Stellaris Dev Diary #366 - Announcing Stellaris 4.0

by Eladrin

Happy New Year! It’s good to be back!

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

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

• War and War Resolution[forum.paradoxplaza.com]
  
• Pirates and Crime[forum.paradoxplaza.com]
  
• Espionage[forum.paradoxplaza.com]
  
• Factions and Politics[forum.paradoxplaza.com]

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

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

A Moment of Prophecy?​ A long, long time ago, I was asked when we would move on to Stellaris 4.0, and I answered “Definitely not until we get to release Update 3.14”.


Little did I know how prophetic that joke really was.

Announcing Stellaris 4.0​ The Q2 Stellaris release, currently expected sometime around our Anniversary in May, will be the Stellaris 4.0 ‘Phoenix’ update.
It will be released alongside our major expansion for the year.​
While designing the plan for the Stellaris 4.0 release, the Custodian team had the following major priorities:

• Performance Improvements
  
• New Player Guidance and Game Pacing
  
• Quality of Life Improvements

As much of this is still very deep in active development, I don’t have too many screenshots to show off yet, so I’ll go over some of what we have planned and provide more in-depth details in future dev diaries. As they get closer to completion, some of these features will likely change as we iterate on them, and it’s possible that some may end up very different from how they were described in this dev diary, be delayed, or even cut altogether - these are some of the risks of sharing plans in an early stage, but I feel that the benefits outweigh any potential drawbacks.

Performance Improvements​ Stellaris has many moving parts, and an incredible number of calculations are performed every month. Many of those calculations rely on others, forcing them to be performed sequentially rather than in parallel. This causes the game to slow down as the number of calculations increases throughout the game and is especially noticeable in large galaxies - more planets and empires means more pops filling more jobs, producing more resources, with more pathfinding for the fleets, and so on.

Pops and Jobs​
The Pop and Jobs system introduced in Stellaris 2.2 ‘Le Guin’ have always had major performance implications in the late game, and we’ve been working on incremental improvements ever since.


The Tech Pope Speaks

Last year I mentioned that we were exploring a Pop Groups prototype, and showed you a horrifying placeholder screenshot in the last dev diary of the year. Our initial experiments have been promising, so in the Stellaris 4.0 ‘Phoenix’ update, we’re changing the way Pops fundamentally work. Pops will be grouped together into Pop Groups based on species, strata, and ethics, and these Pop Groups will produce Workforce that is used to fill (or partially fill) Jobs. As part of this change, we’re changing the overall scale of Pops - most things that previously affected or manipulated 1 Pop would now affect or manipulate 100.

These changes will significantly impact other systems, such as Pop Growth, Migration, and many others. I’ll dedicate a full dev diary to more details before the Open Beta.

Trade​
The current Trade system, with its constant calculations around pathing and pirate generation, is another that has a disproportionately high impact on performance compared to the benefit. We’re simplifying that one significantly and making Trade act as a standard resource. Trade will also be used to represent general logistics capability and as such, will likely become available to gestalt empires for these logistical purposes. Again, we’ll cover this in a future dev diary.

Additional Comments​
Fleets are the remaining system I’d highlight for having a major performance impact. While 4.0 will have some general fixes, we’ve got our hands full with these changes so we’re expecting to focus more on them in a future update.

New Player Guidance and Game Pacing Much of the feedback we’ve received from newer players indicates that Stellaris has become overwhelming in the early stages of the game, providing a flood of decisions and a seemingly endless barrage of notifications. They have trouble identifying which of these choices are important for long-term growth versus which are primarily flavor, and the constant interruptions make it difficult to form both short-term and long-term goals.

More Meaningful Events​
The Content Design team has been reviewing events and notifications to ensure that any interruptions are meaningful. Events should generally not be purely informative – you should have a choice that has an impact. A substantial number of purely informational events, such as the discovery of Terraforming Candidates or new Strategic Resources, have been converted into toasts or notifications.

As an example, during your first steps to the stars you’ll find evidence that life is surprisingly common out in the galaxy. While this used to simply have an acknowledgment, you’ll now have choices based on the nature of your empire.


Event options should help guide the way your empire grows.

Anomalies are a wonderful content delivery vehicle during the exploration phase, but having a window pop up in your face every time one of your science ships finds anything interesting is decidedly less wonderful. We’re moving the popup to a Toast - you can click it or a notification to open the full anomaly window, or get to it through the Situation Log.


Anomalous readings registered! ​

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


Radical.​

Message Settings​
Speaking of Toasts and Notifications, the Message Settings system has been expanded to give you more control over how different messages should appear.


We’re doing a pass on the default settings for each as well.​

The new Message Settings should allow you to customize your notifications to suit your preferences – whether you want a popup that automatically pauses the game or to turn certain notifications completely off.

Leader Trait Frequency​
Empire Leaders were cited in your feedback as feeling very needy, like they’re constantly clamoring for attention to select new traits if you owned Galactic Paragons. We’re looking at merging the first two tiers of leader traits and reducing the number of levels that you make trait selections at - this has the net effect of increasing the overall power of leaders a bit (as they’ll start with what was formerly a tier 2 trait, and if you select a new trait at level 3 instead of upgrading their starting trait, you’ll have two formerly tier 2 traits), but makes the experience with them a bit smoother.

Fewer trait selections do put you at greater mercy of the random selection of options, so we’re increasing the number of option draws by 1. This should reduce some of the risk of getting a “dead trait” without diminishing the benefit of +1 Leader Trait Option effects too much.

Galaxy Generation Updates​
As Stellaris has grown, so has the number of pre-scripted systems. Many of these unique systems were set at extremely high weights to appear, causing most of them to appear in every game you play. Since these special systems usually contained one or more habitable worlds, it inflated the number of such worlds well above the expected number, especially since they did not respect the Habitable Worlds slider from your settings.

We’ve done a normalization pass on the weights of these systems - many should still appear in each game, but it shouldn’t try to stuff all of them in. They also now respect the Habitable Worlds and Pre-FTL sliders from galaxy setup if appropriate, and should generally no longer appear in the immediate vicinity of Empire homeworlds.

This change yields general benefits to game pacing and indirectly, an improvement to performance in general.

Empire Focuses​
The Focus Trees in some of our other Grand Strategy Games do a great job of outlining possible ways you could take your country. In Hearts of Iron, for example, you already know the general “plot” - the different factions will behave as you expect until World Tension reaches a certain level, after which the world descends into war. The differences that will occur from game to game are largely due to how the events play out, and your interference in history lets everything spiral out into an alternate resolution. The Focus Trees not only provide a great way to create butterflies that can change history but are fantastic at providing new players with short and medium-term goals.

We decided that static Focus Trees were not appropriate for Stellaris though - our sandbox and 4X nature with a mysterious universe require any such systems to be more adaptable to what’s happening in this galaxy. Instead of trees, we’ve decided to go with suggested tasks that fall into Conquest, Exploration, or Development aspiration categories - these can range from investigating an anomaly to building a Dyson Swarm, or at the highest ranks, even becoming Galactic Custodian. You’ll be able to select your empire’s focused aspiration, which will skew the offered tasks towards your choice.

Completing these tasks gives no immediate reward, but progresses you down Conquest, Exploration, and Development tracks, and if you get a task that you’ve already completed that’s fine - it’ll immediately complete and you can get a new one. We don’t want you to sit there waiting to build your Interstellar Assembly, after all. Reaching certain milestones will grant abilities like Form Federation (which will be moving out of the Diplomatic Traditions), or give guaranteed research options for critical technologies, reducing your reliance on random pulls from the technology deck for techs like Cruisers, Colonial Centralization, or Mega-Engineering.

Veteran players already know how to play the game and are already adept at forming their own goals. We expect that you’ll already be completing these tasks naturally as you play - they’re primarily intended to teach new players how to play like you and guarantee that you’ll be able to force access to those important technologies.

Empire Timeline​
Accessible via a new tab within the Situation Log, the Empire Timeline is a real-time chronicle of your empire’s journey. From humble beginnings on your homeworld to the heights of galactic dominance (or the depths of ignominious defeat), the timeline will automatically document key events and milestones as they occur.

We aim for the Timeline to serve as a practical ledger, allowing you to retrace the pivotal decisions and moments that have shaped your game. It will also provide a rich narrative framework, transforming your gameplay into a story worth remembering.

We look forward to sharing more details on the Empire Timeline in a future diary. For now, we invite you to prepare your empires for posterity – and to ensure that your name echoes across the stars.

Quality of Life Improvements​ Many of the other changes also fall into Quality of Life Improvements, but two I want to highlight in particular include improvements to the Species Modification process and the Colonization flow.

Colonization Process​
Colonizing worlds had a few quirks that we’re smoothing out to make for a better experience, especially if you use Colony Automation. We’re changing the “Colony” designation to a modifier that will exist for some time after initial colonization, and letting you pick a Colony Designation and even turn automation on when you give the colonization order. This should prevent a common situation in the mid to late game where you would colonize a planet, but would have to pick and choose between using automation or losing out on the amenity and stability bonuses of the default designation.

The new flow also helps out Automation significantly since you won’t end up in a situation where Colony is no longer a valid designation and it falls back to an auto-designated selection.

Species Modification and Assimilation Targets​
We’ve gone through the genetic modification process to remove many pain points and make the overall flow much smoother. You’ll also be able to set a template as the species default, and can set sub-species variants to automatically integrate over time into the species default template.


The Species tab is generally more helpful as well.
Note: This branch does not include the pop changes.

Ship Designer​
As we did with Species Modification, we’ve gone through the Ship Designer to improve the general process of creating new ship designs.


And the Auto-generate designs checkbox won’t stop you from saving a new ship design!

The Next Few Weeks​ There’s a lot more going into this update as well - I’m hoping to challenge Lem for the Patch Note Crown.

Next week we’ll go into more detail about some of the changes coming in the Stellaris 4.0 ‘Phoenix’ update that are possible to show, including some things I didn’t go into above like Precursor Selection and the Stellaris Databank.

See you then!