by Eladrin
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.
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.
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.
Searching for “Alloys” gives us every Concept that includes the word, sorting the most relevant to the top.
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.
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.
Actually, scratch that. Everybody should be delicious.
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.
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!
