Stellaris 4.3 'Cetus' is now available!

The Stellaris 4.3 “Cetus” update is now available!

Internally referred to as “The Reckoning”, the “Cetus” patch boasts an impressive list of balance changes, fixes and performance improvements, while cutting back on the supercharged navies and economies that were introduced with Stellaris 4.0.

Cetus Design Goals and Philosophy​

4.3 “Cetus” is not looking to re-create the economic and power balance of 3.x, but rather we’re establishing a new baseline of where the 4.x economy should be. The smaller economies and navies in 4.3 “Cetus” will reinvigorate early-game and mid-game challenges, adding more incentive to do things like Pacify Space Fauna, which might otherwise be a challenging barrier to bypass. Over the course of the Open Beta we iterated over a good many of these mechanics and balance changes, some things were reworked due to Community feedback, and other things were removed entirely. Behind the scenes the Custodian programmers focused heavily on performance and stability. You should find the game significantly faster and more stable from the very start until the end-game. Thanks to everyone who left feedback and bug reports for us during the Open Beta!

Naval Capacity Changes​

We have made significant changes to Navies intended to reduce the overall ship counts, and we feel that the reduced ship counts make individual ships feel more valuable and interesting. Decoupling ships' Naval Capacity usage from the Corvette Standard™ has given us the opportunity to do things like give Frigates their own niche between Corvettes and Destroyers.

Economic Changes​

Major changes have been made to the economy to rebalance it to a lower level, with reductions across the board to unity generation, planetary ascensions, per pop jobs, and more.

Ascensions and Origins​

We did a pass on many Ascension Paths and Origins to bring them more in-line with each other balance-wise. Cybernetics will become a little stronger relative to the other Ascensions, while Psionic and Biological Ascension Paths have had some of their runaway production bonuses toned down. Similarly, the early Ascension Origins have also received particular attention, with the objective of pushing their Ascension later into the game.

Read the full patch notes here.

We hope you enjoy Stellaris 4.3 'Cetus' as much as we enjoyed bringing it to you. Thank you all for playing Stellaris!

If you have an important game going you would like to finish, please back up the save file before trying to load it in the new version.

You can roll back to a prior version by opening steam and right-clicking on Stellaris in your library -> Properties -> Betas -> choose the desired version from the drop-down.

If you experience crashing or other issues, first disable all mods and start a new save. If the issue persists, please report it on the Bug Report forums.