The new free patch 2.2 Le Guin for Stellaris has completely transformed the game. The Le Guin update changed so much that the game will probably be very scary and confusing the first time you start playing it after the latest update, especially for beginners so this Stellaris 2.2 Le Guin Guide (which includes Megacorp things) is to bring you up to speed on the new mechanics.

Table of contents

Introduction

Please note that the screenshots and some of the information was taken from Quil18’s Youtube Channel, if you prefer watching video guides check out his Stellaris video guide.

Particularly the primary mechanic is the entirely new way that Stellaris planets work, the tile system is completely gone. The new population and building system in stars is meant to give Stellaris a lot more ability to customize your planets whilst opening the potential for the future both in terms of Stellaris 2.2 mods and future Stellaris expansions.

Stellaris 2.2 Resources

There are two new basic resources, in addition to energy, minerals and food we now have consumer goods and alloys. Alloys are used to build spaceships and star bases because minerals are no longer used for ships and no longer used for star bases. Minerals are still however used for mining stations and research stations. Consumer goods are a resource that are consumed by your population as part of their normal upkeep so remember that they don’t just need food anymore they also need some consumer goods. How much consumer goods they cost depends very much on their position in society as well as your particular set of laws. Consumer goods are also consumed by various jobs to produce things such as research.

Population

Population is a very important thing to learn, let’s say your capital has 64 people, they can be divided into three Stratus — rulers, specialists and workers (lowest of them all). Depending on your empire you might also have a set of slaves as well. If you’re playing an alternate Empire such as a hive mine or machine Empire you will likely only have two stratuses though you will have complex drones and simple drones and in addition to those you may also have bio trophies as a separate throttle.

Jobs

Your workers can be working on various jobs, for example clerks can be farmers, miners and technicians. Farmers are workers that produce food, miners produce minerals and technicians produce credits. If you look at clerks, they produce amenities and trade value. Earthicians are a sort of technicians and by clicking on the information button you can get a full breakdown everything about them. These “earthicians” workers are all identical, they’re exactly the same race they are all militarists. All of them are clerks which are in the worker stratum and they all belong to the same faction and have the same happiness. Earthicians in this case have the same political power and they all produce crime.

Every pop on your planet produces crime which is a new value in Stellaris 2.2 Le Guin update, most pops create the exact same amount of crime. Unemployed people do generate a little bit more because they’re kind of cranky and bored. Bored people might become criminals, for example they have a certain amount of need for housing as well as amenities. Every unit of population also has an upkeep, most biological pops will require one food per month and they’ll generally also require some amount of consumer goods to be happy. The amount that they need will depend on their rights as well as various other government picks. Getting stability on your planet is really important! Having stable population and planet will let you get a lot more consumer goods from each artisan than you should, and that’s all for free. The workers will work more efficiently so always keep an eye on different Strasus’ and different specific subgroups to make them happy and efficient.

Robot farmers have an upkeep which is simple energy, simple robots don’t have any happiness or political power or anything of that sort which means you don’t have to worry about them as much.

Planet

Planet summary screen is another important mechanic because it lets you see the amount of employed and unemployed people and general information about your population as well as the buildings. If you check the screenshot below, you’ll see that this particular planet has 64 people and 63 of those have jobs which means there is one unemployed person. The planet has zero housing available in the city and if more people are born here or migrate to here the population could grow in which case that will produce homeless people which makes people very unhappy and you want to avoid that.

Being informed about the number of amenities is crucial because if it’s a positive number it means everyone’s getting all the amenities that they want and that in return leads to bonus population happiness which is crucial for building a stable planet.

Districts

Total number of districts is determined by the size of your planet. For example a size 16 planet can have a total of 16 districts. There are four types of districts available to be built: agriculture which gives farming jobs, mining which gives miner jobs and generator districts which give technician jobs. These districts will make money for you. Each of these three basic districts produces two housing and two jobs which is a nice one-to-one ratio and they are very good to build early on all of your planets because when your population is low you don’t need massive amounts of housing you just need to make sure you’ve got plenty of jobs for everyone.

City districts give you only one job instead of two but they give you a whopping five housing slots. City districts are important if you want to grow your planets to very large sizes and you can do so by having lots and lots of people.

If you have lots of housing but not very many jobs you will end up with a bunch of unemployed people which would be no good. This is where buildings come in, whereas districts always produce some amount of housing to various degrees, buildings tend to just allow for jobs.

Metallurgists are people that turn minerals into alloys, this is very good because minerals are crucial for building basic stuff like buildings but if you want spaceships you need alloys so by building alloy forges you can have people employed in the metallurgist area to work on converting minerals into alloys.

Buildings

Buildings almost exclusively produce jobs for your workers some of them have passive effects. Luxury residences are the only buildings which provide housing (in this case three) and amenities.

The maximum number of buildings you can have is based on your population, all your building slots will be unlocked by the time you reach a certain amount of population. Your population can of course continue to grow beyond that but you won’t get any extra building slots for that and then it’ll become more important for you to upgrade existing buildings so you can have as much housing as possible.

Planet Features

Planets also have features, features primarily increase the maximum number of a specific type of district you can have so fungal caves increases the maximum number of agricultural districts by 2 but note this does not increase the maximum number of total districts.

For example if a planet has zero features and it is a size 22 planet you could build 22 districts but the only districts you would be allowed to build would be city districts. This way you have no ability to build any other kind of district. This planet has two rare planetary features and that is the spiral hewn mine and loop plowed farm. They increase the max by four each and again it will not let you have more stuff on the planet it just maybe gives you a few more options about how you can build up the districts.

Blockers generally reduce the number of districts available so for example dangerous wildlife gives a minus two to maximum districts which means the planet with dangerous wildlife can only have 20 districts built instead of 22.

Sometimes the blockers have extra features, this glacier has the minus one max district it but also it makes a geothermal vents special feature available which will increase the maximum generator districts by three.

Some special districts have other features, bubbling swamp is also special feature and it enables you to build a gas extraction well and this is a special building which isn’t available for most planets and is only buildable where there’s a bubbling swamp. This building provides your workers a new job: a gas extractor job. The gas extractor workers produce exotic gases and this is one of the new special resources available with the Stellaris 2.2 update. Volatile moats, exotic gases and rare crystals are the new special and rare materials and they are used for a lot of cool things. Higher tier buildings require some of these new rare resources as a sort of upkeep.

Market

One of the new features in Stellaris 2.2 is a special market. You do start the game with an internal market and then later on it will get upgraded to a galactic market and it simply allows you to buy and sell resources. The internal market will only be able to trade the base of minerals, food, alloys and consumer goods whilst later on with the Galactic market you’ll also be able to buy and sell volatile motes, exotic gases and rare crystals.

The slave market is only available if have the Stellaris Megacorpse 2.2 and it allows you to buy and sell slave population if you would like to do that sort of thing.

Empire Size

One more major topic to talk about is empire size. It has always been the case in Stellaris that the bigger your empire is the more expensive technologies and traditions become. It’s a bit of an anti-snowballing mechanic now and generally speaking assuming you were smart with your expansion the bigger you got the more science you made and the amount of science you were making far outstripped the amount of increased cost from it. For every population you have the cost of a technology will go up but as long as you do a good job of organizing your empire you will get a lot more science from all that population than the cost of it. There’s an explicit Empire size modifier and an explicit administrative cap modifier it tells you what the cost gains are and in addition to affecting technology and tradition costs this now affects campaign costs as well. There is no longer a cap on how many leaders you can have but leaders cost you a monthly maintenance and the bigger your empire gets the more expensive that becomes so be careful.

The administrative cap is how big your empire can be before you start accruing these previously mentioned extra costs. Administrative cap is not a hard limit, you don’t hit it and then stop, if you are a normal civilization you must keep growing that’s the way it is and you’re going to have to accept the increasing costs and just make sure that you’re being efficient with your management.

However for corporations such as Megacorp the penalty for being above your Empire size is increased by 50% as a Megacorp it’s much more painful to grow above your administrative cap. But as a Megacorp your initial cap is going to be a little higher as it normally starts at 30 as a Corp so you get an extra plus 20 making your cap 50. On top of that if you’re going to add more and more modifiers the higher you can increase your administrative cap the longer you wait until these penalties start to kick in and even when they kick in they’re not going to be as severe.

Trade value and Pirates

The other new thing to talk about is trade value, clerks for example produce trade values and amenities. Amenities are easy, they make people happy. Population produces trade value and by default trade value is converted to credits. Each of your colonies has a trade value and always work on increasing the trade value on all of them.

Trade value is not just money, if you look at your policies you’ll see that you have a policy on trade by default and has a wealth creation value, each point of trade value earns you energy credits.

The pirate system has also changed, pirates don’t randomly spawn in disconnected systems anymore, instead piracy happens along trade routes because all trade must flow through the capital so there’s a new trade route map mode where if you click this by default it selects your capital Starbase.

Any system with a skull and crossbone means that pirates are present. When piracy is at a negative value it indicates how much money the Pirates are trying to take. It has a maximum cap of piracy of 1.25. When you fly a fleet through a system it reduces that piracy number potentially all the way down to zero depending on how long you stay there and how long the anti-piracy strength of the fleet is and always remember that because it’s crucial to negate the effect of pirates. Small ships are much more efficient at destroying pirates because they’re very fast and agile. Every system has the shield, the shield tells you how much trade is protected.

Default stations protect their own system by adding defensive modules, you can add plus one and another plus one and another plus one of trade protection range. Also, fleets do have a new patrol mode which you can access by clicking the patrol button and this will make the fleet patrol back and forth between systems keeping the piracy levels close to none so you can have an easier time winning versus pirates.

Best strategy for a Stellaris 2.2 fresh start

The best way to start it off is to really focus on just building your districts at first — basic jobs and basic resources that you’re going to need for a lot of things. I do recommend one of the first things you do is you build a second alloy Forge because you do start with one on your capital when you start a new game but you’ll probably want a second one because alloy is very important. Remember to work on your rural districts it’ll pay off early pretty good. After you set everything up, the easiest way to get a lead is to start converting your planet more and more into an urban planet, add lots of housing start removing really basic jobs and upgrade your technology. Focus on the fancy building jobs and the specialist jobs because specializing is one of the newer things added in Stellaris 2.2. Planets labeled as an industrial world instead of a rural one provide your artisans with 5% more efficiency as they consume the same amount of minerals but will produce 5% more consumer goods for you so you might want a world that is heavily focused on just civilian industries.

I know, if you’ve read all of this you’ll feel like it’s just too much to take in and you’re probably right. Stellaris is a very complex game and the 2.2 update added even more complexity to it. Hopefully this Stellaris 2.2 Ultimate Guide covered everything you needed to know so that your colonies can survive for longer, if there’s anything else you’re interested in make sure to leave a comment below!