Stellaris Dev Diary #396 - 4.1 'Lyra' Preliminary Release Notes

by Eladrin

Hello, Stellaris Community!

Shadows of the Shroud and the 4.1 ‘Lyra’ update will be released next Monday, September 22nd.

Today we have preliminary release notes, as well as the Chosen set of Civics and some of the Advanced Psionic Government options.

Preliminary Release Notes​

Here’s the current list of expected changes coming next week.

Shadows of the Shroud DLC​

The ‘Arc of Ascension’ is complete at last with Shadows of the Shroud.

• Overhauled Psionic Ascension

  • Like the other Ascension Paths, Psionic Ascension has now been elevated with an Ascension Situation that explores the impact Ascension has on your Empire. Your moral and ethical decisions will influence your attunement to the domains of the Shroud, culminating in your first delve as you Breach the Shroud.

  • Track your exploration of the Shroud in the new Shroud Panel, which will show your current attunement to the domains of the Shroud and provide means to influence your spiritual travels. Attuning to a domain grants Accords, and the local Patron may offer you a Covenant: Power for a price.

  • The Shroud contains 4 Major Patrons, 8 Minor Patrons, and 2 Great Patrons, though not all can be encountered in a single playthrough.

  • Encounter new events when "Delving" into the Shroud, including 4 new Psionic technologies for ship components.

  • A new path through the Shroud where you reject Covenants to forge your own way, beholden to no Patron.

  • An overhauled End of the Cycle

• Psionic Auras

  • The power of the Shroud can influence corporeal reality through Psionic Auras. These manifestations of the strength of your attuned domain or Patron spread outward from your colonies but can be countered by the Shroud Seals of the Mindwarden Enclave.

• 3 New Origins

  • Shroud-Forged: The guidance of a Shroud entity comes with a cost. The entity known as the Animator of Clay has taken a special interest in this Machine Intelligence civilization.

  • Mindwardens: Freedom is meaningless without sovereignty of thought. Carry on the fight of your ancestors by defending the galaxy from psionic threats.

  • Endbringers: IT IS NOT YET YOUR TIME. BUT IT COULD BE.

• 6 New Civics

  • Entropy Drinkers

  • Secret Societies

  • Superstitious Beliefs

  • Experimental Sentencing

  • Tankbound

  • Chosen

• Expanded events when delving in the Shroud

  • Plus 80+ additional new galactic anomalies and events (unrelated to the Shroud)

• 8 New Paragon leaders

• 2 New Relics

• Mindwarden Enclave & Shroud Seals

• New Shroudwalker Enclave interactions

• Proxy Wars introduced

• Hive Minds and Machine empires can now Psionically ascend

• Advanced Psionic Governments

• 13 New portraits

• Psionic shipset

• Mindwarden shipset

• Advisor Voice

• 4 New Music tracks by Andreas Waldetoft

STELLARIS 4.1.0 ‘LYRA’ PATCH NOTES​

Features

• Significant improvements to the Planet UI based on player feedback.

  • The Planet UI now makes better use of horizontal space available even at our lowest resolutions.

  • City Set and Environments have been re-exported at higher resolution to reduce blurriness.

  • Surface Tab:

    • Build Queue is always visible.

    • More information in the Planet Summary, including the Planetary Decisions button

    • Multiple buildings can be sequentially added to the build queue from the same building specialization

    • New District Specialization icons

  • Management Tab:

    • Added Monthly Pop Summary including Growth, Migration, and Assembly information

      • Pie charts are back!

    • Reworked the Current Population information to show more and clearer information about your pop groups. Pops are now sorted by Species, Strata, and then Group.

  • Economy Tab:

    • Added Workforce Summary providing more easily accessible information

      • Pie charts are back!

    • Improved Tooltips for jobs, which now show the total production and upkeep of all pops working that job (instead of just showing the pop-based production and output).

      • Holding ALT will show estimates for 100 Pops working that job in these tooltips, allowing for better job-to-job comparisons.

  • Armies Tab:

    • Recruitment is now part of the main window.

  • Holdings:

    • Mostly just arrangement changes.

Balance

• The Fallen Shipyard planetary feature now gives 1 miner per 25 pops, not 1 per 4 pops.

• The Ship Junkyard planetary modifier now gives 0.5 alloys and 0.5 engineering research per 100 miners instead of 1 of each.

• Combining Planetscapers and Arc Welders will only spawn blockers that block a single district.

• Planetscapers will now spawn two different blockers on your homeworld.

• Slaver Guilds and Indentured Assets now provide Job Efficiency for Slaves. These civics no longer enslave a percentage of your population. We intend on revisiting them in a future update to find a better way to fulfill their fantasy.

• Leaders governing planets and sectors now gain 10 XP whenever planetary infrastructure (districts, district specializations, or buildings) are constructed. If a planet has a local governor and a sector governor, the local planetary governor will take priority.

• Rural support district specializations that add trade upkeep to farmers, miners and technicians, now scale greater on ringworlds, since ringworld districts have as many jobs.

• Necromancers now produce Society and Engineering research instead of Physics and Society research.

• Removed automation from Telepath jobs - you cannot automate telepathy effectively

• Planetary Ascension cost reduction is now capped at 90%.

• Reduced the initial power of Resource Consolidation, but allowed the origin to ignore the tech requirements for the Machine Worlds AP.

• Buffed the Dread Encampment to provide additional research production (and upkeep) to Necromancers.

• The Computation Core Focus policies now affect job efficiency for selected jobs instead of planetary production of selected resources.

• Hive Sensorium Sites now require the Cultural Heritage technology. Hive Minds can now research this technology.

• Cultural Heritage technology now requires Planetary Unification instead of being a starting tech.

• Heritage Site technology is now Tier 2 instead of Tier 1.

• Hypercomms Forum technology is now more expensive.

Bugfix

• Fix auto-culling prioritizing culling breeding adults over babies

• The Chosen can no longer be declared the most delicious aliens in the galaxy, letting you contact them early when they are still sealed away.

• Fixed an issue where the game would not let you build Ephaptic Clusters after researching the technology.

• Cloned leaders will now also clone their flags and variables from the original leader

• You can no longer build a grand archive over a sufficiently populated pre-FTL world

• Add safeguard for potential crash while handling graphics for capture space critter fleet order

• Fixed some tooltips saying that Scrap Miners were converted into Scrap Miners.

• Fix a crash when displaying growth tooltips

• Fix Federation perk modifiers not being localized properly

• Add missing modifier for Fanatic Pacifist

• Planetscapers can no longer start with more districts of a certain type than a planet can support (e.g. 7/6 generator districts).

• The Atomic Clock will no longer be able to make your Arc Furnace into a gaia world

• Paragons no longer spawn with all their bespoke traits as well as all their trait picks still available.

• Nanotech and Machine Foundry World flavor text displays correctly.

• Fixed armies shenanigans, resulting in randomly dying fleets

• Fix pop growth wildly varying between months by calculating it across species instead of per pop group

• Trade deposits in space be collected by mining stations

• Fix Maulers flying in circles instead of attacking

• The Prethoryn should no longer constantly attempt to colonize uninhabited habitats or ringworlds as they lack interesting biomass.

• Fix pop groups changed from purge to slaves staying in promotion job

• Fixed The Nursery event telling you that it will advance your Evolutionary Predator situation even when you don't have the origin.

• Fixed an exploit where if you got a resort world through trade or integration it would stay a resort world. Allowing you to get multiples of them.

• Integrating a subject will no longer leave you with their dimensional fleets in perpetuity.

• Fix Wilderness jobs having malus workforce for 1 month at game start

• Fix the workforce tooltip of wilderness pop jobs never showing modifiers

• Gave the Riddles Decoded modifier a proper icon.

• Fixed Synaptic Sub-Processing stating that it only gave +2 jobs

• Fixes not all pops being properly assigned to jobs and not calculating workforce multipliers properly

• Pre-sapients now once again need feeding

• Robots don't get Bonus Growth anymore

• Planet UI now shows Downgrade again instead of Destroy for upgraded buildings

• The evolutionary predators agenda granted by mutation traditions now grants other species mutagenic habitability

• Fixed amenities on the Storm Relief Center for Wilderness

• Fixed job efficiency modifiers for disconnected drone citizenship

• Slaves should be less likely to get stuck in a "repurposing" job.

• Job modifiers now correctly apply to production for the Overlord

• Stopped the Botanical Paradise project from attaching to the science ship discovering it.

• Made the Arc Furnace dismantling not leave any lingering deposits.

• Repairing a ruined Arc Furnace no longer gives too many mineral deposits.

• Hive and Machine worlds now correctly have access to district specializations for harvesting of betharian, rare crystals, exotic gases and volatile motes.

• District specializations for strategic resources now correctly check you have the required technology.

UI

• Gestalts and Robots can now have their migration controlled

• Large species selection buttons in the species list will now work even when hovering over some other tooltip triggering UI element inside the button.

• Updated city sets and environments to higher-resolution versions with standardized 800×400 px layers.

• Fix Last Month Growth of species or strata sometimes being incorrect

• Improve Growth tooltips at the species level

• Improve production and tooltip display of job types triggered static modifiers

• Improve the tooltip when hovering the name of a job in planet view

• Fix a bunch of resources display discrepancies in the holding tab

• Improve District Specialization requirement tooltips

Performance

• Fixed various scripted localization performance issues related to the Paragons content

• Diminish the number of VFSExists from portrait evolution

• Default texture lifetime management is now forbidden for CInstantSprite.

• Reduces the frequency of portrait texture file existence checking

• Branch office planet profits are calculated monthly instead of daily

• We no longer create a fake country on the death of great leaders

AI

• The AI should now build defensive platforms in orbit of deep space citadels.

• Improved AI behaviour for agendas granted by ascension paths

Modding

• Scripted localization for renowned and legendary leaders have moved to the actual leaders. So we now have set_leader_tier and is_leader_tier on the leader scope for them. They can be defined in common/leader_tiers

• tier attribute is now supported for the create_leader and clone_leader effect. And the same goes for the ethic_leader_creator scripted effect

• Add owner_or_space_owner scope

• Added the on_zone_complete on action.

• Remove unused can_be_cleared_override and add can_be_cleared_potential to deposit type. If false, the clearing buttons and infos are not shown

Chosen Civics​

The Chosen set of Civics act as a fast-track to forming Accords with a Major Patron of your choice.

Shortly after starting, you will be able to select which Major Patron has selected your people.

After making your choice, you will gain attunement with your Patron and begin with their first Accord. Your innate connection to the Shroud lets you view the Shroud UI, though you will not be able to Delve into the Shroud itself until you progress through Psionic Ascension.

You’ll also be able to affect your Attunement to the Shroud.​

Once you Breach the Shroud, you’ll be greeted by the Major Patron with whom you have traditionally been affiliated.

Having a way paved for you makes things easier, and while you start with a head-start at attuning towards your Chosen Patron, you are not required to form a Covenant with them. Those who took this easy way are, however, unable to forge their own path.

We hadn’t mentioned it before when we initially revealed Accords and Covenants, but some time after initially forming a Covenant with a Patron you have an opportunity to confirm or renounce it.

Psionic Advanced Governments​

During one of your Delves into the Shroud, the Shroud itself may ask you a series of tarot-style questions. Your answers will reshape your Empire.

Your questions may vary.

My United Chosen of Earth ended up as a Transcendant Democracy. The individualist organic transcendent governments are:

Other answers would have led us to these corporeal variants:

Gestalts have these authorities:

What’s Next?​

Release! See you Monday!

The next Stellaris dev diary is planned for October 2nd.

Shadows of the Shroud and the 4.1.0 ‘Lyra’ update will be released on Monday, September 22nd, and is included as part of Stellaris: Season 09[pdxint.at].