by Eladrin Hello everyone! Midsummer approaches, and with it, holidays.

Stellaris: Free to Play

We want you and your friends to have a reason to celebrate too. As we announced last week, Stellaris will be free to play on Steam from the 22nd to the 26th. With the addition of Co-op (that is, up to five players playing as the same empire), theres never been a better time to introduce your friends to Stellaris! Remember, as host, your friends will have access to all of your DLC.
Stay tuned to our social media channels during the Free to Play event - they have plans.

Stellaris Nexus

Stellaris Nexus is a simultaneous turn-based multiplayer 4X game offering the full spectrum of a thrilling, strategic 4X experience. Choose a unique faction and leader and challenge up to 5 other players, plotting and battling your way to galactic dominance; all in about 1 hour. As part of Steam Next Fest, its also playable for free until the 26th!

Community Designed Starter Pack

Hello! This is MordredViking, the Community Manager for Stellaris. We recently asked the community for their input on what DLCs to recommend to new players, and we thought we should share some of our findings. We got 420 responses from you all, and among the questions we asked was, for how many hours had you played Stellaris? The answers ranged from a couple of hundred to a whopping 13,000! This came out to an average of 855 hours among all respondents. A pretty hardcore group! The core of the questionnaire however, was of course which DLCs to recommend to a new Stellaris player, and heres the top 10:
From these results, we wanted to have a bundle that provided a representative selection of available content, catering to a range of different play styles and fantasies. With this criteria and the survey results in mind, we settled on Utopia, Federations, Distant Stars and Synthetic Dawn. Utopia allows for a broader range of empire choices, by providing new tools to develop the empire and ultimately allowing players to transform their nation into a paradise. Federations taps into a more diplomatic playstyle, and really ramps up the potential for in-game alliances and also enables power projection through bodies like the Galactic Council. Distant Stars entices eager explorers with new discoveries throughout the galaxy. Then finally, Synthetic Dawn brings those robot dreams to life with expanded robotic gameplay options.

Whats Next?

We will return with dev diaries on July 27th with Habitat discussions, and start going into detail regarding whats planned for the 3.9 Caelum update. Like 3.1 Lem, 3.3 Libra, and 3.6 Orion, Caelum will be a Custodian update focused on revisiting old packs, catching up on technical debt, and generally improving the game.

Spoiler: We Dug Up Some Lithoid Previews

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The newly clarified Calamitous Birth tooltip.
The home crater gets a bit of a boost.
A minor tweak to the craters makes a big difference.
What do Lithoids eat?
Pom-a-granites!
Placeholder icons on the approaches.
Once you start feasting, it's really hard to stop. Om nom nom. [/expand]