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Stellaris Dev Diary #367 - 4.0 Changes: Part 1

Greetings, Stellaris Community!

Last week we announced the Stellaris 4.0 ‘Phoenix’ update, today we’re going to start going through some of the changes coming in it. As mentioned before, the changes we’ll be going through in the next few dev diaries are still scorching hot on the development branch, and may change drastically before final release.

That said, the ones I’ll be talking about today have cooled off a little bit and are pretty stable at this point.

Precursor Selection​

Let’s start with a simple one that I already leaked to you back in December.

The Advanced Settings tab when you’re setting up a new game will now have a section that lets you set which Precursors are available in your galaxy.

Galaxy Setup, Showing Precursor Selection.

The galaxy will be split into slices and the available Precursors distributed as they are currently - in the above example, the First League and Cybrex would not appear for anyone in this galaxy.

You are free to set the number of available Precursors to whatever number you desire, even none, but remember that in multiplayer games, each Precursor chain can only be completed by a single player. We recommend having at least four, to keep a sense of uncertainty and wonder in the galaxy, but it’s up to you if you want to force a specific Precursor.

The Stellaris Databank​

Back in the Stellaris 3.8 ‘Gemini’ update we introduced ‘Concepts’, as our variant of Tooltips-within-Tooltips. We’ve been iterating on how we use them over time, and they’ve become a great asset in helping explain the complexities of Stellaris.

In the Stellaris 4.0 ‘Phoenix’ update, we’re adding a compendium of sorts that contains Concepts in a searchable form, the Stellaris Databank.

Stellaris Databank

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Concepts in the Databank are divided into categories, and can themselves include further Concepts. Clicking the icon in the top right searches for the Concept in the Stellaris wiki, for more detailed information.

Filtered Databank

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Searching for “Alloys” gives us every Concept that includes the word, sorting the most relevant to the top.

Concepts showing links to the Databank

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If you have a Concept open, clicking will open the Databank, if you would like to know more.

We’re interested in seeing how you use the Databank and how it can be improved in the future.

Species Modification Changes​

We gave you a quick preview of the Species menu last week, but now we’ll go a little more in depth. The Species screen now provides you with more information about the various species in your empire, including showing the number of trait picks they might have remaining.

The template modification window itself has been remade to provide better sorting of positive and negative traits, and listing them by value, making it easier to find the traits you’re looking for.

Species Modification Process (Using a Special Project)

My serviles should be delicious, don’t you think?​

The new flow removes a few clicks from the process, starting the Special Project immediately.

If time is not of the essence, instead of using a Special Project to modify your species, you can designate a template as the Species Default, and let them integrate over to that default template slowly over time. Certain traditions or buildings might affect the speed of this integration process.

Species Modification Process (using Integration)

Actually, scratch that. Everybody should be delicious.
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Ship Designer Changes​

Like some of the other UIs we’re exploring today, the Ship Designer has had some quality of life updates.

We’ve taken the Ship Roles that were introduced in the 3.6 ‘Orion’ update and made selecting one part of the basic ship design flow and giving them a better representation than a scrollable text list. Some pain points of ship design, like the Auto-generate changes button blocking saving, have been removed, and in general it’s a faster and easier process to create a general ship design.

Ship Design Process

We’ve added a “Custom” role for veteran players that want to design the ship from scratch, or you can take one of these generated templates and modify them to suit your needs before saving.

Next Week​

Next week we’ll go over more details regarding the improvements to Message Settings, as well as a selection of other features that are still so hot in development that they’re still glowing placeholder-magenta. If I can’t get you decent screenshots, I’ll post some of the concepts and explain what we’re in the middle of.

See you then!
 
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I love the Precursor selection options, and I note the spaces crying out to be filled (perhaps in future updates).

One thing I will say is that which precursors get selected, and which don't, should be some valuable data as to which Precursors are regarded as strong and which are regarded as weak. Perhaps this may portend buffing in future patches for Precursors which are considered underwhelming?
 
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The Databank is something that I will likely be using more than I'd care to admit. I'm assuming that there won't be anything lore-related in there?
 
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All welcomed changes but if i understood correctly. pre-cursor selection will only determine what galaxy will generate. Not what we are going to get.
Later one is needed more i believe.
 
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Is it correct to say that the galaxy is split into a number of slices equal to the number of precursors? So if we only have one it doesn’t matter where you spawn, you’ll get it? And if you have two the galaxy is 50/50? Also will the AI get precursors or did that not survive testing?

For pop mods I can’t wait for integration, that’s so good! Have you considered adding some nuance for climate habitability? I can see situations where I want everyone the same other than their habitability.
 
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I came to the restaurant after watching a YouTube video about course meals.

I found out too late that the course meal will come out slowly, chopped up until May.

I'm hungry.
 
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Eladrin said:

Precursor Selection​

Let’s start with a simple one that I already leaked to you back in December.

The Advanced Settings tab when you’re setting up a new game will now have a section that lets you set which Precursors are available in your galaxy.


The galaxy will be split into slices and the available Precursors distributed as they are currently - in the above example, the First League and Cybrex would not appear for anyone in this galaxy.

You are free to set the number of available Precursors to whatever number you desire, even none, but remember that in multiplayer games, each Precursor chain can only be completed by a single player. We recommend having at least four, to keep a sense of uncertainty and wonder in the galaxy, but it’s up to you if you want to force a specific Precursor.
Click to expand...


So, its like, 6am here, so apologies if this is a dumb question with an obvious answer, but is this confirmation that during singleplayer games, I can complete multiple precursor chains?
 
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How hard would it be for mods to add stuff to the databank?
I assume mods that, say, introduces a new resource would very much like to be able to add to the databank.
 
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Grenartia said:
So, its like, 6am here, so apologies if this is a dumb question with an obvious answer, but is this confirmation that during singleplayer games, I can complete multiple precursor chains?
Click to expand...
No, this will just determine which precursor will show up. Effectively allowing you to filter out any precursors you really don't like and would normally restart a game because of that.
 
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Love the Precursor selection option - very useful! I wonder if it's possible to extend that to other things, eg Leviathans? Would be nice to be able to have the option to choose without needing mods.
 
meruem02 said:
All welcomed changes but if i understood correctly. pre-cursor selection will only determine what galaxy will generate. Not what we are going to get.
Later one is needed more i believe.
Click to expand...

If you select only one Precursor, you have guaranteed what you will get.
 
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I'm still kinda confused on how precursors are generated. From what I understand if I have 8 precursors the galaxy is split into 8 "pizza slices" each precursors occupying one, so what happens if i reduce it to 7? Is one of the "slices" empty or will remaining slices expand to fill the region?
 
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1. What would happen if we go below the recommended 4 precursors to maybe 2 or even 1? I can see myself experimenting by pairing particular origins to a precursor, like Life-Seeded to Baol, or Teachers of the Shroud to Zroni.

2. How will pick-able precursors effect multiplayer? Will there be multiple First League homeworld's spawn, or will players be fighting over the same one? Could precursor clues become a tradable asset for players to find, if they wanted to keep the Cyberex, for example, out of a rival's hands?
 
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Is it possible for us to set default template for planet specific? Having a specific template for specialized planet and common template for most planets.
 
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rvdleun said:
The Databank is something that I will likely be using more than I'd care to admit. I'm assuming that there won't be anything lore-related in there?
Click to expand...

We're still experimenting with exactly how we want to use it, but generally it's expected to be a repository of Concepts to help you get information inside of the game itself whenever possible.

Grenartia said:
So, its like, 6am here, so apologies if this is a dumb question with an obvious answer, but is this confirmation that during singleplayer games, I can complete multiple precursor chains?
Click to expand...

We have not changed the "one precursor per empire" rule.

Calvax said:
Is it correct to say that the galaxy is split into a number of slices equal to the number of precursors? So if we only have one it doesn’t matter where you spawn, you’ll get it? And if you have two the galaxy is 50/50? Also will the AI get precursors or did that not survive testing?
Click to expand...

That's currently accurate. We'll continue playtesting it and see if we want to have a minimum number of slices, since I generally feel that it's better for a single Precursor to be localized to a portion of space rather than literally everywhere. (Some of the events imply that they were local powers rather than galaxy dominating behemoths.)

The recommendation of 4+ Precursors started with that in mind, but currently we do not create "empty slices".

The AI does not get precursors currently. It kind of ended up making the player get all of them, while also introducing a "feels bad" moment if they beat you to yours.

Re: Habitability, sounds like something a biologically ascending empire would be interested in making smoother.
 
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very nice changes. but id love if we could take ship blueprints from one save to another and got ways to faster navigate between designs. endlessly scrolling is annoying as is always designing the same ship variants every game anew
 
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