Stellaris News

Stellaris 3.1 "Lem" Update Now Available!

The Stellaris Team is proud to announce the free 3.1 “Lem” Update is Now Available!

This is the first release from our new Custodians Development Team at Paradox Development Studio. This team will operate in parallel to the “Expansion Team”, which will focus on creating new content for Stellaris. Read more about the Custodians Initiative here.

This patch is named to honor the 100th Anniversary of the birth of renowned Sci-Fi author Stanisław Lem, bringing with it a host of balance changes, bug fixes, AI improvements, as well as adding content to several previously released paid DLCs.

Release Trailer: [previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h2]Selectable Traditions (Free Feature)[/h2]

For the “Lem” Update, Traditions have been reworked, in addition to adding a new Tradition Tree to the base game (Mercantile), we have also removed empire limitations on Tradition Trees that were previously in the game, reworked some of the Tradition Trees, and redesigned the user interface for Traditions. We have also added the Unyielding Tradition Tree (requires paid DLC Apocalypse) and the Subterfuge Tradition Tree (requires paid DLC Nemesis).

Now, instead of having a fixed 7 Tradition Trees to unlock, Empires can now choose 7 from up to 11 (with all the DLC) Tradition Trees, adding further customization to players’ empires.

[h2]New content for Plantoids Species Pack (paid DLC)[/h2]

Along with the free Lem Update, The Plantoids Species Pack now comes with two additional Civics and three new Species Traits.

Catalytic Processing Civic: Changes Metallurgists to Catalytic Technicians, who convert Food into Alloys
Idyllic Bloom Civic: Allows the construction of Gaia Seeder buildings on ideal planets, which after a series of upgrades will terraform the planet into a Gaia world
Budding Species Trait: Pops with this trait will reproduce by budding, adding Organic Pop Assembly to planets they live on
Phototropic: Pops with this trait have 50% of their Food upkeep converted to Energy.
Radiotropic: Pops with this trait have 50% of their Food upkeep converted to Energy, but do not pay the Energy portion of their upkeep on Tomb Worlds.

[h2]New content for Humanoids Species Pack (Paid DLC)[/h2]

The Humanoids Species Pack now comes with a new Clone Army Origin, as well as two new Civics.

Clone Army Origin: Do not reproduce naturally, but instead rely on Ancient Cloning Vats to reproduce. Natural warriors, Leaders and Armies get combat bonuses, but Clone Army Empires are limited by the number of Ancient Cloning Vats buildings they can construct across their empire.
Pleasure Seekers Civic: Gain access to the Decadent Lifestyle Living Standard, giving Increased Happiness in exchange for Increased Consumer Good upkeep. In addition pops working Entertainer jobs add to Pop Growth, and Servants produce 5 extra Amenities
Masterful Crafters Civic: Artisan jobs are replaced by Artificer Jobs, which in addition to Consumer Goods, also produce Trade Value and Engineering research. For Empires with this civic, every three Industrial Districts on a planet also will unlock another building slot.

[h2]New content for Necroids Species Pack (Paid DLC)[/h2]

The Necroids Species Pack has been rebalanced in the Lem Update, with the Reanimated Armies Civic being named to Reanimators, as well as other changes.

Necrophage Origin: Can now be taken by Hive Mind empires, pops are now also more likely to escape the Necrophage Purge, as well as several other balance changes to bring Necrophage more in-line with the other Origins.
Death Cults Civic: Have had the odds of getting bonuses when sacrificing Mortal Initiates increased based on the percentage of the Empire’s overall population sacrificed, as well as the total number of jobs created by Sacrificial Temple buildings reduced
Reanimators Civic: Start with the ability to build Dread Encampment buildings and they now create Undead Defense Armies. In addition, enemy armies destroyed in battle have a chance of returning as Undead Armies and can reanimate certain Leviathans that have been defeated in battle

The Lem update comes with a wide array of new toys for our Modding Community to play with, you can read more about Modding in Lem here.

For the full list of changes included in the 3.1 “Lem” Update, you can read the patch notes here.

Thank you for playing Stellaris, and always remember: The Galaxy is vast and full of wonders...

Stellaris to get the free 3.1 'Lem' update on September 14

Paradox Interactive announced today that the free 3.1 Lem update for Stellaris is going to release on September 14.

Read the full article here: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2021/09/stellaris-to-get-the-free-31-lem-update-on-september-14

Stellaris Free 3.1 “Lem” Update releases September 14th!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

The Stellaris team is proud to announce the free Lem Update, honoring the 100th year anniversary of Sci-Fi author Stanisław Lem, will be released on September 14th!

[h2]The Custodians Initiative[/h2]
The update marks the first free update of Stellaris from our Custodian Development Team. This new group of developers was created with the mandate of updating and maintaining the amazing content that has been added to Stellaris over the years, as well as crushing bugs, adding content to existing DLC, as well as improvements to Quality of Life, Performance, UI and AI. The Custodians Team operates in parallel with the “Expansion Team”, which will continue to develop new content for Stellaris.

With the Custodians initiative’s added resources, we hope to be able to increase the frequency of our free patches, and by extension the overall quality of the game.

For the Lem Update, in addition to bug fixes and AI improvements, the Custodians have focused on adding additional content to previously released DLC, as well as updating Traditions, a system that was added to Stellaris in the 1.5 “Banks” version.

[h2]Selectable Traditions[/h2]
In addition to the eight Tradition Trees that are in the current version, we have added three new Tradition Trees: Mercantile (free), Unyielding (requires Apocalypse), and Subterfuge (Requires Nemesis). The existing Tradition Trees have had a balance pass as well.

In the Lem Update and with all the DLC, there are now up to eleven total Tradition Trees, with each empire only being able to pick and unlock up to seven Tradition Trees. Some Tradition Trees also now unlock further abilities, such as Mercantile and Trade Doctrines, similar to Supremacy and the Supremacist diplomatic stance. This will add more variety and replayability to every playthrough.

[h2]Plantoids Changes[/h2]
The Plantoids Species Pack (Paid DLC) has also been refreshed in the Lem Update, Plantoid and Fungoid species will get three new species traits and two new civics. Plantoids will be able to reproduce by Budding, adding organic pop assembly by simply existing. Or they can choose to be either Phototropic - converting some of their food upkeep into energy - or Radiotrophic, and feast on concentrations of background radiation. In addition, empires can choose to take either the Catalytic Processing Civic - and convert food into alloys - or lead an Idyllic Bloom empire which can convert ideal worlds into organic paradises.

[h2]Humanoids Changes[/h2]
We also have revisited the Humanoids Species Pack (paid DLC) and added a new Origin, as well as two new civics to this species pack. Start as the lost remains of an ancient Clone Army, play as a species of Masterful Crafters whose artistry is appreciated throughout the galaxy, or have your species live a Decadent Lifestyle as continue to Seek Pleasure throughout the galaxy. These new origins and civics add many ways to tell your species’ story like never before.

[h2]Necroids Changes[/h2]
The Necroids Species Pack (Paid DLC) will also receive a significant overhaul in the Lem Update, with the Reanimated Armies Civic changing to the Reanimators Civic, which can lead to some interesting reanimation options. The Death Cult civic is getting an overhaul with increased bonuses due to the reduced pop growth in Stellaris 3.0, as well as some balance changes to the Necrophage Origin including the option to start as a Hivemind (requires Utopia). In the Lem Update, the Necroids Species Pack is unlocking its true potential.

[h2]Balance Changes[/h2]
In addition to the changes above, the Custodian Team has been hard at work, doing a balance pass on civics, you can dive into the details in the patch notes. In addition, the Shattered Ring Origin has been changed to work more like the Remnants Origin - you now start on a Shattered Ring segment, that you can upgrade to a Ringworld Segment when you have the Prerequisite Technologies. The Void Dwellers traits have also been changed so that the negatives from living on a planet can no longer be simply gene-modded away. For Quality of Life updates, when constructing an Ecumenopolis, it will now take into account the planetary designation of the planet, meaning that Factory Worlds will get more Factory Arcologies, and Foundry Worlds will get more Foundry Arcologies when the upgrade is complete. Additionally, Rogue Servitors can now build Ecumenopolis, and get a special district to house their bio-trophies.

For all the full list of additions, balance changes and bug fixes, you can read the Lem Update patch notes here.

We hope you enjoy our latest additions to Stellaris for PC, and enjoy the free Lem Update on September 14th!

Stellaris megastructures - a quick guide

So, you want to know about Stellaris megastructures? These gargantuan feats of engineering were first introduced in the first Stellaris DLC - Utopia - and range from habitats and gateways, to more specialised structures such as Dyson Spheres, giant art galleries, and a device that can destroy the entire galaxy.

Some megastructures - like Ring Worlds - will spawn naturally even if you don't own any of the expansions, and you'll be able to repair them if you have the right tech. You won't be able to research and build any new ones though apart from gateways without some DLC. Quite a few were included in Utopia, for example, but MegaCorps, Federations, and Nemesis introduced new options as well.

Other expansions, such as Distant Stars and Synthetic Dawn, also interact with the megastructure mechanics in some way - the former introduced the L-Gate cluster, for example, while the latter will cause more natural Ring Worlds to spawn in a specific place. We've put together this quick guide to Stellaris megastructures, we hope you find it useful, although for a more thorough breakdown you can also refer to the official Paradox Wiki, which we've drawn a lot of information from.

Read the rest of the story...

Stellaris Dev Diary #222 - Moddability Updates in Lem

by Caligula

Welcome to another Stellaris Modding Dev Diary! Today, I’ll be talking you through some of the new scripting language features in the upcoming 3.1 patch.

We have already mentioned that Traditions are considerably more moddable now with the new system, with far less heavy lifting needed in the gui and loc files. I can also confirm that you can, for instance, now script in tradition trees that only become available if you make certain decisions during the game. But today, the main focus will lie on variables.

[h3]Variables[/h3]

I mentioned last time that we have been looking to do more with variables. In the last patch, several more ways to save various bits of information in the game were added, but the biggest missing one was an easy way to get trigger values, like for example the number of pops on a planet. You also were still quite limited in where you could use variables, especially compared to PDS’ newer games like CK3. Also, the syntax for using them was not quite ideal, in many cases.

With 3.1, we have greatly increased the power of variables. First of all, the format: previously, when you wanted to get the value of a variable, you had to refer to… well, the variable itself, and that was all. Now, you can do a few more things:

    value = my_var                                 #gets the value of my_var variable set on the current scope

    value = from.capital_scope.my_var              #gets the value of the my_var variable set on from’s capital

    value = trigger:num_pops                       #gets the number of pops in the current scope

    value = from.capital_scope.trigger:num_pops    #gets the number of pops in from’s capital

So you can do dot scoping, which saves a lot of ugliness, and is a big improvement as it is. And as you can see, you can also refer to triggers, with trigger:. This will support any trigger checking a number and just a number, with no { }.

(Note: the previous, ugly format for copying variables across different scopes has been removed. The one where you'd specify "value = { scope = x variable = y }")

3.0 already had an effect, export_trigger_to_variable, but it only worked with fleet_power. That was the prototype; the functionality has been expanded to all such triggers. Importantly, that effect lets you get values from triggers that are a bit more complex, with { }, that are still comparing a single number:

    export_trigger_value_to_variable = {
        trigger = num_assigned_jobs
        parameters = {
            job = miner
        }
        variable = num_miner_jobs
    }

3.0 also, to mention it again, added a bunch more ways to get game values such as modifier numbers and resource stockpiles to variables. It also added a few more places where you could use them: multipliers in add_resource and add_modifier, for instance. With 3.1, we have added a lot more things that you can use a variable for:

As values in triggers checking single numbers, e.g. "num_pops > my_variable", "intel = { who = from value < trigger:num_pops }"
As values in effects using a single number, e.g. "add_experience = my_variable".
As a multiplier parameter in triggered resource tables (e.g. in a building):

     resources = {
        category = planet_buildings
        cost = {
            trigger = {  }
            minerals = 100
        }
        multiplier = my_var/owner.trigger:num_pops
    }

In MTTH/AI Chance modifiers:

     ai_chance = {
         factor = 1
         modifier = {
            add/factor = my_var/trigger:num_pops
            is_variable_set = my_var
         }
     }

add_modifier now has a time_multiplier as well as a multiplier parameter, you can use it there. E.g. for death cults, this is used to apply a modifier for 10 years X edict_length_mult
In ordered_script_lists: a feature yoinked from our newer games. I’ll let the trigger docs entry explain:

ordered_owned_fleet - Iterate through each fleet owned by the country - executes the enclosed effects on one of them for which the limit triggers return true. Picks the specific object according to the order specified (position 0, order_by = trigger:num_pops would run the effects on the X with the most pops)

ordered_owned_fleet = {
    limit = {  }
    position = 
    order_by = /trigger:
    inverse = yes/no (default: no - if yes, then 0 is lowest rather than highest)
    
}

Supported Scopes: country

If your variable is too exact a number, you can now use round_variable_to_nearest to round its value to e.g. the nearest multiple of 10.

A summary of these functionalities have been added to an information file in the events folder (and attached to this post). Also, I could well imagine further expanding on these usages of variables, so it’s quite possible there will be even more coming along these lines in future. The changes have already proven extremely useful to us, e.g.:

Improving Death Cult rewards: cut about 1000 lines of script and still ended up with the new version taking more factors into account to determine the adequate reward for you!
Fixing Golden Rule cash payouts: the previous solution was to fudge the numbers and give you an amount with a rather tenuous connection to the actual pay-in. This is no longer necessary.
Improving Federation Science Leadership Challenge: adding the actual number of techs and repeatable techs you have researched as a factor
And more.

[h3]Sprite Sheet Changes[/h3]

That was already quite a lot, but there’s a few more things that I’d like to highlight. Firstly, certain older elements of the game used sprite sheets for their icons - a system where a list of icons would all be in a row on one image file, and we’d specify that we’d want to use, say, the 5th icon on the list. We had a few issues with these inhouse (the colony automation button currently accidentally being a robotic cow springs to mind), and modders have pointed out that they are a pretty bad overwriting bottleneck, since only one mod can overwrite the sprite sheet at a time, and therefore only one can add extra types of that object that add new graphics at a time.

We figured out a way to change index references to icons in sprite sheets into normal key references, which meant that we could convert these elements of the game to use string references to sprites (with no need for new icons to be inside a sprite sheet). This got rolled out to the likes of army types, colony automation types, bombardment stances, and (with great difficulty!) ship sizes.

An example:

    spriteType = {
        name = "GFX_ship_size_military_1"
        sprite_sheet_sprite_type = "GFX_ship_sizes"
        default_frame = 2
    }

In the case of ship sizes, it was a bit tricky, since the icon_frame index number then specified which icon it would use on multiple sprite sheets. In the end, we left that system in place for starbases (since very few tend to add a new type of starbase) and made the line “icon = ship_size_military_1” tell the game to refer to several sprite keys: GFX_text_ship_size_military_1, GFX_ship_size_military_1, GFX_ship_size_military_1_top, GFX_ship_size_military_1_top_damaged

This will need some updating for mods which change the affected objects, since the old format no longer works, but in the long term it will hopefully solve a lot of compatibility headaches!

[h3]Randomness[/h3]

Some have noticed that, in certain cases, the randomness of script functions such as random_list is not very random. Specifically, events fired from on_game_start had this issue (and various other on_actions, but that was the one that hurt the most). This was pretty unfortunate, since this effectively meant that certain things that were meant to be different each game... simply were not. Relatedly, we also revisited some more longstanding issues like where if you used while loops or every_x loops, each time the effect happened within that loop, the random result would be the same. (As in 25x random_list resulting in 25x the same result rather than 25x a random result).

We fixed this quite exhaustively:

The lack of randomness in on_actions like on_game_start is fixed. If we in future make the mistake that caused this to happen again, the game will warn us, so hopefully it is banished for good.
While loops and every_x loops have improved randomness
For good measure, we added a reroll_random effect

[h3]Other Cool Stuff[/h3]

On another note, we can now add triggered pop modifiers to traits, so for instance, you can add a trait that gives a bonus on one planet class and a penalty on another. The potential that this unlocks is quite considerable - for instance, it allowed us to stop using the somewhat unintuitive (and eminently cheeseable) stopgap solution of giving Void Dwellers two traits, and instead giving them one that applies differently depending on what sort of planet they are on.

As some have noticed, the Clone Army origin does several cool, new things that we haven’t really explored in the game before. A lot of what we added for it could have further cool uses in the future, for instance:

You can now gender-lock species
You can set an empire limit on how many instances of a building you can build. (And alter it during the game).
A game rule, “should_force_decline_species”, has been added. It will make a species for which it returns true decline on a planet, triggering an alert based on whatever tooltip is specified in the game rule. It is also hooked up to stop pops from migrating/being resettled/etc to a place where they would immediately start declining.

Finally, we added a bunch of new effects, triggers and modifiers, as usual. A couple to highlight are:

set_visited = - reveals a system to you, without you having surveyed it
set_saved_date - lets you save a specific date (can be in the future) so that you can use it in locs, similar to variables: [This.my_saved_date].
Technically, the last effect is actually adding a _flag, so the standard flag effects and triggers have been ported over to all scopes
You can now use [loc] commands in button effects, which apparently will be very useful for dynamic modded UIs
You can define descriptions for districts, buildings, jobs and special projects through desc = { text = X trigger = { Y } } now. They also now take loc commands.
We deleted has_non_swapped_tradition and has_tradition_swap, and consolidated them into has_active_tradition. Modders: do a search-replace!
Every scope that lacked script flags (e.g. country_flag) now has them. Also, variables work in all scopes now too.
Note for updating mods: count_diplo_ties is now count_relation, count_armies is count_owned_army or count_planet_army (depending on the case). any/every/random_mining_station/research_station have also been removed, because they were nonsense. Use simply mining_station/research_station/orbital_station scope change instead. Also, observation_outpost no longer takes a "limit", but you can say "exists = observation_outpost" as compensation.

Adding all these new functionalities has been a boon for us in the Custodian team, and we are gradually rolling them out to older parts of the game which can benefit from them. It’s something I look forward to doing more of in future, and equally, I am excited (and, I’ll admit, a tiny bit afraid) to see what modders will do with them!

One last thing: the old trigger_docs.log has now been deprecated, and instead we now have a more wieldy and more comprehensive script_documentation folder, the contents of which are attached to this post.

And as some of you are probably aware, we did some early access for Modders for the Nemesis update. We had ~10 mods update on release day, servicing around 1.6 million subscribers, overall we were very happy with the results and the community reaction, and if this continues to go well we’re looking to gradually expand this experiment to more of the Modding Community. For Lem, we’re looking to add another 10-ish Modders to the early-access experiment. If you’re interested you can fill out the Modder Early Access Request form.