Pacing Adjustments
Stellaris is a game with many moving parts, each of which interact with other elements to produce a complex whole. Small adjustments in one spot can have significant effects in another, and in the end there can be unexpected impact to the general pacing of the game and overall economy.Galaxy Generation
As mentioned in Dev Diary #366, we’ve gone through all of the scripted systems and done a normalization pass on the frequency of these systems appearing, as well as preventing many of them from appearing in empire starting clusters. Some other adjustments have been made to generation as a whole, which should distribute non-guaranteed habitable worlds a bit better and reduce the likelihood of massive clusters of them right around your homeworld. There were comments in the thread asking for the ability to easily change these weights. Since most of them now use scripted variables, they’ll be very easy to change with mods. As the pool of anomalies and prescripted systems with guaranteed anomalies have also grown over the years, we’ve adjusted the anomaly spawn chance increment a bit to compensate.Leader Traits
A minor change from the original announcement is that we’ve implemented a suggestion from the forum thread to have the trait selection levels on even levels - it’s much cleaner overall. Leaders still begin with a starting trait at level 1. If you have trait selections to make, the leader level up Notifications will show the green “call to action”. If you don’t, they’ll have a more subdued monochrome icon. Leader positions will also have a significantly greater effect on which traits will be selected for players without Galactic Paragons or those that prefer automatic trait selection. For those that prefer picking leader traits themselves, this bias is instead reflected in which traits are selected for the pool of possible traits whenever a new trait is available. In Settings, we’re also letting you choose what you would like your default automatic trait selection to be. Any time you take over an empire as the primary human player (a distinction that is primarily relevant for co-op gameplay), it will make sure that the Auto Select Leader Traits box is set to your preference.
Events, Messages, and Notifications
We’re going through many events, messages, and notifications to reduce the number of popups that disrupt your general gameplay. While major events still appear as popups, those that don’t require an immediate response or are purely informational have been converted into notifications or toasts.





Empire Focuses and the Timeline
While designing the Empire Focuses we had several thoughts.- Stellaris is a dynamic game full of wonder and possibilities. Our sandbox nature means predefined and structured trees cannot work for us.
- Tasks provided by Focuses should help guide newer players through the game, providing suggestions for short and medium term goals.
- Behaving in a manner consistent with your Empire Focus should naturally complete the Tasks from that category. [list]
- Empire Focus categories are Conquest, Exploration, and Development. (Names subject to change.)
- Any rewards you get should feel narratively consistent with your empire’s behavior. For instance, acting as an aggressive militarist should naturally guide your researchers to theorizing applicable technologies.
- These rewards should reduce the need to rely on lucky draws from the tech pool if you want to pursue your Focus.



Hard Reset
In the 4.0 ‘Phoenix’ update, we’re adding a new Origin to the Synthetic Dawn story pack called Hard Reset. As a warning, this Origin gets pretty dark (even for Stellaris), very quickly.



Achievements
As part of the development process, we decided to take this opportunity to review some of the rules around gaining achievements. As I think that many of the simpler ones are a great tool for letting you know that you’re playing the game “correctly”, so we’ve made a change. Ironman mode is no longer required to earn most Stellaris achievements. An unmodified game checksum and being in single-player remain as requirements.- The "Victorious" achievement has been updated to "Win the game through any victory condition in Ironman mode."