Stellaris Dev Diary #387 - 4.0.21 is Out, What’s Next?

by Eladrin

Hello, Stellaris community!

Last week I said the next dev diary would be on the 26th, but I didn’t want to wait that long to discuss our plans moving forward.

This week we released 4.0.21, with the following changes:

Stellaris 4.0.21 Patch

Improvement

• Storm Aftermath events will no longer happen in systems where you are constructing megastructures. Meaning that it will no longer randomly spawn an anomaly under your Dyson swarm that was 99% done.
• Save game transfer speed is now increased in multiplayer by default. If you encounter difficulties in transferring saves, the host can change to using the former transfer mode through settings.

Bugfix

• Memorialists now give their priests the ethics modifiers their civic tooltip promises
• Armies that have landed on planets show properly in the outliner
• Reforming the government to Genesis Guides allows building Genesis Arks
• Ringworld districts now correctly spawn on pre-ftl ringworlds
• Fixed ringworlds colonized by gestalt empires having a mysterious city district that shouldn't exist.
• Fixed the leader survived notification text
• Fixed Fear of the Dark random empires being able to get bioships
• The Purity Breach event can no longer destroy colonies
• Fixed an error preventing refugees from behaving properly
• The Fatal Mutations event should no longer destroy colonies
• The Necrophage Purge option will now only be displayed if you can take it, this is to avoid confusion when pops might be getting purged in your empire unintentionally, such as Hive Pops being disconnected from their hive.
• Evolutionary Predator Empires can now once more gain and keep the Psionic Ephase trait
• The Entrepreneur traits once again grant Commercial Pact Efficiency
• Serviles should no longer end up as Specialists or Elites
• Removed an errant plus from some of the mutagenic habitability tooltips
• Fixed the tooltips listing the effects for the Subsume World decision and Xeno-Compatibility AP
• Biologist jobs that aren't zookeepers now have the correct upkeep.
• Fixed an issue that could occur when machine empires colonised ringworlds.
• Fixed an issue where AI empires would respond with generic text when accepting a Status Quo peace deal, instead of dynamic responses.
• Corrected a localization issue where an AI empire accepting peace would incorrectly refer to the player as having "better things to do" instead of themselves.
• Secondary specializations for fortresses and civilian industries on special worlds correctly have doubled jobs.
• Transport ships for eager explorer civics now equip a subspace drive if you haven't researched hyperdrives. They will automatically swap once hyperdrives have been researched.
• Fix a tooltip in the Demographics tab of the Empire view
• Gestalt empires have access to fallen empire trade buildings

Balance

• Necrophage fixes/buffs:[list]
• Pops with the Necrophage trait can now grow (slowly) even if there are pops being Necrophaged on their planet.
• Reduced the Pop Growth Speed penalty on the Necrophage trait from -75% to -50%.
• Necrophages begin with more of their prepatent species (and fewer of their Necrophage species).
• Necrophages (and other empires that have multiple species present) should no longer sometimes start with unemployment.

The Resettlement Prohibited policy now grants +100% Automatic Migration. (In other words, banning manual resettlement increases automatic resettlement.)

Empires with biological ships can now access repeatable technologies for explosive weapon damage and fire rate

Machine Worlds now always have their maximum number of jobs.

Resource Consolidation now starts with fewer Generator and Mining Districts, due to these districts providing 600 jobs each.

Resource Consolidation no longer has the Malfunctioning Replicator Bay blocker

UI

• The Colonize planet button can now be accessed on the management tab as well as the surface tab

Modding

• Add refresh_auto_generated_ship_designs effect

If you want to see the list of all of the things we fixed in the previous releases, here they are.

We’re continuing to investigate the other issues that you have reported.

What’s Next?

It’s time to review the last couple of months and look at what we’ve done and where we’re going from here.

Back in Stellaris Dev Diary #383, I committed to continuing to fix things until the 4.0 release is in the state it needs to be in. 

We’ve released a tremendous number of patches since then at a rapid rate - but our patch cadence has become problematic (and even counterproductive) in some ways. Too often in game development, fixing one bug introduces another - and I haven’t been giving our internal QA testers enough time to fully vet and test the changes we’ve been making. Examples from recent patches include a few weeks ago when an unrelated fix to a pop issue caused Wilderness empires to seemingly randomly destroy themselves by killing all of their biomass, or when another fix just after that caused save games to corrupt and become unloadable. 

We remain committed to continuing to fix things until the 4.0 release is in the state it needs to be in.

We need to change how we’re doing this though, taking a more measured and deliberate approach to allow internal testing to catch up while giving you a more stable environment to play the game in. This means that the patching frequency is going to slow down, but with more impactful releases. Our ongoing plan is to make greater use of Open Betas - the first instance of this is the Wilderness Open Beta that we put up last week (which may or may not ever go live based on your feedback).

We will be more careful in vetting changes and merging them into that ongoing Open Beta, continuing to focus on stability, performance, AI, and bugfixing. My intent is for us to update the Open Beta on a weekly to fortnightly basis depending on internal progress throughout the summer. While the Stellaris team will be continuing development during this time, it will soon become difficult for us to arrange for live patches - barring a critical hotfix or a “eureka moment”, I expect the next 4.0.x live release will be sometime in August. (Which as mentioned earlier, may not include the Wilderness changes.) To the Modders that have been waiting for a moment of stability, now’s your time - and if you run into issues updating your mods, please don’t hesitate to let us know.

Things We're Actively Working On

For more transparency:

I’m personally currently looking at ways to improve the AI’s behavior. Other things currently in active development are OOS investigations, a number of strata issues that affect slavery, purging, and other oddities among pop employment, and more of a design change rather than a bugfix - based on your feedback we’re looking at having newly grown pops go straight into the Civilian stratum or its appropriate equivalent instead of being unemployed members of their parent pop group. While we liked the verisimilitude of top-heavy planets having more stability issues than ones that were more evenly developed, we acknowledge that having a persistent trickle of unemployed pops feels wrong.

We’re also continuously looking for performance improvements. We’ve found one so far where every empire was calculating their Biomass total far too often - even if they weren’t Wilderness, and while it was one of the heavier scripts in the early portion of the game, that’s not where our biggest problems are.

Some of these will likely go to the Open Beta next week, after more rigorous testing.

I will be putting the Stellaris Dev Diaries on hiatus until August, replacing them with the Open Beta updates on that weekly or fortnightly basis as they occur, and we’ll remain in constant communication with you as we continue to update and improve the game.

Please continue bringing up the issues you find, balance issues you encounter, and providing save games and out of sync logs whenever you can. They help a tremendous amount.

Thank you for playing Stellaris!