Paradox Interactive has released update 4.5 “Cygnus” for Stellaris, calling it the biggest patch in the game’s history. The developers have prepared over 350 fixes to improve stability, AI, and synchronization, with a large portion of these changes coming as a result of feedback from players themselves.
There are a total of 525 lines of changes in this update, of which Paradox internally estimates that approximately 46.7% are directly related to community posts. During the open beta, which began in early July, players were particularly proactive in helping out and received nine in-between updates. The developers would like to extend a special thanks to everyone who submitted bug reports, shared saves, and discussed issues on the forums, Reddit, and Discord.
One of the most notable changes is the redesign of popular groups. The population is no longer divided by factions and morals, each population shows a certain proportion of the population with different views and factional affiliations. This should significantly reduce the number of groups in the late game and make planet management less overwhelming. Meanwhile, the factions themselves have also been redesigned – players can now better see their appeal and the factors that influence it.
Additional content for Nomad Empire has been released, including Cosmic Origin Ambition, Poison God Origin Knights, and Origin Storm Chasers, as well as corresponding DLC. Nomad AI has also received improvements that affect economic planning and system selection. In addition, new federal economic laws have emerged that allow you to obtain free research agreements and commercial or route agreements.
The update also brings some more practical changes. Strategies now lets you customize ship auto-designer preferences and defense station weapons, and select borders, map fills, and ship colors independently of each other. Mac users are even luckier: the game version now runs natively on Apple Silicon, without the need for Rosetta 2, which should improve performance.
However, there is an important warning before installing 4.5. Due to the redesign of the Pops storage system, saves from versions 4.4 and earlier are no longer compatible with newer versions. Paradox recommends that you back up your saves in advance. Once you enable a save in 4.5, you will not be able to use it back to 4.4.
As per usual, the developers couldn’t help but make a joke: the size of the patch notes is estimated to be around 3.857 “Pierres” – a special unit of length measurement that emerged after comparing old patch notes with the height of Paradox employee Pierre.
You can read the full list of changes here.