Stellaris Dev Diary #416 - Quality of Life Improvements

by Eladrin

Hello Stellaris Community!

The 4.3.4 ‘Cetus’ update was released today, with the following changes:

Notes in italics were not in the 2026-04-10 Open Beta update.

Balance​

• Added a cap of 10 years (in defines) for how long a fleet can go MIA. (Exceptions: Phased or Eaten fleets, and those exploring Astral Rifts.)

• Disruptor weapons now also reduce Regeneration Effectiveness on hit for 10 days.

  • T1: -20% Shield, -10% Armor/Hull Regen.

  • T2: -35% Shield, -20% Armor/Hull Regen.

  • T3: -50% Shield, -30% Armor/Hull Regen.

  • Psionic: -35% Shield Regen, -20% Fire Rate, but remains on the anti-fire-rate channel so will stack with other disruptors.

• Increased Exotic Gas production of Advanced Bio-Reactor to 0.1 from 0.05.

• Increased Ministry of Production and Production Center Alloy and Consumer Goods bonus to 0.2 from 0.1.

• Faculty of Archaeostudies:

  • Biologists on a Relic World now produce +0.25 Minor Artifacts (was +0.1)

  • Archaeo-Engineering AP now increases Biologist Minor Artifact Production by +0.15 (was +0.05)

  • Increased Minor Artifact storage cap to 2000 (was 1000) and the Archaeo-Engineering bonus to 3000 (was 2000)

  • Reduced Building Upkeep to 8 Energy from 10 Energy

  • Corrected tooltip that has been very wrong for a very long time

• Astral Siphon:

  • Increased Astral Siphon thread production to +0.2, +0.35, and +0.50 (was +0.1, +0.2, +0.3).

  • Reduced Astral Siphon Physics bonus to +0.2, +0.35, and +0.50 (was +0.25/+0.5/+0.75)

  • Reduced additional upkeep to +1/+1.5/+2 CG or +2/+3/+4 E/M for Gestalts. (Was +1/+2/+4, +2/+4/+8, and +2.5/+5/+10)

  • Increased thread storage to +200, +400, +600 (was +100, +200, +300).

• Reduced the fleet power of Voidworms to be more accurate to their capabilities. (Especially if you use Point Defense against them.)

• High tier habitat capitals can now gain +1 habitat district per major body. Corrected tooltips.

Bugfix​

• Fixed Mutagenic Habitability being capped at lower threshold than stated.

• Fixed an issue in the create_random_fleet and create_fleet_from_naval_cap effects that didn't recognize that ships are much bigger than they used to be, so was typically creating fleets five times the size it was supposed to.

  • This will primarily impact the GDF reinforcement fleet, Revolts, Machine Uprisings, and Civil Wars, Habinte, and a Zevox ending.

  • The Doom of the Eater fleet has been increased to compensate for this change - plus a little extra on top.

• Fixed the "Volcanic Forge" technology from "Planet Forgers" not appearing for certain origins

• Adjusted the name of the "Conduit" ship class in the German translation

• Purges like the Prethoryn, Sentinels, and others now really only occur while they are left alone on the planet. ALL purges now pause any time there is a ground battle for the planet going on. (This includes normal purges, though collateral damage may still kill pops.)

  • Updated Mechanocalibrator, Terraforming Mutants, Mutant Horrors, and Titanic Guardian events to clean up properly as well.

  • Corrected a logical error where if an empire was bad at purging, they’d be able to slow the decline of pops by setting them as Undesirable.

• Updated Luminary tooltip to reflect their improved lifespan.

• Scourge Missiles were missed in the initial pass that kept torpedoes and similar weapons from dealing 5x intended damage. Your behemoths are now slightly safer.

• Oppressive Autocracies can now build medical centers.

  • Reminder: Only Elite stratum jobs generate amenities in Oppressive Autocracies and Medical Workers & Genomic Researchers are Specialists.

• Fixed Necrophage+Planet Forgers pre-FTL worlds becoming volcanic at game start

• Fixed Necrophage+Planet Forgers not getting Volcanic Forge as guaranteed research

• Fixed Ministry of Acquisition tooltip showing blank consumer goods job name

• Fixed star_eater_cap displaying as raw LOC key instead of ship name

• Fixed Offworld Foundry job localization tooltip

• Corrected Ion Cannon collateral damage. (Should be 100, was 20)

• Storm Chasers should have an increased chance to draw Storm techs, not decreased.

• Fixed tooltips for the Esteemed Quartermaster.

• Sanctuary of Toil tooltip numbers are no longer truncated.

• Increased the width of the Naval Capacity entry on the top bar so the entry in Chinese isn't truncated once you reach XXXX / YYYY Naval Capacity.

• Fixed a logical error that made the Prethoryn Scourge have more fleets on lower difficulties than higher ones.

• Updated Gravity Storms to have a reduced damage penalty based on ship size, since ships are on average 5x larger than they used to be.

AI​

• Updated AI alloy and food budgets to better handle new Starbase costs.

• Adjusted AI food budget so bio-ship empires will rebuild their fleets if they recently lost a war.

• Adjusted AI influence budgets so they'll be less prone to immediately allocate their entire influence stockpile to changing vassalization contract terms if they become an Overlord.

Stability​

• Fixes an OOS when a hotjoiner is accepted during a hotjoin, after the "start" button had become active in the hotjoin status window

• Fixed an OOS when a player leaves and rejoins

• Fixed an OOS related to Spy Networks.

• Fixed an OOS at start when players don't have the same DLC as the host, and someone choses a random empire.

• Fixed issue with particle system crashing due to invalid scripting or very low frame time.

• Fixed issues with fleet move vector distances sometimes end up "freezing" the game.

• Fixes an OOS caused by the strategic war data being calculated differently on the host and on the clients. (CS_COUNTRY_AI)

Now we’re going to look at some of the Quality of Life improvements you’ve been asking for that we’re bringing to you in the 4.4 ‘Pegasus’ update.

A frequent request since The Grand Archive released was for us to improve the exhibition and storage systems. Some of you found clever workaround using small vassals, but you’ll need to do so no longer.

We’ve increased the Storage capacity to 60, and you can now move Specimens into or out of Storage freely. Right-Clicking a Specimen that is on Exhibition will now send it to Storage instead of selling it, and Left-Clicking a Specimen in Storage will send it back to the Exhibition. You can now only sell Specimens to Private Collectors that are in Storage.

Improvement:​

• Grand Archive Quality of Life Improvements:

  • Specimens on exhibit in the Grand Archive can now be sent to Storage by right-clicking on them.

  • Specimens can now only be sold to a private collector from Storage.

  • Specimens no longer resort themselves based on acquisition date - active exhibits will remain in the order that they were displayed, and inactive specimens will remain in the order they were moved to exhibition or storage.

  • Increased Specimen Storage to 60, and added a scroll-bar to the list.

  • Storage is now fully draggable and can be dragged outside the boundaries of the main Grand Archive UI.

  • Removed Collection Auto-Selling. You have 60 spaces for storage now, it’s very unlikely to come up and freed up more space for actual Specimens.

Another request I’ve seen several times (especially since 4.3’s change to Fallen Empire buildings) was a way to disable Automated Workforce if you have an excess of pops that are better suited for the job.

Turning down Automated Workforce on those Technician Jobs didn’t work so well for this Tankbound Empire - but it still gives you more control over what’s going on.​

Improvement:​

• Automated jobs now have their own workforce limit slider, letting you directly cap how many of a job's slots are filled by automation.

Starbases now support Tab (and Ctrl-Tab) for cycling forward and backward through the list.

While we were messing around with Starbases, we also brought over collapsable lists from the Shipyard.

An Experimental Open Beta​

We have some fundamental changes to how planet job selection works that I’d like to put through an extended open beta. These will not be going live with 4.3.5. If things go absolutely perfectly they may go into 4.3.6, but my expectation is that we will hold them until 4.4.

These changes complete the removal of Unemployment that we began with 4.3.0 and massively simplify some of the core loops surrounding job selection. It changes how job displacement works, so more efficient workers (or slaves) will now displace existing workers more reliably. Each month, certain jobs will also test against raw efficiency without an incumbency bias, with lower stratum jobs performing this “egalitarian” check more often than higher stratum ones.

These changes will be going up on the [c]stellaris_test_job_assignment[/c] branch - hopefully today, but they may slip to Friday or even next week if QA finds any issues:

Improvement:​

• Finished the removal of Unemployment begun with 4.3.0.

  • When a pop loses their job, they now immediately fall to their stratum's fallback category (Citizen, Maintenance Drone, etc.) rather than passing through a temporary unemployed tier.

  • Reworked Nascent Stage pops to work more similarly to sub-species integration, with approximately 1/60th of the pops growing into their base species each month (on colonies that are at least 60 months old). This should result in Nascent Stage being more reliable and less error-prone.

  • Improved how pops compete for jobs combining basic job weights and how efficient they actually are at them, so a more suitable pop will now properly displace one already holding a position. (i.e. Slaves and shackled robots will displace organics from worker tier jobs, intelligent pops will take more research positions, etc.)

    • Higher-stratum jobs turn over more slowly — Workers and Simple Drones may reshuffle every 3 months, Specialists and Complex Drones every 7, and Elites every 13 — so an out-of-place pop won't be kicked out immediately but will eventually be displaced by a better fit.

    • Gestalt pops have a weaker attachment to their current jobs overall.

  • On underpopulated planets, pops tend to fill jobs proportionally between all the capped jobs they are eligible for, though bonuses to job efficiency (such as from the colony designation or traits) could heavily skew this towards certain jobs.

    • They will still tend to prefer higher stratum jobs when possible.

    • Prioritized jobs ignore this proportional fill, but lower strata jobs may still be bypassed in favor of higher weight ones.

    • Pops should no longer take deficits into account for job prioritization, as this caused extremely erratic monthly behavior on underpopulated planets.

Modding:​

• The [c]demotion[/c] and [c]promotion[/c] blocks in pop job script definitions have been removed.

• The intermediate unemployment job types and pop categories [c](ruler_unemployment, specialist_unemployment, worker_unemployment, complex_drone_unemployment, simple_drone_unemployment, slave_unemployment2)[/c] have been removed.

• The [c]pop_unemployment_demotion_time_mult[/c] static modifier and [c]pop_cat_X_unemployment_political_power[/c] family of modifiers (used in living standard definitions) have been removed.

• Nascent Stage presapient maturation is no longer handled via script demotion chains. It is now driven by the new [c]forced_integration[/c] block on species traits. Set [c]integration_rate[/c] (fraction of pops converted per month) and optionally [c]minimum_colony_age[/c] (in months) on any species trait to gradually integrate pops into their parent species.

If you load an existing save on this branch, pops may disappear for a month and your error log may go to the moon, but internally these issues appeared to resolve themselves after the next monthly tick. It’s probably safer to start a new game, but we’d appreciate feedback from either. (If it’s save-breaking, we want to know. It wasn’t for me internally when I tried, but you’ll probably have some variations that I wasn’t able to test.)

We’ll be taking a look at the Situation Log and the Megastructures UIs next week.

I think you’ll like some of these updates too.

See you then!

Edit:

Since the initial dev diary was written, we've added a small cooldown to discourage extreme micromanagement of Specimens. A Specimen that has been moved from Storage to Exhibition cannot be returned to Storage for 2 years. The Exhibition Specialization tradition in Archivism reduces this by 25%.