Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Today's dev diary is going to briefly cover our plans for future Stellaris updates, and what you can expect from us going forward.

The Adams Update
With Utopia and Banks now out, the next thing we have planned for you is the 1.6 'Adams' update. This update, named after Douglas Adams, is going to focus completely on bug fixing and quality of life changes, with no major feature additions and no accompanying paid DLC. Work on 1.6 actually started almost immediately after Banks/Utopia went into code freeze, and it already contains hundreds of bug fixes and usability/UI additions and tweaks. A particular focus of Adams has been to work on our backlog of old issues, taking care of many of the smaller issues and annoyances that have been present in the game since release. We've also made time for some of the things that were originally planned for Banks, but had to be cut due to time constraints. While I can't give you an exact release date for Adams yet, I can say that you shouldn't have to wait too long.

Beyond Utopia
Back in Dev Diary #50, I listed a number of priorities for us going forward from Heinlein/Leviathans. A number of these things have since been added to the game, so I'm going to go ahead and list it again to give you an idea of where our focus will lie in future updates, expansions and story packs, with the items that are already completed noted with a strikethrough. The list is NOT in order of priority.

As before, THIS IS NOT AN EXHAUSTIVE OR FINAL LIST, AND NOTHING BELOW IS CERTAIN TO HAPPEN (unless it already did)!
[S]Ship appearance that differs for each empire, so no two empires' ships look exactly the same.[/s]
[S]More potential for empire customization, ability to build competitive 'tall' empires.[/s]
[S]Global food that can be shared between planets.[/s]
[S]Ability to construct space habitats and ringworlds.[/s]
[S]Factions that are proper interest groups with specific likes and dislikes and the potential to be a benefit to an empire instead of just being rebels.[/s]
[S]Ability to set rights and obligations for particular species in your empire[/s].
Deeper Federations that start out as loose alliances and can eventually be turned into single states through diplomatic manuevering.
Superweapons and planet killers.
More story events and reactive narratives that give a sense of an unfolding story as you play.

More interesting mechanics for pre-FTL civilizations.
A 'galactic community' with interstellar politics and a 'space UN'.
Buildable Dreadnoughts and Titans.
Reworking the endgame crises to be more balanced against each other and the size/state of the galaxy.
Reworks to war to address the 'doomstacks' issue and make the strategic and tactical layers of warfare more interesting and less micro-intensive.
Deeper mechanics and unique portraits for synthetics.

With Utopia and Banks, we decided that rather than divide our focus, it was better to have the update and expansion focus almost exclusively on empire customization and internal politics, and this is the policy we intend to continue with for future expansions. As always, I can't tell you specifically what the next expansion, update or story pack is going to be about, but the above list should at least give you some ideas of where you can expect Stellaris to go in the future.

That's all for today! Next week we'll start going into specifics of the 1.6 'Adams' update so until then, I leave you with this picture of some of the free graphical content coming in Adams: