Stellaris 2.1 Niven update will change hyperlanes and make anomalies less scary

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Some key changes are coming with Stellaris’ next update, its game director wrote in a Paradox forum post this week. The game’s hyperlane generation system is getting an overhaul, anomalies are changing to be less daunting, and they’re adding a few new types of star system.

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Paradox are changing the hyperlane system to make it less likely to have leviathans sitting in chokepoints on the galaxy map. The new algorithm, Paradox say, identifies clusters of stars and creates thinner “highways” interconnecting these systems, with hyperlanes connecting these to each other. The algorithm can then identify chokepoints, so the game won’t spawn leviathans in those systems. All in all, it’ll make travel easier, and less of a gamble.

Another big change is coming to anomalies. Paradox are completely removing the possibility of failure when researching anomalies. “We found that the possibility to fail on anomalies added little to the game in terms of interesting choices, and mostly frustrated players or made them wait with researching said anomalies until their chance of success was maximized,” game director Wiz wrote in the post. With the Niven update, anomaly research time will depend on scientist skill – researching an anomaly that’s a much higher level than the scientist’s skill level will take a very long time.

They’re also adding an anomaly tracking pane, which will take note of anomalies you haven’t researched yet.

Finally, more star and system types are on the way. Binary and “trinary” systems will include multiple stars in the same system, and will usually be more resource-rich than their single-star counterparts. Brown dwarves and class-M supergiants are two of the new star varieties coming with Riven.

In all, the new features sound like they’ll be welcome quality-of-life improvements, and it’s always nice to have new system types to explore. You can check out the whole post over at the Paradox forums. There’s no release date set yet for the update.