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As we near nine years of Stellaris, the sprawling Paradox space strategy game remains one of the best in the business. Despite maintaining a strong presence on Steam after all these years, thanks to a user rating of 88% from more than 124,000 reviews, it’s starting to feel its age. To help it continue to grow alongside the likes of Crusader Kings 3 and Hearts of Iron 4, the developer has big plans for 2025. In a new blog, game director Stephen ‘Eladrin’ Muray announces Stellaris 4.0, which is set to land in May, around the time of the game’s ninth birthday and alongside its next major expansion.
Stellaris 4.0 is known as the ‘Phoenix’ update, and is designed to help the beloved strategy game burn even more brightly than ever before. Muray notes that the patch is “still very deep in active development,” but outlines three major priorities that the Stellaris Custodian team has been working on for the space game. These are performance improvements, quality-of-life changes, and improved new player guidance and game pacing.
First on that list, then, is an attempt to make the game run more smoothly. “Stellaris has many moving parts, and an incredible number of calculations are performed,” Muray says. As it has continued to grow, that load has only increased with it – and because many calculations rely on others, they have to be done in sequence rather than at the same time, causing the game to slow down ever more as games roll on and galaxy sizes increase.
In particular, Muray highlights the ‘Pops and Jobs’ systems introduced in update 2.2, which determines the population of your empire and where they’ve been assigned to work. Following some extensive experiments, population is being reworked into ‘Pop Groups’ that will rescale their implementation. “Most things that previously affected or manipulated one Pop will now affect or manipulate 100,” Muray explains.
He notes that this change will “significantly impact other systems such as Pop growth, migration, and many others,” but we’ll get a closer look at exactly how this works closer to launch. Trade is also being simplified to tackle its “disproportionately high impact on performance compared to the benefit [it provides].” Finally, Muray notes that Fleets are also a consideration, although says that the changes to these in 4.0 will be more on the general side, with a bigger overhaul in a future update.
Next up are improvements to the pace of games and guidance provided for new players. “Much of the feedback we’ve received from newer players indicates that Stellaris has become overwhelming in the early stages of the game, providing a flood of decisions and a seemingly endless barrage of notifications,” Muray remarks.
As such, events are being reviewed to ensure they feel meaningful, offering players impactful choices. More purely informative or flavorful events, such as anomalies, have been changed into simpler toasts and notifications, and you can further adjust how you want these to appear if you like. This won’t just be a simplification, however – some notifications such as the discovery of other intelligent life early on will now present you with decisions that can help you shape the direction of your empire from the start.
Several other changes are being introduced to improve the overall pacing, especially in the early game. Paradox is considering merging the first two tiers of leader traits to make them feel less “needy” for constant upgrades early on, but making them slightly stronger overall. The weighting on post-launch systems has been normalized slightly, meaning that the generation tool won’t try to force every single mechanic into a single galaxy when you start a new game.
While Paradox’s focus trees have been a great success in its other games, Stellaris is more of a 4X game than other offerings, and as such the team “decided that static focus trees were not appropriate” for its more flexible structure. As such, you’ll instead be given suggested tasks to complete, along with a ‘focused aspiration’ that will impact the types of tasks you’ll be offered. Muray says this system is “primarily intended to teach new players how to play” without impacting the experience of Stellaris veterans too dramatically.
Another addition is an Empire Timeline, which will act as an extensive, real-time chronicle of your journey throughout a single game, documenting all your key events, battles, and other milestones.” Beyond that comes a range of quality-of-life updates, such as an overhaul to the ship designer and the species modification process. Colonization is also being reworked slightly to make it feel smoother, especially for players using colony automation.
Stellaris patch 4.0 is set to arrive as a free update in the second quarter of 2025. It’ll be accompanied by the game’s major paid expansion for the year. Muray adds that “there’s a lot more going into this update,” and you can look forward to more details in the coming weeks.
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