Hello everyone! As were approaching the 4th anniversary of the release of Stellaris, I thought we would take a look at what Stellaris is, and how much has changed since its release on May 9th 2016. Stellaris was the studios first original IP in many years, so when we released the game we didnt really know exactly what makes Stellaris. As a natural consequence of that the game has changed a lot since release as we explored what the game is really about, and which experiences we think are fun and valuable. Stellaris is an exploration-focused space-fantasy strategy game that explores dystopian and utopian themes in a playful and light-hearted manner. There is no one true timeline and it's important that players are able to tell their own stories every story is equally true. The best thing we can do is provide more tools for storytelling, and of course new gameplay to make playing the game more interesting.

A Look Back

Stellaris has had time to really grow in these last 4 years, and I thought it would be fun to take a look back and see how far weve come. In the last 4 years we have (in no particular order):

• Added a whole bunch of new anomalies to explore
• Tweaked the galaxy multiple times to feature more interesting things to discover
• Added a new Archaeology system
• Added Relics & Minor Artifacts
• Added terrifying Leviathans
• Reworked the economic system to feature jobs
• Added Civics & Authorities for more options during empire creation
• Added Traditions & Ascension perks for more customization of your empire while you play
• Added a whole bunch of new portraits for you to choose from
• Added Starbases and changed how you take ownership of star systems
• Added Hive Minds & Machine Intelligence empires
• Added bigger and bigger ships like Titans, Juggernauts, Colossi and Juggernauts
• Reworked Federations and added new Federation types
• Added the Galactic Community
• Added a whole bunch of diplomatic actions, such as federation associate, improve relations or defensive pacts
• Added Curator, Artist and Trader enclaves
• Reworked space combat & balance multiple times, and added new weapons such as the extra large Tachyon Lance or Mega Cannon
• Added a lot of megastructures such as the Dyson Sphere or the Mega Art Installation
• And so much more....

We have come a long way since the release of Stellaris, and our story has just barely begun. I think we have a lot to be excited about for the future, as Stellaris has almost infinite potential. Lets take a look into the future together!

Announcing the 2.7 Wells 4th Anniversary Update

To celebrate these 4 years, and to take another step into the future, we will be releasing the free 2.7 Wells update next week on Tuesday the 12th of May! For this update weve been looking at a lot of your feedback from 2.6 Federations, and added a couple of new features and made some tweaks to already existing ones. We will be releasing 2.7 Wells as 2.7.1. If you wanna read the full pach notes, have a read in the forum post here. Thank you all for your continued support! Were very thankful for being able to work on such a great game and to have such an engaged and great community! Lets celebrate many more anniversaries to come!