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Stellaris Dev Diary #254 - 3.4.3 'Cepheus' Patch Released (Checksum 9d15)... What's Next?

Hi all!

I'm happy to announce that the 3.4.3 hotfix should now be live and available on all platforms!

On Monday I said that we were planning to address primary issues as quickly as we could and have a larger patch in a few weeks, but the team was absolutely on fire and was able to bring many of the fixes and changes that were originally scheduled for the later release into this hotfix. As a result, the 3.4.3 hotfix is significantly larger than a hotfix would usually be.

I want to stress exactly how helpful the bug reports we received were during this process - they made it possible for QA to generate a list of the biggest issues affecting the community and helped us prioritize our work, so thank you for submitting them, and please continue doing so if you run into issues.

Without further ado, here are...
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######################### VERSION 3.4.3 ############################
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Revolt and Planet Stability related fixes and changes:
  • When planets revolt, there is now an option to declare war on the new country immediately rather than being subjected to a 10-year truce. The revolting planet counts as the aggressor. (if the planet joins another empire, and you choose war with them, the other country is now considered the aggressor).
  • Revolt Situations no longer cause escalating stability maluses, as these could make it impossible to stop a revolt. They now give a flat 10 stability malus at all stages.
  • The modifier a pop gets from its faction's happiness now updates properly (so if you make a faction happier, it will correctly make its pops happier now).
  • Fixed it being possible for a Revolt Situation to start and immediately cancel. (They will now only start if the planet is calculated to be currently capable of succeeding the revolt)
  • Planets with Culture Shock can now only start a revolt situation after 8 years of unrest, rather than 1, as it could be quite hard to avoid a revolt on these planets. Otherwise newly-conquered planets have 4-year cooldowns.
  • Improved AI decision making on Revolt Situations.
  • Fixed cases where rebels and released empires would have traditions and techs they should not have had access to (e.g. if non-gestalt pops rebelled against a gestalt empire).
  • Fixed cases where rebels and released empires would use their parent countries scientists for research. I.e. the researcher would be active in both countries, until one country changed their task.
  • Cleaned up some unclear language in the tooltip for Revolt Situation progress (the one describing what you can do about it).
  • Void Dwellers now replace the 1 Politician (or Executive) job from Habitat Administration buildings with two Colonist jobs, which should increase their overall stability in the early game.
  • Doomsday origin starting planets will no longer clamor to revolt. (Revolt Situations are disabled on them.)

Deficit related fixes and changes:
  • To help them to deal with unexpected deficits, Empires can now purchase basic or advanced resources (specifically food or consumer goods) from the internal market if they have expenses of that type, even if they do not produce any themselves.
  • Fixed never-ending deficits - if you go into a deficit of a resource you do not produce at all, and then stop spending it (i.e. end up with both expenses and income of 0), the deficit will now resolve itself in a few months. This solves issues with machines having inexplicable food and consumer goods deficits, as well as cases where people over-spend rare resources they gained via event.
  • All resources provided for deficit bailouts now scale with the game year, instead of just those for the situation that completed.
  • Fixed a case where the situation approach to cut the maintenance of habitats would count double.
  • Fixed stray reference to Minerals in the Consumer Goods Deficit Situation.

Subject and Agreement related fixes and changes:
  • Subjects should no longer flip-flop between regular subject types and protectorate.
  • Fix issue where a new subject created from a Status Quo would be made up of the wrong systems.
  • Subjects can no longer sign Defensive Pacts or Guarantee Independence of other empires.
  • Releasing a sector as a subject or enlightening a pre-ftl civilization now ignores the cooldown on agreement negotiation.
  • Increased the effects of Relative Power on AI acceptance of agreement negotiation.
  • Added base acceptance for subsidiary.
  • Tweaked AI acceptance of resource contribution terms, making them more likely to accept harsher tithes/subsidies.
  • AI overlords and subjects will now be more likely to accept specialist subject types that disagree with their ethics.
  • Set minimum Advanced Resources tax for Prospectorium to 15% from 30%
  • Fixed ACTION_DEMAND_SUBJUGATION_NOTIFICATION and ACTION_ASK_TO_BECOME_SUBJUGATED_NOTIFICATION loc keys.
  • Fix for trade deals that are accepted and then canceled immediately.
  • Fixed AI not taking relative power into account when considering subjugation proposals.
  • You can no longer set the priority of overlord catalytic or metallurgist jobs.
  • Overlord catalytic jobs no longer have the pre-3.4 penalties for food deficits.
  • Corporate overlords now have access to the protectorate subject type.
  • Slaves can now be "employed" as mind-thralls.
  • Fixed issue when removing/replacing overlord removes the corporate holdings.
  • The Divided Patronage loyalty penalty is now correctly removed from existing subjects when taking Shared Destiny, Feudal Society or Franchising.
  • You can no longer immediately see the secret fealty status of sectors released as subjects.
  • Rebalanced trade weights for specialist subject leaders.
  • Subjects that are converting to a specialist subject can continue conversion even if they should flip to a protectorate.
  • Subjects that are converting to a specialist subject cannot flip to a protectorate due to low tech level.
  • Empires can no longer have negative diplomatic weight.

Game Stability related fixes and changes:
  • Fixed crash connected with resettling the last pop of a species.
  • Fixed a rare crash in the Situations interface.
  • Fixed crash with modded shipsets.
  • Fixed a crash that would happen when generating very large galaxies with high hyperlane density.
  • Fixed a crash related to Federation Laws.

Ship related fixes and changes:
  • Ship starting experience modifiers now work when provided empire-wide (e.g. Fleet Supremacy edict)
  • Fixed tracking not countering evasion.
  • Added missing ship components for Offspring ships.
  • Mercenary fleets are now buffed by Offspring Auras
  • Added missing L2 Battleship section for Offspring Battleships.
  • Fixed ship build and upgrade cost modifiers not being applied correctly when retrofitting ships.
  • Fixed certain AIs (the ones with Calamitous Birth and Private Colony Ships) never colonizing.
  • You can no longer found mercenary enclaves using fleets belonging to your federation or the galactic community.

Other fixes and changes:
  • Legacy Human portraits have been re-added as an option in empire creation.
  • Fixed pops that grow as specialists on Colonies.
  • Fixed pops which go into a loop of swapping jobs with unemployed specialists constantly resetting strata demotion timers.
  • Amenity job management is now activated even when there are no resources available for planet automation.
  • Fixed an issue where planet automation could not use resources from their local sector stockpile.
  • Planet automation will now check that the unemployed pops can work the jobs that the automation would build, e.g. preventing specialist job creation for slave pops.
  • Reduced the amount of research given by merc dividends.
  • Fixed an issue where systems with primitives in them would not be transferred correctly during a status quo war resolution.
  • Non-Prophet Organization now correctly checks for the Teachers of the Shroud origin.
  • Fixed the Stellar Performance achievement not being awarded properly.
  • Subterranean empire are now shown uncapped mining districts on uncolonised worlds.
  • The Crystalline Bane modifier is now removed if you kill the Crystal Kraken in a dishonorable manner.
  • Progenitor Nest deposit is no longer removed when terraforming a planet into a hive-world.
  • Hive worlds now provide an offspring drone for progenitor hives instead of a spawning drones.
  • Fixed the Cyro Pod warrior event for xenophobes.
  • Meeting the artist enclave now sets the correct flag.
  • Added tooltip on create office branch button when players could not open a branch office.
  • Shroudwalker greeting event now fires only once.
  • Fixed tooltip for starbase resource silos.

###################
New Known Issues
###################

  • Localization for non-English languages related to these changes will be coming in a future update.
  • When negotiating an agreement, if the other party does not wish to accept the terms but does not have the influence necessary to decline, the eventual notification says that the deal timed out and auto-declined when in fact it was auto-accepted.

So what's next?

We'll be continuing to keep an eye on things, so keep those bug reports and feedback flowing. Currently our plan is to have a 3.4.4 update in a few weeks, that will contain localization updates for the 3.4.3 hotfix, more fixes and balance adjustments.

A sneak peek of some of the things we're looking at for the planned patch include the following:
  • The Imperial Fiefdom will start with colonies close to every member of their empire, so nobody will feel left out of the fold. Those who feel particularly loyal will now also be able to remain a vassal of the empire after the civil war has started.
  • Added Hydroponics Station designation for habitats. This designation removes 2 housing from Habitation Districts in exchange for adding 1 farmer jobs.
  • Ships now gain 5 exp per day in battle instead of 1.
  • Doubled the base unity output of telepaths.
  • Khan should no longer be hostile to mercenaries.
  • Admirals no longer abandon their post on leased fleets.
  • Planetary automation will no longer seek to build gene clinics if you are a synthetically-ascended empire.
  • Planetary automation will now seek to clear blockers as soon as there is any need. It now uses the same formula as the indicator on the outliner: i.e. if it is limiting the number of districts OR if there are buildings that could be built by clearing the blockers OR if planet growth speed is reduced (previous behaviour was to only check the first of those).
  • Fixed issue where planetary automation would upgrade Necrophage Centers of Elevation (which is often undesirable as it may lead to you running out of necrophytes)
  • Newly colonized planets will now have their planet automation turned on if they are in an automated sector
  • Made some clarifications for the Shroudwalkers, so it is clearer what asset you are getting from them and how the planet modifier works.
  • You can no longer build an orbital ring around a planet with a destroyed orbital ring.
  • Added is_human_species scripted trigger if you want additional portraits to be considered humans.
  • Added on_fleet_lease_started/ended on_actions for more friendly mod compatibility
  • Added is_human_species scripted trigger if you want additional portraits to be considered humans.
We also have some quality of life automation improvements planned for 3.4.4:
  • Automated Exploration and Automated Research are now available from the start of the game rather than being tech-locked.
  • Construction ships now have an Automated Construction mode, which will automatically build Research and Mining Stations over appropriate deposits. (It will not automatically build Observation Stations, Hyper Relays, or other constructions.)

Automated Construction

Thanks for playing!
 
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Even if the Megastructures weren't on the outliner, just a way to find them easier in general would be fantastic. It would also be absolutely insanely awesomely turbo rad if didn't have to click 'upgrade" on gateways anymore and could just build them in one stage even if it cost the same resources and time as it does now. If I don't instantly drop what I'm doing and click the "go to" button on the pop up to build the next stage of the gateway, there's a roughly 0% chance I'm ever finding that half built gateway again
 
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Good work, but i hope you incidentally didnt let some hot-code laying around, since your team was, well - "absolutely on fire".

Any chance we could get weekly and incremental patches instead of one big month or so down the line?
 
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Good work, but i hope you incidentally didnt let some hot-code laying around, since your team was, well - "absolutely on fire".

Any chance we could get weekly and incremental patches instead of one big month or so down the line?
Every fix was checked before and after merging. So we should be good ;) We put in a lot of extra effort to that end.


Weekly patches are a no go, too much overhead and possible disruption to everything else we've got going on unfortunately. 3.4.4 won't be a month out but after that the next release will be the next custodian patch.
 
  • Automated Exploration are now available from the start of the game rather than being tech-locked.
Only took six years, but I'm glad the team finally made the correct design decision.
 
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Will the automated station construction being discussed take funds from the automation stockpile?

Can you add an alert, popup, etc for the following: can share tech with a merc enclave, can expand their fleet, or when a fleet's contract expires? When I was playing earlier, I didn't think that happened and got confused when my fleets disappeared in the middle of a war (for all I know, I just missed this in the patch notes).

Is it possible for excess resources (or at least minerals and energy) to be auto-donated to the automation stockpile instead of disappearing? I only thought of it now since there is a much bigger emphasis on automation now.
 
I personally don't know anything about the merging of robot pops, but the Megastructure outliner and fleet outliner reordering have been on my table for quite some time already. It has just been pushed around several times due to putting priority on the 3.4 free update and the assigned UX designer moving teams.

I would like to try and address the fact that the outliner has grown a bit out of control for the space allocated to it as we've added more and more features into the game and making these changes before we do that work would lead to some double work, which isn't efficient use of our time and that's also lead to that work being delayed.

But rest assured that as soon as I have a UX designer by my side in this task, I will push for making it happen!
I also want to stress that we do read the suggestions forum, so keep posting and voting in there :)
The big dev posts this week have been really positive after a rather painful DLC launch. It is good to know what's happening and why.

I hope when you can work on the outliner you consider adding options similar to the different TinyOutliner mods to fit far more items on the screen at the same time, especially now that Orbital Rings flood the outliner (and are hard to tell apart and navigate from ring to ring without lots of clicks) and the new situations take up room at the top of the outliner... personally I just find it irritating to have several idle ships that have been ignored just because the outliner isn't concise enough to show the required information without scrolling a lot. (For megastructures I've taken to leaving construction ships at important locations as living bookmarks).

Also I think that the lack of a single suggestion in the "Implemented" tab of the Suggestions sub-forum makes people feel ignored. But that's probably more an issue with the implemented filter never being used since the forum has been reworked a few times and changes get made that reset the view figures for older items to 0 making them look ignored when the forum incorrectly says they haven't been viewed much.

It a similar feeling with bug reports. Of the past 25 bug reports I've made for example only 3 were "confirmed" or had a response, the rest didn't get any indication they had been read. Only one of those actually asked for any follow-up information when they struggled to replicate the issue. I wish they'd ask for more information. If you sort by newest you have to go past page after page of bugs to find some responses or confirmed tags. So if you report a bug again and again each version of the game with no response it can feel a bit miserable (like when someone mentioned the marauder+FTL inhibitor bug before, and QA had never heard of it despite bugs being reported on each game version for litterally years and it being something I've personally noticed in every single game I have played since FTL inhibition was added).

Also, since you said you don't know about robotic pops there are several issues I can think of that it could be about:
1. Machine empires capture Robots from normal empires but can't really do anything with them making them a drain on your economy (Robots lack machine traits and trait points, can't be modded into your machine race, can't be purged) and these end up cluttering your species list.
2. Normal empiores capture Robots and each empire's Robots count as a seperate species. As they can all be modded to have identical traits they should be able to be coded as sub-templates of a single master template to reduce some clutter and micromanagement. I want to eventually have 1 pop template with a set of traits, but end up with 7+ pop templates with the same traits that can never be merged and need to be modified individually which isn't really worth doing for a couple of pops so it's just a big cluttered list of pops I've picked up.... more irritating and confusing than harmful.


But I do understand there are far bigger problems with Overlord and relatively little things like poor UI and poor tooltips complaints get little traction. I understand the need for triage to deal with actual gamebreaking bugs and even having to wait for staff with the correct skills to be available for any UX changes. If nothing else your message does help to temper any expectations at least. I don't expect the things that bug me to get fixed anytime soon, but at least I know why.
 
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auto exploration is back on the menu boys!
 
I personally don't know anything about the merging of robot pops, but the Megastructure outliner and fleet outliner reordering have been on my table for quite some time already. It has just been pushed around several times due to putting priority on the 3.4 free update and the assigned UX designer moving teams.

I would like to try and address the fact that the outliner has grown a bit out of control for the space allocated to it as we've added more and more features into the game and making these changes before we do that work would lead to some double work, which isn't efficient use of our time and that's also lead to that work being delayed.

But rest assured that as soon as I have a UX designer by my side in this task, I will push for making it happen!
I also want to stress that we do read the suggestions forum, so keep posting and voting in there :)
And this is why people are so happy with ya'lls communication. Just the simple statement of; we had the guy/gal that was working on it (with the right skill set) move teams to work on something else is a very clear indication of why something isn't being addressed in the timeframe that people/consumers would 'think' it should take.

I think most of us understand people are resources and losing a team member can set back a project's goals while the project team looks for obtaining a suitable replacement. But just the simple communication sets all the expectations to a right level and helps knock down any 'what are they doing' walls/resentment from the players.
 
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It a similar feeling with bug reports. Of the past 25 bug reports I've made for example only 3 were "confirmed" or had a response, the rest didn't get any indication they had been read. Only one of those actually asked for any follow-up information when they struggled to replicate the issue. I wish they'd ask for more information. If you sort by newest you have to go past page after page of bugs to find some responses or confirmed tags. So if you report a bug again and again each version of the game with no response it can feel a bit miserable (like when someone mentioned the marauder+FTL inhibitor bug before, and QA had never heard of it despite bugs being reported on each game version for litterally years and it being something I've personally noticed in every single game I have played since FTL inhibition was added).
Unfortunately there's far too many reports to ever maintain a "clean" sheet. We can only spend so much time on each issue and prioritise accordingly. There's no responses in the past day or so too, because I've given my team a break from trawling the forum and will revisit once a weekend has passed of play with 3.4.3 to see what issues rise to the top to be dealt with.
 
Well, first message on the forum.

First, good job on the fast and massive hotfix! But don't burn yourself over an update, health before work.

Void Dwellers now replace the 1 Politician (or Executive) job from Habitat Administration buildings with two Colonist jobs, which should increase their overall stability in the early game.

I would have understood if the reason behind this change was to nerf Void Dwellers but it instead seems the goal is help Void Dwellers with stability.
Like Nevars said colonist are practicaly useless and the gain in stability is not worth the lost of 4 working Pop at the start of the game.

I can think of 2 solutions on top of my head that would help stability.

1) Add 1 Clerk or Colonist job to the Habitat Administration buildings. This will provide the Amenities demanded without impacting the economy of Void Dwellers in any major way.

2) The second solution is not a really good one but maybe it will give some ideas to people more intelligent than me. Replace the Holo-Theatres on the capital with Hydroponics Farms and the Hydroponics Farm on habitat 2 and 3 with Holo-Theatres. The problem of this solution is Pop will not want to work on farmers job on the capital and instead will take specialist jobs.
 
Unfortunately there's far too many reports to ever maintain a "clean" sheet. We can only spend so much time on each issue and prioritise accordingly. There's no responses in the past day or so too, because I've given my team a break from trawling the forum and will revisit once a weekend has passed of play with 3.4.3 to see what issues rise to the top to be dealt with.

When you say "rise" to the top, how do they prioritize older bug reports to actually review?

Votes?
# of replies?
Most recent reply?
Only things with save games or other attachments?
Only reports based on the most recent version?

Like, someone could make a completely legit old bug report that is so thorough and correct that people just read it, nod their heads, and assume QA will eventually log it. Without voting/replying.
 
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On the topic of new QoL changes for 3.4.4, are there any plans for allowing us to merge various robot species and adding megastructures to the outliner?

I would like to try and address the fact that the outliner has grown a bit out of control for the space allocated to it as we've added more and more features into the game and making these changes before we do that work would lead to some double work, which isn't efficient use of our time and that's also lead to that work being delayed.

IMO there should just be a Mercs tab in the Fleet Manager window or something, where you can see an overview status of your Enclaves. It seems like it would be fairly easy to show their current tech and size level and let you increase it with a button click, as well as their deployment status and to whom. It could let you customize them there, or at least it would be nice if you could tell them "Focus on Shields / armor and Kinetics / Lasers".

To me, it looks like in general PDX for some reason tries to avoid adding complicated UI elements like windows when possible. Eg. the merc enclaves use standard enclave diplomatic screens, new features like holdings (and branch offices earlier) are added to the UI in what to me looks minimum viable effort (new tab in the planet screen). I don't know the reason, but I am probably talking out of my .... but I guess designing UI for Stellaris requires comparatively lot more resources/time than many other aspects of the game.

I hope, at some point, PDX/Custodians could make some larger changes to the UI. Outliner is great but not everything should be in it. I already find the outliner to be cumbersome as because pretty much everything goes to it.

I don't normally really care about branch offices and how much credits they are bringing, I only want to see them if there is a new building slot available or maybe if the income drops under X amount. Or planets which have no issues. I think there should be UI windows for managing stuff like branch offices, megastructures, merc enclaves and so so and the outliner could be used for more important stuff the player should notice. Eg. newly colonized planets, planets with blockers, no housing, unemployed pops, open building slots etc.

Suggestion for adding Branch offices (and now Holdings) to the expansion planner is one of the most popular suggestions and was posted in 2020: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...e-to-expansion-planner-for-megacorps.1376008/
 
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Automated exploration and construction is a dream come true.

Not the most exciting dream, but a dream nonetheless.
 
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Speaking of the Crystal Kraken, is there a chance that nations that have pacified crystal entities could have an interaction to coexist with the kraken
 
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With the new patch the AI seems very willing to allow vassalage by other AI even without war.

I can see multiple AI empires with a ton of vassals that have massive negative subject power modifiers towards them.

In my autorun, by 2300 the entire 1000 star galaxy of 20 ai empires was beholden to 3 different overlords. That seems a little excessive.
 
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When you say "rise" to the top, how do they prioritize older bug reports to actually review?

Votes?
# of replies?
Most recent reply?
Only things with save games or other attachments?
Only reports based on the most recent version?

Like, someone could make a completely legit old bug report that is so thorough and correct that people just read it, nod their heads, and assume QA will eventually log it. Without voting/replying.

I'm sure they just read through the forum and find the ones that

  • Are Actually Bugs
  • Are actually replicable
  • Have enough details to be useful
  • Are serious enough to be worth fixing
  • Are fixable without a ridiculous amount of investment

I highly doubt they put much weight on number of replies or most recent reply etc, beyond it giving some small indicator that it needs to be looked at first while scrolling through the forum, if even that. I'm not even part of QA and still skim the bug forum most days and it only takes like 15-20 minutes to read all the new posts and tell which are actual bugs, which are user error, which are suggestions in the form of a bug report etc

The #1 rule of fixing bugs is you have to be able to replicate it. If you can't, it ain't getting fixed because you won't know what caused it / can't tell if a fix even worked. After that, they are just going to order their internal list priority based on what is the most important and what's the easiest to fix. Dev hours are extremely expensive and the main "currency" used internally in a company, instead of spending 40 dev hours fixing a random bug that barely effects people, they will spend a few hours fixing 10 game breaking bugs caused by a simple typo in the code.


Source: I file JIRA tickets for a living and deal with developers daily.

Also, yes they almost certainly disregard any bug from a past version of the game unless it's still there. You'll want to test old bugs on the latest versions and update your report / make a new one




To me, it looks like in general PDX for whatever reason tries to avoid adding new UI complicated UI elements like windows when possible

I'm pretty sure they just don't want to bloat the UI any further because new players are scared of it, but IMO just hiding it in extra tabs is fine because new players won't get overwhelmed by it until they have played more and are actually researching different mechanics
 
Automated Exploration and Automated Research are now available from the start of the game rather than being tech-locked.
Thank god, I hated having to waste time researching those, and if you got them late it felt pointless.
 
I would have understood if the reason behind this change was to nerf Void Dwellers but it instead seems the goal is help Void Dwellers with stability.
Like Nevars said colonist are practicaly useless and the gain in stability is not worth the lost of 4 working Pop at the start of the game.

Void Dwellers started with negative amenities on their two side habitats, but were also starting with way too much unity compared to other origins.

The change was primarily intended to help them deal with that early game amenity issue while having minimal effects on them long term (since they're going to upgrade that capital building ASAP anyway).
 
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