Hello Stellaris Community! Were now less than a week away from the release of the First Contact Story Pack! You can preorder it here. For those of you who dont want to read this summary, we have Community Manager Mordred Viking on the Stellaris YouTube reading, so you dont have to! [previewyoutube=8vsr5c1H61Y;full][free features video][/previewyoutube] Today, were here to dig into what the Custodians have been up to while the Expansion team has been working on First Contact. As many of you know, the Custodian team works on fixing bugs, improving the UI, increasing performance, adding new modding support, working on the AI and adding new content to previously released DLC. While there are additions to multiple DLC in Canis Minor, one of the biggest new features is included in the Ancient Relics Story Pack: archaeotechnologies. Archaeotechs are ancient technologies, repurposed to fit and amplify your current technologies and are generally found by excavating dig sites, or completing your precursor event chain and doing the Secrets of special project. Researching the Archaeostudies technology (or starting with the Remnants Origin) will give your empire the ability to construct (or start with) a Facility of Archaeostudies, which produces a steady stream of minor artifacts to fill all your archaeo-needs, as well as increasing the speed at which your researchers can discover archaeotechnologies. To help cover the costs of the new archaeo components, completed dig sites now have a chance to passively generate a small amount of minor artifacts monthly, which lead in turn to a rescaling of the costs of certain minor artifact actions. Additionally for First Contact, the Custodian team has been working on improving the interactions with pre-FTL societies. The free patch includes new diplomatic options such as providing technology, improving and harming relations, and building a spy network. Espionage actions have been added as well, allowing you to plant advanced knowledge on the planet, or infiltrate the pre-FTL government or hive mind. Uplifted species will now gain the literally unplayable Enlightened Origin, giving the uplifted species +10% research speed and +0.5 Loyalty per month towards their Overlord. Overlords of uplifted subjects may also now choose specialty subject types for them (requires Overlord). Other older event chains have been reworked and improved, including adding the ability for pre-FTLs to spawn as several Origins tied to other DLC

• Mechanists (requires Utopia)
• Life-Seeded (requires Apocalypse)
• Ocean Paradise (requires Aquatics)
• Subterranean (requires Overlord)
• Void Dwellers (for pre-ftls in the Federation's End unique system)
• Shattered Ring (requires Federations)

For Canis Minor, we also reduced the AIs willingness to peacefully subjugate themselves. Additionally the AI takes the economic impact of trades into account when calculating trade acceptance, as well as a host of other AI bug fixes and improvements. We also fixed several edge-cases where you could get stuck as a vassal stemming from Independence Wars and Federations, and fighting joined independence wars with your other vassal friends will now result in all of you being freed, instead of just the vassal who declared war. Alien Zoos have been reworked and now provide a Zookeeper job. As you mightve guessed, constructing Alien Zoos also no longer requires the alien pets special deposit. Presapients set to preserve, or livestock pops may take jobs working at the Alien Zoo, and the Zookeepers output scales with the number of pops working at the Zoo. But thats not all! The Custodians have accumulated pages of changes, and while we cant post them all here, heres some selected other changes:

• adjusted several other Pop Factions preferences and demands,
• rebalanced certain planetary designations including a colony designation for habitats,
• increased the Juggernauts speed to be in line with battleships and titans
• changes to traveling via the Quantum Catapult
• grants +33% fire rate after jumping
• Slingshot to the Stars increases bonus to 50% and get increased accuracy when using a Quantum Catapult
• Slingshot Origins also no longer lose a guaranteed habitable world to their quantum catapult

Thanks for playing Stellaris, and we hope well see you for the launch of Stellaris 3.7 Canis Minor and the First Contact Story Pack on March 14th!