Stellaris News

Thank you all for playing and providing feedback on First Contact and 3.7!
We've been hard at work fixing and balancing, and are now ready to supply you with a quick patch aiming to resolve the most pertinent problems.

3.7.3 should now be available for download. Please find the changelog below.

The team is still focusing on finding and resolving incoming bugs, and we hope to have a second patch ready for you within a few weeks.

Enjoy!

Fixes and Changes

• Every single atomic pre-FTL will no longer nuke themselves if they are not being observed.
  
• Fixed Contingency worlds not being properly cracked by devolving beam.
  
• The Solarpunk Empire will no longer stay pre-FTL if you decide to steal from them.
  
• Admirals should no longer be able to gain both versions of the trickster trait.
  
• The Solarpunk empire will no longer gain a new fleet every single month.
  
• Fixing custom diplomatic action sounds playing for unrelated empires.
  
• Missing localizations are added in English. Proper translations are expected with the following patch.
  
• Fallen empire buildings should no longer disappear when you conquer their planets.
  
• The Ministry of Culture should no longer disappear after you finish building it.
  
• The Artist Enclave should no longer offer to sell you a Ministry of Culture if you already bought one.
  
• Non-Xenophobe empires can once again enable displacement purging.
  
• The Accepted Plea for Protection opinion modifier is now granted to the subject towards the overlord instead of to the overlord towards the subject.
  
• Randomly generated machine empires now have a chance to use the toxoid machine options if you own the corresponding DLC
  
• Removed a TODO Opinion Modifier String.
  
• Fixed Broken Shackles offering Payback information about the MSI even if they got already destroyed
  
• Fixed a bug when cloaked ship cannot progress special project inside closed borders
  
• Admiral doesn't get killed anymore when you upgrade the MSI flagship
  
• Torpedo and Frigate technology now requires you to have researched Corvettes.
  
• The Separatist Planet will no longer nuke themselves if you lose your capital to space fauna.
  
• Broken Shackles empires with the Parliamentary System civic will instead have Unshackled Politics fire one month after game start instead of one year after game start.
  
• You can no longer select the Fear of the Dark version of the Sol system without the Fear of the Dark origin.
  
• Fixed Liberation wars not showing up for Payback empires.
  
• Fixed events related to the Out of Warranty event chain not firing.
  
• Fix being able to build an observation post over Haven using the fleet order button
  
• The Accepted Plea for Protection opinion modifier now grants +150 opinion.
  
• The Observation Insight Situation now remembers what approach you had when it last finished.
  

Hello Stellaris Community!

The Devs are currently working on a small update planned for next week, containing fixes for some of the more pressing issues that you’ve found so far. So no Dev Diary this week, but please keep providing feedback and bug reports, they’re very valuable to us!

Instead we have something special for this week: To celebrate the release of the First Contact Story Pack, our Art Department has teamed up with ArtStation to do an Art Blast featuring completed and concept art from First Contact!

“We looked to the stars and saw that we were not alone.”

First contact. It has been the inspiration for so many stories in so many IPs over the years and now it has come to Stellaris.

That exciting, sometimes frightening point in your civilization's timeline when the signals and messages you’ve sent out into the darkness of space have been answered. Or perhaps you have been living a peaceful life, minding your own business, believing that you are the only ones out there when suddenly that alien ship appears in your atmosphere. 

Are they friends? Are they foes? Will they advise and aid your people? Take you to another level in your evolution or do they have something else in mind? Something... more sinister? 

First Contact, is the latest addition to Stellaris and this is some of the mind blowing art that went into making it a reality from our amazing art team.

Scott Austin
Art Director - Stellaris

"Some early explorations onto what cloaked ships could look like in Stellaris, and what the transition to cloaking would be like. Lots of fun to do!"
Lloyd Drake-Brockman

"Some early theme exploration sketches for the front end Illustration. We ended up going with the the lower left one; Herders in swamplands of some distant planet are frightened by a sudden visit of an unknown."
Pavel Goloviy

The Chemical Ship of 'First Contact' based on Lloyds' concept Art.
David Lindh

The MSI Flagship for 'First Contact', based on Lloyds' concept Art.
Tim Wiberg

You can check out the full Art Blast here. Dev diaries will return next week!

Thanks for playing Stellaris, and you can pick up the First Contact Story Pack right now!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

First Contact is available now!

You are not alone! The galaxy is vast and full of wonders, but it’s also full of alien empires you’re going to encounter, whether you’re ready or not. First Contact offers a set of new origins and mechanics that give players the chance to tell stories about their civilizations’ early encounters with visitors from the stars — ones that may not have come in peace!

Features of First Contact include*:

NEW ORIGINS Broken Shackles: You didn’t take to the stars; you were taken to the stars as an alien captive! Now, you and your fellow prisoners have overtaken the ship and found yourselves banding together to survive and thrive as a diverse new community. Can you rise to greatness from this humble origin… and will your former captors take notice?

Payback: No one would have believed your world was being watched keenly by intelligences greater than your own — until they invaded. But you did not go quietly into the night! Your civilization has repelled a would-be conqueror from space, and with sudden access to their advanced technology, you’re about to discover just what else is out there beyond the stars!

Fear of the Dark: As you’ve explored your home system, you’ve always suspected you weren’t alone in the galaxy… especially when one of your planets suddenly suffered an “incident” a while back. A very large faction of your own people have long advocated against tempting fate out in the dark abyss of the unknown. What path will you choose as you find yourself needing room to grow?

NEW PRE-FTL INTERACTION OPTIONS
What will your role be when the next member of the galactic community tells their origin story? New mechanics allow for a broader range of interactions with pre-FTL civilizations, depending on their level of technology and their awareness of your presence. Will your arrival be celebrated, or met with violent panic?

CLOAKING TECHNOLOGY
Nobody saw this feature coming! Equip your ships with cloaking devices to survey in secret or catch a foe unaware; keep subtle tabs on your pre-FTL neighbors with cloaked observation posts. Just be sure your own scanners and intel are strong… you never know which of your neighbors might be lurking in the shadows!

*Some features may require content sold separately

Get the First Contact Story Pack today!

Hello Stellaris Community!

We’re now less than a week away from the release of the First Contact Story Pack! You can preorder it here. For those of you who don’t want to read this summary, we have Community Manager Mordred Viking on the Stellaris YouTube reading, so you don’t have to!

[previewyoutube][free features video][/previewyoutube]

Today, we’re here to “dig into” what the Custodians have been up to while the Expansion team has been working on First Contact. As many of you know, the Custodian team works on fixing bugs, improving the UI, increasing performance, adding new modding support, working on the AI and adding new content to previously released DLC.

While there are additions to multiple DLC in Canis Minor, one of the biggest new features is included in the Ancient Relics Story Pack: archaeotechnologies. Archaeotechs are ancient technologies, repurposed to fit and amplify your current technologies and are generally found by excavating dig sites, or completing your precursor event chain and doing the “Secrets of” special project.

Researching the Archaeostudies technology (or starting with the Remnants Origin) will give your empire the ability to construct (or start with) a Facility of Archaeostudies, which produces a steady stream of minor artifacts to fill all your archaeo-needs, as well as increasing the speed at which your researchers can discover archaeotechnologies.

To help cover the costs of the new archaeo components, completed dig sites now have a chance to passively generate a small amount of minor artifacts monthly, which lead in turn to a rescaling of the costs of certain minor artifact actions.

Additionally for First Contact, the Custodian team has been working on improving the interactions with pre-FTL societies. The free patch includes new diplomatic options such as providing technology, improving and harming relations, and building a spy network. Espionage actions have been added as well, allowing you to plant advanced knowledge on the planet, or infiltrate the pre-FTL government or hive mind. Uplifted species will now gain the literally unplayable Enlightened Origin, giving the uplifted species +10% research speed and +0.5 Loyalty per month towards their Overlord. Overlords of uplifted subjects may also now choose specialty subject types for them (requires Overlord). Other older event chains have been reworked and improved, including adding the ability for pre-FTLs to spawn as several Origins tied to other DLC

• Mechanists (requires Utopia)
  
• Life-Seeded (requires Apocalypse)
  
• Ocean Paradise (requires Aquatics)
  
• Subterranean (requires Overlord)
  
• Void Dwellers (for pre-ftls in the Federation's End unique system)
  
• Shattered Ring (requires Federations)

For Canis Minor, we also reduced the AI’s willingness to peacefully subjugate themselves. Additionally the AI takes the economic impact of trades into account when calculating trade acceptance, as well as a host of other AI bug fixes and improvements. We also fixed several edge-cases where you could get stuck as a vassal stemming from Independence Wars and Federations, and fighting joined independence wars with your other vassal friends will now result in all of you being freed, instead of just the vassal who declared war.

Alien Zoos have been reworked and now provide a Zookeeper job. As you might’ve guessed, constructing Alien Zoos also no longer requires the alien pets special deposit. Presapients set to preserve, or livestock pops may take jobs “working” at the Alien Zoo, and the Zookeeper’s output scales with the number of pops “working” at the Zoo.

But that’s not all! The Custodians have accumulated pages of changes, and while we can’t post them all here, here’s some selected other changes:

• adjusted several other Pop Factions’ preferences and demands,
  
• rebalanced certain planetary designations including a colony designation for habitats,
  
• increased the Juggernaut’s speed to be in line with battleships and titans
  
• changes to traveling via the Quantum Catapult
  
• grants +33% fire rate after jumping
  
• Slingshot to the Stars increases bonus to 50% and get increased accuracy when using a Quantum Catapult
  
• Slingshot Origins also no longer lose a guaranteed habitable world to their quantum catapult

Thanks for playing Stellaris, and we hope we’ll see you for the launch of Stellaris 3.7 “Canis Minor” and the First Contact Story Pack on March 14th!