Fight me! Stellaris beta patch fixes AI not declaring war

War has returned to the galaxy with a hasty hotfix for Stellaris [official site], clearing up some big problems created by the recent update 1.6 (nicknamed 'Adams'). Here's the biggest one: AI factions were not declaring war. That's a bold utopian vision of our spacefuture but a bit wonky for a game full of spacewar. That's a mighty embarrassing bug, both for developers Paradox and for me. I've been feeling chuffed about my diplomatic skills in my current game but, er, nope, my spacepeacocks flourished because my rivals were entirely unable to spacepunch me in my beautiful spaceface.

Update 1.6.1 is now live as an opt-in beta patch. It's opt-in because while Paradox think its fixes don't cause more problems, they haven't tested it fully yet. Rather than leave the galaxy without war over the weekend, they've released 1.6.1 in beta.

To get the update, right-click on Stellaris in your Steam library, select Properties, then go to the Betas tab, and select "1.6.1_beta" from the drop-down menu.

"If after a few days in the wild we're convinced the fixes are good and no new issues have been introduced, we'll push it 100% live as an official patch," Paradox say.

Stellaris project lead Jamie Wood, who took over the role last month, apologised for this mess in yesterday afternoon's announcement:

"I'd like to offer my sincere personal apology to everyone negatively affected by issues with 1.6.0. We know it hurts when something you care about fails, and believe me, it hurts us too. Software development is a massively complex beast with a million little things all interacting, and with the sheer scale of fixes we brought in with Adams, some things got un-fixed. That's why we dropped everything relating to future development plans to correct this right away. I hope this patch will address the worst concerns, and that you all can have a fun weekend playing the game."

Check the full 1.6.1 beta patchnotes over here. Looking over player reports, it sounds like Stellaris still has a fair few bugs skittering around, some more serious than others. But 1.6.1 certainly won't be Stellaris's final update, given Paradox's strategy game model of eternal expansions and updates.

I dread what will happen to my current empire of friendly spacepeacocks after I install this patch. "I'm fairly certain I have MASSIVELY overextended but no one has stopped me yet," I said in the RPS treehouse yesterday. Well, now I know why. A reckoning is coming right to my spaceface.