The time has finally come to present the full patch notes for the 2.2 'Le Guin' update and the accompanying MegaCorp expansion coming out on December 6!

VERSION 2.2.0

DESIGNERS' NOTE Greetings! Stellaris has (once again) undergone bold changes! In 2.2 the focus of the changes has been to rework how you develop planets and to deepen the game's economy. The purpose is to make the management of planets more fun and engaging. Tiles are gone, and have been replaced with Districts, Buildings, and Jobs. You will now instead construct City Districts, Farming Districts, Mining Districts, and Generator Districts, as well as various Buildings with more specialized roles. Districts and buildings provide Jobs, and a job worked by a Pop will produce resources. As a planet gains more Pops it will unlock more Building Slots. Buildings work similar to how they did before, but now most of them provide Jobs instead of producing resources directly. 2.2 also introduces a new Trade Route system. What you essentially want to do is to collect Trade Value (found in space and produced on planets) by upgrading a nearby starbase. You should then set up a Trade Route leading back to your home system. Trade Value is converted into usable resources when it reaches your Trade Capital. We recommend you to take a look at the updated tutorial!

Megacorp Expansion Features

Megacorps

• Added the Megacorporation empire type, which features unique civics as well as the ability to become an economic powerhouse by spreading branch offices on the planets of other empires

Ecumenopolis

• Added new ascension perk: Arcology Project, enabling the Decision to convert a planet to an City-World completely covered in urban sprawl

Hive Worlds

• Added new ascension perk: Hive Worlds, similar to Machine Worlds but for Hive Minds, which allows them to terraform planets into living planets on which only hive drones can live. Hive Worlds gain a bonus to resource output and are not limited by deposits in how many resource districts they can support

Xeno-Compatibility

• Added new ascension perk: Xeno-Compatibility, which allows cross-breeding between species

• Universal Transactions

• Added new ascension perk: Universal Transactions, which makes it easier for Megacorporation empires to establish branch offices and commercial pacts

Caravaneers

• Added the Caravaneers, nomadic space traders who will give unique offers in exchange for a variety of resources, and also offer games of chance in their home system

New Megastructures

• Added new Megastructures: the Matter Decompressor, Mega-Art Installation, Interstellar Assembly, and Strategic Coordination Center, including ruined versions you can discover

Slave Market

• Added a galactic Slave Market so you can buy or sell slave Pops (once the Galactic Market is established)

New Voices and Music

• Added 3 new advisor voice sets as well as 16 minutes of new music (added to the soundtrack DLC as well)

New Canon Empires

• Added new pre-scripted Empires using Megacorp mechanics, and changed the existing Chinorr to a Megacorp

Achievements

• Added 10 new achievements

2.2 Le Guin Free Features

• Added Simplified Chinese localization
• Removed planet/habitat tile system, replaced with districts, jobs
• Pops and Pop Jobs now belong to a social class (Pop Category) that determines their luxury needs. Social classes are ranked, and Pops that belong to a higher social class will refuse to take jobs belonging to a lower class until they demote over time
• Added unemployment for pops without suitable jobs, which lowers planetary stability if their living standards are low
• Added planetary housing, usage of which depends on pop's social strata (rulers and specialists = a lot, slaves and menial labourers = a little)
• More dynamic pop growth system: populations can grow and decline based on their rights, living standards, immigration/emigration
• Added crime. Crime is generated by overcrowding and poor living conditions, and negatively affects planet stability. It can also generate events
• Added new and reworked planetary decisions and empire edicts
• Added new resource types (alloys, consumer goods, etc) which tie in to the economic simulation in many ways, diversifying the domestic activity of empires considerably
• Added the Internal Market, where resources can be converted into other resources at a cost
• Added the Galactic Market, in which all game resources can be bought and sold in open exchange between empires, with prices fluctuating based on supply and demand. This is formed when enough Empires are in contact with each other, replacing the Internal Market. Genocidal empires do not get access to the Galactic Market
• Added trade routes, where you can collect trade value from upgraded starbases and send it back to your trade capital to convert to wealth for your empire. Reworked piracy system to link in to this, and added a patrol order so your fleets can actively suppress piracy
• Added commercial pact diplomatic agreement, where the signatories gain trade value equal to 10% of the other party
• Added empire development based on owned systems, districts, and colonies. It is a soft cap that, when exceeded, applies scaling penalties to leader cost, edict cost, research speed, etc. This replaces the old system of static penalties based only on systems owned, and more accurately reflects the size and complexity of your empire. Development cap can be increased with techs and ascension perks
• Introduced a new concept called Empire Cohesion. Empire Cohesion is increased by each owned system, and decreased by each external hyperlane connection and cut-off (non-owned) system inside your borders. If cohesion loss goes above cohesion gain, you will suffer penalties in the form of increased empire size and the corresponding costs it brings
• Added 9 new basic Mandates relating to your empire's internal economy
• Tweaked army display and ground combat screens, with improved army icons
• Reworked planetary bombardment to produce devastation, which damages housing, amenities, trade value, and pop growth. High devastation will ruin buildings and kill pops
• Reworked sectors to be automatically generated, removing the "mini-economies" and having them directly contribute to your empire stockpiles
• Reworked factions to always give an amount of influence based on their faction approval, rather than having a hard cutoff below which they would contribute nothing
• Reworked the Tradition Trees to synchronize with all the new systems
• Added Shared Burden civic for all your luxury space communism needs, with a new prescripted empire using it, the Kilik Cooperative
• Replaced authoritarian Caste System with Stratified Economy living standards: does not use slavery but has a similar effect (happy rulers, downtrodden masses). Authoritarians can still use species-wide slavery. Slaver guilds civic is now required to enslave own species
• Added alert messages for completing a Megastructure's intermediate upgrade steps
• Added a conclusion to the Strong Magnetic Field events
• Unity Ambitions are now a free feature, and no longer restricted to owners of Apocalypse
• Added new single star custom system options
• Created and implemented new SFX for Natural Wormholes which have been silent until now. No more.
• Since the Chinorr have become a Megacorporation, replaced them in non-Megacorp games with a new prescripted empire, the Glebsig Foundation
• Added technology Resort Worlds that unlocks the ability to designate a colony as a Resort World. This colony will be unable to have districts and most buildings built on it, but will increase amenities and immigration pull across the empire.
• Added tech for Penal Colony worlds which have high crime rates but decrease crime on other planets
• Added a tech for slaver empires to designate a world as a Thrall-World. Thrall-Worlds cannot support city districts or manufacturing/research buildings, but get vastly increased growth rate and access to special buildings and jobs for slaves
• Updated tutorial to explain the new systems
• Added the multiplayer observer mode from the 2.1.4 beta to the default game version
• Added new civic: Byzantine Bureaucracy, that reduces housing/amenities usage and allows for the construction of Bureaucratic Complex building that adds administrator jobs
• Deploy Hunter-Killer Drones decision can now be toggled on and off
• Added a game setup setting for how many habitable worlds are guaranteed to spawn near your starting system
• Research Agreements are now diplomatic actions, rather than being part of trade deals
• End game victory conditions reworked into a score system, tallying up your total empire accomplishment based on size, population, military, tech, federations, and many other measures
• Added some new Colony events.
• Civilian ships are now constructed at starbase rather than planets
• Added pop selection view to colony ship construction in starbases
• Colony ships can now be built populated with any species which you have a migration treaty with
• Colony ships built via the expansion planner will be automatically constructed at the starbase nearest the target planet
• Planets have a decision to stop pop growth, although this comes with a penalty to stability for regular empires.
• Blockers now generally reduce the usable districts on a planet, while clearing them often unlocks additional district types.
• Clearing Blockers can now also give one time bonuses, i.e. clearing a slum grants a pop.
• The homeworld of the First League is now an Ecumenopolis
• Notifications dealing with the players own empire are now marked with a golden yellow rim to distinguish them from those affecting only other empires
• Added 6 new corporate-themed empire flags

Balance

• Improved distribution of space creatures and unique systems
• Leader Capacity has been removed from the game and replaced with energy credits upkeep for each leader
• Subterranean civilization famine event now uses food rather than energy
• Increased the delay between the Prethoryn Vanguard and the main swarm arriving
• You no longer get influence when another empire finishes first contact project before you do
• Teachings of Warriors event now only gives energy as reward for selling to a private collector
• Removed neighbor restrictions on rivals and most CBs
• No longer possible to pick Imperial Prerogative as first ascension perk
• Federation members now automatically have a commercial agreement with each other, but have to pay 15% of their energy credit income in federation taxes
• Federations are now always led by the most powerful member empire rather than having a rotating presidency (25% more power than leader is required to replace an existing president)
• Added a decision to curtail planetary growth through voluntary measures, available to empires that don't allow other forms of growth control. It reduces growth by 75% at the expense of increased pop upkeep
• Reworked relative empire power to be based on fleet power, economic power and tech power (in order of descending importance). Economic power is calculated as the amount of resources produced by the empire each month, multiplied by the base value of said resources, while tech power is calculated by the total cost of researched techs
• Added two new technologies for machine empires that improve pop assembly speed
• Nivlac pops now generally spawn in groups of 15
• Nivlac species trait effect on habitability and pop growth has been significantly reduced
• Added Cadet difficulty setting as an 'easy' level below Ensign, granting the player economic buffs
• Admirals no longer gain the Fleet Logistician trait from a random (MTTH) event
• Changed Forlorn Ruins modifier to be -5% happiness instead of -20%
• Drastically reduced the research cost for Entropic Recursion and Doctrine: Strange Loop, and removed their associated buildings
• Drastically reduced the Machine Uprising's starting fleets so they shouldn't immediately economically collapse
• Habitats now have a monthly alloy upkeep on their capital building
• Strong/Weak traits now have a small effect on worker output
• Culture shock is now a planet modifier rather than a pop modifier
• Assimilation now faster, and planetary culture shock will be removed if there is only hive/cyborg/machine pops on the planet, because free will is a painful illusion
• Xenophobes now get +10%/+20% pop growth instead of claim cost reduction (to balance for not having as much growth from migration, etc)
• Ascension perk Defender of the Galaxy now grants bonus damage against the Tempest too
• Ascension perk Galactic Contender also grants bonus damage vs the gate builders
• Yurt, Vultaum, and Irassian Home systems now have some additional resources
• Having an L-gate in your space increases the odds of rolling gateway tech if you dont have a regular gateway
• Spiritualist faction will no longer be unhappy about Tomb Worlds if you get Wormed
• Having Psionic pops in your empire allows for the possibility of rolling the Psionic theory tech if not otherwise possible
• Several existing civics have been adjusted to affect the new jobs system: Merchant Guilds, Police State, Agrarian Idyll, Aristocratic Elite, Citizen Service, Exalted Priesthood and Technocracy
• Species trait Thrifty now increases Trade Value production, new trait Ingenious increases Energy Production
• Reduced cost of robo-modding a species
• Reduced the cost of bio-modding a species
• Databanks Uplinks tradition now increases research station output instead of unlocking assist research
• Assist Research is now available from the start of the game
• Ending a resource deal with a merchant enclave early now gives -5 opinion
• Distinguished Admiralty civic effect on admiral level cap reduced from 2 to 1. In addition, the effect on naval capacity has been replaced with ship fire rate

UI

• Split the policies and edicts view into their own views
• You can now start the game with the "-console" argument and it will dump all console commands to the info.log file
• Added various info about target planets in the Resettlement dropdown list
• Colonization screens only show the list of species and will generate a ship from the closest shipyard
• Species are sorted in habitability order on the colonize "select species" window
• Expansion planner now shows scripted district in a moddable way instead of being hardcoded into energy, minerals, food
• The expansion planner now shows Rare Deposits
• Added navigation sidebar and moved all topbar menu items to it
• Reworked planet battle view to show frontline, reserved and disengaged armies separately
• Standardized colors for displaying cost and time

AI

• AI now considers the potential resource gain against its system upkeep cost when deciding whether to build an outpost
• Adapted AI to new economy system
• Improved early game economy AI
• AI will now revoke claims it has on empires it wants to maintain a long-term alliance with

Modding

• Added scriptable leader classes, old classes are now attributes for the new ones
• Added on_crossing_border on-action
• You can now set an arrival_effect on auto_move_to_target, this will fire that scripted effect on arrival
• Added "on_fleet_combat_joined_attacker" and "on_fleet_combat_joined_defender" on_action. Both are fired when fleet enter combat, scopes etc in the file "00_on_actions.txt"
• Added country_trade_fee modifier
• Replaced free_pop_slots trigger with free_housing trigger
• Updated the "if" trigger to work in the same way as the "if" effect: if { limit = {...} } else_if { limit = {...} } else { ... }
• Added define for default trade change
• Added MARKET_FLUCTUATION_EPSILON define to avoid useless calculations
• Added last_building_changed / last_district changed triggers
• Added on_system_lost and on_system_gained on-actions
• Create Species can now accept an event_target for the species class create_species = { class = event_target:caravaneer_fleet2_country.species }
• Most modifiers in the game now take custom_tooltip to print a custom desc
• Added perc_communications_with_playable trigger
• Added "country_immigration_pull_add," "country_immigration_pull_mult," "country_emigration_push_add" and "country_emigration_pull_mult" modifiers. They work like the planet modifiers of the same name, but at country level
• Added triggers "has_rival = " and "has_overlord="
• Added is_half_species trigger
• Added create_half_species effect
• Added country-scoped variants of event pulses. Which countries get these is controlled in country type settings
• Added GetRulerName to localization script in Leader scope
• The "has_colonization_control" trigger now works like other species rights trigger: has_colonization_control = { value = no country =root }
• Added a "can_colonize_with_species" game rule
• It is now possible to directly script a civic as changing the empire's homeworld class, and this will be reflected properly in empire designer
• The number of district types shown in the expansion planner is now fully moddable through a Define ( EXPANSION_VIEW_NUM_DISTRICTS ) However, the gui files must also be changed to have that number of district buttons/icons
• Added set_market_leader effect
• Anomalies with a null_spawn_chance set that are set to only happen once for the country/game will now be blocked from being rolled again if they fail to pass the null spawn chance check, meaning that some anomalies can be made properly rare and not occur in every game
• Added the "diplomacy_economy" database where you can defines upkeep and production of resources for various types of diplomatic relations.
• Added remove_deposit effect
• Added is_deposit_type trigger
• Add define for resource base, min and max price on the market
• Add defines for constants in price change equation
• Buildings can now have a custom tooltip effect

Bugfixes

• Fixed incorrect starbase Missile Battery description
• Restoring changes to Impossible Organism event to allow Nivlacs to be spawned on any planet, not just the capital
• Fixed Contact Report: Primitives event sometimes fetching the wrong text key
• Fixed incorrect pluralization for Gene Warrior armies
• Fixed a handful of Crystalline Entities not being affected by the Crystal Pacification project
• Fixed the Lokken Mechanists pre-scripted empire using the wrong ruler title
• Fixed a bunch of old sound files that had bad loops or other cruddiness
• Fixed literally unplayable localization bugs
• Removed references to a nonexistent special project in an event chain
• Fixed an edge case where paying off Marauders would cost you nothing
• Fixed "The Xvan Labs" special project spawning in too-distant systems
• Preventing Ketling planets subject to ongoing invasion, orbital bombardment and/or starbase construction from progressing to spacefaring Ketlings
• Fix crash at start when the outliner settings contain double entries
• Fixed Leviathans first contact report not firing in some cases
• Scavenger Bot and Tiyanki Matriarch systems are now flagged as hostile (and guardian) systems
• Fixed bug where upon re-election a ruler would not get a proper new mandate
• Fixed Crisis ambient audio continuing to loop after Crisis has been defeated
• Fixed an issue where Primitives would accumulate too many Ethics over time
• Removed arrow from peace messages since they were misleading
• Added localization that had been missing from Observation events that had been missing since 2015, good golly Miss Molly
• Pacifists are now blocked from Aggressive First Contact protocols, as charming as it was that they had a loophole in their ethical structure that permitted unlimited violence until polite first greetings had been exchanged
• Leviathan Death Notification message should now function
• Fixed the bug when in the MP Lobby create new empire tab was shown beneath custom empires
• Fixed the multiplayer "show players" mapmode being saved and reloaded in single player mode, resulting in all-grey maps
• Fixed tutorial making observer mode outline visible in single player
• Master Builders Ascension Perk no longer applies twice to Habitats
• Marauder fleets now actually show up in the Marauder Vengeance event, rather than merely threatening to do so
• Fixed a crash when deleting an empire led to having a corrupted empire design selected
• Create vassal button now checks properly if a vassal can actually be created
• Fixed multiple contact from same empire
• Fixed empires created by rebellion, being released as a vassal always showing up with grey map colour
• Fixed the "blue solution" sometimes not granting a trait
• The red/green/blue event now adds a custom free trait so as not to mess with trait points.
• There will now always be a minimum of one L-Gate system when playing with the Distant Stars Story Pack, regardless of galaxy size
• Fixed peace deal localization
• Fixed some loc references in post-war messages from Fallen Empires
• Fixed the Horizon Signal event chain sometimes resulting in Pops getting incompatible traits
• Fixed the Grateful Refugee pop modifier potentially stacking (modifier is now instead refreshed if the pop becomes a refugee again)
• Contact Report: Leviathans (story.8) should now fire for all leviathans (will now display a special desc for mechanical leviathans)
• Fixed an issue with terraforming in the Atomic Clock event
• Numerous other bugfixes and performance improvements

As mentioned in the patchnotes, there are 10 new achievements to be had:

• Franchising: As a Corporate empire, have a branch office on 5 different empires' capitals
• Inscrutable Power: I won the Galatron and all I got was this lousy achievement
• Megapolis: Have a planet with at least 100 Pops
• Obscure Tastes: Build a Mega-Art Installation in a nebula system
• Black Hole Mining: Build a Matter Decompressor
• Strategic Initiative: Build a Strategic Coordination Center
• Center of Trade: Earn at least 1000 Energy Credits per month from trade
• Giga-Engineering: Have at least 4 fully operational Megastructures within your borders (Habitats, Ring Worlds and Gateways do not count)
• We Are Legion: Be a biological Hive Mind with at least 1000 drone Pops
• United Space: Build an Interstellar Assembly

Also, for our awesome modding community, here's the DD we did detailing the latest moddability changes. We worked hard on this one. It changes the game in dramatic ways. Please enjoy it when 2.2/MegaCorp debuts next Thursday, December 6th!