Stellaris News

[p]Hello Stellaris Community!

Work on the open beta is still chugging along, and the Devs have put together another batch of balance changes, bug fixes and performance improvements that we're ready for you to try out.

This update should also NOT require any of the previous workarounds for Linux.

How do you feel about the latest version of the open beta? Did we go too far, or have things still left to update? Let us know in the comments below and on the Open Beta Feedback form.

Here are today's patch notes:
[/p][h3]4.3 ‘Cetus’ Open Beta Patch Notes 2026-02-06​[/h3][p]Balance​[/p]

• [p]Changed the scaling of Imperious Architecture[/p]
• [p]Increased the maximum damage scaling for weapons that increase damage based on target ship size.[/p]
• [p]Reduced the effect that Councilor skill levels has on Agenda speed.[/p]
• [p]Loyalty Circuits has been replaced by Compliance Filters as an auto-modding trait. This means that Augmentation Bazaars can pick it on game start as well.[/p]
• [p]The augmentation center now provided 400 jobs for Driven Assimilators[/p]
• [p]Augmentor jobs for regular empires now provide flat bonus pop growth, not a multiplier to existing pop growth.[/p]
• [p]Synthetic Fertility now starts with Powered Exoskeletons[/p]
• [p]Significantly changed the Eater of Worlds Covenant Powers and Auras[/p]
  • [p]The Doom power for the Eater of Worlds no longer immediately starts a war.[/p]
  • [p]The Aura Intensification of the Eater of Worlds no longer summons ships from nothing.[/p]
  • [p]The Aura Intensification of the Eater of Worlds now increments your Doom Intensity.[/p]
  • [p]The Doom power now manifests the Doom of the Eater fleet.[/p]
  • [p]Between 3 and 6 Intensity, this fleet only has Teeth (escorts).[/p]
  • [p]Between 6 and 12 Intensity, this fleet has Teeth (escorts) and Fangs (cruisers).[/p]
  • [p]At 12 or higher Intensity, this fleet has Teeth (escorts), Fangs (cruisers) and Tusks (Battleships).[/p]
  • [p]Intensity is capped at 50.[/p]
  • [p]The number of ships depends on Doom Intensity.[/p]
  • [p]Manifesting a new fleet will instantly dismiss any current fleet.[/p]
    • [p]IMPORTANT WARNING: The Eater of Worlds will consume any Admiral left in charge of this fleet when it is dismissed. This wasn't intentional so we'll probably change this, even though it's very thematic.[/p]
  • [p]The fleet will appear in orbit of any planet with a Sanctum of the Eater (or if one doesn't exist, your capital).[/p]

[p]Bugfix​[/p]

• [p]Refugee Attraction was not working at all, whoops.[/p]
• [p]The cross-platform Cloud Save system now works as expected.[/p]
• [p]Tidied up some Cybernetics related tooltips.[/p]
• [p]Remove flickering from buildable area for Deep Space Citadel.[/p]
• [p]Fire Oracles now only appear if the main species of an empire has habitability \\
• [p]Wilderness empires now pay Biomass when terraforming a Volcanic World into a normal habitable planet[/p]
• [p]Fixed command_limit_mult acting like command_limit_add.[/p]

[p]Stability​[/p]

• [p]Rebuilt libPDXSDK.so for Linux to make it compatible within the steam runtime environment as well as directly run in a Ubuntu 20 compatible distribution[/p]

[p]Performance​[/p]

• [p]Significantly reduced the lag spike when creating the Solarpunk country[/p]
• [p]Optimization of functions related to string[/p]
• [p]Optimized memory allocations in Alert Manager[/p]
• [p]Improved fleet icon logic[/p]
• [p]Added experimental economic threading changes to the Open Beta[/p]
  • [p]New dependency tracking should reduce the cpu wait time when updating and reducing the “monthly stutter”[/p]
  • [p]Decreased sizes of threaded batches for objects that are many and becomes uneven in cpu need for better distribution over multiple cores[/p]
• [p]Added experimental modifier threading changes to the Open Beta[/p]
  • [p]Mainly for reusing memory and reduce time spent on allocations/deallocations in the update[/p]
  • [p]Decreased sizes of threaded batches for objects that are many and becomes uneven in cpu need for better distribution over multiple cores (yeah here as well)[/p]
• [p]Major rework of modifier calculations for Planets, PopGroups, Armies, Leaders, Ships and Fleets[/p]
  • [p]Moving trigger dependent calculations out to suitable pulses instead (Micro, Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Yearly)[/p]
  • [p]Number of trigger evaluations optimized[/p]

[p]Known Issues​[/p]

• [p]Multiplayer games will see a mass desync at game start, but resyncing should resolve it[/p]

[p]The rest of the 4.3 "Cetus" Open Beta patch notes can be found on the Paradox forums.[/p][p]Thanks for playing Stellaris, and we look forward to seeing your feedback on this new version of the Open Beta![/p]

[p]Greetings, spacefarers!
[/p][p]Today we’ll be looking at the impact the changes of the 4.3 ‘Cetus’ Open Beta has had on performance, with graphs and a comparison video.
[/p][p]As a reminder - during the Cetus cycle, dev diaries will be on a once-every-two-week cadence.[/p][h3]Performance[/h3][p]Back in 3.14, we had hit the limits on how far we could go with optimization with many of the systems of Stellaris. In the 4.0 update, we changed planet and pop systems to one that would be a better foundation for future performance improvements. Alongside the design changes to reduce ship counts and balance the economy, with 4.3 we’re finally able to deliver some of those promised improvements.[/p][p]We’ve been running side-by-side comparisons of different versions of Stellaris, and while the major differences in versions means we can’t do direct comparisons, we tried to minimize divergence. [/p][p]Today we’ll be showing off 3.14.1592653 vs. 4.3, with Default settings - except that it’s on a Huge Galaxy, Ensign Difficulty, with the Prethoryn Scourge as the crisis. Autosaves were disabled on this run so they wouldn’t interfere with the recording. Both of these were run on the same higher end Windows machine, an i9-14900K with 32 GB of ram and a GeForce RTX 3060, and as some of these changes are hardware dependent we’re very interested in hearing about your performance experiences in the Cetus Open Beta.[/p][p][/p][previewyoutube][/previewyoutube][p]
Here’s a chart looking at seconds per year, generated from .tsv’s using the [c]-gamestatetimer[/c] command line parameter.[/p][p][/p][p]-gamestatetimer? Explain.[/p][p]If you add [c]-gamestatetimer[/c] to the launch options of Stellaris, the game will generate a game state timer log in your logs directory.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]My command line parameters.[/p][p][/p][p]This is a tab separated text file that looks something like this:[/p][p][/p][p][c]Game Date Time Unit Seconds[/c][/p][p][c]2200.01.01 Micro 0.000611[/c][/p][p][c]2200.01.01 Micro 0.001599[/c][/p][p][c]2200.01.01 Micro 0.006324[/c][/p][p][c]2200.01.01 Micro 0.008577[/c][/p][p][c]2200.01.01 Micro 0.000912[/c][/p][p][c]2200.01.01 Micro 0.002078[/c][/p][p][c]2200.01.01 Micro 0.000530[/c][/p][p][c]2200.01.01 Micro 0.001898[/c][/p][p][c]2200.01.02 Micro 0.073470[/c][/p][p][c]2200.01.02 Micro 0.003261[/c][/p][p][c]2200.01.02 Micro 0.000590[/c][/p][p][c]2200.01.02 Micro 0.001874[/c][/p][p][c]2200.01.02 Micro 0.001394[/c][/p][p][c]2200.01.02 Micro 0.011386[/c][/p][p][c]2200.01.02 Micro 0.001238[/c][/p][p][c]2200.01.02 Micro 0.002009[/c][/p][p][c]2200.01.02 Micro 0.000521[/c][/p][p][c]2200.01.02 Micro 0.001725[/c][/p][p][c]2200.01.03 Micro 0.023613[/c][/p][p][c]2200.01.03 Day 0.047612[/c][/p][p][c]2200.01.03 Micro 0.003535[/c][/p][p][c]\[...And so on for a little over 1.2 million more lines][/c][/p][p][/p][p]Importing this .tsv into a spreadsheet and filtering out Time Units to just show the Year entries will give you the time the year ending on that date took, just as if you had run the [c]one_year[/c] console command over and over again three hundred times.[/p][p]Warning: These files can get pretty big, as they record the micro-tick times, and end up at about 30 MB of text for 300 years of game tracking.[/p][p]The [c]-incrementalsaves[/c] launch option I have up there keeps save games at 2200, 2275, 2300, 2325, 2350, and every 50 years thereafter until 2600. We use them to look at the galaxy’s development in interesting automated runs.[/p][p][c]-loadrandomseed[/c] is used to reduce game divergence.[/p][p][/p][p]The 3.14 build started at 30.52 seconds per year, while our 4.3 build started faster than a month per second at 11.54. It took until 2269 for 4.3 to slow down to 3.14’s starting time, by which point 3.14 was taking 44.63 seconds per year.[/p][p]The 4.3 game ended at 2500.01.01, we ended the 3.14 game halfway through 2506 because at that point it was already nearly two hours longer than the 4.3 video.[/p][p]Here’s a chart showing the cumulative elapsed time it took each game to reach the specified game years.[/p][p]
We’re pretty happy with these improvements, but we’re also not quite done yet.[/p][p]We’re updating the Cetus Open Beta today with a branch that has some more experimental performance updates. As this branch includes experimental changes, we’d like to remind people that we have a Cetus Rollback branch that uses last week’s build. In my internal tests, this build was about 4% faster than the main Cetus Open Beta, but we think we’re going to be able to squeeze a little more out of it.[/p][p]Three games from an identical save, same random seed, i7-13700k w/32 GB RAM, RTX 3060 Ti[/p][h3] 4.3 ‘Cetus’ Open Beta Patch Notes 2026-02-06[/h3][p]Here are the preliminary release notes for tomorrow’s Open Beta update:[/p][p]Balance​[/p]

• [p]Changed the scaling of Imperious Architecture[/p]
• [p]Increased the maximum damage scaling for weapons that increase damage based on target ship size.[/p]
• [p]Reduced the effect that Councilor skill levels has on Agenda speed.[/p]
• [p]Loyalty Circuits has been replaced by Compliance Filters as an auto-modding trait. This means that Augmentation Bazaars can pick it on game start as well.[/p]
• [p]The augmentation center now provided 400 jobs for Driven Assimilators[/p]
• [p]Augmentor jobs for regular empires now provide flat bonus pop growth, not a multiplier to existing pop growth.[/p]
• [p]Synthetic Fertility now starts with Powered Exoskeletons[/p]
• [p]Significantly changed the Eater of Worlds Covenant Powers and Auras[/p]
  • [p]The Doom power for the Eater of Worlds no longer immediately starts a war.[/p]
  • [p]The Aura Intensification of the Eater of Worlds no longer summons ships from nothing.[/p]
  • [p]The Aura Intensification of the Eater of Worlds now increments your Doom Intensity.[/p]
  • [p]The Doom power now manifests the Doom of the Eater fleet.[/p]
  • [p]Between 3 and 6 Intensity, this fleet only has Teeth (escorts).[/p]
  • [p]Between 6 and 12 Intensity, this fleet has Teeth (escorts) and Fangs (cruisers).[/p]
  • [p]At 12 or higher Intensity, this fleet has Teeth (escorts), Fangs (cruisers) and Tusks (Battleships).[/p]
  • [p]Intensity is capped at 50.[/p]
  • [p]The number of ships depends on Doom Intensity.[/p]
  • [p]Manifesting a new fleet will instantly dismiss any current fleet.[/p]
  • [p]The fleet will appear in orbit of any planet with a Sanctum of the Eater (or if one doesn't exist, your capital).[/p]

[p]Bugfix​[/p]

• [p]Refugee Attraction was not working at all, whoops.[/p]
• [p]The cross-platform Cloud Save system now works as expected.[/p]
• [p]Tidied up some Cybernetics related tooltips.[/p]
• [p]Remove flickering from buildable area for Deep Space Citadel.[/p]
• [p]Fire Oracles now only appear if the main species of an empire has habitability \\
• [p]Wilderness empires now pay Biomass when terraforming a Volcanic World into a normal habitable planet[/p]
• [p]Fixed command_limit_mult acting like command_limit_add.[/p]

[p]Performance​[/p]

• [p]Significantly reduced the lag spike when creating the Solarpunk country[/p]
• [p]Optimization of functions related to string[/p]
• [p]Optimized memory allocations in Alert Manager[/p]
• [p]Improved fleet icon logic[/p]
• [p]Added experimental economic threading changes to the Open Beta[/p]
  • [p]New dependency tracking should reduce the cpu wait time when updating and reducing the “monthly stutter”[/p]
  • [p]Decreased sizes of threaded batches for objects that are many and becomes uneven in cpu need for better distribution over multiple cores[/p]
• [p]Added experimental modifier threading changes to the Open Beta[/p]
  • [p]Mainly for reusing memory and reduce time spent on allocations/deallocations in the update[/p]
  • [p]Decreased sizes of threaded batches for objects that are many and becomes uneven in cpu need for better distribution over multiple cores (yeah here as well)[/p]
• [p]Major rework of modifier calculations for Planets, PopGroups, Armies, Leaders, Ships and Fleets[/p]
  • [p]Moving trigger dependent calculations out to suitable pulses instead (Micro, Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Yearly)[/p]
  • [p]Number of trigger evaluations optimized[/p]

[p][/p][p]We have a new feedback form available here.[/p][p][/p][p]This week’s update was a little light on balancing and bugfixing, so the design team will be shifting back to that, while the programming team is going to change focus to primarily stability and out-of-syncs. We’ll be keeping an eye on your performance feedback and metrics in the meantime.[/p][p]Davide and I will also start streaming 4.3 today and every Thursday to show off some of the changes and answer your questions. Come distract me at critical moments so we get eaten by voidworms. Future weeks may have other guest stars there to answer more technical questions.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]The next Stellaris dev diary will be on Feb 19th! We’ll likely be doing another review of the feedback thus far and some of the changes we made during those weeks based on it. See you then![/p]

[p][/p][p]Hello Stellaris Community!

There will be no dev diary this week, we hope to be back next week with a dev diary. We’re expecting dev diaries to be irregular over the next little while our focus is working on issues with the base game.

Today’s beta update has lots of great fixes and balance changes that the community has been asking for over the course of the open beta. From scaling down Mid and End-Game Crisis strengths, to buffs to Cybernetic Ascension, to offering more sources of Command Limit and Naval Capacity, we hope that this is the best iteration of the Open Beta yet.

Have some feedback, or something feel not-quite-right? We also have a new Open Beta Feedback Form to fill out!

Without further ado, let's get to the patch notes:
[/p][h3]4.3 ‘Cetus’ Open Beta Patch Notes 2026-01-30​[/h3][p]Balance​[/p]

• [p]Voidworms will be less likely to attack a planet with fewer than 1000 pops.[/p]
• [p]Changes to the Necrophage Origin:[/p]
  • [p]Necrophage Chambers of Elevation now block pop growth for necrophage species.[/p]
  • [p]Necrophyte Apprentice jobs now boost the pop growth of non-necrophage species on the same planet by a small amount.[/p]
  • [p]These changes mean that the pop growth weirdness of the origin should be gone and planets with Necrophyte Apprentices should retain a high rate of growth of the secondary species, with the once per decade rituals mass converting pops to the primary species.[/p]
  • [p]When playing a hive-minded necrophage, the force spawned pre-ftl empires are no longer hive-minded.[/p]
• [p]Entropy Drinkers civics[/p]
  • [p]Replaced the scaling empire-wide energy credit production from Entropy Drinkers civics with "Energy Credits per 100 Psionic Pops: +0.5"[/p]
  • [p]Entropy Drinkers councilors now give +3% Leader XP per level.[/p]
  • [p]Taking any non-Psionic ascension path now blocks you from reforming into Entropy Drinkers, since starting with the civic locks you into psionic ascension.[/p]
• [p]Chosen civics now give +10% Unity at 1,000 attunement points (was 50%)[/p]
• [p]Space Fauna now have 10% Armor and Shield Hardening per rarity tier for each tier above Common[/p]
• [p]Modifiers for rural jobs from Storm Relief Centers have been halved.[/p]
• [p]Reduced the power of the Prethoryn, Contingency, Extradimensionals, Great Khan, Diadochi, Tempest, and Dessanu fleets by approximately a third.[/p]
• [p]Cybernetic Ascension:[/p]
  • [p]Added two new positive Cyborg species traits for pop growth and bureaucrat output.[/p]
  • [p]The Metabolic Reprocessing now also gives robot assembly from Augmentor jobs and organic assembly from Roboticist jobs.[/p]
  • [p]The Integrated Anatomy no longer gives +1 organic species trait pick but instead +1 robot species trait point and +1 robot species trait pick.[/p]
  • [p]Robot pops should no longer be penalized by reduction to non cyborg pop happiness.[/p]
  • [p]Cyber Hives now receive temporary buffs (+3 skill level, +25% xp gain) to their Nodes as well as planets (+15% job productivity and -7.5% job upkeep) when assimilating new cyborgs into the collective. Devouring Swarms receive these bonuses upon purging pops instead.[/p]
  • [p]Driven Assimilators now unlock additional effects on their cyborg traits for their ruler (-35% cyborg upkeep and +15% complex drone productivity) and governors (+20% replicator output).[/p]
  • [p]Augmentors now produce 1.75 engineering research, up from 1.5, as well as 1.75 society research. The driven assimilator variant now provides 3 pop assembly, from 2. (The regular variant instead grants robot assembly, as mentioned above).[/p]
    • [p]The society research output of genomic researchers and spawning drones (after completing genetic ascension) from 4.5 to 3.5 to bring them in line with this.[/p]
• [p]Reduced the power of Awakened Fallen Empires and Cetana's fleets by roughly half.[/p]
• [p]Increased many sources of Command Limit and Naval Capacity.[/p]
  • [p]Galactic Force Projection, War Games (Supremacy Traditions), and Better Glandular Stimulation (Behemoth Fury Crisis Perk) now grant Command Limit multipliers instead of flat values.[/p]
• [p]Increased the costs to build larger and higher tier ship sections and ship components. This includes the Fallen Empire ships from Cosmogenesis.[/p]
• [p]Reduced the damage reduction of Crystal Plating to 1/2/3 and 2/3/4 from 1/2/4 and 2/4/8.[/p]
• [p]Slightly improved mineral deposits on Asteroids and energy deposits of many stars.[/p]

[p]Bugfix​[/p]

• [p]All awakened empires now get their automated production bonuses.[/p]
• [p]Increased Voidworm Command Limits so they can now fit enough adults into a single fleet to merge into a troika.[/p]
  • [p]Let us know if the Voidworm Plague keeps eating the galaxy.[/p]
• [p]Scrapping robots during an alloy deficit now gives 1 alloy per pop instead of 100 alloys per pop.[/p]
• [p]Regular empires can no longer psionically awaken robots.[/p]
• [p]A mysterious ghost district no longer sometimes appears in the UI for the Synaptic Lathe.[/p]
• [p]The Interloper in pre-ftl Shattered Ring systems can now be removed.[/p]
• [p]Fixed resettlement costs being inconsistent.[/p]
• [p]Storm Relief Centers can now be built.[/p]
• [p]Some slaves no longer benefit from job efficiency bonuses twice.[/p]
• [p]Fixed the tooltips for Battle Thrall slavery and Military Service to clarify that slaves need to be Battle Thralls to be soldiers.[/p]
• [p]The rampaging trees no longer continue to kill everyone after they have in fact been defeated.[/p]
• [p]Some bioship components that escaped earlier cost and upkeep adjustments now match their mechanical counterparts. The same is true for Offspring ships.[/p]

[p]Performance​[/p]

• [p]Removed some redundant modifier updates from Armies and from Pops[/p]
• [p]Optimized allocations when counting species[/p]
• [p]Moved script calculations out of modifier calculations for better performance[/p]
• [p]Moved some trigger evaluations out of modifier calculations for better performance[/p]
• [p]Fixed a bug that was disabling threading of the economic system introduced in earlier open beta. This should be especially noticeable (or rather, should no longer be noticeable) on the monthly calculations, which should be more seamless now.[/p]
• [p]Fixing performance regression in language localization system.[/p]

[p]Stability​[/p]

• [p]Addressed some stack overflows on macos[/p]

[p]Modding​[/p]

• [p]Added support for districts_per_building for District Specializations. This allows limiting the number of buildings based on the number of built districts but is not currently being used yet.[/p][p][/p]

[p]For previous Open Beta patch notes, please visit the Paradox forums.[/p][p][/p][hr][/hr][p][/p][h3]How to Opt-In[/h3][p]To access the Stellaris beta, go to your Steam Library, right-click the game, and select "Properties". From there, choose the "Betas" tab, and in the "Beta Participation" dropdown menu, select the "cetus_open_beta" beta branch from the list.

A Note for Linux Users:

The Linux binary at the moment requires a openssl 4 enabled version of curl, this is not provided by Steams base environment, we are currently addressing this.
You can either try and run Stellaris directly if your system has this provided for you or use proton to run the windows version

Run Stellaris directly:
[/p]

1. [p]Right click Stellaris in Steam and select "Properties..."[/p]
2. [p]Goto "Installed Files" tab and select "Browse..." (this should take you to where Stellaris is installed)[/p]
3. [p]Find the file "stellaris" and double click it[/p]

[p]Run thru Proton:
[/p]

1. [p]Right click Stellaris in Steam and select "Properties..."[/p]
2. [p]Goto "Compatability" tab and tick the "Force the use of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool" checkbox[/p]
3. [p]Select "Proton 10.0-3" or a suitable version (https://www.protondb.com/app/281990 for help)[/p]
4. [p]Update the game and press "Play" in steam[/p]

[p]Thank you for playing Stellaris and for your feedback and support during the 4.3 “Cetus” Open Beta![/p]

If you’ve ever intrepidly looked up a Paradox game, seen a million DLC expansions on the Steam page, and fled screaming into the woods, rest assured that Paradox have you in their eye. It’s doubtful they’re going to change anything about their broad DLC strategy, mind, but they’re aware that some players may feel reluctant to purchase older Paradox games that have dozens of add-ons.

Read more

[p][/p][p]by Eldarin[/p][p][/p][p]Hello everyone! Welcome back to Stellaris Dev Diaries!

During the Cetus cycle, dev diaries will be on a once-every-two-week cadence.

The 4.3 ‘Cetus’ Open Beta continues!
[/p][h3]The State of the Open Beta​[/h3][p]Last week we casually snuck the ability for multiplayer games to allow new hotjoins while an existing hotjoin was ongoing into the Beta, but a flag wasn’t being set properly and broke Resync, so we’re updating again this week.[/p][h3]4.3 ‘Cetus’ Open Beta Patch Notes 2026-01-22[/h3][p]Improvement​[/p]

• [p]Field Modulation, Eco Simulation, and Geothermal Fracking technologies are now marked as Gateway technologies for Rural District Specialization.[/p]
• [p]Improvement "Scorched World Heralds" civics now mention that diplomacy with other Thermophiles is possible[/p]
• [p]Option text for Rogue Servitors discovering alien life is tonally appropriate[/p]
• [p]First Robot timeline event blocked for machine species[/p]

[p]Balance​[/p]

• [p]"Scorched World Heralds" cannot longer grant Full Citizenship or Residence status to conquered non-Thermophile pops[/p]
• [p]Reduced the minimum fleet power necessary to trigger the fight with the ambushing Cutholoid to 600. It'll be a tough fight and you'll probably lose some ships, but usually win.[/p]

[p]Bugfix​[/p]

• [p]Fixed the Resync button in multiplayer[/p]
• [p]Fixed some scoping issues with the random events if you neighbour the caravaneers[/p]
• [p]The Luminary for Under One Rule will now have the correct number of traits for their level[/p]
• [p]Fixed the Galactic Crucible not triggering a notification / event choice after capture in certain situations (after the war)[/p]
• [p]The "Scion" origin now blocks the "Scorched World Heralds" civic[/p]
• [p]Modifiers from starbase targeting owner country now makes the country recalculate as it should[/p]
• [p]Upgrading a Starbase with a Resource Silo on it no longer lowers the total resource capacity for the Empire.[/p]

[p]Performance​[/p]

• [p]Optimized event parameter storage.
  Effects of this include:[/p]
  • [p]Reduces heap allocations for 95% of EventScope uses.[/p]
  • [p]AddOrUpdateScopeParameter now 71x faster. Improved consistency and eliminated performance spikes.[/p]
  • [p]CreateEventScope now 48x faster. Performance variability eliminated.[/p]
  • [p]AddScopeParameter 83x faster. Highly consistent.[/p]
  • [p]GetScopeParameter 35% faster - median time reduced by 84%; meaningful improvement on a less frequent code path.[/p]
  • [p]Ship CalculateModifier 68% faster.[/p]
  • [p]Army CalculateModifier 5.3% faster.[/p]
  • [p]Uninhabited Planet DailyUpdate 3-5% faster.[/p]

[p]Summary: Changes result in smoother gameplay, reduced load on memory allocator, frame processing time reduced by ~10%.​[/p][p]Note: This change snuck into last week’s update.​[/p]

• [p]Improved Scripted Trigger caching[/p]
• [p]Optimize string allocation 76% faster[/p]

[p]
Let’s look at some of the feedback that we’ve gotten over the holidays.[/p][p][/p][p]Just over half of the respondents placed the economic balance rating as “just right”, with the remainder being split over a nice curve in both directions, skewing a little bit towards being a bit underpowered.[/p][p]Several of you mentioned Tankbound in comments - we agree that they’ll need more review. Others commented on Energy being more of a struggle, which is a significant change from earlier 4.x builds, with some comments stating a dislike of the “static job” buildings and how they don’t fit terribly well in the current design.[/p][p][/p][p]While there’s a nice spike at 3 for mechanical ships, there’s a pretty strong lean towards “too weak” for Fauna. Most comments in general were extremely in favor of the changes, though pirates and Fallen Empires were mentioned repeatedly, as well as that first Cutholoid special project. We’ve already nerfed pirates, and we do want Fallen Empires to be much more of a challenge than they’ve been for a few years, but they might be overdoing it a little. The Cutholoid definitely wasn’t fun - so we’ve reduced the required threshold to challenge it in today’s update.[/p][p]Food production appears to be considered an issue with Space Fauna empires.[/p][p]Many of you wrote that static defenses were too powerful - though we did adjust some of them in last week’s beta update. We’ll continue monitoring them.[/p][p]Battlefield control weapons from Bio-Ships may be a bit oppressive with the lower ship counts.[/p][p][/p][p]The general consensus seems to be that high Stability is still too easy to maintain in the Open Beta, and many of you were pretty content with the changes to Empire Size.

Overall, the feedback thus far has been solid enough that I expect that we’re on track to go through with both the economic rebalancing and the naval changes, and will continue balancing with the expectation that both will ship with 4.3 Cetus.
[/p][h3]The Stellaris Bug Report Forum​[/h3][p]We have an update to the bug report forum from @MrFreake_PDX :

In response to your feedback about the level of transparency around Stellaris Bug Reports, we’ve been trying to improve in that area over the last couple of months. Some of you may have noticed myself and others replying to bug reports more often, keeping you apprised of the status of the bug reports. In order to be able to turn on further automation with regards to this, we needed to switch to a new bug report forum style. This is still a work in progress, and we hope to see the new features roll out fairly soon.

All previously reported bugs are still logged internally, so don’t worry if you can’t see a bug you’ve reported in the past. We will continue to go through them, but any new bug reports should be added to this new section on the forum instead.

In order to do this, we’ve had to change the format of our Bug Reports forum to line up with the fields we used in our internal bug tracker.

Please fill out all of these fields to the best of your ability.[/p][p][/p][p]How to Verify your Game Files:[/p][p]On Steam:[/p][p]Right Click Stellaris (in Steam), go to Properties, Local Files, and click Verify Game Files[/p][p][/p][p]On GOG:[/p][p]Right click your game in your library, Click Manage, Click Files at the top, Click Verify and Repair and let it finish[/p][p][/p][p]On Microsoft Store:[/p][p]Select your game in your library, Click the Customization button (to the right of the Play button), Click Manage Installation, Click Verify/Repair and let it finish[/p][p][/p][p]How to Verify your Mods are disabled:[/p][p]All versions:[/p][p]Open Stellaris, at the Main Screen at the bottom, mouse over the version number, if it says “Checksum Is Modified” then you still have a mod enabled (or have extra/modified versions of files in your Stellaris directory).[/p][p][/p][p]How to use the new Bug Report form:[/p][p]Here is the new bug report form, these have been changed to better line up with the fields in our internal bug tracker.[/p][p][/p][p]Issue Type:

Don’t worry too much about getting the correct Issue Type, QA can update the report to ensure it has the correct issue type.

[/p]

• [p]VFX - Issues with Visual Effects (Explosions, Space Storms, etc)[/p]
• [p]Audio - Issues with in-game sounds or music[/p]
• [p]Out of Sync - Report multiplayer desyncs. Please include OOS reports from the host and client. You can find OOS reports here:[/p]
  • [p]On Windows: C:/users/YOURUSERNAME/Documents/Paradox Interactive/Stellaris/OOS/[/p]
  • [p]On Mac:[/p]
    1. [p]Open Finder: Click the Finder icon in your Dock.[/p]
    2. [p]Go to Documents: Click on Documents in the sidebar.[/p]
    3. [p]Navigate: Open the Paradox Interactive folder, then Stellaris, then the oos folder.[/p]
    4. [p]Find Files: Inside OOS, you'll see folders for each desync. We need one from the client who desynced, and one from the host of the multiplayer game[/p]
  • [p]On Linux:[/p]
    1. [p]if environment variable XDG_DATA_HOME is not empty logs will be in:[/p]

[p]$XDG_DATA_HOME/Paradox Interactive/Stellaris
Otherwise they will be in:
~/.local/share/Paradox Interactive/Stellaris[/p]

• [p]Content Design - for literally unplayable typos, issues with Script, in-game Events, Situations, etc.[/p]
• [p]Crash - For crashing issues, please be sure to include a Crash Report. By default you can find Crash Reports here:[/p]
  • [p]On Windows: C:/users/YOURUSERNAME/Documents/Paradox Interactive/Stellaris/Crashes[/p]
  • [p]On Mac:[/p]
    1. [p]Open Finder: Click the Finder icon in your Dock.[/p]
    2. [p]Go to Documents: Click on Documents in the sidebar.[/p]
    3. [p]Navigate: Open the Paradox Interactive folder, then Stellaris, then the crashes folder.[/p]
    4. [p]Find Files: Inside crashes, you'll see folders for each crash, containing exception.txt, error.log, debug.log, and settings files, which are very helpful for debugging.[/p]
  • [p]On Linux:[/p]
    1. [p]if environment variable XDG_DATA_HOME is not empty logs will be in: [/p]
  [p]$XDG_DATA_HOME/Paradox Interactive/Stellaris, otherwise they will be in: ~/.local/share/Paradox Interactive/Stellaris
  [/p]
• [p]UX - Report issues with the User Interface[/p]
• [p]Code - for issues that are not handled through script. Don’t worry too much about having to choose between this and Content Design, QA can update the report[/p]
• [p]Game Design - for systems-related issues, whether they be mechanics that don't seem to work right, the numbers seeming off on something, or general balance issues. If it fits on a spreadsheet, it probably goes here[/p]
• [p]Art - Issues with models, event art, etc[/p]

[p]Summary:[/p]

• [p]This will be the title of your bug report, keep it short and succinct[/p]

[p]Description:[/p]

• [p]Here you can describe the issue in more detail[/p]

[p]Expected Result:[/p]

• [p]What you expected the outcome to be when you encountered this issue[/p]

[p]Actual Result:[/p]

• [p]What actually happened when you encountered this issue[/p]

[p]Steps to Reproduce:[/p]

• [p]We always treat this internally as an “Explain Like I’m Five” steps to reproduce, so include things like “Launch the Game”, “Start a New Game”, etc.[/p]

[p][/p][p]Repro Rate:
This is the Reproduction Rate. Does it happen every time, or only occasionally? This field can let QA know that if they don’t reproduce the issue the first time, that they should probably try, try again.

Attachment:
Use this to upload screenshots, save files, and in the case of Crashes or OOSes the applicable reports (see the sections above)

We would like to thank you all for your cooperation while we roll out this new system, and hopefully give you all a little more transparency into what’s going on behind the scenes here at Paradox Green!
[/p][h3]What’s Next?​[/h3][p]The next Stellaris dev diary will be about further updates to the Open Beta, and will be on February 5th.

See you in the beta![/p][p][/p][hr][/hr][h3]How to Opt-In to the Open Beta[/h3][p]To access the Stellaris beta, go to your Steam Library, right-click the game, and select "Properties". From there, choose the "Betas" tab, and in the "Beta Participation" dropdown menu, select the "cetus_open_beta" beta branch from the list.

A Note for Linux Users:

The Linux binary at the moment requires a openssl 4 enabled version of curl, this is not provided by Steams base environment, we are currently addressing this.
You can either try and run Stellaris directly if your system has this provided for you or use proton to run the windows version

Run Stellaris directly:[/p]

1. [p]Right click Stellaris in Steam and select "Properties..."[/p]
2. [p]Goto "Installed Files" tab and select "Browse..." (this should take you to where Stellaris is installed)[/p]
3. [p]Find the file "stellaris" and double click it[/p]

[p]Run thru Proton:[/p]

1. [p]Right click Stellaris in Steam and select "Properties..."[/p]
2. [p]Go to "Compatibility" tab and tick the "Force the use of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool" checkbox[/p]
3. [p]Select "Proton 10.0-3" or a suitable version (https://www.protondb.com/app/281990 for help)[/p]
4. [p]Update the game and press "Play" in steam[/p]