Stellaris is slowly and steadily approaching its tenth anniversary, but Paradox Interactive shows no signs of slowing down its support for the 4X grand strategy game – on the contrary: A major update for the title has been announced with a Q2 2025 release window. Stellaris 4.0, dubbed the Phoenix Update, will be launching alongside a new expansion for the game.
Although no details on the DLC have been revealed, Paradox shared the outlines of Phoenix, which will prioritize three aspects: Performance gains, new player guidance, and quality-of-life improvements.
Population will be concentrated in Population Groups in one of the most substantial changes of the update. This has major implications for many other gameplay systems, but will – crucially – have a positive impact on the game’s performance, especially in larger galaxies. Trade will be simplified and transformed into a regular resource to further improve performance. Finally, a few smaller fixes to fleets are on the agenda to increase the game’s technical performance with a set of greater changes being planned for the future.
Informational events will be turned into simple notifications or changed so that players can make choices that actually have an effect on their empire – this will hopefully prevent the newer players from being overwhelmed by events that demand their attention at the start of the game. In a very similar vein, the first two trait tiers for leaders will be merged and drawn options on level-ups will be increased. This reduces the amount of times players will have to choose traits.
Empire Focuses will provide a series of quests to players, which lead them down three paths: Conquest, Exploration, or Development. Completing these missions will provide rewards and enable players to effectively plan a win condition in the endgame. While veteran players pursue such goals naturally, newer players will have these Empire Focuses to guide them in the future.
Finally, Stellaris 4.0 will be smoothing out aspects like colonization, species modification, and ship design with adjustments to the systems as well as to the UI.
