Stellaris Dev Diary #384 - The Art of BioGenesis

15 May 2025Developer post

Source: Steam Community (opens in a new tab)

Hello everyone!

Today the artists are excited to bring you the Stellaris Art Blast, but first I wanted a moment to talk about the patching of 4.0 and where we’re going.

4.0.10 will be releasing today (which makes four updates this week!), with the following changes:

Stellaris 4.0.10 Patch

Improvements

Bloomed Biomass is now prioritized if unqueing a Building that costs Biomass on Gaia worlds.
Cleaned up Terraforming options for Wilderness empires if they did not start with that planet type to avoid the painful game loop of colonizing a terrible world so that you could then pay in energy to improve it.
Candidates that are not the primary species of an empire now have a reduced chance of being elected in Non-Xenophilic, and under the proper circumstances, non-Selective Kinship Empires.

Bugfix

Augmentation Bazaars civic no longer claims to increase trade per cybernetic trait
Wilderness Empires will no longer be offered Gene Seed Purification
The final tier of the Gaia Seeder building will no longer be destroyed in Wilderness Empires
Wilderness Biomass is now more likely to gain the Bloomed trait
Democratic Transference will no longer be granting hundred times more efficiency than expected.
Biological Ship empires should now be able to grow Fledgling Dragons when playing the Here Be Dragons origin.
Fixed the Expand Planet Decision for Wilderness refunding the Biomass spent
Updated the "Weak" trait tooltip
Fixed outdated Overtuned Traits tooltips
Restored icons to the "Win a War" Focus Card
Total War Empires can now complete the "Win a War" Focus Card
Terravores will no longer be give the "Terraform 3 Worlds" Focus Task
Delicious and Felsic species traits now give +100% job efficiency to livestock jobs
Secrets of Inetian Traders' vanilla modifier now reduces trade fees.
Fixed the Mutagenic Spas descriptions because they weren't displaying the correct job swap.
Fixed Clear Design for space fauna duplicating components and not clearing anything.
Fix some incorrect text in civics tooltips during empire creation
Slaves and purged pop groups no longer listed as being demoted
Bio-trophies and some other jobs cannot be automated anymore, as funny as it was for the Rogue Servitors to be so sad at the empty domes and make animatronic trophies to care for.
Fix some modifiers missing from job production tooltips.
Fix to Tiyanki Graveyard animation
Xenophobes are once again prevented from giving Full Citizenship and Military Service to Xenos

Balance

Augmentation Bazaars grant access to Augmentation Merchants which combine the benefits of Merchants and Executives in one
Hyperlane Breach Points and Hyperspace Slipstreams technologies now also increase the number of pops that can move each month due to Automatic Resettlement by +25%
Doubled the effect Transit Hubs have on Automatic Resettlement to +200%.

Significantly improved Pop Job's production tooltip and details panel
Buildings in the Planet UI do not escape their frames anymore.
Updated the size of the Districts backgrounds, so their sizes and their padding are evenly distributed.
Updated the District Cap Background size and also the district slots padding.
Added more padding and even margins for the Planet UI.
Updated the look of Planet Production and Planet Deficit section of the Planet UI.
When opening the leaders view, the Available Positions window will now always start closed.

Performance

Reduce amount of pop groups by adding mechanic for merge smaller similar ones.
Calculate the planet upkeep/produce/profit during the monthly tick and use the cached amount for all the calculations
Reduced memory allocations between monthly job distributions
Tweaked the grain size for planetary threaded updates

Stability

Fix common OOS related to wrongly recalculated planet profit (again, for real this time)
Some changes that are an attempt to fix a RANDOM_COUNT OOS that we cannot reliably reproduce internally.
Fixed crash when opening leader level up message if there is no trait to pick.
Fixed OOS due to ship designer using synchronized random

Modding

Add can_be_automated token for jobs that cannot be automated

So far we have released a total of 9 patches but we have not yet reached a place where we want to be. Currently, our major priorities are on multiplayer stability and performance. Our goal is to get the Out of Sync errors under control as soon as possible. As these are notoriously difficult to track down I can’t guarantee it over the next week, but we remain committed to getting back to MP stability. As soon as these are out of the way, improving the AI is next on my hit-list. In addition the team will also keep focusing on the most important issues that we gather from your feedback and our internal testing.

My current plan is to have two patches next week, with the first scheduled for Tuesday. We’ll be evaluating this on a daily basis in case there’s anything that shows up that we deem requires a hotfix, and of course will continue afterwards as long as needed.

Many thanks to everyone who has been reporting bugs and providing save games, it’s helped us tremendously. If you run into crashes, reporting them really helps, especially if you can provide a few lines about what you were doing immediately before it.

Now I’ll yield the floor to Anton.
- Eladrin

Hello there!

As courtesy dictates; Introductions first. I’m Anton and I have the honor and privilege to manage our extremely incredibly talented Stellaris Art Team here in Stockholm.

It’s become a bit of a tradition that after each release, we bring you a Dev Diary from our team, where we get to talk about (and show off!) the art behind that release. And yes, this is that Dev Diary.

So welcome to The Art of BioGenesis & 4.0!

You’ve most likely already watched all the “Art of…” videos we’ve uploaded to the Stellaris YouTube channel (right? RIGHT!?), including the latest one where some of our artists discuss how we approached BioGenesis and the reasoning behind certain creative decisions. But those videos only scratch the surface of what we’ve done.

Watch video on YouTube (opens in a new tab)

Fact is, and these numbers are fresh from JIRA, that we logged 870 workdays (that’s over 25 million seconds) on creating art for BioGenesis across all disciplines. That’s nothing short of both impressive and amazing.

Fantastic job, Team!

Now: before we dive into the Meat and Bones (see what I did there?) of this Dev Diary - I wanted to mention two quick things that might come in handy as you scroll through the post:

1. If you click the artist’s name and title (the headline, in bold), you’ll be taken to their ArtStation page, basically their portfolio, where you can check out even more of their incredible work.

2. Likewise, clicking the project title (also in bold) will take you directly to the specific project page on their ArtStation-page.

Anyway, that’s enough from me for now. So before I hand it over to our Art Director, I just want to say Thank you for all the great feedback on our work, we genuinely appreciate it. I know I speak for the whole Art Team when I say that we love creating the art you see and the assets you get to play with in the game.

We can’t wait to show you what’s coming next!

Meat Ships!

For as long as I’ve been at this studio, one request has echoed louder than the rest: Bio Ships. Or, more affectionately (and possibly unsettlingly), meat ships. Some folks were more refined in their petitions - opting for the elegant “Organic Vessels” or “Biological Shipsets” - but the dream was always the same: meaty, fleshy, bony, and squishy starcraft.

With BioGenesis, we finally got to bring that dream to life. And not just one shipset - two. In true Ascension Pack fashion, we had the chance to explore both sides of the biomass coin: the menacing Spinovores and the noble Shellcraft. Two very different flavors of organic ships, two entirely new challenges for our art team.

We usually do hard-surface ships. Angular, mechanical, symmetrical. Bio ships? They’re messy. They're weird. They’re alive. (Are they alive? That’s one for the players to determine ;-) )That meant learning new visual language, new workflows, and in some cases, unlearning habits we’ve built over years. And honestly? It was a blast.

This was a rare chance to stretch some artistic muscles we don’t always get to use. And the team made it count. Every tentacle, plate, gland, and chitinous hull—painstakingly sculpted, painted, and polished with the same care we give our most beloved fleets.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll keep saying it: Our team is small, but they deliver like giants. Year after year, they match (and often outmatch) the output of teams twice or three times their size. Every line, every pixel, every polygon has to carry its weight. No room for fluff. Just art. Just bone. Just muscle and protein.

Hope you enjoy the weird, wonderful biology of BioGenesis. We sure did.

-Scott Austin-

Art Director, Paradox Interactive