Stellaris updates are slowing down to stop empires randomly destroying themselves, among other bugs

Space strategy game Stellaris has received another update jam-packed with the kind of systemic adjustments that, were you to shout them through your bedroom door at your mum, would cause her to smile shakily, then go downstairs and sob into a tea towel at the knowledge that her treasured child, her brightest and best, will never amount to anything useful, for they are too busy obsessing over ringworlds and genesis arks and xeno-compatibility.

Mum! MUM. I’ve just heard that “Storm Aftermath events will no longer happen in systems where you are constructing megastructures”! Even better, “Evolutionary Predator Empires can now once more gain and keep the Psionic Ephase trait”! Christmas has come early, mum! The eagle has landed! MOTHER, LOOK AT ME. I will not be denied.

The Storm Aftermath-fixing update in question, Stellaris patch 4.0.21, accompanies a cautionary note from game director Stephen “Eladrin” Muray, who says that developers Paradox Interactive are planning to slow down the rate of Stellaris patching in the wake of the game’s 4.0 update, because they keep accidentally lighting whole planets on fire. It turns out the old Zuck mantra “move fast and break things” only gets you so far when you’re troubleshooting galaxies.

“We’ve released a tremendous number of patches since then at a rapid rate – but our patch cadence has become problematic (and even counterproductive) in some ways,” Muray writes. “Too often in game development, fixing one bug introduces another – and I haven’t been giving our internal QA testers enough time to fully vet and test the changes we’ve been making.

“Examples from recent patches include a few weeks ago when an unrelated fix to a pop issue caused Wilderness empires to seemingly randomly destroy themselves by killing all of their biomass, or when another fix just after that caused save games to corrupt and become unloadable,” he goes on.

Paradox remain “committed” to patching Stellaris, which has sunk to a Mixed Steam user review consensus following the release of the apparently cataclysmic 4.0 update, but they’ll be “taking a more measured and deliberate approach to allow internal testing to catch up while giving you a more stable environment to play the game in”.

Specifically, they’re shifting the emphasis to open betas that bring together QA work and player feedback more organically – the first of these will be updated “on a weekly to fortnightly basis depending on internal progress throughout the summer”, with “the next 4.0.x live release” due sometime in August. Muray suggests that modders who “have been waiting for a moment of stability” take advantage of the shortage of major changes during that period.

As for what exactly they’ll be patching next, please summon your mother back upstairs, for it is once again time to defeat and confuse her with the kind of preposterous sci-fantasy jargon she never ever imagined her darling baby would ever learn, back when you were just a wee tyke nuzzling at the nipple.

“I’m personally currently looking at ways to improve the AI’s behavior,” Muray continues. “Other things currently in active development are OOS investigations, a number of strata issues that affect slavery, purging, and other oddities among pop employment, and more of a design change rather than a bugfix – based on your feedback we’re looking at having newly grown pops go straight into the Civilian stratum or its appropriate equivalent instead of being unemployed members of their parent pop group.

“While we liked the verisimilitude of top-heavy planets having more stability issues than ones that were more evenly developed, we acknowledge that having a persistent trickle of unemployed pops feels wrong,” Muray continues.

Did you hear that, mum? He took the words right out of my mouth. Mother, will you stop weeping and fetch me my abacus so I can calculate the performance losses from the bug “where every empire was calculating their Biomass total far too often”. No, I do not want to speak to the careers advisor again. Yes, I will be eating dinner in my room this evening.