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The Wilderness Open Beta has been updated again, with fixes to Workforce calculations, advanced and endgame AI plans, a fix to espionage, improvements to district tooltips, and more.
Here is a list of what we've changed:
4.0.22-Wilderness Open Beta 2025-07-08 Update
Balance:
Substantially increased the base Command Limit of fleets and most sources of Command Limit. We know you were going to doomstack those fleets anyway. (This is secretly mostly for performance reasons, don't tell anyone.)
Bugfix:
Fixed Workforce calculations.
Fix to Neural Chips in the Synaptic Lathe not functioning properly.
Planetary Logistic Deficits slider should now correctly apply.
Erudite trait now correctly applies to Leaders when gained through Adaptive Evolution
Fixed certain events not correctly creating buildings when initializing planets or otherwise changing AI controlled worlds.
Fixes wilderness biomass not being updated when loading an older savegame
Open Beta Only: Spy Networks should once again grow properly.
AI:
Continued improving the AI's economic plans to be more effective.
AIs now have distinct advanced and endgame economic plans that focus largely on Research, Naval Capacity, and whatever it is they use to build ships.
The AI is less enthusiastic about building Storm related buildings.
UI:
Pop Strata with no possible unemployment (like Civilians) hide the Unemployment values in collapsed planet jobs view
Improved District tooltips:
Hovering a district now shows the scaled and separated modifiers
Hovering the build button shows the values for a single district (this is what you'll gain)
Instead of being essentially omnipresent, the orange briefcase in the outliner now indicates that you have 500 or more Civilians + Unemployed pops on the planet. (100+ Unemployed pops should still override it with the red briefcase.)
Stability
OOS fix related to bombardment and ground combat
Potential OOS fix related to Grand Archives
Modding:
Added ship_reactor_power_add/mult modifiers
The num_empires trigger now correctly counts the number of empires instead of the number of fallen empires. Whoops.
The complete list of previous changes in this branch (excluding the new one) are here:
4.0.22 Ongoing Release Notes
Improvement
Significant quality of life and system changes to Wilderness empires.
To prevent issues with biomass not being available on planets due to construction, all Wilderness jobs are now automatically worked without requiring biomass. These jobs are worked by your primary species.
Jobs for Wilderness are now also properly represented instead of being worked by a single pop with massive workforce bonuses, you now see exactly how the job is worked, and the sliders are also now usable to customize how much of each job will be worked.
These changes are intended to prevent situations where some jobs would go unworked, make Wilderness less bug-prone, and are intended to give you more control over your economy in deficit situations. Please provide feedback!
Grown pops now spawn in a default stratum and job (like “Civilian”) instead of being unemployed their parents' stratum
Planetary Automation no longer actively tries to keep some civilians around.
Balance
The Arc Furnace no longer decreases in Mineral output as it increases Alloy output. The stages are now: 1m, 2m, 2m+1a, 2m+2a.
Updated the broadside stingers to correctly follow the 24-36-48 small slot-equivalency for their weapon slots. The youngest stage now has more medium slots but fewer large slots, while the adult and elder stages only have large slots.
The Cipher Mauler has given up two of its small weapon slots in exchange for two point defense slots
20% of the habitability ceiling reductions from Shattered Ring blockers have been moved to the more easily cleared Ancient Rubble blockers.
Shattered Ring Origin now starts with two additional Scrap Mining districts.
Various guardian space critter factions will now ignore ftl inhibitors.
The diplomacy tradition "The Federation" now also gives 25% progress in the Federation Code technology
The Holo-Museums acquired from the Curator enclave now swap Entertainers (or Evaluators) to Curators (or Curator Drones). These jobs produce Unity and Amenities, with each Holo-Museum adding additional job upkeep and output. Holo-Museums can now be constructed in research and resort specializations. Finally, these buildings are improved by the Archaeo-Engineers AP.
Galactic Curator civics also swap Entertainers (or Evaluators) to Curators (or Curator Drones)
Bugfix
Fixed the Controlled Evolution achievement checking you had the pre-BioGenesis genetic ascension. Also made it check that the species that granted the achievement did in fact have genes.
Fix Slaver Guilds constantly reassigning slaves and never enslaving workers
Updated the ship role handling of the cosmogenesis biological ships
Cosmogenesis biological ships can now equip the unique components of the equivalent regular biological ships, excluding growth components.
Fixes building limit calculation that was causing incorrect removal of buildings.
Fallen Empire trade buildings should no longer self destruct
The Corporate Embassy now correctly gives trader jobs for Worker Coop empires
Fix to building limit logic that was destroying things like the Archaeostudies building.
Land Appropriation once again kicks pops off their planets and makes them into refugees.
Strategic resource maximum for invalid countries is now calculated as zero
Fixed edge cases where shipyards could have ships from the old owner in the construction queue after being taken over
If you change your civics but not your authority the Ruler Chips modifiers should no longer reset.
Synapse drones job modifier will use the correct icon in the building effect summary.
Jobs production modifier fix in nested tooltip for Serviles trait
Maze Harbingers now use the correct amount of naval capacity
The hive Sensorium building no longer mentions Evaluators
The effects of the Galactic Curator civic councilors (both regular and corporate) now apply to Entertainers
Fixed Integrated Preservation still giving modifiers to Evaluator jobs
Job swaps that require buildings on a planet now require the building to not be disabled.
Improved consistency with the tooltips for the Galactic Curator civics
Virtuality Machine Empires on Ringworlds should no longer get regular engineering or physicists jobs, only gestalt ones.
Behemoth empires that have become Ever Hungry will no longer get "Nice Guy" event options, such as not being allowed to space Reth Unddol.
Unrest.4200 will no longer generate descriptions that don't describe the planets.
Improved dead object database
Science ships can no longer continue progressing archaeological sites without a leader
Biomass and Neural Chip Processing and Unprocessing jobs now have unique names so it's easier to tell what's going on.
AI
The AI should no longer occasionally just decide to stop building anything and wait for the sweet release of death.
Reduced the AI's love of hydroponic farms and other static job resource production buildings, and commercial nexuses.
AI is more likely to build Engineering, Physics, or Society Research modifying buildings if they have a specialization focusing on that research branch on the planet.
AI Shattered Ring empires will now actually clear their blockers to make use of their other habitable segments. They also favor the techs that are prerequisites for their shattered ring blockers.
AI Shattered Ring empires will wait a bit longer and space out their colonization of the other segments.
AI now has a better opinion of housing buildings and will not blow them up as often.
AI (and automatic tech selection in general) now more strongly favors techs that unlock District Specializations.
Reduced the "stickiness" of trade and urban designations on planets
The AI now has a greater preference for Cruisers and Battleships.
Adjusted AI priorities regarding research and trade targets.
The AI is no longer quite as gung-ho about Defense Privatization.
AI will no longer spam amenity buildings if it doesn't actually need them.
AI will no longer mix unity or trade district specializations with research or industrial specializations.
AI will now re-evaluate planet designations once per year.
Relaxed some restrictions regarding the AI building "flat job" buildings like Research Labs and Foundries.
The AI will now only build Research Specialization buildings on planets likely to have those types of researchers, but are more likely to do so than before.
The AI will only build more than two Strongholds on planets with a Fortress District Specialization.
AI Void Dwellers will now correctly budget alloys towards building Districts.
Fixed a bug where the AI would order fleets to follow one another, resulting in no fleet movement at all
Stability
Fixed an OOS at reconnect related to the bureaucrat job
Fix OOS related to Specimens and Exhibits
Fixed an OOS when a client uses a different language from the host
Fix CTD related to specimens
Fixed another OOS at reconnect
Performance
Fixed biomass growth on_monthly being called for non-wilderness empires
Refactored parts of the Planet UI to improve performance, this likely has the greatest benefit for lower end machines
Improved Nascent Stage Logic by roughly 75%. Let your favorite gladiatorial beasts flourish!
The AI will no longer constantly be starting and canceling Arc Furnaces and Dyson Swarms
Minor improvement to refugee_effect
Minor improvement to handling modifiers
Memory leak fix from faulty pattern.
UI
Update Deposits when a blocker is cleared while Planet view is open
Centered the army icons to be in the middle on background
Habitability and Dig site no longer overlap each other in the Planet UI.
Pop amount in the Current Population does not overlap other elements when it has more than 2 digits anymore in Planet UI.
Pop Count of Pop Group in the Ressettlement Window does not overlap when it has more than 4 digits.
New icon for strange wormhole
Introduced min/max pitch settings for Ship model preview: It will no longer do sharp and unpredictable turns when turning the ship model around.
Modding
Add district_limit to buildings
Console commands now use country index instead of country ID, making them easier to use
Add displace_pop_amount effect that simply raises on_pop_displaced
Add research speed and draw chance modifiers for tech types (rare, dangerous, insight, custom)
Added a new ignore_ftl_inhibitors flag for the country type. Setting this to true, would enable that country type to ignore FTL Inhibitors.
It is now possible to override the Icon for the dynamically generated modifiers by adding a [modifierName]_icon entry in the localization.
Added on_queued, on_unqueued, on_built effects for district specializations
Added a capital_tier parameter for capital building and an associated planet scope trigger.
Refactored the has_x_capital scripted triggers to account for capital building tiers
As mentioned before, these changes are expected to be released on the live branch in August, and your feedback will determine whether or not we keep the Wilderness changes. (Currently we're leaning towards "yes".) Please keep your feedback coming.
To opt into the Wilderness Open Beta, go to your Steam library, right click on Stellaris -> Properties -> Betas -> select "wilderness- Wilderness Open Beta" branch in the Beta Participation dropdown. You may need to restart Steam to get it to appear.
Description [v4.0.20] [a73a] Alloy/consumer good buildings still broken in prison worlds. Game Version v4.0.20 What version do you use? Steam What expansions do you have installed? Synthetic Dawn, Utopia, Apocalypse, Megacorp, Ancient...
While it might be ‘meta’ to doomstack one type of ship in fleets with the way admiral traits work, this further minimizes the strategic aspects of fleet management or admiral selection.
This in exchange for a performance increase, which was supposed to come with the pop-rework of this patch, is IMO not a welcome change. I sincerely hope more strategic &/or tactical player decisions are not going to be put on the chopping block to make up for the performance increases that have yet to materialize with the rework.
I was really hoping for changes in the opposite direction where maybe the number of ships OVERALL was reduced significantly—supporting both performance issues and increasing the importance of both ship and admiral selection in a fleet. Not to mention I think it might be a little more immersive to actually notice when I lose a battleship rather than it being one of the hundreds late game (1000’s if corvette missile art-comp spam).
Hoping this will not turn fleet combat back into an exhausting game of border system doom stack whack-a-mole.
Reducing fleet numbers would be a terrible modification, as it ruins the epic feeling of Stellaris. Just imagine being a galactic empire with only 300 to 400 ships. Compared to the improvement in gaming experience brought by performance enhancements, the damage it inflicts on players' gaming experience is devastating—it undermines the very essence of what makes the game immersive.
Just make a new slider. No number is going to appeal to all players so for contentious issues where increasing a decreasing a value is at question then let people choose how they want their game to work. There are many systems with number limits that should just be relegated to a slider.
With regards to fleets causing lag, is every ship being tracked individually within a fleet unit? That would seem odd except when combat occurs.
Grown pops now spawn in a default stratum and job (like “Civilian”) instead of being unemployed their parents' stratum
Instead of being essentially omnipresent, the orange briefcase in the outliner now indicates that you have 500 or more Civilians + Unemployed pops on the planet. (100+ Unemployed pops should still override it with the red briefcase.)
Arent Unemployed directly sent to civillian stratum? so why include them in calculations
The Wilderness Open Beta has been updated again, with fixes to Workforce calculations, advanced and endgame AI plans, a fix to espionage, improvements to district tooltips, and more.
I don't even know why I check this forum anymore. This game will probably never be in a good state again. 4.0 has done irreversible damage to this game, not that anyone really cares anyways.
Substantially increased the base Command Limit of fleets and most sources of Command Limit. We know you were going to doomstack those fleets anyway. (This is secretly mostly for performance reasons, don't tell anyone.)
I doubt that is the result of my little reply in posts in the forum and surveys with exactly that suggestion, but I tested that in a mod before with nice results. Glad to see it in-game.
What you still might need to fix are "stranded" fleets that cannot reach their target fleet and make single-ship fleets in the outliner that never merge again (I believe). I think that still happens to players and AI. Maybe "just" make it impossible to not reach a fleet? Could a fleet be refilled even in emergency FTL?
Another question. does it have to be that pops grow for every ethic, stratum, possible combination, and so on? Could you not have growth for a single species and give every new pop a random chance to join a ethic and faction weigthed by what we already have? would that not be even better for performance? we would not realy lose anything if pops do not grow for every possible combination of ethic, strata. subspecies and so on
Grown pops now spawn in a default stratum and job (like “Civilian”) instead of being unemployed their parents' stratum
Instead of being essentially omnipresent, the orange briefcase in the outliner now indicates that you have 500 or more Civilians + Unemployed pops on the planet. (100+ Unemployed pops should still override it with the red briefcase.)
Finally, new pops start as Civilians — such a long-awaited and very welcome change!
Also glad to see planets won't light up the outliner just because of a single pop with nothing to do anymore.
As for the shipyard bug — honestly, I wouldn't call it an edge case. I ran into it in almost every war, especially when quickly rushing and taking over key systems. A few times I even lost a system because a starbase kept building ships for the old owner.
Really curious about the AI changes too — hope this leads to actual improvements.
Reducing fleet numbers would be a terrible modification, as it ruins the epic feeling of Stellaris. Just imagine being a galactic empire with only 300 to 400 ships. Compared to the improvement in gaming experience brought by performance enhancements, the damage it inflicts on players' gaming experience is devastating—it undermines the very essence of what makes the game immersive.
agreed, epic fleets are part of epic strategy games and i would very much be opposed to cutting them down just because some people don't have imaginations vast enough to care when "number too big".
agreed, epic fleets are part of epic strategy games and i would very much be opposed to cutting them down just because some people don't have imaginations vast enough to care when "number too big".
Fewer ships is not even necessary. Bigger fleets with the same amount of total ships are still epic and still do reduce performance impact because there are fewer orders for movement and calculations for targets. More ships share the same orders. More important is still to reduce and eliminate single-ship fleets.
Also, there are calculations for more than one fleet to attack the same target. That would be a calculation less if a single fleet is enough, where it was 1.5 fleets before for example.
Small bug which was present also during previous beta - output info on Civilians seems a bit borked. Compare left to right values. It's from early game, I just have Utopian Abudance online.
Reducing fleet numbers would be a terrible modification, as it ruins the epic feeling of Stellaris. Just imagine being a galactic empire with only 300 to 400 ships. Compared to the improvement in gaming experience brought by performance enhancements, the damage it inflicts on players' gaming experience is devastating—it undermines the very essence of what makes the game immersive.
I've actually thought off and on about a mod to do exactly that. Put ship numbers down to something resembling that of nations in the battleship to carrier era of our world. There would be far fewer ships, but they would be individually more meaningful.
Ship names effectively shift by an increment. Battleships (including battleship-scale carriers) are a big deal; they require special docks that not every nation has, and even major nations have only in limited quantities and locations. Minor powers don't have any. Lesser powers have one or two, and while they're very proud of them, they spend most of their time in dock due to cost. Regional and midsized powers have a few, and can afford to have at least one of them out on patrol in rotation. Major powers have at least a half-dozen, and can keep fleets with a battleship deployed into multiple theaters. Superpowers have at least a dozen, and routinely station them near potential trouble spots around their entire sphere of influence. (Battleships would use a modification of the existing Stellaris titan rules, with limited numbers and special shipyards.)
Most nations will have 2x to 4x the number of cruisers as battleships, 2x to 4x the number of destroyers as cruisers, and 1x to 2x the number of smaller craft (frigates, "submarines" (stealth frigates), corvettes, etc.) as destroyers.
Consider the US at the end of WW II, as those numbers are readily available; if we take fleet carriers to be battleship-scale and escort carriers to be cruiser-scale (which more or less matches reality and Stellaris), that gives 51 battleships, 143 cruisers (2.8x), 377 destroyers (2.6x), and 593 frigates & submarines (1.6x). Total 1,164. By standard Stellaris scaling, that would be a fleet size of 2,327; and arguably the US was spending extra to exceed its fleet cap; so perhaps a max fleet cap of around 2,000. I'd say you'd want max fleet size to be 1/4 to 1/3 that; so 500 to 700 or so. Most nations in peacetime would have only one to three fleets, and probably all but one of that moored at a starbase long-term, which could cut down fleet and path calculations tremendously.
Edit to add fleet size thoughts: By the above metric, the arguably largest naval battle, Leyte Gulf, featured on the US side 20 battleship-scale, 51 cruiser-scale, and 116 destroyer-scale ships; 596 fleet size in Stellaris terms, and part of the point of how that battle evolved was that it was split into two separate fleets with different admirals that didn't coordinate well.
You shouldn't, mercs are not that good since their ship designs are super random, and they cause so much war exhaustion when fighting.
Bascilly one lost battle with mercs causes 100% war exhaustion...
My guess would be that since players like to doomstack anyway, having no cap would allow you to use one commander for your entire navy, and then any extras would just be for swapping out depending on the situation.
Wouldnt that kind of go against the whole
fleets/ships --> lag
As far as i can see the command limit was increased to keep the balance of the current naval capacity
while reducing amount of fleets per empire (e.g. 3 small ones --> 1 big one)
Could just increase the base naval capacity without raising any other sources of it.
It would also make the technologies be less ... jarring?
Currently, you go from 20 to 45 when researching your first naval capacity technology, which is a bit much (More than 100%). Raising the base to 50 would make it only 50%
Before the leader rework, there wasn't a reason. Until then, it was literally pointless, you just moved 5 fleets of 200 capacity instead of 1 fleet of 1000 capacity. There was no meaningful gameplay implication made, you just recruited four more dirt-cheap, uncapped, and generally individually non-impactful admirals. That was about it.
There IS a reason post-rework of leaders, because leveled admirals have a significant gameplay impact and now ARE capped. They cause significant performance changes reliably by level 5 or 6, and usually more like 2 or 3. If fleets were uncapped, one single admiral could apply their buff to the entire thing, which would both mean fewer of them to level and 100% bonus coverage - whereas, currently, by the time you have 5-6 fleets you generally don't have 100% coverage of admirals on those fleets (or are paying penalties, including admirals xp gain, to go over cap).
This latter part is also what gameplay impact increasing the cap DOES have, because previously the absolute limit before you'd start needing to go over cap or not have all fleets have an admiral was around 1500 naval capacity. With fleet command roughly doubled, that is too.
This is why, some years ago, I suggested that fleets should only have a cap if they have an admiral. This remains my suggestion. The ONLY thing the fleet command limit does is make it more difficult to apply admiral buffs, so a fleet of 5K has no admiral vs 10 fleets of 500 has no admiral, literally nothing changes except reducing performance losses per this current change and saving a lot of room on the outliner.
