Stellaris News

Dev Diary #226 - Custodians and Next Steps

written by grekulf

Hello everyone!

Today I thought we’d go back and talk a bit about the Custodian Initiative and what the future can hold.

The 3.1 ‘Lem’ Update which we put out about 2 weeks ago contained a lot of good stuff that we'd been working on for some months. We’re really happy with how you have received the Custodian Initiative and the first free update, so it’s really fun to see that things seem to be moving in a clearly positive direction.

[h3]The Custodian Initiative[/h3]

With the Custodian Initiative we’re doing a lot of new things at once, and in combination with a lot of internal changes as well, means we’re still learning and adapting. One goal that we haven’t been able to quite deploy a solution for is how to better work together with everyone in the community. We very much appreciate your feedback and we like to have constructive or fun interactions with you, and we want to figure out how to make this process more effective for us. For example, we’ve been thinking about how to have more public-facing bug tracking where you could potentially vote for issues (the voting functionality currently exists in our bug forums, albeit a bit more hidden than would be ideal). None of this has any concrete plans right now, but I thought it was important to mention anyway, so that you can more clearly know that we’re very interested in figuring out how to better make use of community engagement and feedback.

If you have any thoughts, let us know! We are also interested in hearing if you have ideas on how you can organize yourselves in the community to promote ideas, bugs and suggestions for improvements.

Our primary ways of interacting with you are our forums, steam, reddit and discord.

[h3]Future Custodian Updates[/h3]

As we’ve mentioned before, we aim to release a new free update about every 3 months. These updates will sometimes be released together with a new DLC. The next update is scheduled for late November.

In the November 3.2 update, our strategy will be to be a bit less ambitious than the Lem Update, and to focus on a bit more safe improvements. Going forwards, we may alternate between safe and more spicy changes for these free updates. Even if we aim to make 3.2 a bit safer, there will still be some interesting changes to look forward to – like pretty significant improvements for the AI. We will talk a bit more about that in detail next week. We will talk more about 3.2 in the coming weeks after that as well.

After 3.2 we will be aiming to release a 3.3 update sometime in February. This update will be a bit more spicy. Among other things, the Unity & Sprawl rework, mentioned earlier in dev diary 215, is likely to be finished and tested by then. Given the spiciness of these changes, we’re also looking into the possibility of an Open Beta for them to help things go as smoothly as possible :) We will be talking more about that in the coming months, mainly after November.

Keep in mind that the Custodian Initiative is still in its infancy and things are prone to change, so try to be patient with what you can expect with future updates. Together we'll be able to make Stellaris even more awesome!

---------

That is all for this week! Next week we will be back to talk about AI improvements for the upcoming 3.2 update.

3.1.2 Patch Released (Checksum 6df7)

Hello everyone!

As we work on the next patch with the Custodian team, we thought that there were a couple of issues that have been brought up by you all that we thought needed to be addressed a bit sooner than the next Custodian patch. Nothing has changed since the changelogs were posted in last weeks Dev Diary.

[h3]3.1.2 Patch Notes:[/h3]
[expand]
#################################################################
######################### VERSION 3.1.2 ###########################
#################################################################

######################
# Performance and Stability
######################

* Fixed a crash where releasing a vassal as a Clone Army could cause an invalid species.

######################
# Bugfixes
######################

* Fixed the Clone Army origin tooltip not having a matching ship upkeep reduction with their admirals. Also changed the bonus to scale in a cleaner way, the upkeep is now 5/10/20% based on the Army's decisions.
* The Genetic Crossroads special project will now abort if a species completes Synthetic Evolution before finishing it.
* Fixed habitability of planets that clone armies have abandoned through lack of clone vats being locked at 0% for them.
* Ancient Clone Vats can now only assemble Clone Soldier pops.
* Going into a food deficit when using the Catalytic Processing civic will now give a -50% production penalty to alloy production. This penalty is in line with the penalty non-catalytic empires suffer from a mineral deficit
* Fixed players being able to move their Science Ship to blow up systems using the “Elder One” event.
* Fixed exploit where AI acceptance from Eminent Diplomats tradition also applied to trade deals.

######################
# Known Issues
######################

* The penalty to alloy production from a food deficit in catalytic empires is not shown in the deficit tooltip.
* Mastercraft Inc. Civic does not change Artisans into Artificers on an Ecumenopolis.
* Some inconsistencies in the number of jobs exchanged by Foundry Station designation for empires with the Catalytic processing civic.
* It’s possible for the Nivlac species to be created without the Radiotrophic trait in certain instances.
* Party Aftermath event can create crossbreed species between caravaneers and an infertile clone pop.
* Shattered Ring World can turn into a planet due to takeover or devastation.
* Mechanical pops with a Decadent Lifestyle have no pop upkeep.
* Awakened Empires don't use traditions properly.
* Machine empires can spawn with the necrophage origin.
[/expand]

We hope you appreciate our continued effort in improving Stellaris, and thank you for your feedback!

Stellaris Enigmatic Fortress - a quick guide

So you want to know about the Stellaris Enigmatic Fortress? In this sci-fi grand strategy game, there are many powerful entities that can spawn known as 'guardians'. These were first introduced in the Stellaris DLC Leviathans, although Distant Stars and Ancient Relics have introduced more since. Some are giant spaceborne aliens, but the Enigmatic Fortress is ancient abandoned stronghold.

This massive space station is guarded by many unique defense platforms that can spawn in any random class A star system. The defenses use regular components and weaponry, and so can be countered like anything else, there's just a lot to get through! If you defeat the fortress, there's then an event chain you need to work through to actually get the rewards.

If you let the timer expire at any point, or if you choose the wrong option during the chain, the defences will reactivate and you have to defeat them all over again - so it's better to get things right the first time. That's where we come in! We've put together a quick guide on the fortress, its defences, and the event chain itself - hopefully it should arm you with everything you need. Note that you will need the Leviathans expansion for this one to spawn in your game.

Read the rest of the story...

In Stellaris' latest update, the robots are coming to eat you

There's a new patch out for grand strategy game Stellaris that makes some custodial updates based on the community's reports as the big 3.1 'Lem' update has settled into orbit. There are some welcome tweaks, like some additional clarity on the Clone Army origin tooltip and a fix for a crash when Clone Armies released vassals and caused an 'invalid species.' But perhaps the most important news can be found under the 'known issues' heading in the patch notes: robots are coming to eat you.

One of the remaining issues Paradox's Stellaris team says it has to address is the fact that apparently, machine empires (introduced in Synthetic Dawn DLC) can spawn with the necrophage trait. Necrophagic species reproduce by consuming other populations, so it seems as though you could be looking at the prospect of a space civilisation of Five Nights at Freddy's monsters next time you start a game.

Normally, machine empires are composed of self-replicating networked drones. Now it seems they can lose the ability to repair and replace themselves, and require the flesh of organic life forms in order to procreate.

Read the rest of the story...

Stellaris Dev Diary #225 - 3.1.2 "Lem" Patch Update

written by MrFreake

Hello Stellaris Community!

This week’s Dev Diary comes to you with a little bit less of the future development and more of what we’ve been doing with the Custodian team’s work. That means that we’ll be sharing a little bit of information on the upcoming fixes for the 3.1.2 patch. Next week we should be back to the regular schedule of dev diaries that we know you’re looking forward to; however, this week we want to continue the conversation from last week and provide details on the patch.

First off, we want to thank all of you for submitting your bug reports! Bug reports are extremely useful to us, and we want to thank our Community for dedicating their time to reporting issues in Lem. I just want to share a little context with you all for a moment:

On launch day we peaked at ~18k concurrent players on Steam, supposing each of those players plays one hour, that’s 18 000 hours. Assuming a 40 hour work week, that’s 450 workweeks. This isn’t meant to make excuses, but just to put into context that our community does more playing in the hour after release than we could hope to accomplish in the time between the release of Nemesis and now.

With that being said, we have put together a patch for the 3.1.1 “Lem” Update! The Custodian team has spent the last week fixing issues raised by the community, and we hope to get this patch out to the larger community around the middle of next week (as long as there are no further issues).

[h3]3.1.2 "Lem" Patch Notes[/h3]
[expand]
#################################################################
######################### VERSION 3.1.2 ###########################
#################################################################

######################
# Performance and Stability
######################

* Fixed a crash where releasing a vassal as a Clone Army could cause an invalid species.

######################
# Bugfixes
######################

* Fixed the Clone Army origin tooltip not having a matching ship upkeep reduction with their admirals. Also changed the bonus to scale in a cleaner way, the upkeep is now 5/10/20% based on the Army's decisions.
* The Genetic Crossroads special project will now abort if a species completes Synthetic Evolution before finishing it.
* Fixed habitability of planets that clone armies have abandoned through lack of clone vats being locked at 0% for them.
* Ancient Clone Vats can now only assemble Clone Soldier pops.
* Going into a food deficit when using the Catalytic Processing civic will now give a -50% production penalty to alloy production. This penalty is in line with the penalty non-catalytic empires suffer from a mineral deficit
* Fixed players being able to move their Science Ship to blow up systems using the “Elder One” event.
* Fixed exploit where AI acceptance from Eminent Diplomats tradition also applied to trade deals.

######################
# Known Issues
######################

* The penalty to alloy production from a food deficit in catalytic empires is not shown in the deficit tooltip.
* Mastercraft Inc. Civic does not change Artisans into Artificers on an Ecumenopolis.
* Some inconsistencies in the number of jobs exchanged by Foundry Station designation for empires with the Catalytic processing civic.
* It’s possible for the Nivlac species to be created without the Radiotrophic trait in certain instances.
* Party Aftermath event can create crossbreed species between caravaneers and an infertile clone pop.
* Shattered Ring World can turn into a planet due to takeover or devastation.
* Mechanical pops with a Decadent Lifestyle have no pop upkeep.
* Awakened Empires don't use traditions properly.
* Machine empires can spawn with the necrophage origin.

[/expand]

For those of you still waiting for your mods to update, we also have been maintaining a list of updated mods for 3.1.*, you can check it out here.

Thanks for reading, we’ll see you next week where grekulf will shine some light on the operations of the Custodian team.

The Stellaris Team