- Various code improvements mainly related to pirate patrol and reinforcement logic (do not visibly affect gameplay).

- Fixed a bug in pirate patrol logic that sometimes caused Pirate Haven guards to behave incorrectly right after winning a space battle.

- Further tests showed that the recently added "+10% fire rate" bonus made pirates a bit too difficult for some AI empires to handle in the early-game. As such, it is replaced with a weaker bonus of "+10 tracking". This change only applies to newly spawned pirate countries.

- The "at least one contact with another regular empire" pirate spawn condition is no longer checked when no other regular empires exist in the galaxy.

- The long-redundant condition requiring empires to control at least 3 systems to spawn pirates is removed.

- A new condition requiring at least one contact with another regular empire is added.

- The mod is updated to support Stellaris v4.0.22 (remains compatible with the previous game version).

- Pirate ships and stations now use tier 1 armor, shield and reactor booster components instead of tier 2 ones. However, all pirate countries spawned by this mod now get a +10% fire rate bonus. These changes result in slightly increased pirate fleet power across the board.

- Pirate Havens and Pirate Stations are now allowed to spawn debris.

- The above changes may not fully apply to ongoing playthroughs.

- Fixed pirate raiding fleets not immediately disbanding upon destruction of their country's Pirate Heaven.

- Pirate raiders now also steal some minerals (half the amount of energy stolen). The respective variables are added to the "LS_scripted_variables.txt" file.
- Minor code cleanup.

- Having very high crime (>70) on one of your planets now increases the pirate country spawn chance even further.
- Several adjustments to the scripted variables file.

Note:

The "common\scripted_variables\LS_scripted_variables.txt" file contains several configurable values intended for dev use such as pirate country spawn cooldown or raid resource deductions. However, occasional updates may overwrite the file, resetting the values or even introducing new ones. The way to temporarily circumvent this is by copying the file and prepending one or more "!" to its name (e.g. "!LS_scripted_variables.txt"), then making the changes to it rather than the original.

- Fixed an issue which sometimes resulted in incorrect pirate raid frequency.

Update prep