Stellaris developers rolled back the experiment with factions in the 4.3 "Cetus" open beta

Stellaris Developers Roll Back Faction Experiment in Open Beta 4.3 "Cetus"

Short version: the faction/ethics revamp that surfaced in the test branch has been pulled out of the open beta for now. Paradox Interactive quietly shipped an update to the 4.3 "Cetus" open beta of Stellaris that removes the experimental changes after the devs saw too many problems during testing.

Why the rollback? The devs say the open beta exposed a lot of issues, so they chose to yank the system and keep polishing it. Expect it back later — roughly in version 4.5, which they’re aiming to work on over the summer (approx. timeline).

If you were in the middle of a campaign and groaned when your save broke: yeah, that happened. The rollback breaks save compatibility again, so Paradox created a separate branch for anyone who wants the previous build: cetus_open_beta_broken_factions. The main open beta branch is once more compatible with saves from last week or the rollback snapshot.

Besides the big change, the patch also cleans up several bugs. The portrait system bug that caused galaxy generation to spit out identical worlds got addressed. Housing weirdness from mining districts on volcanic, machine, and hive worlds was fixed. Other touch-ups include fixes to Purity traditions, the Biomorphosis situation, and some misbehaving psionic bonuses.

One more note from the studio: there won’t be a developer diary this week. They plan to resume the diaries next week, but postings will be irregular for a while as the team focuses on tackling core issues in the base game.