New Update And Anniversary Edition For RTS Stellaris Out Now

It's been a year since real-time strategy game Stellaris was released, and to mark the occasion, developer Paradox has released a special edition for the game. It launches today alongside a new patch.

The Digital Anniversary Edition comes with the three expansions released over the past year in addition to the base game. It includes the Plantoids Species Pack, which adds twelve portraits of sentient plant-like beings, the Leviathans Story Pack, which adds new monsters and encounters, and the Utopia Pack, which adds megastructures and new advancement options. This edition costs $70.16 on Steam, a 10% discount from buying the game and each expansion individually.

Current owners of Stellaris get some freebies, as well. Paradox announced that the Creatures of the Void pack, previously reserved as a preorder bonus, and a new Anniversary Species Portrait Pack will be free for Stellaris players. Further, it will be cutting the price on the base game and the Leviathans and Plantoids Packs, although those discounts are not live on Steam at the time of this writing.

In addition, the latest update for Stellaris went live today, and it focuses on quality of life improvements. You can see the massive list of bug fixes and tweaks here.

There are also a few new features that come in the update, which you can read about below:

• (Utopia Expansion) Added Devouring Swarm civic to the game for Hive Minds
• (Utopia Expansion) It is now possible to find and repair ruined Megastructures in the galaxy
• Possible to repair ruined Ringworlds with the Mega-Engineering technology
• Reworked the empire diplomacy rooms into a set of 16 different rooms themed around AI personalities that can be freely chosen between when designing an empire
• Replaced Growth Time modifier effect with Growth Speed and rebalanced related values
• Added the ability to drain sector resource stockpiles, giving you 75% of their stockpiled resources at the cost of 100 influence. The cost is reduced to 25 influence during defensive wars
• It is now possible to terraform inhabited planets if you have researched the new Ecological Adaptation tech
• You can now set taxes for Energy Credits and Minerals on sectors separately
• Ironman autosaving is now quarterly instead of monthly

Stellaris came out in 2016 for PC and sold very fast: 200,000 copies were purchased in the first 24 hours of release. It broke the Paradox record for amount of revenue earned in a single day. You can read GameSpot's 7/10 review here.