Grand strategy behemoth Stellaris has grown continuously since its launch back in 2016 and, with its ninth anniversary coming up later in 2025, its development team has confirmed that the long-awaited 4.0 update’s release date is not that far off now.
Named Phoenix, Stellaris’ patch 4.0 is developed by the title’s Custodian team and, as of early January, aims to improve performance, quality of life, game pacing, as well as give new players better guidance.
Stellaris Update 4.0 Phoenix Release Date
As pointed in 2025’s first developer diary, Stellaris’ update 4.0 is currently aiming for a May 2025 release date, launching at the same time as the title’s next major expansion.
- Stellaris update 4.0 Phoenix release date: May 2025
Stellaris Update 4.0 Phoenix Content
Before outlining the team’s approach to changing the key areas mentioned above, Game Director Stephen Muray noted that the update is currently “very deep in active development.” The features it contains at launch may end up changing over the coming months or being removed altogether.
As part of the development team’s ongoing efforts to improve performance – especially during the late stages of a campaign and while playing on large galaxies –, pops and jobs will be reworked when Stellaris update 4.0 lands.
“Pops will be grouped together into Pop Groups based on species, strata, and ethics, and these Pop Groups will produce Workforce that is used to fill (or partially fill) Jobs,” Muray explains. “As part of this change, we’re changing the overall scale of Pops - most things that previously affected or manipulated 1 Pop would now affect or manipulate 100.”
Other systems, including pop growth and migration, will naturally be affected. The developer’s plans for them will be outlined in a future dev diary.
From there, trade will be simplified, acting as a standard resource that also represents the general logistics capability of empires.
As far as new player guidance goes, Stellaris’ patch 4.0 aims to make the first part of campaigns less overwhelming by better highlighting meaningful events that impact the short and long-term state of our empires.
In addition, the message settings system is being expanded, allowing us to manually select the individual types of messages for which we see notifications, toasts, or popups.
Another feature planned for Stellaris’ Phoenix update are empire trees, which share the general concept of focus trees from other paradox grand strategy games. Their purpose is to guide empires towards a set of goals that align with a philosophy of our choice.
Here, however, they take the shape of tracks through which we progress by completing “suggested tasks that fall into Conquest, Exploration, or Development aspiration categories.”
Improvements to the ship designer and colonization systems are also planned for may and you can read more about them in the developer diary linked above.
Future developer diaries will delve deeper into planned features and changes ahead of Stellaris’ highly-anticipated update 4.0 release date.
Keep updated on the latest Gaming News by following GameWatcher on X, checking out our videos on YouTube, or by giving us a like on Facebook.
