Paradox announce Stellaris 4.0 will be a big overhaul sometime in Q2 2025

Paradox Interactive have announced that a big free Stellaris 4.0 update is coming later this year, and it's going to overhaul quite a lot. There's no date set for it yet but it will be sometime in Q2 2025, and will launch along with another major paid expansion.

This was originally announced January 16, with a follow-up first part to go over some more changes on January 23rd.

Pictured - Stellaris, credit: Paradox.

As any Stellaris player will know, the game has grown to such a scale that there's so many moving parts, there's a lot that can break and performance can be an issue in the late game too with all the calculations the game is doing. So thankfully performance is going to be a big focus of it too.

To help players understand the game one thing that has been announced is the new compendium, allowing you to search through all sorts of things that will be in nice neat categories. They've been iterating over their tooltip system too, and this will all work together to give you all the info you need on every concept in the game. Sounds useful.

There's also going to be improvements to the Ship Designer as they said:

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. 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.

We’ve added a “Custom” role for veteran players that want to design the ship from scratch, or you can take one of these generated templates and modify them to suit your needs before saving.

More updates to help newer players are coming as well, as the game does quickly get quite complicated, so they're making numerous quality of life improvements to make the game flow easier to understand.

On the subject of game-flow, they're converting events that don't need you to pick any options from a game-interrupting pop-up into a simpler "toasts or notifications". However, you'll be able to adjust it, as they're adding a Message Settings screen to change how you wish to view them all across notifications, toasts, pop-ups and auto-pause for each type. They also said that "Certain event chains that are not particularly loved have had (or will have) a bit of adjustment as well".

There's so much more like improvements to galaxy generation, and a big one they have in other Paradox games with Focus Trees, will make a sort-of appearance but tweaked for how different and dynamic Stellaris is. Instead of a set tree, they're going to add in "suggested tasks that fall into Conquest, Exploration, or Development aspiration categories".