Stellaris is finally getting rid of unemployment, but not without some extensive testing first

The next major Stellaris update is addressing some much-requested quality-of-life aspects across the space 4X game. Stellaris 4.3.4 is out today, bringing a fresh list of balance changes, stability improvements, and overhauls to the AI for rival empires. With that now in the books, game director Stephen 'Eladrin' Muray and his team at Paradox Interactive are looking towards the future, and the Stellaris 4.4 patch dubbed 'Pegasus.' Among these are some changes that are going into test today, including a redesign for the job selection system.

Muray has already teased one big feature he's hoping to see launch with Stellaris update 4.4: the ability to join and leave wars in progress, typically as part of trade deals. Today, he's looking at several more quality-of-life improvements that the community have been asking for that should arrive in the Pegasus update. The first of these is automated workforce limit sliders that let you manually cap how many of a job's slots can be filled by automation. Starbases get collapsible lists (brought over from the Shipyard), and the ability to quickly cycle through your list with Tab (and Ctrl-Tab to go backwards).

Next up are "some fundamental changes to how planet job selection works." These are significant enough to warrant their own extended open beta, and Muray stresses that we won't see them reach live in the 4.3.5 update. "If things go absolutely perfectly they may go into 4.3.6, but my expectation is that we will hold them until 4.4," he notes. "These changes complete the removal of unemployment that we began with 4.3.0, and massively simplify some of the core loops surrounding job selection."

In the new system, when a pop loses their job, they'll now immediately be put into their stratum's fallback category (citizen or maintenance drone, for example), rather than having to sit in a temporary 'unemployed' tier. The way pops compete for jobs is changing as well, taking into account basic job weights and how efficient each candidate is at them, meaning that more suitable pops will now properly displace those already in a position when suitable.

The turnover happens at a slower rate for higher-stratum jobs, but out-of-place pops will still be replaced eventually. On underpopulated planets, pops will try to fill jobs proportionally between all the jobs they are eligible for. This will still take into account a preference for higher-stratum jobs and those that they're better suited for, with jobs that have been prioritized ignoring the 'proportional fill' rule.

For the Grand Archive specifically, Muray says Paradox has received frequent requests "to improve the exhibition and storage systems." To start with, it's increasing storage capacity to 60 in update 4.4. You can now move specimens in and out of storage freely, but with a short two-year cooldown "to discourage extreme micromanagement." You simply right-click specimens on exhibition to put them in storage, and left-click those in storage to send them to the exhibition. Specimens must be in storage in order to sell them to private collectors.

Additionally, specimens will no longer attempt to re-sort themselves based on the date you acquired them - instead, they'll remain in your selected order if active, and in the order they were last moved while inactive. The storage window has also been made fully draggable, and you're free to move it outside the boundaries of the main Grand Archive menu.

Stellaris update 4.3.4 is now available in full release. You can check the latest patch notes courtesy of Paradox Interactive. It includes balancing for disruptor weapons, exotic gas production, the Faculty of Archaeostudies, and the Astral Siphon, alongside improvements for the enemy AI's handling of budgets. There are also several stability fixes to mitigate potential out-of-sync issues in multiplayer matches.

The Stellaris job assignment beta is also live now. If you want to take part in that, simply right-click the game in your Steam library, open the properties menu, and navigate to 'game versions and betas.' There, you can switch your branch over to the 'Stellaris test job assignment' build. Make sure to back up your saves beforehand, just to be on the safe side. Muray notes that "it's probably safer to start a new game" for the test, although says that if you can weather pops temporarily vanishing and your error log "going to the moon" for the first month, it should resolve after that on an existing save.