1. How Stellaris Tricks You and Why Pops Move
2. The Salorim Confederation vs. Anathurian Refined Foundation
3. I Just Want To Know What To Do

“Pride thinks it’s own happiness shines the brighter by comparing it with the misfortunes of others.”
― Thomas More, Utopia

I’ve wanted to have large multi-species empires in Stellaris for a long time. In 3.14 Stellaris the nature of population growth made getting migration treaties a net benefit if you ran a stable society with amenities, consumer goods, and housing. As a confirmed Jellyfish lover I was excited to gather the various creatures of the universe to my ocean paradise but I wasn’t able to make it work. In this article, without using math, I’ll walk you through how to use Migration Treaties to grow your population and provide some tips on how to build your empire to attract the various species. If you’re more concerned with grabbing and taking populations this guide isn’t for you. We will talk about how pops move in Stellaris and why it’s counterintuitive, show an example of this in action, discuss how you can build an empire that increases your chances to get pops to migrate towards you, and finish with some advanced technics that might not hold up.

How Stellaris Tricks You and Why Pops Move

I say this with a great deal of respect and appreciation that Stellaris is still getting new and updated mechanics nine years after being released. The game doesn’t provide good information on how and why pops move in game. As the gallery below shows resettlement (2), emigration (1), and immigration (0) don’t appear in the Databank as of 8/31/2025. Unlike some other mechanics that can just be ignored if you’re not using them Migration Treaties are one of the few areas of the game where the NPC empires suggest (over and over) that you accept if you have good terms with them.

Pops in Stellaris are currently divided into 4 categories. These are Elite (gold triangle), Specialist (Silver Triangle), Workers (Bronze Triangle), and Civilians (unemployed pops in 3.14). Civilians are a new pop type in 4.0 and aren’t exactly unemployed populations. As you build and upgrade your colonies from the starting Reassembled Ship Shelter to the System Capital-Complex and build out districts and buildings that populations will tend to prefer the higher jobs like Elite unless you manually prioritize some jobs or have restrictions on what jobs can be done. Robots not being able to do specialist jobs is an example of this. Even in societies with utopian abundance pops in Stellaris prefer to work and toil providing labor to make the numbers go up.

Stellaris typically has good tool tips that allow you to understand what is directionally happening without digging into the numbers. Gene Clinics increase population growth so if you build them population will go up. If you look at the tool tip under Stability it says there are two items that appear to be relevant to us:

• Automatic Resettlement Chance
• Automatic Resettlement Destination Chance

Neither one of these terms are described or discussed in game but basically a high stability makes it less likely for the population of this planet to resettle and more likely for it to be the destination to resettle. This makes sense. You might expect pops to move between worlds in a similar manner to how they migrate in world, with the best places (Ocean Paradise with Consumer Goods distributed) being a destination for pops living in low habitability. This is not true. The only pops that move automatically in Stellaris are civilians and unemployed pops in the other stratas. Per early dev diaries it appears like, for performance reasons, civilians target an empire to move to in step one and move to the capital, then in step 2 move to the desired planet. Testing this is kinda outside the scoop of this article.

Civilians are the target of A LOT of discussion and balance so I want to repeat that because it is the only thing to take away from this.

On a practical level THE ONLY POPS THAT MOVE AUTOMATICALLY IN STELLARIS ARE CIVILIANS AND UNEMPLOYED POPULATIONS .

As somebody who regularly reads the Stellaris Reddit and PDX forums this is a little nugget that explains much of the strange behavior of migration treaties and I think that there are several people who might know this but don’t understand and internalize it. Things like living standards, amenities, natural beauty, extra consumer goods, habitability, government ethics, and what we as humans might consider “a nice life” don’t matter. Xenophile Pops would rather live as a miner or farmer with low amenities in an autocratic slave empire rather than live as civilians with utopian abundance in a world made specifically for them.

If you’ve not entered into a migration treaty none of this matters are your movement only serves to assign your population with jobs under the broad theory that employed pops are more valuable than unemployed pops (this has not been true for certain builds in 4.0). There are also several reason why you might want to have a “reserve” labor force in advance of settling a new colony or to make into soldiers with a commander as planetary governor.

The Salorim Confederation vs. Anathurian Refined Foundation

Shortly after one of the 4.xx patches I had wanted to play around with an ascension focused civilian build on an ocean paradise. My goal was to create a utopia and convert every species to ocean dwelling through the power of song deluge colossal weapon. I wanted to provide a home for all species and make sure they could travel and migrate to my ocean paradise. From the start I had a policy of Utopian Abundance for all citizen species.

Everything was going well and I had found a neighbor in the Anathurian Refined Foundation another oceangoing species at are not egalitarian so they are unable to offer utopian abundance as living standard.

A few years into a migration treaty we hadn’t received a single glassy-eyed reptile. Several of my precious Salorim have migrated towards them.

Demographically I had a pure empire full of my founding species. However, I wanted to have an exchange (in my favor) between our two species and only found that my Salorim are moving away from what I thought was perfection.

Even worse, my aquatic Salorim were migrating to a continental world from an ocean paradise. I was providing the highest possible living standard in the game and didn’t have any other negative controls.

The answer, as we discussed above, was that my capital world had some civilians (unemployed) Salorim. Despite having no crime, high stability, and good housing and amenities my jellyfish were leaving paradise to go work in Toledo, OH.

If you want to point out that I only had one colony I’d agree and that’s a pretty unique build I’d say sure. However, I’m using this example because it’s clear that despite having a perfect planet and high default rights I’ll continue to lose civilians each month as part of the migration treaty. Pops in Stellaris prefer working a bad job compared to no job at all.

The Best Immigration Builds

So with all of this knowledge if you’re seeking to create a multi-species empire full of species willing migrants and keep your own population the “best build” isn’t focused on rights and the conditions of your population. There are three important factors you can focus on to attract new pops as part of migration treaties.

• Open Jobs
• Housing
• Automatic Resettlement Destination Chance

Jobs – This is an easy one to fix but finding new ways to get additional jobs on your worlds can be a little hard. Functional Architecture and Prosperity become a much more important Civic/Tradition set to increase the speed that you can build new districts. Remember, if you don’t have open jobs a migration treaty is only going to serve to reduce your

Instead of focusing on things like species happiness and amenities you’re going to focus on building labor camps coworking spaces that provide what all pops in the universe want employment. Functional Architecture and Prosperity become a much more important Civic/Tradition set to increase the speed that you can build new housing and worksites compared to Harmony, egalitarian ethics, or even Free Haven (the automatic resettlement civic). Even things like living standards and being a xenophile don’t impact migration from other species. I tested out two empires to prove that there are some counterintuitive factors at work in migration treaties in Stellaris. First, the nice guys – Sovereign Quentian Worlds are a pacifist moral democracy that are a free haven with functional architecture. I worked to make friends with everyone and built 6 migration treaties with 5 active (more on that later).

As the gallery above shows I haven’t lost a single member of my founding species despite having only ‘decent’ living standards. Once you understand that idle hands, not the automated dreadnaught, are what pops fear the most everything else in the universe falls into place. Even species like the Uindar, with artic preference, are begging to cross over and join my empire. As you can see the cities I’m offering them have negative amenities, high stability, and open housing and jobs.

As you can see above most of my population growth comes from migration. Eurus, with more jobs, pulls in net migrants each month while Bhiranna, closer to full employment, is attracting fewer migrants. Since we know none of my core species are migrating out of my empire we can assume (but not know) that there is some migration between the two planets on a monthly basis. To me this is extremely odd since “Migration can only occur with civilians” and this empire has never had both civilians and a migration treaty. Our traditions (including prosperity) and policies (with peace festivals and land of opportunity) are focused on attracting migration but .

I Just Want To Know What To Do

It’s pretty easy – just build a lot of jobs on every single colony. Ironically, functional architectural is better than free haven for attracting pops and not losing your own.

I made a 14 minute video about this topic.