The days are getting short and the cold winds are blowing, which means it’s time for our end of year review.
As we close out 2025 and look toward the future, I wanted to take a moment to look back at what we set out to do this year, what actually happened, where we stumbled, and where we feel we’ve ended up.
2025 was about setting the stage for the future. We took some of Stellaris’ oldest systems and tried to rebuild them into something that can carry the game forward for many years to come. It was an ambitious undertaking, occasionally painful, and will continue to be shaped and improve based on your feedback.
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Changing the Foundations
[p]We spent the first half of 2025 rebuilding the core of Stellaris, and the Custodian team spent much of the second half catching up.Pops and individual Jobs converted into Pop Groups and Workforce, Planets changed to accommodate the new aggregate model and to support customizable Districts through Specializations, and the nature of Trade changed to include Logistical capability. Job swaps brought us more immersive variants based on your Civics, planet modifiers, or other decisions.
These changes weren’t small, and we underestimated the amount of time that it would take to get them into proper shape. It went live with the 4.0 ‘Phoenix’ update, which true to its name, ran hotter than we would have liked. We did not successfully deliver one of the major intentions of these changes - better late game performance - but we are confident that the changes give us a better foundation for the future.
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They’re Made Out of Meat
[p]We released BioGenesis alongside 4.0 as our first big content beat of the year. It had a clear fantasy: What if we took biological play to its logical extreme?[/p][p][/p][p][img src="https://clan.akamai.steamstatic.com/images/9703436/57d6f24104fe3bc495e1833cdf27f7fca87e1f52.png"][/img][/p][p]This gave us meat ships with biological ship components and unique mechanics, expanded and improved the genetic ascension path, added another player crisis through Behemoth Fury, and brought us the Wilderness Origin - an entirely unique way to play Stellaris.This brought us to the next phase of the year - frenzied stabilization. The dev team spent the majority of the summer releasing a steady stream of 4.0.x patches at an unprecedented rate. Sometimes we acted too quickly, introducing new issues that needed rapid hotfixing, and we eventually came to a healthier cadence where we released potential patches as Steam Open Betas at the same time that we sent the patches to certification. We kept that process improvement through 4.1 and 4.2 post-release support, and it greatly improved the releases.
Twenty-one patches over seven weeks with twenty-three in total is a record for us, but one that we’ll hopefully never come anywhere near again.
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Finishing the Arc of Ascension
[p]The 4.1 ‘Lyra’ update and Shadows of the Shroud completed our remastering of the Ascension Paths by tackling Psionic Ascension and expanding the lore and mechanics surrounding the Shroud.[/p][p][img src="https://clan.akamai.steamstatic.com/images/9703436/78390b7b96682b7ac012a51ce21bcbd25b282a09.png"][/img]We worked closely with Abrakam in this expansion to rebuild Psionic Ascension in a style similar to the others. Shadows of the Shroud added a new interface to better visualize your travels through the Shroud, and Accords, Covenants, and Callings all made up parts of the new interactions with the entities of the Shroud - each of which had their own agendas and interests.The End of the Cycle was revamped with its own unique Shroud UI, and we introduced the Mindwarden Enclave as a foil to psionic empires. (And their very cool shipset!)
The lessons we learned from post-release support after the ‘Phoenix’ update helped us here - as a clear example, our Open Betas found issues that prevented 4.1.4 from shipping and breaking things.
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Heating Things Up
[p]The final major content beat of 2025 was Forgotten Empires’ Infernals Species Pack. Where BioGenesis explored the biological extreme, and Shadows of the Shroud dug into the metaphysical, Infernals let us explore a different type of fantasy - thermophile life living in a galaxy that is becoming colder and more hostile every day.[/p][p][img src="https://clan.akamai.steamstatic.com/images/9703436/9ac05320c6b86c4d249013cb075a335c164701ab.png"][/img]Infernals raised the bar compared to our other Species Packs by adding a new planet class and the Galactic Hyperthermia crisis.[/p]
The Ongoing Plan
[p]We’re finishing up the year with our first drops of the 4.3 ‘Cetus’ Open Beta. Dev Diary #399 outlines our ongoing plan and Dev Diary #407 details what we’re trying to do with this Open Beta.We look forward to seeing more of your feedback regarding these changes, which are intended to reset the balance level of Stellaris. We believe that the Open Beta is an excellent tool to catch issues earlier with more varied save games, give modders time to prepare for incoming changes, and create a better shared understanding of what we’re doing and why, and get feedback even if we disagree on specific points. The ability to react and incorporate some of the changes you suggest make Stellaris a better game.
Stellaris remains a game with a very wide range of playstyles and hardware setups, and we hope that the Open Beta can get us as wide an array of feedback as possible.
This year we’ve learned that launching a massive systemic overhaul and a large DLC at the same time is extremely demanding, for both the team and for you, the players. The changes in Cetus are sweeping, but are compartmentalized in a better way than Phoenix was, and none of the elements are at a “point of no return” - we’ll release them, hold onto them in beta, or discard them as appropriate.
On behalf of the whole team: thank you for sticking with us through a very big, very technical, and occasionally very fiery year of Stellaris. Your saves, bug reports, balance discussions, and creativity are what let us keep pushing this game forward and make Stellaris better with each bit of feedback.
Have a very happy holidays and I’ll see you among the stars in 2026.
[/p][p]- Eladrin and the Stellaris Team[/p]
