Paradox has announced a release date for the upcoming Stellaris 3.3 update. Titled "Libra", the update will bring new content, tweaks to existing stuff, and lots and lots of balance changes, as befits a Paradox grand strategy patch. It's landing next week.
What can we expect in the Stellaris 3.3 update?
This update follows in the wake of November's Stellaris 3.2 patch, which was rather humorously codenamed "Herbert" and added AI improvements and a new ship browser. Now, Stellaris 3.3 is bringing even more improvements and new content to the spacefaring grand strategy game. First up, you're getting two new star systems and three new anomalies: Temporal Prism, Lost Soul, and Ancient Vending Machine. There are also two new archaeology sites to discover in the base game.
There are also a range of other improvements and tweaks to the base gameplay systems in the new Stellaris update. A major Unity rework (not the engine) has changed the way in which the Unity resource functions in a number of ways. This change has affected not only the resource itself, but also jobs, traditions, and perks related to it. There's a new Permanent Employment civic for the Necroids species pack, and a number of pre-sapient pops have been added to various species packs (if you own them).
As you can imagine, there's also an absolute smorgasbord of balance changes, small gameplay tweaks, and bug fixes to discover. Leaders will now only stay in the talent pool for a year, so you'll need to snap them up quickly. We're betting there are a lot of people out there wishing leaders only remained active for one year in the real world. Spiritualists can no longer take the Byzantine Bureaucracy civic, mostly because they don't have bureaucracy. Paradox patch notes are always fun to read, so make sure to give the full Stellaris 3.3 patch notes a once-over to make sure you've got everything you need from them. You'll also find some notes marked "Beta", which indicates features that have been introduced or tweaked based on player participation in the beta version of the update.
When is the Stellaris 3.3 update release date?
The Stellaris 3.3 update release date is February 23rd at 10am Central European Time (which is 4am Eastern and 1am Pacific, so it's one to download in the morning). If you haven't played Stellaris yet, and you're a fan of massive-scale grand strategy games, you're definitely missing out. It's such a big game that it has two separate teams: one that works on updates to existing content and one that works on new expansions. At its core, Stellaris is a game of space diplomacy and politics; you're not going to find much here if you enjoy exciting laser-filled space battles. If you love games like Crusader Kings 3 or Europa Universalis, though, you'll find plenty to love in Stellaris. It's proven so successful that a Kickstarter for a tabletop version of the game reached over $2 million in funding.
You can grab Stellaris right now on PC, PlayStation consoles (on PS5 via backwards compatibility), and Xbox platforms. Paradox releases major content updates for the game every three months or so; by that reckoning, we're expecting to see a hypothetical Stellaris 3.4 update sometime around May. We'll bring you more on that as soon as we get it, but in the meantime, be sure to head into the game and take a look at everything that's new on February 23rd.
Are you excited for the new Stellaris 3.3 update? Let us know in the comments below!
