New Stellaris beta tests big, experimental changes to the Wilderness origin

The Stellaris Wilderness open beta has just begun, as developer Paradox trials potential changes to the best new origin in the space strategy game. Introduced with Stellaris Biogenesis, Wilderness allows you to inhabit a sentient planet that gradually spreads its biomass to other stars. It's a tremendously creative alternative to most of the game's playable factions, and has become very popular among players as a result. But it's run into a few teething issues, so game director Stephen 'Eladrin' Muray outlines a new test run for a potential solution, and calls on your help to put it through its paces.

I spoke with Muray in May about the Stellaris community's response to Wilderness. He said he "knew would be interesting" but was also surprised by just how popular it proved. Muray remarked that players were a little too eager to spend all their biomass from the start: "I think we need to do something to be like 'hey don't spend all of it; it needs to grow. Biomass is pops. Don't eat all your pops'." Despite players gradually learning the systems, however, it seems more tweaks are still in order.

A few weeks on, in the latest dev diary for the 4X game, Muray comments that Paradox has "seen a lot of erratic behavior with Wilderness empires, especially when your biomass totals on a planet get too low, where sometimes jobs would go unworked, and you aren't always able to influence it in any way." As such, the Stellaris team has cooked up some experimental changes, but considers them "impactful and different enough" to warrant thorough testing before they are deployed to the full release.

To begin with, all Wilderness jobs are now automatically worked by your primary species without requiring biomass, ensuring that you won't run into problems where construction makes the resource unavailable. "This replaces the massive workforce bonus that wilderness pops received, and makes it behave closer to the intended design of the origin," Muray explains.

As such, jobs for Wilderness are also now properly represented rather than being worked by a single pop bearing a giant bonus. Instead, you'll see exactly how the job is worked, and will be able to use sliders to customize this amount. "These changes are designed to prevent situations where some jobs would go unworked, make Wilderness less bug prone, and are intended to give you more control over your economy in deficit situations," Muray notes. "Please provide feedback."

The Stellaris Wilderness open beta is available now. It also includes an experimental 'fast save transfer' feature for multiplayer games. To join, find Stellaris in your Steam library, right click on it, and head to properties, then betas. Click the drop-down menu and pick the 'Wilderness Open Beta' branch. Muray says the team plans to run the test "for the rest of the summer so we can gather feedback on these changes."

Looking for more ways to freshen up your next playthrough? Here are the best Stellaris mods for your perusal. We've also picked out the best space games for plenty more ways to get weird among the stars.

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