After confirming last week that sci-fi grand strategy game Stellaris is preparing to take another significant step forward with its Phoenix update 4.0, Game Director Stephen Muray has now shared a handful of specific details on what we can expect from the patch.
Aside from the rather straightforward Precursor selection feature, available at game start, the title will also receive the Stellaris Databank – a searchable compendium that contains vital in-game concepts – alongside a series of changes to species modification and its occasionally daunting ship designer.
Stellaris Update 4.0 Changes
Stellaris’ patch 4.0 adds a new section in the advanced settings tab – available when creating a new game – that shows the Precursors are available in your galaxy.
“The galaxy will be split into slices and the available Precursors distributed as they are currently,” Muray noted, before confirming that we can select the number of Precursors in our games.
The Stellaris Databank builds on the nested tooltips introduced in the 3.8 update, gathering all the vital in-game concepts into a searchable compendium-style menu.
The menu itself is divided into categories and itself makes use of nested tooltips. In addition, each concept with an entry in the Databank has a link to its section in its tooltip, which will hopefully make playing Stellaris without resorting to external wikis a tad easier for new players.
Stellaris’ update 4.0 also brings a series of changes to species modification. First and foremost, the species screen now offers more information about the inhabitants of your empire, including the number of remaining trait picks.
“The template modification window itself has been remade to provide better sorting of positive and negative traits, and listing them by value, making it easier to find the traits you’re looking for,” Muray explains.
“The new flow removes a few clicks from the process, starting the Special Project immediately.”
In addition, rather than modify our species using a Special Project, we can instead set a template as default, and let pops who don’t belong to it slowly integrate to it.
The ship designer is also getting some quality of life updates in Stellaris’ patch 4.0.
“We’ve taken the Ship Roles that were introduced in the 3.6 ‘Orion’ update and made selecting one part of the basic ship design flow and giving them a better representation than a scrollable text list,” reads the dev diary linked above.
“Some pain points of ship design, like the Auto-generate changes button blocking saving, have been removed, and in general it’s a faster and easier process to create a general ship design.”
A custom role has also been added, allowing experienced players to design ships from scratch.
More Stellaris update 4.0 details are coming next week, when we’ll find out more about the improvements to message settings, alongside other upcoming features.
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