Stellaris News

by Ealdrin

Hello everybody!

Last week we released 3.12.2 to the public, and since then we’ve been working on further post release support. Today we’ll be going into some of the things we’re planning for a 3.12.3 release. Currently we’re looking at next Thursday as the tentative release date, but we’ll keep you posted.
[h3]Selected Changes and Improvements from the Changelog​[/h3]
Following the deluge of feedback from the release of The Machine Age, 3.12.3 will include the following changes:

• Selecting the “physical” path for Synthetic Ascension will unlock the advanced machine traits from the Modularity path for Machines.
  
• Selecting the “virtual” path for Synthetic Ascension will unlock the Virtual Economic Policy from the Virtuality path for Machines. (Though the policy has been rebalanced.)
  
• The unique planetary features added from the Transformation situation are now kept when turning a planet into an ecumenopolis or restoring a shattered ringworld.
  
• Synthetic authorities have been rebalanced.
  
• The Commodities Consolidation situation will now show if you are on track to produce enough consumer goods or if you do not have enough storage space to the quota.
  
• The Virtuality, Modularity and Nanotech tradition trees now have agendas.
  
• Cybernetic Creed:
  
  • Embracing a Cybernetic Creed no longer forces a template onto your species.
    
  • Embracing a Cybernetic Creed now gives +10% Faction Approval when they become your sole Spiritualist faction (This does not apply if you unite the Creeds).
    
  • Embracing a Cybernetic Creed now awards a unique country modifier for that Creed.
    
  • Non-Spiritualist pops in a Cybernetic Creed empire now only have the Cybernetic Creed traits removed instead of all Cyborg traits.
• Synthetic Fertility:
  
  • Your choice in the Virtual Salvation event now influences the Synthetic Society Shift in the Digital Refactoring event chain.
    
  • Finishing the situation now grants access to the Subsidized Identity Backups and Optimized Identity Creation edicts.
    
  • Completing the Synthetic Fertility event chain will now grant additional robot modification trait points and picks and award a unique free trait for your synthetically ascended population.
• Refugees won't willingly resettle to the Synaptic Lathe anymore.
  
• Dark Matter Engines have been reduced from +60% Resource Production to +40%
  
• Virtuality Adoptions grants a -15% metallurgist and artisan production
  

[h3]Solar System Tooltips[/h3]​
As a small QOL UX improvement, if you can construct Arc Furnaces or Habitats, the tooltips for solar systems will now include a summary of the system potential for both megastructures.



[h3]Kill-a-Structure​[/h3]
Long have the conquered Hyper Relays of your fallen enemies been the bane of your economy, however in 3.12.3, this will be changing with the addition of the ability to dismantle select kilostructures.

Kilostructures that will be allowed to be dismantled (for a moderate energy and time investment) will be limited to:

• Gateways
  
• Hyper Relays
  
• Dyson Swarms
  
• Arc Furnaces
  

As always, modders will have the ability to extend this to their megastructures (and make us weep in horror).

The pesky UNE will soon have their railway network dismantled!

Even better if you have a Scavenger civic, dismantling buildings, districts and kilostructures will give you a slight refund on any physical resources used to construct them.



[h3]Election Tweaks​[/h3]
We’ve added the ability for Civics (and other sources of country modifiers) to easily modify the length and variance of election terms along with the government screen now showing the length of election terms in your empire. Two civics have made use of these changes

Worker Cooperative now has a -50% to Election Term Length making it have the same as a regular Democracy.



Meanwhile, Shadow Council now grants +5 to Election Term Variance, as the powers-that-be in the shadows ensure elections never occur on a regular basis.



[h3]What’s Next​[/h3]
If all goes according to plan, next week’s dev diary will be the 3.12.3 release notes. I expect that we'll have one more release after that before we head off for the summer, so keep on submitting bug reports and suggestions, they’re very helpful for allocating post-release support resources.

See you next week!

Strap in to your acceleration couches, this one's a going to be a big one. - E

Hello there!

I’m Anton, the Art Manager & Producer on Stellaris, and I would like to welcome you all to this absolute monster of a Dev Diary we have prepared for you!

I just want to use this opportunity to mention how amazing it is to work with these fantastic artists on a day to day basis and how extremely proud I am of the team.
We managed to do a lot for this DLC, more than we’ve done for an expansion or DLC ever before.

In fact the total logged art work time (I just looked at our stats in JIRA) for The Machine Age is over 2 years and 41 weeks.

Truly spectacular. Great job Team!

In the last The Art of The Machine Age dev diary, we showed you (and talked about the process of) a lot of what we had been doing - but far from it all.

So get comfortable, take out your favorite snack and get ready to look at a lot of art. Almost everything we did for The Machine Age will be showcased - but first, some words from our Art Director.

Alright! Here we go! We hope you enjoy this!

[h3]Scott Austin - Art Director[/h3]

As you have heard countless times already, our latest project, The Machine Age, is the largest pack we’ve ever put out for Stellaris. The reason that you’ve heard it countless times is because we think it’s worth repeating. We have well over double the amount of ships and FX, triple the amount of characters and animation, and probably quadruple the amount of 2D/Icon work. As daunting as that might seem, we pulled it off. And not just pulled it off, but did it without losing any quality and with an unbelievably tight schedule. Sure things were busy, but we can proudly say that we didn’t have to burn the midnight oil or resort to overtime or crunch.

While I would love, as the AD, to just take credit for all of that hard work and bask in the amazing light of glorious praise, the real credit goes to our “Little Art Team That Could”.
In the boundless expanses and the incomprehensibly infinite universe of game design, our small art team shines like a supernova of talent and efficiency. Though few in number, our art team possesses a galaxy's worth of skill and dedication, crafting the most awe-inspiring sci-fi visuals that breathe life into every pixel, every polygon and every frame of Stellaris.
Each artist possesses a bewildering array of talents, with skills so sharp they could slice through space-time, creating shortcuts to other dimensions where deadlines don't exist and cups of caffeinated beverages never run dry. They churn out masterpieces with such alarming speed and regularity that one begins to suspect they've cloned themselves and are operating in shifts spanning multiple parallel universes (Please, do not let HR in on this…).

I am ever thankful for the chance to voyage through the cosmos of Stellaris with such brilliantly unhinged minds. Their talent and relentless dedication are the warp drive to our projects, and their visionary artistry is the very soul of our games. I am ever grateful for their dedication and downright chuffed to navigate the nebulous realms of creativity alongside such splendidly imaginative life forms.

Together, we continue to chart courses that boldly go where no game has gone before. And, as always, to the players, I say: “You ain’t seen nothing yet!”

-Scott Austin-
Art Director, Paradox Interactive

[Note from your friendly Stellaris Community Ambassador: Steam will not allow us to include all 150+ images the Art Team has shared in this Dev Diary, so please visit the Paradox forums if you want to see it all!]

[h3]Alec Beals - Concept Artist[/h3]

Cybernetic Portraits







Synthetic Portraits







The Synthetic Queen









[h3]Lloyd Drake-Brockman - Concept Artist[/h3]

Illustrations







Super Structures & The Synthetic Queen Ships Concepts







The Machine Age Ship Concepts







[h3]Felix Englund - Concept Artist[/h3]

Cybernetic Portraits







Cybernetic Portraits - Part II







Synthetic Portraits







Illustrations







Concept Art - Ships







[h3]Tim Wiberg - 3D Artist[/h3]

Cybernetics Ship Set







Machines Ship Set







[h3]Emma Quer - 3D Artist[/h3]

Cybernetics Ship Set







Machines ship set







The Synthetic Queen Ships







[h3]David Strömblad Lindh - 3D Artist[/h3]

Cybernetics Ship Set







[h3]Erik Forsström - VFX Artist[/h3]

[Stellaris CA note: the GIFs that go here are too pretty to compress to fit Steam image limits; go look at them on the forums or click through to Erik's ArtStation page.]

[h3]Erick Ramirez Mota - Animator[/h3]

Stellaris - The Machine Age - Animations



[h3]Cassandra Lindquist - UI Artist[/h3]

Achievements, Technologies, Buildings, Authorities, Traits & Civics







The Ruler Chip Relic



Synthetic Fertility Event Image





[h3]Gabrielle Rodrigues - UI Artist[/h3]

The Machine Age UI Art - The Synaptic Lathe





The Machine Age UI Art - Cosmogenesis Crisis





The Machine Age UI Art - Tradition Trees, Achievements and Misc





[h3]Ingela Hallberg - UI Artist[/h3]

Building Icons - Part I



Building Icons - Part II



[h3]Let’s Talk About AI​[/h3]
Eladrin here. There has been an ongoing discussion about the responsible use of AI tools in game development.

As mentioned in our Steam AI generated content disclosure, during the development of The Machine Age the Stellaris team used text and image generative AI tools for ideation purposes to inspire creativity in a developer, or to aid in explaining a designer’s intent to other members of the development team. We subscribe to the legal opinion that there is no copyright or ownership attached to the output of generative AI, and our team is disallowed from putting any such generated text or image directly into the game.

[h3]Everything you see or read in The Machine Age has been created, developed, or written by our creative staff in the Studio.​[/h3]

We have used an advanced text-to-speech AI tool to create a voice for Cetana and the Cyberpunk advisor. The scripts and lines for these voices were created by our Content Design team, and the voice actors that created any voice models that are used by this tool receive payment for each line generated, and will continue to receive payments if more lines are generated using their voice models in the future. The use of this tool allowed our Audio team (with quite a bit of effort as described in Dev Diary #340) to fully voice Cetana, and will allow us to keep the advisor voice up-to-date should new mechanics be added to Stellaris over the upcoming years. This will prevent the voice from needing to fall back to the default VIR voice, as many of our other advisors did when Galactic Paragon added Council Agendas.

These technologies are evolving quickly, and personally I have great hopes for further improvements and potential uses of this text-to-speech technology in particular. In the 3.6 “Orion” update we added support for text-to-speech in events as a major accessibility improvement, but currently it is limited to the use of operating system based voice packs. While these audio tools are not yet at a point where we can use this technology to improve that experience, I look forward to a day some years from now where AI-based advanced text-to-speech could replace these relatively crude voices with more thematically appropriate ones, and be able to better handle languages other than English.
[h3]Next Week[/h3]​
Next week we’ll be looking at post-release support, and may have a preliminary list of release notes for the next planned patch.

See you then!

Dear Stellaris Fans,

Our first official patch is now ready following last weeks Machine Age release.

3.12.2 is available for download!

This version includes what was made available in the open beta previously, plus a few more fixes and tweaks.

The team is now focusing on the next patch.

3.12.2 Patch Notes
[expand]

Bugfixes

• Added additional checks to prevent fully virtual pops from being created on the lathe
  
• Fix for Hive Mind background unaligned
  
• Fixed Sectors released by Individualist Machines having the wrong ethics
  
• Fixed virtual pops sometimes being created while planets are being colonised
  
• Fixed weapon and strike craft range calculations in ship behavior.
  
• If an active relic gets removed the relic cooldown is now reset.
  
• The paradox titan will now appear correctly in the ship view
  
• Updated Resort Workers, Clerks and Cyberdome Spectators to have trade preference for auto-modding
  
• Uplifted species will now always have their required traits
  
• Blocked Cosmogenesis empires from becoming custodian
  
• Fix for pause being completely blocked in MP forcing the player to rehost
  
• Fixed cybercreed pops not being able to grow if every pop on the planet was spiritualist
  
• Fixed non-spiritualist pops in cybercreed empires sometimes having their augmentation bazaars traits removed
  
• Fixed Determined Exterminators starting with too many planetary features on their homeworld
  
• Hired fleets are now able to properly enter Cetana's territory once the projects have been researched.
  
• Inwards Perfection now provides Pop Assembly Speed to Individual Machines
  
• Megastructures should now correctly hide resources unless they are making use of them.
  
• The Progressive Growth agenda now gives progress on Machine Template System for individualist machines
  
• Trait Integrated Weaponry for cyborgs requires The Machine Age DLC

Balance

• The Progressive Growth agenda now gives progress on Artificial Workforce without needing Powered Exoskeletons

Stability

• Civic tooltip CTD fix
  
• Fix CTD when resync has occured with a player in system view using certain graphical assets
  
• Fixed CTD after resync
  
• Fixed CTD in planetview timed modifier tooltip.
  
• Fixed potential crash in resettlement view tooltips
  
• Fixed rare crash in planet view
  
• Fixed crash when buying subscription from the additional content browser.
  
• Fixed CTD in traits effect tooltip
  
• Fixed CTD when aborting the construction of Synaptic Lathe

AI

• Fixed building type AI weight calculations

Modding

• Added range_components to ship behaviors, which specifies which components to use for range calculations.

[/expand]

[h3]Please note that save file compatibility between major versions is not guaranteed.

If you have an important game going you would like to finish, back up the save file before trying to load it in the new version.

You can roll back to a prior version by opening steam and right-clicking on Stellaris in your library -> Properties -> Betas -> choose the desired version from the drop-down.

If you experience crashing or other issues, first disable all mods and start a new save. If the issue persists, please report it on the Bug Report forums.[/h3]