maximum Operational Reserves now scale with the number and tier of owned Arkships (base 15,000, plus 5,000 / 7,500 / 10,000 per Tier I / II / III Arkship) instead of a fixed cap.
Civilian Arkships grant an additional 2,500 Operational Reserve capacity per Tier.
Resource Silos, Fallen Empire Resource Silos, Arkship Resource Silos, and Waystation Logistics Silos now raise a Nomadic empire's maximum Operational Reserves.
Added a Critical stage to the Operational Reserves track with severe research, Unity, and Alloy penalties; the Festival, Conserve, and Burn approaches now gate on reserve stage rather than fixed thresholds.
The Critical Operational Reserves stage now also penalizes the populations the reserves sustain: Lithoid pops lose Happiness, pop growth, and Job Efficiency, and Mechanical and Machine pops lose Job Efficiency.
Wanderlust now gives some of its bonuses immediately, and the second half after completing 4 categories, not all of them. Category bonuses and progression remain unchanged.
Rewards from the Arkship Readiness Checklist now last 20 years.
Rebalanced the Ranger Paladin trait.
Reduced the opinion penalties empires hold against Nomadic Empires for strip-mining, reprocessing planets, and Exodus Jumps, and made these penalties decay more quickly.
Nomadic Primal Calling now starts with a Voidlure Array equipped on the Arkship
Removed the nomadic tradition swap for Domestication tradition finisher
Rebalanced the Passenger Satisfaction situation for Forever Cruise to allow staying in the middle stage longer
The Champion's forge now waits 20 years before firing instead of 10, this should give the galaxy a bit longer to find each other before all getting introduced at the tournament.
Star Seeker Celebrations now provide +100% all Job Efficiency, +100% Resources from Jobs, +100% Pop Growth Speed, and -75% Diplomatic Weight from Economy.
Arkship District Specializations that increase weapon damage (Laser Capacitors, Flight Decks, Ammunition Lines, or Missile Silos) now also add +0.15 strategic resource upkeep to Soldiers.
Species with Mutagenic Habitability living on Arkships will now gain 50% habitability (like Regular Arkship Habitability and Habitat Auto-modded habitability) instead of 30%
Rogue Servitor Forever Cruise Passengers now provide an additional +1% Complex Drone Job Efficiency on top of the base Gestalt bonus.
Bugfix
Arkships now have a 10 year cooldown after benefiting from a Max Aura effect, meaning you can't chain them to get a level 10 ascension Arkship super early.
Nomads can now build Megastructures in a system containing one of their Waystations even if the system has not been surveyed.
Fixed that Tombworld Earth was spawning way too often, so often that it would spawn instead of the UNE when playing the GRS or CoM.
Fixed an issue where pre-FTL earths couldn't have defensive armies (sorry this does not fix the issue of not having the cool unique armies :frowning2: )
Assault Armies will no longer split into separate Transport Fleets after leaving the planet surface.
Harvest Resources Contracts will now be cancelled if a different empire harvests the resources first.
Fixed a very rare case where if you settled and left the event open for too long another empire could claim the system. The fix is delaying them from claiming the system for 300 days. Please make a decision before then.
The CFL should no longer accept Orbital Rings as contestants (even though that’s why they call it a Championship Ring, right?)
Added a fallback if your arkship was in a hyperjump when progressing through the adAkkaria event chains
Due to legacy script your capital arkship was never able to find precursors
Stopped Scan Debris Contract from auto-cancelling on accept
Blocked the Sectors Map Mode for Nomads.
Fixed habitats not using the correct entity from your chosen shipset.
Fixed some scripted issues with refugee modifiers.
Fixed issues with Payback and Broken Shackles district specializations.
Fixed farming colony designation not applying to agri-drones.
Bio-Repurposing tradition now provides the nomadic effects for nomadic necromancers instead of the necromancer effects.
Brought the cost and upkeep of the Nanite Hub waystation module in line with the equivalent starbase building.
Fixed the Realign Shields decision not recognising some pulsar systems.
Living and Grid Amalgamated species now have bespoke living standards so they don't use consumer goods.
Fixed Astro Harvester job modifiers not applying in some cases.
Harvesting a celestial body that has no deposit no longer incurs a diplomatic opinion penalty.
The Creativity Exhibition Vault now boosts Cruise Passengers for Forever Cruise empires, instead of applying its bonus to Bio-Trophies they do not have.
Buildings that can be built on a planet or its orbital ring (Psi Corps, Planetary Shield Generator, Galactic Stock Exchange, Embassy, Noble Estates, Slave Processing Facility) can no longer be built as both a colony building and an Arkship starbase building at the same time.
The Galactic Stock Exchange can no longer be built on both a planet and its orbital ring at the same time.
Fixed pops sometimes being stuck in the Assimilation citizenship or stratum.
Pops that already have the cybernetic or psionic trait are no longer flagged for assimilation they do not need.
Negative arkship modifiers from Grand Refurbishment and Operational Checklist are removed when another empire conquers the arkship, so you aren't stuck with a bunch of negative modifiers and no way to remove them.
Arkship can now issue a survey command by clicking the survey button and clicking on the system in galaxy map
Fixed the tooltip information where the survey single planet vs surveying the whole system information was mixed up
Fixed Waystations, Arkships and modded starbases that have forced components from starbase modules and buildings regressing their designs and losing components.
If you are too slow and don't stop the Khan Aspirant from becoming the Khan they now properly despawn, avoiding a scenario where there are two Khans.
If you play with 0 marauders enabled and as a Heirs of the Khan empire, then the backup Marauder empire will avoid Fallen Empire systems so that they don't get killed in the first few weeks, making you the Khan while others are still figuring out Blue Lasers.
Fixed a crash when updating waystation networks
Ranger Lodge now correctly informs that Biologists are converted into Rangers, instead of saying Rangers are converted into Rangers
Arkship construction notification now mentions an arkship, not a starbase
Missions counters can now be infinite
Fixed missing localization for message descriptions
Fixed the End-Bringers' shrouded world failing to spawn in games featuring Nomadic empires.
Fixed Arkships unintentionally syncing to the same auto-generated design. Building or upgrading one Arkship will no longer sometimes overwrite armaments or utilities on others of the same type.
Fleets that are repairing or upgrading now correctly sync their FTL, Jump Drive, and Catapult actions.
Fixed an issue with generated empire adjectives.
Inetian trader special project bound to planet, meaning that if your science ship were to blow up you can still progress
The Claimant event's description received a scope fix
"Secrets of the Past" event from "Biomorphosis" Ascension Situation blocked for Nomads
Harvest Resources Contracts will now be cancelled if a different empire harvests the resources first.
Nomads will no longer get double the benefit from their own resource producing megastructures. Megastructures will no longer be giving resources directly and a waystation will always be needed to collect those resources.
Planets can now be bombarded during first contact war
Contact view now properly closes if diplomacy window is opened
Fixed some megastructure effects showing incorrect modifier icons and “+100%”.
Rogue Servitors can no longer take a machine species as their secondary species when playing as a Forever Cruise. The machine can not be pampered.
(Beta only) Increased the Shrinkspace Depot and Extra-Dimensional Depot effects on Operation Reserves from 500 to 2500 and 1000 to 5000.
Pops can now migrate from Arkships
Hive Mind Forever Cruise empires with machine passengers start with the Machine Assembly Plants building
Hive Mind Forever Cruise empires start with the passenger Population Controls set to No, which allows the species to grow or be assembled
When starting a new game as a Forever Cruise Origin, crew species will correctly get assigned "cruise_founding_crew" flag. Various effects depends on it being set properly.
Fixed custom empires set to Force Spawn not spawning when using certain portraits.
Fixed custom Spawn Allowed empires with DLC portraits being excluded from the random empire pool.
Added tooltip saying that Nomadic Empires require a waystation in the system to open the L-Gate
Added tooltip saying that Nomadic Empires require a waystation in, or adjacent to, a system to exchange minor artifacts for precursor insight
Added tooltip that highlights that resources need to be harvested with the Arkship in the "Arkship Readiness" situation
Fixed Faculty of Archaeostudies Relic World bonus modifier
Decreased font size in the Empire Creation setup so it would not overlap with the numbers
Spelling error in the "Eager" trait description
Fixed the food upkeep in Phototrophic trait not being disabled when the Radiotrophic trait is active
Nomadic Hive Minds will no longer have access to the Evolutionary Predators decision make planets into hive worlds
Fixed an issue where the Heirs of the Khan claimant could be wiped out by the raider fleets spawned from the same marauder. No infighting!
You will no longer be told that your Khan died from old age when they are in fact immortal
Fixes contracts that had no issuer correctly set
Abort contracts if the issuer ceases to exist
Pre-Sapient species are now allowed to leave Pre-Sapient strata after they have been uplifted.
Fixed Nomadic empires being blocked from excavating their story-locked dig sites that sat in foreign owned systems.
Fixed Arkships sometimes giving up on Surveying.
Empire preview will correctly display forced spawned empires with certain restricted portraits.
Fixed some buildings (e.g. Psi-Corps) being unbuildable on planets.
Arkship habitability preference can now be applied by species modification if your empire is nomadic.
Prospectorium description does not refers to scholarium description
Bio-trophies now give 10 Political Power when playing as Rogue Servitor with the Forever Cruise Origin
The anomaly “The Imitator” will no longer sometimes appear multiple times. The Imitator cannot be imitated.
Removed the habitability requirement for the various Shore Leave internal Forever Cruise contracts.
Machine Intelligence and Individualist Machine Forever Cruises with machine passengers now alternate assembly every month.
Cruise crew and passengers no longer incorrectly assigned Grid Amalgamation or Livestock living standards and slavery types.
Species being assimilated no longer incorrectly assigned Grid Amalgamation living standard.
Individualistic Machine Forever Cruise no longer gets an error from placing Robot Assembly Plants at game start.
Species being integrated are no longer eligible for assembly.
The Package Deal living standard in Forever Cruise now grants political power to employed Economy Class Passengers.
Added missing event sounds to the Forever Cruise situation
Fixed megastructure overclock buttons being unresponsive.
Fixed several Cosmic Storms anomalies appearing more than once per game when they should be unique.
Fixed Stellar Cannon opinion modifier overflow
AI nomads no longer accept and ignore Build Waystation contracts when at capacity
The Build Waystation contract is now longer automatically abandoned for players when at double station capacity, only for AI nomads
Joining an ongoing war is now considered offensive from the perspective of subject agreement terms, regardless of which side is joined
Fixed ships that are waiting to be killed being counted for ship size-specific caps and special project requirements.
Permanent Employment in Forever Cruise now only zombifies the crew, not the passengers
Fixed issues when dismantling Beastports on Arkships.
Added the bottom border line to the research dropdown in the top Resource Bar
Reduced the Consumer Good upkeep of First Class Passenger Mandatory Pampering to 1 (from 1.5) for Rogue Servitors, matching the living standard's description.
Fix waylines persisting on galaxy map after waystation removal
AI
Fixed AI being disabled after a resync in MP.
The AI will now once again assign leaders to sector capitals as well as newly built arkships.
Fixed AI not handling events if they don't have an idle science ship with a leader.
UI/UX
The Operational Reserves situation now shows its capacity breakdown and stored/total readout in the Situation Log instead of an empty Finisher Effects panel.
The Operational Reserves topbar tooltip now shows a predicted monthly change with per-resource Energy and Minerals contributions, each with a resource icon and coloured +/- value, and a Hold-ALT hint to expand the produced/consumed breakdown.
When enabling nomads in empire creation, the civilian arkship is now selected by default.
Arkships no longer show false clearable-blocker icons in the outliner.
Fixed incorrect Arkship button texts in the planet view.
Anomaly window now also shows the name of the anomaly
Fixed a target visibility bug when switching between situation log entries.
Fix Remove Contract button hover hitbox in Situation Log
Science Ships, Construction Ships, and Nomad fleets now share one automation settings window, with options nested under each action in a scrollable list.
The automation settings window now groups actions into collapsible categories, with Survey nested under Exploration so you can automate exploring with or without surveying, and adds a Reset button that restores a fleet's default automation settings.
In species trait tooltips in empire creation, the portrait requirements are now listed in the correct order.
Fixed too large hitboxes for overclocking buttons.
Performance
Fixed science ship Excavate and Astral Rift automation causing a recurring daily stutter when no reachable target was available.
Reduced the CPU and memory overhead of per-fleet order checks, improving performance in large late-game galaxies with many fleets.
Stability
Added some safeguards to avoid crashing related to pop groups.
Modding
Situations can define total_progress with per-stage section_weight for progress bars whose length and stage bands scale at runtime, with auto-generated _max_progress_add/_mult country modifiers and a situation_progress_percent trigger.
Situations, stages, and approaches support custom_tooltip and custom_tooltip_with_modifiers (replacing the approach-only active_tooltip), and situations can override their Situation Log Active Effects and Finisher Effects panel titles and bodies.
Added the orbital_ring_and_arkship_equivalent_absent scripted trigger.
Starbase modules now also support `scripted_effect_cooldown`, `scripted_effect_cooldown_flag`, and `scripted_effect_cooldown_flag_desc`
and are now optional for is_point_of_interest.
Scripted actions support a new automation = {} block with an options sub-block, plus a new fleet-scoped has_automation_flag trigger to gate automation weights.
Scripted action automation = {} blocks now support a parent field that nests an action's row beneath another action in the settings menu.
Added home_colony and background_colony scopes (similar to home_planet and background_planet, but scope to a colony on any carrier type).
One of the big changes in this update is a revamp on the Automation menus for ships, intended to give you more control over what they’re doing.
Harvest from empty space, not my friends.
The Return of our Ethical Refactoring
Well that title certainly sounds ominous.
Back in February, we briefly added a “risky” change to the 4.3 ‘Cetus’ Open Beta, relating to having mixed ethics within a single pop group. At the time we deemed it “not ready for release”, but we’re still interested in getting it into the 4.5 ‘Cygnus’ Custodian Update, as it’s absolutely essential for Willpower (releasing in 4.6).
Since it’s so important for our future plans, we want to put this through a longer Open Beta period, which means we’ll have two of them running at once.
The 4.5 ‘Cygnus’ Open Beta is a very early build, so includes a number of other experimental changes which may or may not make it to the final release - consider everything in this branch as tentative and yet to be balanced.
MacOS builds can also run 4.5 natively on Apple Silicon as a universal (arm64 + x86_64) binary, no longer requiring Rosetta 2 translation. We’d like to get stability and performance information from the community about this change. (Internally, it seems to be pretty nice.)
Stellaris 4.5 ‘Cygnus’ Open Beta Release Notes
Feature
Pop groups are no longer divided by Ethics or Factions, instead each pop group will have a given percentage that belongs to each faction or ethic as appropriate. This means that:
THIS IS A BREAKING CHANGE AND WILL NOT PRESERVE SAVE GAME COMPATIBILITY.
Ethics and factions are now shown on the pop group entries in the planetary management UI, with tooltips showing the attraction to ethics and factions. Verbose tooltips are enabled by holding Alt, to show a breakdown of all modifiers for these attractions.
Pops shift ethics and factions more frequently
Pop group faction conversion happens more frequently
Ethic attraction now impacts faction growth
Simplify factions randomization logic
Updated Cyberization policies to account for the changes to pop groups and ethics. The Limited Cybernetic species trait has been removed, instead if the Limited Cyberization policy is in effect, Cybernetic Spiritualist pops do not benefit from Cybernetic Job Efficiency. The Limited Cyborg leader trait still functions as previously. This will also decrease the Approval penalty from regular spiritualist factions from the demand The Flesh is Strong.
Unlocked Knights of the Toxic God for nomads
Added policies to provide better control over the auto-designer for both players and AI:
Added a Fleet Doctrine policy with six doctrines that determine the tactical roles each ship class is designed to fill, affecting automated ship designs and ship-designer auto-complete.
Added Weapon Preference and Defense Preference policies that steer automated ship designs and technology research.
Added Starbase Weapon Preference and Starbase Defense Preference policies so station loadouts can diverge from the fleet.
Federations can now enact laws to grant members free, automatic Commercial Pacts (and, with the Nomads DLC, Wayline Pacts) or Research Agreements. Each law is unavailable to the federation type that already grants the benefit through its perk (Trade League / Research Cooperative).
Trade League federations now provide free, automatic Commercial Pacts between all member empires.
Trade League federations now also provide free, automatic Wayline Pacts between all members. (Requires Nomads)
Improvement
Regular Empires can now cancel accepted contracts after 20 years, with a notification sent to the operator.
Balance
Strike craft and missile defensive modifiers now also affect strike craft and missiles launched from starbases and defense platforms.
The Cybernetic species trait now provides an additional +5% Job Efficiency.
Hive minds which encounter genetic defects during cyberization can now choose a cyberisation policy.
Scientific Arkships now have +5% Deep Scanning Success Chance per Tier
Your Trade Policy now converts the trade value gained from Commercial Pacts and Branch Offices, just like the rest of your trade value (previously this trade was not run through your policy).
The "The Collective Self" technology now grants +1 Envoy.
The "Federation Code" technology now reduces Diplomacy influence upkeep by 25%.
Bugfix
AI and auto-complete ship designs no longer leave weapon or strike craft slots empty after upgrades or power rebalancing.
Fixed auto-generated ships occasionally receiving two sections in a single section slot.
Role-based section selection always resolves a valid section, so screen and point-defense ships receive the correct section.
Harbinger Crystalline Growth Regulators can no longer grow crystals on strike craft that have been launched, and modifiers that increase the armor and/or shields of strike craft no longer render strike craft functionally immune to damage.
Missile and torpedo armor and shields are now correctly applied in combat, so point-defense no longer ignores them.
Fixed Gospel of the Masses additional trade value not applying to your branch offices.
The Branching Out modifier from the Cyberization situation now gives +10% Trader Job Efficiency.
Automated starbase, waystation, and orbital ring designs now fit armor instead of shields in systems or on stations where shields are negated (pulsars, X-ray binaries, turbulent nebulae, and cloaking modules).
Fixed Deep Scan uncovering anomalies and archaeology sites far less often than the intended 7% and 3% chances.
Sero the Younger's Habitable Deep Scan can now uncover resource deposits, anomalies, and archaeology sites instead of only pre-sapients.
The success chance of Sero the Younger's Habitable Deep Scan now correctly diminishes with repeated scans of the same world.
Deep Scan resource caches now correctly scale with the Advanced Xenostudies resolution instead of A Voice for All.
Federation members can now form Commercial Pacts with one another, matching Research Agreements.
Free and automatic Research Agreements between Federation members now correctly benefit from Research Sharing from Agreements modifiers and satisfy faction demands for having Research Agreements.
Fixed federation members losing their existing Commercial Pacts with one another when forming or joining a federation. Members of non-trade federations now keep their pacts, while Trade Leagues replace them with the free federation pact (This only applies to Commercial Pacts between federation members).
AI
AI empires adopt a fleet doctrine and weapon/defense preferences matching their personality.
Auto-generated ship designs are now fully regenerated when new technology is researched, allowing them to adopt newly unlocked weapons and switch weapon families.
AI empires research weapon technologies matching their preferred weapon type more eagerly.
AI empires research armor or shield technologies in line with their defensive preference.
Sneak-attacker empires are more likely to research cloaking technology.
The AI no longer selects battleship, ember, or Stinger XL sections before it has a usable XL weapon.
The Stinger artillery section is no longer unconditionally preferred over its line section.
AI empires now fit psionic shields when they can afford the zro, instead of always avoiding them.
A shortage of one rare or strategic resource no longer blocks the AI from using weapons and components that rely on other rare resources.
AI empires with stealth fleet doctrines now correctly install cloaking devices on auto-designed ships.
Psionic shields are no longer equipped on stealth ships that lack psionic cloaking.
UI/UX
Waystations now show the amount of resources collected every month.
Improved Waystation stockpile tooltips.
Overlapping list boxes are now properly centered
Policies are now grouped into collapsible categories (Military, Diplomacy, Economy, Research, Society), with a traffic-light header on each category indicating whether all, some, or none of its policies can currently be changed.
Added a button to collapse or expand all policy categories at once.
Military policies can now be reviewed and changed from the Fleet Manager, and research policies from the Technology view.
Performance
macOS builds can now run natively on Apple Silicon as a universal (arm64 + x86_64) binary, no longer requiring Rosetta 2 translation.
Improved mid- and late-game performance by optimizing how pop faction attraction is calculated.
Stability
Fixed a crash that could occur when hovering over certain leader traits.
Modding
Remove obsolete faction parameters
Added missile armor, shield, and hull point modifiers (flat and percentage variants).
Fix `pop_force_add_ethic` and `pop_change_ethic` triggers
Remove deprecated triggers `pop_has_ethic` and `pop_group_has_ethic`
Added the can_spawn_random_anomaly, can_spawn_random_archaeological_site, and can_add_random_non_blocker_deposit triggers, and a surveyor parameter to the spawn_random_anomaly effect.
Exposed defines for allowing the AI to ignore the penalties for being over naval cap or over naval cap. The current state of these defines is no change from previous behaviour.
I was hoping to get the 4.5 Open Beta up alongside this dev diary, but we ran into some issues that we were still tracking down while I was writing this dev diary earlier this week. We hope to resolve those and have the 4.5 ‘Cygnus’ Open Beta available before the weekend on the stellaris_test_4.5 beta branch, though it may slip to early next week.
We expect to update the 4.5 ‘Cygnus’ Open Beta with more changes next week (a day or two after 4.4.5 releases). It’s looking like Nomadic Cosmogenesis and Storm Chasers might have first drafts in that update, along with some fixes to Nomadic Purge Vassals (and purging in general).
What’s Next?
Next week’s dev diary will focus on the 4.5 ‘Cygnus’ Open Beta update, and will be the last dev diary until August, though there are likely to be ongoing updates to the 4.5 Open Beta during July.
The Steam Summer Sale has just entered our orbit! Stellaris is up to 70% off, with additional discounts on selected DLC. Trigger a galactic level crisis while having a cold beverage at your side and take a nice cruise through space and time! Explore the sale here : ----- Stellari
The Steam Summer Sale has just entered our orbit! Stellaris is up to 70% off, with additional discounts on selected DLC.
Trigger a galactic level crisis while having a cold beverage at your side and take a nice cruise through space and time!
Stellaris × Print Clever: 10 Year Anniversary Store
Pre-orders for the Stellaris 10th Anniversary close on June 29, your only guaranteed way to secure exclusive items like the Bomber Jacket, Playing Cards, and collectible Pin before they're gone for good.
Saved from a fate of Deep Scanning and Planetary Processing, this big, pillowy wanderer is ready to drift gently into your life. Give it the happy ending it deserves.
by Eladrin Hello everyone! I know that yesterday I said that we were planning on putting 4.4.5 up as an Open Beta sometime next week, but based on the reactions we received in the thread we decided to expedite it a little bit, and we have an early version of 4.4.5 up momentarily
by Eladrin
Hello everyone!
I know that yesterday I said that we were planning on putting 4.4.5 up as an Open Beta sometime next week, but based on the reactions we received in the thread we decided to expedite it a little bit, and we have an early version of 4.4.5 up momentarily on stellaris_test so you can try it over the weekend.
This release includes a number of fixes, including our planned changes to Operational Reserves, but this is a still-in-development release that has had minimal QA review - there's a reason we were originally planning on releasing it next week.
Here are the release notes:
Stellaris 4.4.5 'Pegasus' Early Open Beta Release Notes
(Ongoing)
Feature
Added a Resource Abundance slider in galaxy settings.
This slider ranges from “Scarce” to x5 in 0.25 increments, where x1 is approximately the resource abundance of v4.3 and x5 is essentially 4.4’s “resources everywhere”.
The default is x2. We do recognize that this is a little confusing, but it gives you more control of getting it where you want.
Added Waystation Voidlure modules
Added Arkship Voidlure Array module that allows you to right-click on a system to lure space fauna.
Improvement
Space Fauna now disable waystations instead of destroying them. They will be re-enabled once the fauna leaves or is destroyed.
Added a fallback event for the CFL if the tournament goes on for more than 3 years, this will ensure that you don't end up with fleets that can never repair
Details map mode now toggles between 3 states: Normal -> Detailed -> Hidden -> Normal.
Clarified the map mode tooltips.
Logistic Ship automation now defaults to on for Harvest Resources and off for Waystation collection.
The game will now recalculate species rights on loading a save game.
Upgrading fleet will reissue upgrade order if one got interrupted because of the mobile starbase jumping away to another system.
Balance
Operational Reserves Changes:
Operational Reserves now track Energy and Minerals 1:1 (previously 3:1).
Maximum Operational Reserves now scale with the number and tier of owned Arkships (base 15,000, plus 5,000 / 7,500 / 10,000 per Tier I / II / III Arkship) instead of a fixed cap.
Civilian Arkships grant an additional 2,500 Operational Reserve capacity per Tier.
Resource Silos, Fallen Empire Resource Silos, Arkship Resource Silos, and Waystation Logistics Silos now raise a Nomadic empire's maximum Operational Reserves.
Added a Critical stage to the Operational Reserves track with severe research, Unity, and Alloy penalties; the Festival, Conserve, and Burn approaches now gate on reserve stage rather than fixed thresholds.
The Critical Operational Reserves stage now also penalizes the populations the reserves sustain: Lithoid pops lose Happiness, pop growth, and Job Efficiency, and Mechanical and Machine pops lose Job Efficiency.
Wanderlust now gives some of its bonuses immediately, and the second half after completing 4 categories, not all of them. Category bonuses and progression remain unchanged.
Rewards from the Arkship Readiness Checklist now last 20 years.
Rebalanced the Ranger Paladin trait.
Reduced the opinion penalties empires hold against Nomadic Empires for strip-mining, reprocessing planets, and Exodus Jumps, and made these penalties decay more quickly.
Nomadic Primal Calling now starts with a Voidlure Array equipped on the Arkship
Removed the nomadic tradition swap for Domestication tradition finisher
Rebalanced the Passenger Satisfaction situation for Forever Cruise to allow staying in the middle stage longer
The Champion's forge now waits 20 years before firing instead of 10, this should give the galaxy a bit longer to find each other before all getting introduced at the tournament.
Bugfix
Arkships now have a 10 year cooldown after benefiting from a Max Aura effect, meaning you can't chain them to get a level 10 ascension Arkship super early.
Nomads can now build Megastructures in a system containing one of their Waystations even if the system has not been surveyed.
Fixed that Tombworld Earth was spawning way too often, so often that it would spawn instead of the UNE when playing the GRS or CoM.
Fixed an issue where pre-FTL earths couldn't have defensive armies (sorry this does not fix the issue of not having the cool unique armies :frowning2: )
Assault Armies will no longer split into separate Transport Fleets after leaving the planet surface.
Harvest Resources Contracts will now be cancelled if a different empire harvests the resources first.
Fixed a very rare case where if you settled and left the event open for too long another empire could claim the system. The fix is delaying them from claiming the system for 300 days. Please make a decision before then.
The CFL should no longer accept Orbital Rings as contestants (even though that’s why they call it a Championship Ring, right?)
Added a fallback if your arkship was in a hyperjump when progressing through the adAkkaria event chains
Due to legacy script your capital arkship was never able to find precursors
Stopped Scan Debris Contract from auto-cancelling on accept
Blocked the Sectors Map Mode for Nomads.
Fixed habitats not using the correct entity from your chosen shipset.
Fixed some scripted issues with refugee modifiers.
Fixed issues with Payback and Broken Shackles district specializations.
Fixed farming colony designation not applying to agri-drones.
Bio-Repurposing tradition now provides the nomadic effects for nomadic necromancers instead of the necromancer effects.
Brought the cost and upkeep of the Nanite Hub waystation module in line with the equivalent starbase building.
Fixed the Realign Shields decision not recognising some pulsar systems.
Living and Grid Amalgamated species now have bespoke living standards so they don't use consumer goods.
Fixed Astro Harvester job modifiers not applying in some cases.
Harvesting a celestial body that has no deposit no longer incurs a diplomatic opinion penalty.
The Creativity Exhibition Vault now boosts Cruise Passengers for Forever Cruise empires, instead of applying its bonus to Bio-Trophies they do not have.
Buildings that can be built on a planet or its orbital ring (Psi Corps, Planetary Shield Generator, Galactic Stock Exchange, Embassy, Noble Estates, Slave Processing Facility) can no longer be built as both a colony building and an Arkship starbase building at the same time.
The Galactic Stock Exchange can no longer be built on both a planet and its orbital ring at the same time.
Fixed pops sometimes being stuck in the Assimilation citizenship or stratum.
Pops that already have the cybernetic or psionic trait are no longer flagged for assimilation they do not need.
Negative arkship modifiers from Grand Refurbishment and Operational Checklist are removed when another empire conquers the arkship, so you aren't stuck with a bunch of negative modifiers and no way to remove them.
Arkship can now issue a survey command by clicking the survey button and clicking on the system in galaxy map
Fixed the tooltip information where the survey single planet vs surveying the whole system information was mixed up
Fixed Waystations, Arkships and modded starbases that have forced components from starbase modules and buildings regressing their designs and losing components.
If you are too slow and don't stop the Khan Aspirant from becoming the Khan they now properly despawn, avoiding a scenario where there are two Khans.
If you play with 0 marauders enabled and as a Heirs of the Khan empire, then the backup Marauder empire will avoid Fallen Empire systems so that they don't get killed in the first few weeks, making you the Khan while others are still figuring out Blue Lasers.
Fixed a crash when updating waystation networks
Ranger Lodge now correctly informs that Biologists are converted into Rangers, instead of saying Rangers are converted into Rangers
Arkship construction notification now mentions an arkship, not a starbase
Missions counters can now be infinite
Fixed missing localization for message descriptions
Fixed the End-Bringers' shrouded world failing to spawn in games featuring Nomadic empires.
Fixed Arkships unintentionally syncing to the same auto-generated design. Building or upgrading one Arkship will no longer sometimes overwrite armaments or utilities on others of the same type.
Fleets that are repairing or upgrading now correctly sync their FTL, Jump Drive, and Catapult actions.
Fixed an issue with generated empire adjectives.
Inetian trader special project bound to planet, meaning that if your science ship were to blow up you can still progress
The Claimant event's description received a scope fix
"Secrets of the Past" event from "Biomorphosis" Ascension Situation blocked for Nomads
Harvest Resources Contracts will now be cancelled if a different empire harvests the resources first.
Nomads will no longer get double the benefit from their own resource producing megastructures. Megastructures will no longer be giving resources directly and a waystation will always be needed to collect those resources.
Planets can now be bombarded during first contact war
Contact view now properly closes if diplomacy window is opened
Fixed some megastructure effects showing incorrect modifier icons and “+100%”.
Rogue Servitors can no longer take a machine species as their secondary species when playing as a Forever Cruise. The machine can not be pampered.
AI
Fixed AI being disabled after a resync in MP.
UI/UX
The Operational Reserves situation now shows its capacity breakdown and stored/total readout in the Situation Log instead of an empty Finisher Effects panel.
The Operational Reserves topbar tooltip now shows a predicted monthly change with per-resource Energy and Minerals contributions, each with a resource icon and coloured +/- value, and a Hold-ALT hint to expand the produced/consumed breakdown.
When enabling nomads in empire creation, the civilian arkship is now selected by default.
Arkships no longer show false clearable-blocker icons in the outliner.
Fixed incorrect Arkship button texts in the planet view.
Anomaly window now also shows the name of the anomaly
Performance
Fixed science ship Excavate and Astral Rift automation causing a recurring daily stutter when no reachable target was available.
Modding
Situations can define total_progress with per-stage section_weight for progress bars whose length and stage bands scale at runtime, with auto-generated _max_progress_add/_mult country modifiers and a situation_progress_percent trigger.
Situations, stages, and approaches support custom_tooltip and custom_tooltip_with_modifiers (replacing the approach-only active_tooltip), and situations can override their Situation Log Active Effects and Finisher Effects panel titles and bodies.
Added the orbital_ring_and_arkship_equivalent_absent scripted trigger.
Starbase modules now also support `scripted_effect_cooldown`, `scripted_effect_cooldown_flag`, and `scripted_effect_cooldown_flag_desc`
We still have a number of changes coming to this branch, and will update the Open Beta next week. 4.4.5 is currently expected to release in about two weeks.
Hello there! A tradition like no other! It's time for the Art of Nomads! We know you might want to head straight for the artwork, which is fair because what the team has been able to pull off for Nomads is nothing short of amazing. But before you do, we wanted to take this opport
Hello there!
A tradition like no other! It's time for the Art of Nomads!
We know you might want to head straight for the artwork, which is fair because what the team has been able to pull off for Nomads is nothing short of amazing.
But before you do, we wanted to take this opportunity (grabbing the mic and/or embracing our inner Iggy, if you will) to talk about the last year for just a short bit.
On Nomads, we spent 682 days just creating art. That’s quite impressive for a period that only had 187 workdays.
This obviously resulted in a lot of art, and while we would like to show a lot of it we felt like around 150 (!) images and videos had to do for this time. And since the forum only allow for about 50 files per upload, we had to split this up into three parts.
A bit into that production, we changed direction quite drastically. It was for the better. And even if this led to better results in the end, it wasn't an easy thing to do - a lot of darlings were killed. A lot of good ideas were scrapped. A ton of good designs were “saved for later” (this is a term we like to use when something probably won’t be used later, but it’s easier to say that it’s “saved for later” rather than “will never see the light of day”, but who knows).
Anyways, that change of direction also came with a lot of questions: how do the Arkships look? What’s their purpose? How do they move? How big should they be? How should the Paragons look? What’s unique about them? What’s their backstory? These are all questions we always ask ourselves for every expansion, but this time we needed to figure out the answers faster.
The team answered the questions fast and efficiently, and with brilliant results.
One of the biggest creative decisions on Nomads was what kind of Arkships we were actually going to build. We landed on three main categories: Civilian, Military, and Science.
When you give three different roles their own visual identity, you get ships that actually say something. The Civilian Arkship feels like a home first, a vessel second. The Military carries weight and threat even at tier one. The Science Arkship reads as curious and outward-facing. We were going for showing genuinely different design philosophies wearing the same nomadic DNA, and we think you can feel that when you see them side by side.
The tiers were important too. A tier one Arkship should feel like a beginning. A tier three should feel like a civilization that has been moving through the galaxy for generations and shows it. That visual arc is something we are really proud of, and we did not want to lose it.
If you want to hear more about the processes, the thoughts behind the designs and direction we went with, check out the Art of Nomads video that we posted on our YouTube channel a while back.
To the Art Team; Lloyd, Felix, Tim, Emma, Mia, Erik, Cass and Gabs - Thank you for your fantastic art and your hard work on Nomads.
To the community, and to you who read this: Thank you for your continued support, during this and the last 10 years!
While we in the art team might not be the most active on the forums, Reddit or Discord, we read and see everything you write - so whenever you express appreciation for the work the team has put in it truly brings us so much joy in our little corner of the office here in Stockholm.
We can genuinely say that creating art for this game, your game, is an amazing honor, a privilege and a responsibility that we don’t take for granted. So thank you!
With that being said, we’d like to quote one of the best pilots in the history of the galaxy: “This is where the fun begins!”
Hello everyone, We trust that you are enjoying your time exploring the galaxy aboard the Arkships. The team has completed a batch of fixes and improvements for your journeys. Stellaris 4.4.4 should now be ready for download via Steam, GOG, and MS Store. Please find the patch note
Hello everyone,
We trust that you are enjoying your time exploring the galaxy aboard the Arkships. The team has completed a batch of fixes and improvements for your journeys.
Stellaris 4.4.4 should now be ready for download via Steam, GOG, and MS Store.
Please find the patch notes below.
Stellaris 4.4.4 patch notes
Feature
The Baol Life Seeding decision can now be enacted on artificial worlds and structures, and grants a unique deposit carrying over some of the bonus of a Gaia world
Improvement
AI will now consider abandoning a contract after 20 years have passed since they have accepted it.
Idle Arkships and Logistic ships will notify the player about having completed the waystation/wayline stockpile collection.
Added Logistics Hub indicator in the galaxy map.
Arkship and Logistic harvest and strip mine orders issued on a whole solar system now target higher-value planets first instead of simply the nearest.
Automated science ships that temporarily run out of reachable tasks now stay automated and resume when new work appears, instead of cancelling automation.
Arkship random names in empire creation now use namelists for ships, not planets.
Fleets will continue repairing and upgrading while following the moving arkship within the system.
Fleets will continue following the arkship after having completed its upgrades.
Improved the randomization of nomadic empires in galaxy generation, so they no longer take up the bulk of the advanced AI empire slots.
Following ships will start charging its FTL drive without waiting for the target to complete its hyperlane jump.
Becoming nomadic now embarks assault armies on the planet instead of destroying them.
Balance
Further reduced the effects that higher difficulties have on Forever Cruise progress.
Deep Sleep civics can no longer be combined with the Synthetic Fertility origin to avoid breaking their starting situation and the identity repository.
Rebalanced Arkship habitability from species traits.
Arkship now have an inherent 40% habitability, matching that of habitats.
Arkship Living Space Module grants +5% habitability in addition to the +1 district slot, but has an Exotic Gas cost and upkeep.
Reduced the size bonus damage from the Vanguard and Knight Paladin subclasses.
Adjusted the starting conditions of Forever Cruise and upkeep of Passengers to not start you in massive deficits. Generally speaking, there are now fewer Specialist Crew jobs present and Passengers (except for Bio-Trophy Passengers) have reduced Consumer Goods upkeep.
Made the Forever Cruise center situation stage longer
Added a Passenger Satisfaction penalty for abandoning Forever Cruise contracts
The Doomsday modifier you get for successfully embarking now grants +60% habitability
Increased offspring ship limits.
Nomad strategic-resource harvesting reworked. Researching a resource's mining technology now grants a +50% harvesting yield for that resource (Volatile Motes, Exotic Gases, Rare Crystals, Living Metal), replacing the previous penalty for lacking the technology. This means that the bonus from the technology now applies to resources inherent to the planet class instead of only those from deposits.
Tribute Vault and Pirate Hideout waystation modules now add their resources to the waystation's stockpile instead of silently adding them to the empire stockpile.
Bugfix
Literally unplayable typo fixed in "Agree to Disagree" perk tooltip.
Fixed opinion modifiers from Defender of the Galaxy applying when they shouldn't if the Nomads DLC is not enabled.
Paladin ships can no longer cloak, as their UI does not support it.
Fixed some Star Seekers checks only checking for the regular version of the civic.
Nomad-exclusive technologies are now hidden if you decide to settle, and re-revealed if you then decide to embark and become nomadic again.
fixed error logged when loading a save that contains popup informing about finish a tech research
The gas giant created by the Primal Calling origin now starts surveyed.
Corrected that mineral_insight_nomad did not provide job efficiency for astro-harvesting jobs.
The Waystation Research Module now establishes communications with pre-FTL civilizations in its system.
Planet class modifiers now apply to Arkship (ship-carried) colonies.
Fixed a crash that could occur while the AI was evaluating which contract to take on.
Total Wars between Nomads now properly move arkships between owners
Preventing a waystation UI from crashing in some modded ui cases.
Fixed the Planet Modifier for doomsday empires embarking not being applied to their arkship.
Fixed the Safe Haven modifier for embarking as a doomsday empire not having an icon.
Allowed Beastports for non-Beastmaster empires if you have tech_alien_cloning..
Fleets will no longer get stuck not being able to jump if the target their are following is currently moving.
In "Decipher Strange Signal", the nomadic empire needs to be in the system owner's empire to make contact
Fixed Nomadic empires not being able to enable L-Gates in some cases.
Arkships no longer benefit twice from waystation network (wayline) modifiers.
The Utility Deck specialization now correctly supports industrial buildings.
Fixed Specific Cetana events being broken for Nomads
Fixed delayed starbase spawn upon settling as Nomads
Fixed Cetana's Databank Project not showing up under Ongoing Crises
Fixed the Clone Army dig site spawn event localisation pointing towards an incorrect planet
Fixed an edge case where it was possible to dismiss the Eternal Chorus scientist before the end of the event chain
Fixed an instance of the Assist Colony special project not spawning properly upon accepting the contract
Fixed the Sable Pilot trait icon being empty
Fixed crash that could happen when federation members were destroyed while a proposal was still being voted
"Cetana: Weak Links" entry stays inside the borders of the Situation Log window.
Fixed 2 resort world specializations deleting themselves after being build
Changing the situation approach will now update the effect list faster - some edge cases used to delay the changes in the effects for a few in game days.
Abandoning an internal contract no longer sends an issuer toast
The on_cancel effect only fires once for internal contracts
Massively increased the likelihood that the Drums of War chains starts for Heirs of the Khan empires near the mid game year.
Ignore border restrictions for nomadic countries in uplift-species special projects
Fixed Recall paladin ability to work for nomad players
Fixed Stellar Ignition Contract being impossible to complete
Take the initiative projects will now abort if they are no longer needed.
Fixed Wanderlust event chain re-appearing in the situation log
The Doomsday event to unlock Embarking once again unlocks embarking.
Lowered the Forever Cruise situation speed change based on difficulty
Enabled the Sacred Path event chain to remain in the Situation Log after completing all Sacred Sites, so players can still find them on the galaxy map.
Color change in "System Warmth Detected" event window
Fixed internal contract spawn chances for Forever Cruise
Fixed the Timeline event for megastructures only firing for Behemoth empires
Fixed GetPlanetMoon returning a capitalized version of Planet as well as not returning moon when it should
The Doomsday Arkship modifier now speeds up decisions, not buildings
Fixed some Patron callings and deeds that were inappropriate for Nomadic Empires showing up.
Fixed the tooltips for some Patron accords not showing the correct tooltips for gestalt empires.
Fixed the tooltips for when an Arkship couldn't perform an action being confusing in some cases.
Blocked Shroud-Forged from Embarking.
You can no longer distribute Zro or Astral Threads during the Psionic Ascension situation if you run out of Zro or Astral Threads.
Astral Scars spawned during the Psionic Ascension situation are now revealed to Nomadic Empires.
Fixed an unlocalized tooltip for cloaking detection.
Fixed some backup clone effects checking for the incorrect tradition.
Arkship Preparation for the Doomsday origin now correctly reduces the time to embark.
Polish and Russian loc fix
Added a fallback if the Cyberization situation gets stuck with less than 100 pops to cyberize
A firing Stellar Cannon no longer blocks interaction with planets and construction in other star systems.
Arkships can now research the special project in Crystal Manufactory
The Breach the Shroud situation now recognizes all types of Psi Corps buildings
Unit Solace now correctly has the Synthetic trait
Players without the Nomads DLC can again create Nomadic empires in multiplayer when the host owns the DLC.
Fixed Arkship afterburners not upgrading to tier 2 when Advanced Afterburners is researched.
Automated fleets no longer drop out of automation after evading hostiles.
Fixed Stingers and the Devastator Mount not obeying the listed firing arcs for their weapons in some cases.
Fixed civic-granted starting buildings not being added on Sacred Path Nomad Arkships (Experimentation Chambers, Sanctuary of Repose, Astrometeorology Observatory, Sacrificial Temple)
Fixed Experimentation Chambers not being added on Hive/Machine Nomad Arkship starts
Fixed Forever Cruise empires incorrectly receiving Luxury Residences on game start
Event generated Nomad empires will no longer get an asteroid
Fixed Arkship move button incorrectly disabled
The Abandon Contract button now warns about the consequences in its tooltip.
Fixed duplicate colony names in the diplomacy tooltip after a nomad empire settles.
Fixed a Special Project icon that could appear underneath the star in certain situations.
Fixed starbase module and building limits showing as 0 in link tooltips.
Timed project alerts no longer show projects from option groups you did not select.
Fixed a duplicate scope name in deposit-related event tooltips.
Fixed accepted contracts showing "Available Until: 0" in the issuer's tooltip.
Fixed the outliner planet tooltip incorrectly reading "Carried by".
Improved unhelpful modifier tooltip labels on Arkships.
The anomaly "The Imitator" can no longer appear twice.
The Stellar Cannon no longer removes portals when it fires.
Fixed situation approaches not working after a repeating situation completed a cycle.
Fixed welding bots facing the wrong way while constructing a megastructure.
Harvesting modifiers for Civilian Arkships are now working correctly.
Fixed some resource mining technologies being blocked for Nomadic empires.
Fixed issues in which settled empires that Embarked could retain starbases and borders. Clarified the tooltip for Waystation conversion in English.
Expulsions wars will no longer move stations nomads are not allowed to build before reverting their ownership
Fixed Governor modifiers not applying.
Nomad Raids now properly transfer waystations on status quo's in both directions
Maintenance Optimization Tradition now grants Amenities bonuses for Calculator Jobs and the Hive equivalent.
Changed icon for "Resources Stolen" alert notification to make it more noticeable after successfully plundering a planet.
Operational Reserves tooltip now mentions the 1-3 scaling of energy/minerals to operational reserves
Fixed numerous modifiers (such as the Stability from Bureaucrats granted by Byzantine Bureaucracy) not granting their modifiers to Arkships. Note to modders: Any scripted modifier needs to be updated to work on colonies rather than planets.
AI
AI will no longer accept unreachable contracts and will abandon contracts that become unreachable.
Fixed AI empires not properly using Deep Sleep mechanics.
Fixed nomadic AI empires not merging their armies into a single transport fleet.
Fixed AI not selecting hostile, domineering, threatened or imperious attitudes if either country is nomadic.
Fixed AI counting their existing armies twice when calculating how many armies to build.
UI/UX
Eager Explorers, Privatized Exploration, Stargazers, and Exploration Protocols are now marked as a Challenging Civic on the empire creation screen.
Ship automation buttons are now disabled, with an explanatory tooltip, for ships that cannot use Hyperlane travel.
The diplomacy window dynamically resizes width as you move between options
Selection box remains in the correct section after building a System or Spinal Mount
Improved concept tooltips for starbase building and module unlocks.
Fix waystation stockpile max capacity rounded to thousands
Removed a duplicate Ascension Perks header in the perk picker.
The starbase module list now keeps its scroll position when advancing through slots.
Fixed the Situation Log selection jumping back to the first entry when scrolling.
Fixed the position of the remove-contract button.
Waystation UI now shows income to two decimal places.
Waystations that are collecting excessive resources now have more room to display their icons in the system map.
Performance
Improved performance of the empire creation UI.
Fixed science ship Excavate and Astral Rift automation causing a recurring daily stutter when no reachable target was available.
Stability
Fixed a crash on the start of the game loaded from an old save file.
Fixed a SHELD_HEALTH OOS on hotjoin
Country Modifiers OOS fixed due to badly parallelized navy coverage calculations
to reduce the amount of OOS at resync, the host will now also reload the save during a resync
Audio
Stellaris Complete Soundtrack updated with Nomads tracks and album artwork.
Correct sound now plays when arkships are attacked.
Modding
Added `category_limit_fail_text` to scripted actions.
Added a `context_menu_ordering` (distance/weight) field for scripted actions to control target ordering when issued on a whole system.
Added a per-ship-class shield multiplier modifier (e.g. `corvette_shield_mult`), matching the existing per-class health and armor multipliers.
Added collected_colony_resources allowing starbase modules to steal or clone resources from colonies in the same system.
Added AI_HOSTILE_FLEET_DISTANCE define.
More is in progress, and you may yet add to our list by letting us know your thoughts.
Hello Stellaris Community! We have just released the Stellaris 4.4.4 "Pegasus" patch to Open Beta. This patch addresses some of the balance and QoL feedback we've received since Nomads' release, as well as a host of bug fixes, and stability improvements. We plan on releasing 4.4.
Hello Stellaris Community!
We have just released the Stellaris 4.4.4 "Pegasus" patch to Open Beta. This patch addresses some of the balance and QoL feedback we've received since Nomads' release, as well as a host of bug fixes, and stability improvements. We plan on releasing 4.4.4 sometime next week, but in the interest of getting fixes to you as fast as possible, we're putting it up as an Open Beta today.
Feedback-wise, we're most interested in feedback on multiplayer stability. We've been getting anecdotal reports that multiplayer stability is much improved, however we've also been getting some mixed signals on that front (eg. isolated reports of OOSes still persisting). For those of you interested in offering feedback on this latest version, please play in multiplayer and make bug reports for any OOSes you experience. If you're wondering what is required for a help OOS Bug Report, we have a How to report multiplayer desyncs guide.
Please note: This is an opt-in Open Beta. In order to opt-in: (On Steam) Right Click Stellaris, go to Properties, click the Betas tab, and choose "stellaris_test" from the list of branches.
Without further ado, onto the patch notes (these are unchanged from the patch notes posted to the forums earlier today in the Dev Diary):
4.4.4 ‘Pegasus’ Open Beta Release Notes
Feature
The Baol Life Seeding decision can now be enacted on artificial worlds and structures, and grants a unique deposit carrying over some of the bonus of a Gaia world
Improvement
AI will now consider abandoning a contract after 20 years have passed since they have accepted it.
Idle Arkships and Logistic ships will notify the player about having completed the waystation/wayline stockpile collection.
Added Logistics Hub indicator in the galaxy map.
Arkship and Logistic harvest and strip mine orders issued on a whole solar system now target higher-value planets first instead of simply the nearest.
Automated science ships that temporarily run out of reachable tasks now stay automated and resume when new work appears, instead of cancelling automation.
Arkship random names in empire creation now use namelists for ships, not planets.
Fleets will continue repairing and upgrading while following the moving arkship within the system.
Fleets will continue following the arkship after having completed its upgrades.
Improved the randomization of nomadic empires in galaxy generation, so they no longer take up the bulk of the advanced AI empire slots.
Following ships will start charging its FTL drive without waiting for the target to complete its hyperlane jump.
Becoming nomadic now embarks assault armies on the planet instead of destroying them.
Balance
Further reduced the effects that higher difficulties have on Forever Cruise progress.
Deep Sleep civics can no longer be combined with the Synthetic Fertility origin to avoid breaking their starting situation and the identity repository.
Rebalanced Arkship habitability from species traits.
Arkship colonies gain +40% habitability from their planet class.
Arkship Living Space Module grants habitability and costs Exotic Gases.
Reduced the size bonus damage from the Vanguard and Knight Paladin subclasses.
Adjusted the starting conditions of Forever Cruise and upkeep of Passengers to not start you in massive deficits.
Made the Forever Cruise center situation stage longer
Added a Passenger Satisfaction penalty for abandoning Forever Cruise contracts
The Doomsday modifier you get for successfully embarking now grants +60% habitability
Increased offspring ship limits.
Nomad strategic-resource harvesting reworked. Researching a resource's mining technology now grants a +50% harvesting yield for that resource (Volatile Motes, Exotic Gases, Rare Crystals, Living Metal), replacing the previous penalty for lacking the technology. This means that the bonus from the technology now applies to resources inherent to the planet class instead of only those from deposits.
Tribute Vault and Pirate Hideout waystation modules now add their resources to the waystation's stockpile.
Bugfix
Literally unplayable typo fixed in "Agree to Disagree" perk tooltip.
Fixed opinion modifiers from Defender of the Galaxy applying when they shouldn't.
Paladin ships can no longer cloak, as their UI does not support it.
Fixed some Star Seekers checks only checking for the regular version of the civic.
Nomad-exclusive technologies are now hidden if you decide to settle, and re-revealed if you then decide to embark and become nomadic again.
fixed error logged when loading a save that contains popup informing about finish a tech research
The gas giant created by the Primal Calling origin now starts surveyed.
Corrected that mineral_insight_nomad did not provide job efficiency for astro-harvesting jobs.
The Waystation Research Module now establishes communications with pre-FTL civilizations in its system.
Planet class modifiers now apply to Arkship (ship-carried) colonies.
Fixed a crash that could occur while the AI was evaluating which contract to take on.
Total Wars between Nomads now properly move arkships between owners
Preventing a waystation UI from crashing in some modded ui cases.
Fixed the Planet Modifier for doomsday empires embarking not being applied to their arkship.
Fixed the Safe Haven modifier for embarking as a doomsday empire not having an icon.
Allowed Beastports for non-Beastmaster empires if you have tech_alien_cloning..
Fleets will no longer get stuck not being able to jump if the target their are following is currently moving.
In "Decipher Strange Signal", the nomadic empire needs to be in the system owner's empire to make contact
Fixed Nomadic empires not being able to enable L-Gates in some cases.
Arkships no longer benefit twice from waystation network (wayline) modifiers.
The Utility Deck specialization now correctly supports industrial buildings.
Fixed Specific Cetana events being broken for Nomads
Fixed delayed starbase spawn upon settling as Nomads
Fixed Cetana's Databank Project not showing up under Ongoing Crises
Fixed the Clone Army dig site spawn event localisation pointing towards an incorrect planet
Fixed an edge case where it was possible to dismiss the Eternal Chorus scientist before the end of the event chain
Fixed an instance of the Assist Colony special project not spawning properly upon accepting the contract
Fixed the Sable Pilot trait icon being empty
Fixed crash that could happen when federation members were destroyed while a proposal was still being voted
"Cetana: Weak Links" entry stays inside the borders of the Situation Log window.
Fixed 2 resort world specializations deleting themselves after being build
Changing the situation approach will now update the effect list faster - some edge cases used to delay the changes in the effects for a few in game days.
Abandoning an internal contract no longer sends an issuer toast
The on_cancel effect only fires once for internal contracts
Massively increased the likelihood that the Drums of War chains starts for Heirs of the Khan empires near the mid game year.
Ignore border restrictions for nomadic countries in uplift-species special projects
Fixed Recall paladin ability to work for nomad players
Fixed Stellar Ignition Contract being impossible to complete
Take the initiative projects will now abort if they are no longer needed.
Fixed Wanderlust event chain re-appearing in the situation log
The Doomsday event to unlock Embarking once again unlocks embarking.
Lowered the Forever Cruise situation speed change based on difficulty
Enabled the Sacred Path event chain to remain in the Situation Log after completing all Sacred Sites, so players can still find them on the galaxy map.
Color change in "System Warmth Detected" event window
Fixed internal contract spawn chances for Forever Cruise
Fixed the Timeline event for megastructures only firing for Behemoth empires
Fixed GetPlanetMoon returning a capitalized version of Planet as well as not returning moon when it should
The Doomsday Arkship modifier now speeds up decisions, not buildings
Fixed some Patron callings and deeds that were inappropriate for Nomadic Empires showing up.
Fixed the tooltips for some Patron accords not showing the correct tooltips for gestalt empires.
Fixed the tooltips for when an Arkship couldn't perform an action being confusing in some cases.
Blocked Shroud-Forged from Embarking.
You can no longer distribute Zro or Astral Threads during the Psionic Ascension situation if you run out of Zro or Astral Threads.
Astral Scars spawned during the Psionic Ascension situation are now revealed to Nomadic Empires.
Fixed an unlocalized tooltip for cloaking detection.
Fixed some backup clone effects checking for the incorrect tradition.
Arkship Preparation for the Doomsday origin now correctly reduces the time to embark.
Polish and Russian loc fix
Added a fallback if the Cyberization situation gets stuck with less than 100 pops to cyberize
A firing Stellar Cannon no longer blocks interaction with planets and construction in other star systems.
Arkships can now research the special project in Crystal Manufactory
The Breach the Shroud situation now recognizes all types of Psi Corps buildings
Unit Solace now correctly has the Synthetic trait
Players without the Nomads DLC can again create Nomadic empires in multiplayer when the host owns the DLC.
Fixed Arkship afterburners not upgrading to tier 2 when Advanced Afterburners is researched.
Automated fleets no longer drop out of automation after evading hostiles.
Fixed Stingers and the Devastator Mount not obeying the listed firing arcs for their weapons in some cases.
Fixed civic-granted starting buildings not being added on Sacred Path Nomad Arkships (Experimentation Chambers, Sanctuary of Repose, Astrometeorology Observatory, Sacrificial Temple)
Fixed Experimentation Chambers not being added on Hive/Machine Nomad Arkship starts
Fixed Forever Cruise empires incorrectly receiving Luxury Residences on game start
Event generated Nomad empires will no longer get an asteroid
Fixed Arkship move button incorrectly disabled
The Abandon Contract button now warns about the consequences in its tooltip.
Fixed duplicate colony names in the diplomacy tooltip after a nomad empire settles.
Fixed a Special Project icon that could appear underneath the star in certain situations.
Fixed starbase module and building limits showing as 0 in link tooltips.
Timed project alerts no longer show projects from option groups you did not select.
Fixed a duplicate scope name in deposit-related event tooltips.
Fixed accepted contracts showing "Available Until: 0" in the issuer's tooltip.
Fixed the outliner planet tooltip incorrectly reading "Carried by".
Improved unhelpful modifier tooltip labels on Arkships.
The anomaly "The Imitator" can no longer appear twice.
The Stellar Cannon no longer removes portals when it fires.
Fixed situation approaches not working after a repeating situation completed a cycle.
Fixed welding bots facing the wrong way while constructing a megastructure.
Harvesting modifiers for Civilian Arkships are now working correctly.
Fixed some resource mining technologies being blocked for Nomadic empires.
Fixed issues in which settled empires that Embarked could retain starbases and borders. Clarified the tooltip for Waystation conversion in English.
Expulsions wars will no longer move stations nomads are not allowed to build before reverting their ownership
Fixed Governor modifiers not applying.
Nomad Raids now properly transfer waystations on status quo's in both directions
Maintenance Optimization Tradition now grants Amenities bonuses for Calculator Jobs and the Hive equivalent.
Changed icon for "Resources Stolen" alert notification to make it more noticeable after successfully plundering a planet.
Operational Reserves tooltip now mentions the 1-3 scaling of energy/minerals to operational reserves
Fixed numerous modifiers (such as the Stability from Bureaucrats granted by Byzantine Bureaucracy) not granting their modifiers to Arkships. Note to modders: Any scripted modifier needs to be updated to work on colonies rather than planets.
AI
AI will no longer accept unreachable contracts and will abandon contracts that become unreachable.
Fixed AI empires not properly using Deep Sleep mechanics.
Fixed nomadic AI empires not merging their armies into a single transport fleet.
Fixed AI not selecting hostile, domineering, threatened or imperious attitudes if either country is nomadic.
Fixed AI counting their existing armies twice when calculating how many armies to build.
UI/UX
Eager Explorers, Privatized Exploration, Stargazers, and Exploration Protocols are now marked as a Challenging Civic on the empire creation screen.
Ship automation buttons are now disabled, with an explanatory tooltip, for ships that cannot use Hyperlane travel.
The diplomacy window dynamically resizes width as you move between options
Selection box remains in the correct section after building a System or Spinal Mount
Improved concept tooltips for starbase building and module unlocks.
Fix waystation stockpile max capacity rounded to thousands
Removed a duplicate Ascension Perks header in the perk picker.
The starbase module list now keeps its scroll position when advancing through slots.
Fixed the Situation Log selection jumping back to the first entry when scrolling.
Fixed the position of the remove-contract button.
Waystation UI now shows income to two decimal places.
Waystations that are collecting excessive resources now have more room to display their icons in the system map.
Performance
Improved performance of the empire creation UI.
Stability
Fixed a crash on the start of the game loaded from an old save file.
Fixed a SHELD_HEALTH OOS on hotjoin
Country Modifiers OOS fixed due to badly parallelized navy coverage calculations
to reduce the amount of OOS at resync, the host will now also reload the save during a resync
Audio
Stellaris Complete Soundtrack updated with Nomads tracks and album artwork.
Correct sound now plays when arkships are attacked.
Modding
Added `category_limit_fail_text` to scripted actions.
Added a `context_menu_ordering` (distance/weight) field for scripted actions to control target ordering when issued on a whole system.
Added a per-ship-class shield multiplier modifier (e.g. `corvette_shield_mult`), matching the existing per-class health and armor multipliers.
Added collected_colony_resources allowing starbase modules to steal or clone resources from colonies in the same system.
Added AI_HOSTILE_FLEET_DISTANCE define.
Save compatibility is not guaranteed between versions and while we are not expecting issues from older save games and this new version, it is always a good practice to back up your save file before loading into a new version.
by Eladrin Greetings, travellers! The Stellaris 4.4.1 ‘Pegasus’ update and Nomads released this Monday. SimasTV created a tutorial on the basics. Today we’re going to look at the first few days, discuss a few common comments, and explain where we’re going next. The First Days a
by Eladrin
Greetings, travellers!
The Stellaris 4.4.1 ‘Pegasus’ update and Nomads released this Monday.
Today we’re going to look at the first few days, discuss a few common comments, and explain where we’re going next.
The First Days and the 4.4.2 and 4.4.3 Hotfixes
Very quickly we saw a number of crash reports coming in. Most of these came down to an issue at low resolutions (x800 or lower), which truncated the Waystation UI. This led to a crash when the game attempted to update the Wayline information that is displayed in the upper section that was no longer there.
We put it up as an Open Beta on Monday, and you players found some issues with the planned Hotfix, such as Precursor selection disappearing from Galaxy Generation, so that’s a +1 for Open Betas.
The 4.4.2 Hotfix released Tuesday afternoon, with the following fixes:
4.4.2 ‘Pegasus’ Hotfix Release Notes
Balance:
Reduced the rate of the Forever Cruise situation speed on all difficulties.
Significantly reduced the amount that the situation increases based on game difficulty. (These are further reduced from last night’s Open Beta release.)
Doubled the grace period after completing a crew or passenger contract - it will now pause progress in the passenger satisfaction situation for 24 months.
More comprehensive changes will be coming in this weekend's Open Beta for the patch planned for next week.
Bugfix:
The Defenders of the Galaxy achievement should now be completable
[Beta Bug Only] Fix overlapping and missing items in single player game setup
Stability:
Preventing a waystation UI from crashing in some cases.
Fixed a crash that could occur when changing the animated main menu background from the in-game settings screen.
Fixed a crash that could occur while the AI was evaluating which contract to take on.
Fix crashing on 800p and lower resolutions when clicking on Waystations.
Fix combat crash when calculating ship design states (from required component arrays having null-object placeholders that defaulted to the “weapon” type)
Fix crash when escaping combat as an enemy is destroyed
Fix crash in spawn_random_anomaly when orbital fleet has no ships
Fixed a crash that could occur when hovering an empire's ethics tooltips, including after that empire was destroyed.
Fixed a crash that could occur when hovering ethics tooltips in the empire setup screen.
Fixed a potential crash when opponents were deleted in mid-combat
The Stability list included fixes to over 90% of the crashes reported in the first 24 hours, and we made a few changes to the difficulty of the Forever Cruise situation speed on higher difficulties - there’s more coming next week though.
The 4.4.3 hotfix was a small one on Wednesday to target a few especially confusing issues.
4.4.3 ‘Pegasus’ Hotfix Release Notes Bugfix:
The Void Reavers civic no longer requires both First Contact and Nomads
Corrected the Trust and Opinion thresholds required to propose a Waystation Pact.
Fixed opinion modifiers from Defender of the Galaxy applying when they shouldn't.
Decisions We Made When Designing Nomads
Operation Reserves are something that it seems we could have had more clarity about. As mentioned in Dev Diary #421, Operational Reserves were introduced as a solution to balance consumption creating a desire to move about (to harvest and collect) and having an angry red number in your resources bar that the last ten years have trained us all to interpret as “EMERGENCY! ACT NOW! YOUR ECONOMY IS IN SHAMBLES! EVERYONE IS GOING TO DIE!” - but this is intended to be the normal state. Merging Energy and Minerals into a single more fungible resource gave us a way to represent the continuous drain of resources while providing several different ways to mitigate it, while hopefully making it not feel the same as a deficit situation in a normal empire. (This also gave us the tech we needed to explore a nice niche for a Nanotech redesign that the Custodians will be looking at during the summer.)
Some people have commented about the difficulty in getting detailed information about the mineral and energy expenditures - it’s a bit obfuscated, but we intended for the Operational Reserves to be more of a black box where you shouldn’t need to care about the exact state of mineral or energy. You shouldn’t be using it for much - construction generally requires more advanced or strategic resources - except for fishing for the Galatron and feeding Lithoids. But since Energy and Minerals are mutually exchangeable, the answer should always be “get more of either”.
There have been many comments about Arkship Skins and Bio-Arkships. The Arkships are the most complicated ships we’ve ever created, with three different specializations, each with three tiers and a number of other customization options (such as the spinal mounts).
While we would have loved to include all of them, if we made them to the same detail level of the Arkships we did create, it’d have required a total of 20 different shipsets x 3 Arkship types x 3 tiers = 180 ships - an impossible scope. While we could have cut the different tiers, reducing the count to 60, that’s still too much. Cutting the three different types as well could have dropped it to 20 - but we felt that the Civilian vs. Military vs. Scientific choices and the multiple tiers of Arkship were a more interesting use of the resources, and we feel that just going with textural changes without form changes wouldn’t have been satisfying.
If at some point in the future we do add a Bio-Arkship, I’d likely want to make it a fourth category with its own mechanics rather than being a copy of one of the other three, especially since we decided to permit bioship empires to use the standard Arkship variants. We would likely permit the reverse as well - empires that use mechanical ships would likely still be allowed to use the Bio variant of the Arkship if we went this direction.
The Very Next Step: 4.4.4 Open Beta
We have a larger patch planned for early next week with a few fixes, which we will be pushing to the stellaris_test Open Beta branch today.
Here are the Open Beta release notes:
4.4.4 ‘Flappy Horse’ Open Beta Release Notes Feature
The Baol Life Seeding decision can now be enacted on artificial worlds and structures, and grants a unique deposit carrying over some of the bonus of a Gaia world
Improvement
AI will now consider abandoning a contract after 20 years have passed since they have accepted it.
Idle Arkships and Logistic ships will notify the player about having completed the waystation/wayline stockpile collection.
Added Logistics Hub indicator in the galaxy map.
Arkship and Logistic harvest and strip mine orders issued on a whole solar system now target higher-value planets first instead of simply the nearest.
Automated science ships that temporarily run out of reachable tasks now stay automated and resume when new work appears, instead of cancelling automation.
Arkship random names in empire creation now use namelists for ships, not planets.
Fleets will continue repairing and upgrading while following the moving arkship within the system.
Fleets will continue following the arkship after having completed its upgrades.
Improved the randomization of nomadic empires in galaxy generation, so they no longer take up the bulk of the advanced AI empire slots.
Following ships will start charging its FTL drive without waiting for the target to complete its hyperlane jump.
Becoming nomadic now embarks assault armies on the planet instead of destroying them.
Balance
Further reduced the effects that higher difficulties have on Forever Cruise progress.
Deep Sleep civics can no longer be combined with the Synthetic Fertility origin to avoid breaking their starting situation and the identity repository.
Rebalanced Arkship habitability from species traits.
Arkship colonies gain +40% habitability from their planet class.
Arkship Living Space Module grants habitability and costs Exotic Gases.
Reduced the size bonus damage from the Vanguard and Knight Paladin subclasses.
Adjusted the starting conditions of Forever Cruise and upkeep of Passengers to not start you in massive deficits.
Made the Forever Cruise center situation stage longer
Added a Passenger Satisfaction penalty for abandoning Forever Cruise contracts
The Doomsday modifier you get for successfully embarking now grants +60% habitability
Increased offspring ship limits.
Nomad strategic-resource harvesting reworked. Researching a resource's mining technology now grants a +50% harvesting yield for that resource (Volatile Motes, Exotic Gases, Rare Crystals, Living Metal), replacing the previous penalty for lacking the technology. This means that the bonus from the technology now applies to resources inherent to the planet class instead of only those from deposits.
Tribute Vault and Pirate Hideout waystation modules now add their resources to the waystation's stockpile.
Bugfix
Literally unplayable typo fixed in "Agree to Disagree" perk tooltip.
Fixed opinion modifiers from Defender of the Galaxy applying when they shouldn't.
Paladin ships can no longer cloak, as their UI does not support it.
Fixed some Star Seekers checks only checking for the regular version of the civic.
Nomad-exclusive technologies are now hidden if you decide to settle, and re-revealed if you then decide to embark and become nomadic again.
fixed error logged when loading a save that contains popup informing about finish a tech research
The gas giant created by the Primal Calling origin now starts surveyed.
Corrected that mineral_insight_nomad did not provide job efficiency for astro-harvesting jobs.
The Waystation Research Module now establishes communications with pre-FTL civilizations in its system.
Planet class modifiers now apply to Arkship (ship-carried) colonies.
Fixed a crash that could occur while the AI was evaluating which contract to take on.
Total Wars between Nomads now properly move arkships between owners
Preventing a waystation UI from crashing in some modded ui cases.
Fixed the Planet Modifier for doomsday empires embarking not being applied to their arkship.
Fixed the Safe Haven modifier for embarking as a doomsday empire not having an icon.
Allowed Beastports for non-Beastmaster empires if you have tech_alien_cloning..
Fleets will no longer get stuck not being able to jump if the target their are following is currently moving.
In "Decipher Strange Signal", the nomadic empire needs to be in the system owner's empire to make contact
Fixed Nomadic empires not being able to enable L-Gates in some cases.
Arkships no longer benefit twice from waystation network (wayline) modifiers.
The Utility Deck specialization now correctly supports industrial buildings.
Fixed Specific Cetana events being broken for Nomads
Fixed delayed starbase spawn upon settling as Nomads
Fixed Cetana's Databank Project not showing up under Ongoing Crises
Fixed the Clone Army dig site spawn event localisation pointing towards an incorrect planet
Fixed an edge case where it was possible to dismiss the Eternal Chorus scientist before the end of the event chain
Fixed an instance of the Assist Colony special project not spawning properly upon accepting the contract
Fixed the Sable Pilot trait icon being empty
Fixed crash that could happen when federation members were destroyed while a proposal was still being voted
"Cetana: Weak Links" entry stays inside the borders of the Situation Log window.
Fixed 2 resort world specializations deleting themselves after being build
Changing the situation approach will now update the effect list faster - some edge cases used to delay the changes in the effects for a few in game days.
Abandoning an internal contract no longer sends an issuer toast
The on_cancel effect only fires once for internal contracts
Massively increased the likelihood that the Drums of War chains starts for Heirs of the Khan empires near the mid game year.
Ignore border restrictions for nomadic countries in uplift-species special projects
Fixed Recall paladin ability to work for nomad players
Fixed Stellar Ignition Contract being impossible to complete
Take the initiative projects will now abort if they are no longer needed.
Fixed Wanderlust event chain re-appearing in the situation log
The Doomsday event to unlock Embarking once again unlocks embarking.
Lowered the Forever Cruise situation speed change based on difficulty
Enabled the Sacred Path event chain to remain in the Situation Log after completing all Sacred Sites, so players can still find them on the galaxy map.
Color change in "System Warmth Detected" event window
Fixed internal contract spawn chances for Forever Cruise
Fixed the Timeline event for megastructures only firing for Behemoth empires
Fixed GetPlanetMoon returning a capitalized version of Planet as well as not returning moon when it should
The Doomsday Arkship modifier now speeds up decisions, not buildings
Fixed some Patron callings and deeds that were inappropriate for Nomadic Empires showing up.
Fixed the tooltips for some Patron accords not showing the correct tooltips for gestalt empires.
Fixed the tooltips for when an Arkship couldn't perform an action being confusing in some cases.
Blocked Shroud-Forged from Embarking.
You can no longer distribute Zro or Astral Threads during the Psionic Ascension situation if you run out of Zro or Astral Threads.
Astral Scars spawned during the Psionic Ascension situation are now revealed to Nomadic Empires.
Fixed an unlocalized tooltip for cloaking detection.
Fixed some backup clone effects checking for the incorrect tradition.
Arkship Preparation for the Doomsday origin now correctly reduces the time to embark.
Polish and Russian loc fix
Added a fallback if the Cyberization situation gets stuck with less than 100 pops to cyberize
A firing Stellar Cannon no longer blocks interaction with planets and construction in other star systems.
Arkships can now research the special project in Crystal Manufactory
The Breach the Shroud situation now recognizes all types of Psi Corps buildings
Unit Solace now correctly has the Synthetic trait
Players without the Nomads DLC can again create Nomadic empires in multiplayer when the host owns the DLC.
Fixed Arkship afterburners not upgrading to tier 2 when Advanced Afterburners is researched.
Automated fleets no longer drop out of automation after evading hostiles.
Fixed Stingers and the Devastator Mount not obeying the listed firing arcs for their weapons in some cases.
Fixed civic-granted starting buildings not being added on Sacred Path Nomad Arkships (Experimentation Chambers, Sanctuary of Repose, Astrometeorology Observatory, Sacrificial Temple)
Fixed Experimentation Chambers not being added on Hive/Machine Nomad Arkship starts
Fixed Forever Cruise empires incorrectly receiving Luxury Residences on game start
Event generated Nomad empires will no longer get an asteroid
Fixed Arkship move button incorrectly disabled
The Abandon Contract button now warns about the consequences in its tooltip.
Fixed duplicate colony names in the diplomacy tooltip after a nomad empire settles.
Fixed a Special Project icon that could appear underneath the star in certain situations.
Fixed starbase module and building limits showing as 0 in link tooltips.
Timed project alerts no longer show projects from option groups you did not select.
Fixed a duplicate scope name in deposit-related event tooltips.
Fixed accepted contracts showing "Available Until: 0" in the issuer's tooltip.
Fixed the outliner planet tooltip incorrectly reading "Carried by".
Improved unhelpful modifier tooltip labels on Arkships.
The anomaly "The Imitator" can no longer appear twice.
The Stellar Cannon no longer removes portals when it fires.
Fixed situation approaches not working after a repeating situation completed a cycle.
Fixed welding bots facing the wrong way while constructing a megastructure.
Harvesting modifiers for Civilian Arkships are now working correctly.
Fixed some resource mining technologies being blocked for Nomadic empires.
Fixed issues in which settled empires that Embarked could retain starbases and borders. Clarified the tooltip for Waystation conversion in English.
Expulsions wars will no longer move stations nomads are not allowed to build before reverting their ownership
Fixed Governor modifiers not applying.
Nomad Raids now properly transfer waystations on status quo's in both directions
Maintenance Optimization Tradition now grants Amenities bonuses for Calculator Jobs and the Hive equivalent.
Changed icon for "Resources Stolen" alert notification to make it more noticeable after successfully plundering a planet.
Operational Reserves tooltip now mentions the 1-3 scaling of energy/minerals to operational reserves
Fixed numerous modifiers (such as the Stability from Bureaucrats granted by Byzantine Bureaucracy) not granting their modifiers to Arkships. Note to modders: Any scripted modifier needs to be updated to work on colonies rather than planets.
AI
AI will no longer accept unreachable contracts and will abandon contracts that become unreachable.
Fixed AI empires not properly using Deep Sleep mechanics.
Fixed nomadic AI empires not merging their armies into a single transport fleet.
Fixed AI not selecting hostile, domineering, threatened or imperious attitudes if either country is nomadic.
Fixed AI counting their existing armies twice when calculating how many armies to build.
UI/UX
Eager Explorers, Privatized Exploration, Stargazers, and Exploration Protocols are now marked as a Challenging Civic on the empire creation screen.
Ship automation buttons are now disabled, with an explanatory tooltip, for ships that cannot use Hyperlane travel.
The diplomacy window dynamically resizes width as you move between options
Selection box remains in the correct section after building a System or Spinal Mount
Improved concept tooltips for starbase building and module unlocks.
Fix waystation stockpile max capacity rounded to thousands
Removed a duplicate Ascension Perks header in the perk picker.
The starbase module list now keeps its scroll position when advancing through slots.
Fixed the Situation Log selection jumping back to the first entry when scrolling.
Fixed the position of the remove-contract button.
Waystation UI now shows income to two decimal places.
Waystations that are collecting excessive resources now have more room to display their icons in the system map.
Performance
Improved performance of the empire creation UI.
Stability
Fixed a crash on the start of the game loaded from an old save file.
Fixed a SHELD_HEALTH OOS on hotjoin
Country Modifiers OOS fixed due to badly parallelized navy coverage calculations
to reduce the amount of OOS at resync, the host will now also reload the save during a resync
Audio
Stellaris Complete Soundtrack updated with Nomads tracks and album artwork.
Correct sound now plays when arkships are attacked.
Modding
Added `category_limit_fail_text` to scripted actions.
Added a `context_menu_ordering` (distance/weight) field for scripted actions to control target ordering when issued on a whole system.
Added a per-ship-class shield multiplier modifier (e.g. `corvette_shield_mult`), matching the existing per-class health and armor multipliers.
Added collected_colony_resources allowing starbase modules to steal or clone resources from colonies in the same system.
Added AI_HOSTILE_FLEET_DISTANCE define.
Let us know if you run into any issues!
Things for the Future
The 4.4 Nomads release adapted a large number of Origins to nomadic gameplay, but more is always better. Most of the list of disallowed Origins have technical reasons.
We plan on enabling more nomadic fantasies going forward. Storm Chasers and Knights of the Toxic God are on the shortlist, along with further investigation into Broken Shackles. We won’t make any promises at this time (Broken Shackles has been especially tricky, since the MSI flagship isn’t set up quite right to just be turned into an Arkship), but the Custodian team wants to enable as many as possible.
Some of these are likely to make it into this summer’s 4.5 ‘Cygnus’ Open Beta.
Questions We Still Have
During the development of 4.4, the programming team spent a lot of time working on multiplayer stability. The data we’ve collected so far looks very promising regarding out-of-syncs, but we’d like to hear more from how it’s been going for you, even if it’s largely anecdotal.
We’re also eager to hear more about what you like and dislike about Nomadic gameplay, so we can adjust our plans for the 4.4.5 patch and 4.5.
Questions You Had
Last Thursday we held a Q&A on discord - here’s a transcript of the questions and answers.
Stellaris Nomads — Dev Q&A
azaken_mobito asked: How terrifying would a fleet of tier 3 military Arkships be?
Well, you can only have 1 per fleet. So not too bad ;)
Answered by: Iggy (Content Design)
neonakoro asked: what happens if everyone closes their borders to a nomadic empire and/or destroys their way stations?
Just closing borders won't stop Nomads from moving through, if everyone in the galaxy had declared war on the nomad to expulse them at the same time, than we move into a wonky situations where the nomad will likely be stuck for a while and they really should work on their PR
Answered by: Gruntsplayground (Game Designer)
velhote1051 asked: How do you plan on supporting nomads in the future? Can we expect nem nomads content in future DLC and/or tweaks and changes from the custodian to nomads?
Future content should work with Nomads. Same as with MegaCorp when there is fun potential fantasies we add them!
Answered by: Iggy (Content Design)
eps200 asked: Have you considered removing megastructure caps, balanced by having the modifier non stacking. That would make second ones less powerful and avoid us getting screwed out by the limits.
One of the things we're probably going to experiment with during this summer is changing Starbase Limits into a Structure Limit, which would also include changing the limits on kilostructures and possibly even megastructures. If our internal experiments go well, expect it to go into an Open Beta at some point for a while.
Answered by: Eladrin (Game Director)
fiji_oskar asked: does operational reserve has capacity limit
Yes, off the top of my head I think it's around 50k or thereabouts
Answered by: Alfray Stryke (Game Designer)
ravana. asked: What's the status of the outliner allowing fleets to be reordered?
It has gone from never to unlikely.
Answered by: Iggy (Content Design)
dskin asked: how effective is playing mp stellaris as a co-op between settled and nomad empires?
I had a lot of fun issuing a bunch of contracts for Cosmogone to do during one of the dev MPs. He buffed my colonies and did things for me, and we coexisted quite nicely together.
Answered by: Eladrin (Game Director)
lucaszorua asked: what are your thoughts on size-based traits? Like if you want a species to be mouse or elephant sized
I have been pitching the Big and Small species pack since my first day here!
Answered by: Iggy (Content Design)
the_no0b asked: if the answer to the big question about life, the universe and the entire rest is "42", then what the hell was the question?
tabernak asked: Does genocidal biological hivemind consume all biomass from worlds and leaves an empty baren world ?
They kill all the pops, but they quite fully scour it. If you want to eat planets you will need to be lithoid.
Answered by: Iggy (Content Design)
squishyfishy asked: any thoughts on abducting cool planetary features?
We actually did talk about that during development. I think Grunts wanted to steal the Eiffel Tower.
Answered by: Eladrin (Game Director)
fleppo99 asked: How will the new Democratic Interlink Cyborg Pop faction work if Cyborgs in that empire type have no Happiness, and factions no Approval Rating to work off of because of that? How is Faction Approval determined with this new faction?
The Interlink has no demands
Answered by: Alfray Stryke (Game Designer)
hotcoffee_ asked: I love the new merch - any plans to make more plushies?
Yep I have seen two of them! Very soft.
Answered by: Iggy (Content Design)
tabernak asked: For you, which ascension path is the funniest to play as a Nomads ? I personally think Virtuality can be hilarious being the biggest moving data center through the galaxy
Virtuality 100%. Though some of the psionic patrons are also hilarious.
Answered by: Gruntsplayground (Game Designer)
sandwich8 asked: are galactic nomads going to put back into the game, even if you own MegaCorp???
The original nomads from 1.0 do not come back with this DLC, they are replaced with actual empires instead of the old NPC ones
Answered by: Iggy (Content Design)
rynn11k asked: What are you most excited for for 4.5?
Hopefully massively decreasing the amount of technical debt in the script to make the plans for 4.6 and 2027 easier to achieve
Answered by: Alfray Stryke (Game Designer)
squishyfishy asked: can nomads create a mercenary enclave in an owned system and remain the patron?
Yep it's tied to the waystation when a nomad creates them. Might be a hard time getting it back if it blows up tho
Answered by: Iggy (Content Design)
formula_c8h10n4o2 asked: Can you still become ruler of the galactic imperium as a Nomad?
I don't see why we would block that 🤔
Answered by: Iggy (Content Design)
azaken_mobito asked: Can Arkships have alien zoos?
Yes, useful if you have a Nascent Stage Kindergarten.
Answered by: Eladrin (Game Director)
halfedead_harry asked: Do nomads act well as advanced subjects?
Nomadic empires cannot be (or have be an overlord to) the specialist subject types from Overlord. They were too planet-/system-based.
Answered by: Alfray Stryke (Game Designer)
dskin asked: are there conquering wargoals allowing you to take over waystations owned by other nomads
Yes
Answered by: Alfray Stryke (Game Designer)
azaken_mobito asked: Would leaders in control of Arkships be Captains, Admirals, or Grand Admirals you think?
Arkships have two leaders assigned to them, one to the colony (as the governor) and one to the ship. The ship leader can be either a Commander or a Scientist.
Answered by: Alfray Stryke (Game Designer)
the_no0b asked: Can a star be changed by the latest revealed spinal mount, then starforged by a Hpyerthermia empire, and then still be Dysonswarmed? Or blown up into a black hole?
Should just work, yes
Answered by: Alfray Stryke (Game Designer)
cipher3250 asked: Did the devs have a chance to do an internal MP game during nomads dev? Did the devs who played nomads end up being more helpful or annoying to the rest of you dirtdwellers?
We have a weekly MP game that's typically 90-120 minutes long. It's incredibly useful for finding all of the crashes and out-of-sync issues that the community thankfully never sees.
Answered by: Alfray Stryke (Game Designer)
formula_c8h10n4o2 asked: Can Forever Cruise be Individualist Machines? And with forever cruise, is it possible to... 'replace' the starting passengers? Say I want to accept passengers from all the strongest factions of the galaxy! Is it possible to offer out services as a cruise to other races and empires beyond our starting passengers?
Yep you can be robits! And yes you can add more passengers or crew as the game goes on. You can not really remove your starting passangers tho.
Answered by: Iggy (Content Design)
jumblee asked: how possible is it to not use harvesting actions and still thrive as nomads (I want to be eco friendly)
Its sub-optimal, but its possible. You will most likely be sacrificing more of your districts for energy production than a harvesting nomad.
Answered by: Gruntsplayground (Game Designer)
azaken_mobito asked: Will Arkships have their own Name lists? Will this update seemlessly inject new name lists without it counting as a mod or a modded game that messes with compatibility?
Civilian Arkships use the Colony Ship namelists, Scientific Arkships use the Science Ship namelists, Military Arkships use the Juggernaut namelists
Answered by: Alfray Stryke (Game Designer)
alexiacew asked: Will nomad empires get colony events?
They'll get Arkship events.
Answered by: Eladrin (Game Director)
dskin asked: what gives warscore against nomadic empires?
Defeating their fleets, disabling their arkships, pretty much everything that would work for normal empires, except occupying starbases
Answered by: Gruntsplayground (Game Designer)
azaken_mobito asked: Have you considered adding an Origin for Nomads that makes them explorers from another Galaxy?
You might want to pay attention to one of the scenarios being released later this year
Answered by: Alfray Stryke (Game Designer)
the_no0b asked: were there any funny errors/bugs/explouts you ran into while developing this DLC?
YES! In fact, this one's even in our release build, so it's a Known Issue!
The galaxy is vast and full of riches. Space based deposits are more common than intended (almost every object in the galaxy has something on it!) but it’s pretty cool so this is probably going to turn into a galaxy generation slider.
It's really fun, so we're gonna keep it as a slider.
Other funny bugs included when logging in or loading a save would immediately kill your empire, as we were partially through the colony carrier conversion. Answered by: Eladrin (Game Director) lucaszorua asked: apologies I meant can you use subspace imaging without creating / discovering new hyperlanes. It sounds like subspace is more likely to find things rather than deep scan
Subspace Imaging has a less than 10% chance of discovering new hyperlanes or wormholes when used and can only be used once per system. I wouldn't worry too much.
Answered by: Alfray Stryke (Game Designer)
formula_c8h10n4o2 asked: Can Nomadic Empires create Nomadic Vassals? The settled and embarked mechanics showed that Nomads could create settled vassals (or become settled while all their other arkships become vassals) but is it possible for a Nomad to remain Nomadic while creating other nomadic vassals?
Nomads can have other nomadic vassals, yes
Answered by: Gruntsplayground (Game Designer)
rafi69 asked: Can one of our colony embark on an arkship while at war, to escape it and let our new vassal deal with it?
You can escape sure, however you are still the country who was in that war :P
Answered by: Iggy (Content Design)
dskin asked: are there events where destroyed empires can evacuate onto arkships, such as escaping from a genocidal empire if they have sufficient pop numbers or resources?
Becoming nomadic has to be done before you lose the game, though of course if you die you could then continue as any empire so you might find a suitable Nomadic empire somewhere in the galaxy.
Answered by: Gruntsplayground (Game Designer)
lavraleksej asked: how painfull will porting a mod relying on planet flags and empire borders be?
Depending on how involved the mod is it might just be a case of replacing `colony_` with `carrier_`, alternatively it might be several days of work. Depends on the mod really.
Answered by: Alfray Stryke (Game Designer)
cipher3250 asked: I probably missed this - how do nomads handle archeology and rifts?
they can always do it outside of borders, and if they get archivisim they can do it inside of borders.
Answered by: Iggy (Content Design)
azaken_mobito asked: How many puns were added in Nomads? Was it enough, or far too little?
never enough.
Answered by: Eladrin (Game Director)
kayla_colon3 asked: do star types affect your arkship? for example more radiant stars increase energy output
big_fish213 asked: is there a setting to choose how many empires will appear as nomads vs traditional empires? or is it just a random chance that an empire may generate as nomads?
We have a slider for how many nomadic empires can appear in the galaxy. Nomadic empires can also randomly be selected to be Advanced Start empires, meaning they start with up to 3 arkships
Answered by: Alfray Stryke (Game Designer)
hotcoffee_ asked: In your opinion what is the best looking shipset?
A tie between the Spinovores from BioGenesis, the Mindwardens from Shadows of the Shroud, the [REDACTED] from Willpower, and the [REDACTED] from [REDACTED] (at least the concept art for it).
Answered by: Eladrin (Game Director)
gorehuchi asked: Have you all ever considered allowing transport fleets to damage starbases or large ships with "boarding" actions? This question is spurred by the fact arc ships can't be invaded.
It is a surprisingly common topic in our design meetings but we have no current plans for this. Just note that this is a far bigger change than it would seem and so not something we would want to implement casually.
Answered by: Gruntsplayground (Game Designer)
gorehuchi asked: Can a nomadic empire have Obsessional Directive? I would like to field a fleet of paperclip hungry von Neumann probes.
Yes. Make the galaxy a consumer good
Answered by: Iggy (Content Design)
mon.archie asked: Could you describe what the Wanderlust AP does in a little more detail?
Go to cool places and be rewarded! You start out with some powerful modifiers and get more based on what systems you visit. See the curators for what might be out there.
Answered by: Iggy (Content Design)
captainkorpie asked: How will Void Dwellers function as a nomadic empire? will that even be compatible?
Void Dwellers are not compatible with Nomads. They're all Void Dwellers.
Answered by: Eladrin (Game Director)
eps200 asked: [ Could a space fauna serve as the colony carrier? A nomadic version of here be dragons?]
I can't immediately think of a reason why this wouldn't be possible to mod in.
Answered by: pthooie (Programmer)
formula_c8h10n4o2 asked: What origins can and cannot be Nomadic? Beyond some obvious examples like Wilderness. Progenitor Hives? Mind Wardens? Under One Rule? Scion? Cybernetic Creed? Synthetic Fertility? Shroud Forged? Here Be Dragons?
azaken_mobito asked: What is each of your favorite parts of this new DLC for all the panelists?
All the new ways you can play. It almost feels like we doubled the amount of combinations and playstyles. Which is really cool!
Answered by: Iggy (Content Design)
azaken_mobito asked: Can we have some murder mystery events happen within our empires sometimes for various potential outcomes and for just the sheer fact it would be interesting?
We do have that already. Usually the mystery is who murdered my energy income. Jokes aside, there is nothing particularly stopping us, but as always it needs to fit into the narratives and themes the Content Design team is exploring at any given time. It does suffer a bit since Stellaris on a galactic scale and murder mysteries are more personal.
Answered by: Gruntsplayground (Game Designer)
formula_c8h10n4o2 asked: Nomads and crisis paths, how do they work? Cause all crisis paths depend on some form of megastructure. The Aetherophasic Engine, The Synaptic Lathe, The Behemoth Egg/Chrysalis, The Galactic Crucible. Are Nomadic empires incapable of becoming these? Or if they can, how does it work with another empire settling the system they built their super galaxy machine in?
You can actually own megastructures without owning the system, so a lot of these actually work quite well out the box. Cosmogenesis is the odd one out since it also required pops and that broke things. But we are investigating it!
Answered by: Iggy (Content Design)
paprusteuton asked: Will the free update set to release alongside Stellaris: Willpower contain changes to internal politics, such as factions and elections?
The free updates alongside releases almost always include at least some updates to the systems we explore within the DLC release.
Answered by: Eladrin (Game Director)
the_no0b asked: Are there any plans for a Nomad specific crisis path? There's a lot of potential to be explored here, like an empire that acts like the scavenger bot, going around destroying stuff and incorporating it into the arcship to make it bigger and bigger...
Not especially, but if you wanted to make me happy go eat every world as a terravore!
Answered by: Iggy (Content Design)
formula_c8h10n4o2 asked: Psionic Auras and Shroud Seals. It was previously mentioned that you could equip waystations with Aura Emitters but do Arkships have any ability to project a psionic aura with their populations or is ALL of that done through the waystations? And I presume Shroud Seals remain the same but I might as well ask. Nomadic Mindwardens?
All colonies project aura if they can. Arkships have colonies. itjustworks.gif
Answered by: Iggy (Content Design)
lucaszorua asked: can you decide to NOT make hyperlanes during a deep scan and just look for deposits etc
Deep Scanning cannot discover new hyperlanes
Answered by: Alfray Stryke (Game Designer)
shaxingren3900 asked: Can a psionicist like Shroudshaper become a Shroud Patron？
I do not think we have ever considered that but its a very cool idea.
Answered by: Gruntsplayground (Game Designer)
engie4212 asked: What made y'all decide Arkships would carry nomadic empires?
Well having a planet off map where your pops lived and just pretend that you were nomadic sounded boring!
Answered by: Iggy (Content Design)
azaken_mobito asked: What Arkship do you all like to start with first?
It depends on how mean I'm planning on being. The meaner I am, the more likely I am to take the Military Arkship. If I'm nice I tend to go for the Scientific one, but not always.
Answered by: Eladrin (Game Director)
corpalcat asked: How will virtuality and nanomachine ascension work as a nomad?
Nanites has been answered already in anther question. Virtuality will work virtually the same. There is very little in its base functionality that Nomads clashed with.
Answered by: Gruntsplayground (Game Designer)
jackisonhiatus asked: The game's ship pathfinding seems obsessed with taking the shortest route possible, even if it leads into obvious dangers like a Marauder homespace or the Shattered Hive's forbidden zone. Is there any way to fix this?
In systems you don't want ships to path through, there is a small button next to the system name, if you click it, it will restrict the system from pathfinding
Answered by: Alfray Stryke (Game Designer)
zilea asked: Have there been any considerations in regards to traditions and Ascension perks. And the bloat there is in there? Right now with the current available slots for either it's very shoehorned into a fixed set of traditions than being able to select some in response to what happens without feeling you loose what you aimed for me. Any plans to increase these slots up to say 12 and matching perks, or allow linking traditions so you can choose to have 2 inside the same slot.
We do not have any plans for something like that. In general the scarcity of AP's and Traditions slots is by design, we want more choices, not less. If builds get to stale, we'd rather investigate this from the direction of "this shouldn't always be the best choice, no matter what"
Answered by: Gruntsplayground (Game Designer)
neonakoro asked: How many origins are available to nomads?
azaken_mobito asked: How useful is the Exodus Jump for invading other Empires you are at war with?
Very!
Answered by: Alfray Stryke (Game Designer)
tempest1273 asked: I understand that in the basegame, being a settled vs nomadic empire will be binary with nothing like "a few planets and a few arkships" but will this be moddable so you can in fact have arkships and planets simultaneously?
You can try, however a lot of the ingame logic assumes that this never occurs and things might break.
Answered by: Iggy (Content Design)
meatshtick asked: Does the scion origin work with nomads?
I was playing it in our Dev MP earlier today. Having a fleet of fallen empire ships made securing victory the CFL! contest dead easy and led to profits acquired via the Pest Control contracts I was issued.
Answered by: Alfray Stryke (Game Designer)
navar asked: Are Inward Perfection Nomads possible?
Ye sure! Go out and be grumpy! Telling people to stay off your lawn when you were the one that drove there.
Answered by: Iggy (Content Design)
necrolcz asked: May i ask if waystations are meant to be weaker spacestations? Or can they be just as good at static defence?
Different, rather than weaker. They are primarily economic in nature though, they're not particularly defensive.
Answered by: Eladrin (Game Director)
the_no0b asked: For regular empires the start of the game consists of scouring nearby systems to find good planets, like relic planets or gaia planets or even just good modifyers and events. Have Arkships something that balances out that they cannot have these things?
Nomads will also want to find special systems, but mostly for juicy deposits. What arkships do have is the promise of being size 27 at the max. Which is guaranteed as well as the freedom of moving away from threats.
Answered by: Gruntsplayground (Game Designer)
gorehuchi asked: Will arc ships have functional turret models? That was something I missed (but understand not having) on bioships
Arkships have functional turrets. Biological ships not having turrets was a deliberate creative choice that the art team made
Answered by: Alfray Stryke (Game Designer)
navar asked: Some civics like Byzantine Bureaucracy, Cutthroat Politics, and Imperial Cult lack flavor, will any be added in the near or distant future? They could have cool stuff, but are just number tweaks at the moment!
Sure
Answered by: Iggy (Content Design)
algae328 asked: How do nomadic terravores work? Do their purge vassals use the consume planet decision?
Their vassals first purge all the pops and sends all the resources to their parent empire.
Then you can use your Arkship to eat the planet <:smjoe_happy:1107796759570284635>
Answered by: Iggy (Content Design)
the_no0b asked: how many stellar cannons does it take to oneshot Cetana? What happens if we do so before are allowed to enter her systems, or even before she establishes contact?
Try it and find out.
Answered by: Eladrin (Game Director)
squishyfishy asked: How exactly does deepscanning work?
In order it does the following:
* Grants some Intel on the System Owner depending on what they have in the system.
* Rolls on the Deep Scanning outcome table:
* 50% Nothing Happens (This chance increases depending how many times the planet has been Deep Scanned)
* 15% Uncover a Resource Cache
* 25% Uncover a Resource Deposit
* 7% Uncover an Anomaly
* 3% Uncover an Archaeology Site
If you uncover a Resource Deposit, the Resource Depletion modifier from Harvesting is removed.
Answered by: Alfray Stryke (Game Designer)
catos67 asked: how will nomad civil wars work
Grand Theft Arkship
Answered by: Gruntsplayground (Game Designer)
terraseb asked: Normal empires have starbases for defense. Do nomads have something similar if one would rather make a like turtle strat or is it only things like ships and military arkships.
Staying put is anathema to Nomads. Void Reavers (and a few options in one of the Nomadic Origins) can fortify their Waystations a bit, but it won't compare to the defenses a settled empire can build in a system.
Answered by: Eladrin (Game Director)
We also had some questions gathered by our Community Ambassador from the Chinese Stellaris Community - the translated questions he gave us and our answers (in English) are here:
Late-game performance remains one of the most frequently raised concerns among CN players. Are there any further plans to improve late-game performance, especially CPU utilization, multi-core scheduling, large-fleet situations, and high-pop/high-system galaxies?
Eladrin (Game Director) said:
Performance, AI, and Stability remain among the top priorities of the Custodian team.
How does the team prioritize bug fixing, stability issues, and event-chain blockers between major content updates? Would the team consider a more transparent or regular process for addressing frequently reported bugs?
Iggy (Content Design) said:
A part of our team, the Custodians, is always dedicated to improvements to the game. These are often exactly the things like you asked, bug fixing, stability issues, etc. That is why when there is usually a patch with no other DLCs attached, the patch notes are a lot longer. When we do release a new update, though, everyone moves over to fixing for a few weeks. Making sure to make the game as good as it can be.
Many CN players feel that weaker civics, origins, and ascension paths should be improved rather than strong playstyles being repeatedly nerfed. How does the team decide whether to buff weak options or nerf strong ones?
Iggy (Content Design) said:
We think so too! If you look back at Custodian updates in the past (especially 3.1 and 3.9) you can see that we really enjoy making old content especially good. This style of development has not been forgotten and it's something we like to do.
Some players worry that old DLC mechanics are weakened or made less attractive when newer DLC systems are introduced. How does the team approach balance between new paid content and older DLC/base-game playstyles?
Iggy (Content Design) said:
Since we are not a competitive pvp game with ladder rankings or tournaments, while we always try to balance new content against old content, we do sometimes overlook some of the more… “creative” uses taken by the Community when using new content. But also we keep making old stuff too powerful, I can't count how many times Rogue Servitors have been made into the best civic in the game.
Are there plans to improve AI empire management, especially in colony development, economy planning, diplomacy, and warfare, so that difficulty can rely less on raw bonuses and more on better decision-making?
Eladrin (Game Director) said:
Yes, we will continue to work on the AI. Game difficulties will very likely continue to grant them efficiency bonuses to make them a greater threat.
As Stellaris becomes increasingly complex, are there plans to improve automation and reduce repetitive micromanagement, such as planet automation, starbase templates, fleet reinforcement, construction queues, and ship design automation?
Eladrin (Game Director) said:
It’s our desire that a player should feel at ease manually selecting a planetary designation, turning on planetary automation, and they should expect to end up with a planet that is roughly what they would expect a Mining World or Tech World to look like when it is done. We do expect you to manually manage your most critical core worlds (like your capital), but conquering a neighbor shouldn’t require immense levels of micromanagement. (This also connects indirectly to some of the AI improvements we want to make - it’s less of an issue if the planets you take over are better.)
We have some plans for things like ship design automation planned for the 4.5 Open Beta during the summer.
Could the new-player experience and tutorial be improved to better explain planet development, economy planning, fleet design, and the overall mid-to-late game structure?
Eladrin (Game Director) said:
With a game that shifts over time as much as Stellaris, we’ve found that other players tend to be the best teachers. (When 4.4 releases, we’ve asked some members of the Community to make tutorials for Nomads, for instance.) That said - I’d love to use the Scenario System to make a proper focused tutorial for various game systems.
Are there any plans to rework or expand ground warfare and planetary invasions? Many players feel the current army system is too simple compared with space combat.
Eladrin (Game Director) said:
We do not currently have plans for a ground combat rework.
Will diplomacy, espionage, trade, and internal politics receive deeper mechanics in future updates? Many players want more ways to influence other empires beyond direct warfare.
Iggy (Content Design) said:
The upcoming Willpower DLC will focus on external politics and pressures; you should see things like ethics attraction, and alliances matter more there. This is something we enjoy and want to keep exploring and expanding.
Will future development include more narrative-driven content, event chains, story origins, scenario-style packs, or deeper long-form stories?
Iggy (Content Design) said:
We always love telling new stories as well as expanding on existing ones. Look to Willpower for the “Lost Makers” origin where you learn more about the precursors than we ever knew before. And with the new Scenario Pack where you play as the Unbidden, learn more about the Extradimensional Invaders and why they might have come to our galaxy.
Are there plans to revisit older systems and DLC content, such as Fallen Empires, the L-Cluster, Leviathans, older megastructures, older ascension perks, and older origins, to bring them closer to the depth of newer content?
Iggy (Content Design) said:
These are all parts of the game the Custodians have had their eyes on. One interesting thing, now that Utopia and others have been folded into the base game, new updates can make use of these and assume that they are part of every player experience. This makes it a lot easier to expand on things like older megastructures.
Will cross-DLC interactions become a larger focus in future updates? For example, stronger links between ascension paths, crises, Fallen Empires, L-Cluster/Nanotech content, Cosmogenesis, and Galactic Custodian/Imperium systems.
Iggy (Content Design) said:
The Custodian team is always looking for interesting and fun ways to improve and connect DLCs, for instance we got the new Fallen Empire and Cosmogensis combined when you play with BioShips. One thing you should look forward to is the “Lost Makers” origin as it ties together with existing precursors.
Can modding support be improved with better documentation, more stable interfaces, version control options, and more exposed hooks for newer systems?
Alfray Stryke (Game Designer) said:
Whenever possible, we aim to make new additions to the game as moddable as we can.
Are there plans to improve Simplified Chinese localization quality and terminology consistency, especially for newer mechanical text and UI strings? Could there be a clearer channel or workflow for collecting and fixing localization issues?
Eladrin (Game Director) said:
Our Community Ambassador has been bringing your reports directly to us, and we hope that it has improved the quality of the translations at least somewhat.
Are there plans to improve multiplayer stability and desync issues, especially late-game desyncs and random_count-related problems? Would official matchmaking ever be considered?
Eladrin (Game Director) said:
Multiplayer stability is incredibly high on the Custodian programming team’s priorities.
What is the long-term development vision for Stellaris? How many more years of major updates does the team currently plan for, and how does the team decide between continuing Stellaris and eventually making a sequel?
Alfray Stryke (Game Designer) said:
We have all of science-fiction to draw upon for inspiration and the design team has no shortage of ideas for future updates.
Could the game offer more configurable galaxy/gameplay settings for players who prefer different pacing, such as resource output, empire size penalties, fleet capacity, and crisis timing?
Eladrin (Game Director) said:
We’ve already added some sliders in galaxy generation for some of these - naval capacity and command limit sliders were added in 4.3.3, and the end-game year (which dictates when the end-game crisis can occur) has been around since the beginning. 4.4 will be adding a Fallen and Awakened Empire Strength slider, and we have a Galactic Resource Abundance slider planned for this summer’s 4.5 Open Beta.
Many thanks to everyone who participated!
What’s Next?
Next week we have our Nomads Art Blast. I took a peek at the work-in-progress diary, and it’s looking really nice.
by PDX-Loke Hello, Another more small and quick patch has been readied, aiming to fix a few extra impactful bugs from Monday's release. Version 4.4.3 should now be available via Steam and GOG, with MS Store following shortly. Please find the change log below. Stellaris 4.4.3 patc
by PDX-Loke
Hello,
Another more small and quick patch has been readied, aiming to fix a few extra impactful bugs from Monday's release.
Version 4.4.3 should now be available via Steam and GOG, with MS Store following shortly.
Please find the change log below.
Stellaris 4.4.3 patch notes
The Void Reavers civic no longer requires both First Contact and Nomads
Corrected the Trust and Opinion thresholds required to propose a Waystation Pact.
Fixed opinion modifiers from Defender of the Galaxy applying when they shouldn't.
More comprehensive improvements are underway, accumulating into a proper patch. Until then!
Under this arrangement, the Nomadic empire will be allowed to freely harvest resources within the borders of the Settled empire for the duration of the agreement. However this has some costs:
Smelting Processes for a fully upgraded Arc Furnace
With some creative reimagining of how ship sections were supposed to work and some exploration by one of our animators, we’ve made a prototype in which each ship section/growth stage of the nanite swarm is visually two ships but is considered a single ship for calculations. 
One thing lead to another and then Iggy came up with the idea “what if you can edit your flag in game”
This then led to conversions in the design team of “what if you could edit your subjects’ flags or the flags of those you’ve humiliated in war?”
Beautiful. (?)
What’s Next?
Harvest from empty space, not my friends.
