Characters / Stellaris: Non-Empire

Here you'll find tropes for the various non-empire entities, creatures and factions you may encounter throughout the galaxy of Stellaris.

Galactic Community

In General

Introduced in the Federations Downloadable Content, the Galactic Community is founded once enough species make contact with each other.

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• Cincinnatus: The Galactic Custodian, added in Nemesis, is elected to protect all life in the galaxy from a class X-3 Apocalypse How, and is granted great but temporary powers in the Galactic Community. Such a custodian can attempt to hold onto the great powers granted to them for extended periods of time, or even abolish the limits and declare themselves The Emperor... Or they can vote to end their term early if the crisis is resolved before the end of their mandate. Doing this last one grants the player the "Modern Cincinnatus" achievement.
• Emergency Authority: What the Custodian amounts to — a single member of the Galactic Council is democratically granted extraordinary powers for a set amount of time, enabling them to cut through red tape and establish sweeping legal reforms. However, with enough support, the Custodian's term limits can be abolished, and they can then attempt to declare the formation of the Galactic Imperium.
• Fictional United Nations: Their role is similar to the UN with various empires voting on resolutions that effect the greater community. It can have a powerful subcommittee known as the Galactic Council, a Security Council equivalent.
• Majority-Share Dictator: What happens once a single empire has more diplomatic weight than the rest of the members combined. Becomes more literal if they're the only member of a fully empowered Galactic Council and abolish elections to the Council, just in time to name themselves the Custodian.
• Opt Out: You can refuse to participate in the founding of the Galactic Community, and may leave it at any time. If the initiative fails to attract at least three supporters, it fails outright.
• Took a Level in Badass: In the default years at least, it used to be that the galactic community was little more than a meat shield against the Endgame Crises, but as of 2024, depending on how early or late the endgame crisis arrives, the community can, without player input, put up minimal defense, last a fair while clearing most of the initial crisis fleets, or defeat the crisis on their own.

Galactic Imperium

In the face of a crisis, the Galactic Community may choose to elect a Custodian, given great power in order to protect the galaxy. However, with enough support, the Custodian can subvert the council and proclaim the Galactic Imperium, making it the ultimate ruler of the galaxy.

Introduced in the Nemesis DLC, the Galactic Imperium serves as a way to spice up the endgame, though don't expect everyone in the galaxy to appreciate such a proclamation quietly...

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• Badass Army: The Galactic Imperium can recruit up to 12 Imperial Legions, and they are probably the most powerful 'normal' army in the game. ^note The more powerful ones are Titans, Mega-Warform, and Psionic Avatar
• Civil War: If imperial authority drops below 50 points, dissenting empires can perform the "Spark Rebellion" operation to declare one of these. The Galactic Imperium splits between two opposed federations, and the ensuing war can have multiple outcomes:
  • If the loyalists win, the Imperium reforms with a large boost to authority, and the rebels (forced to rejoin the Imperium) suffer a long-lasting penalty to diplomatic weight.
  • If the rebels win, the Imperium is disbanded and returns to being the Galactic Community. All Council positions are revoked, and the loyalists receive a penalty to their diplomatic weight — the former Emperor gets an even harsher penalty, for obvious reasons.
  • If the war ends in a status quo or white peace, the Imperium remains standing, but the rebel federation collectively secedes from it, likely starting a Space Cold War.
• The Emperor: What the Custodian becomes after the Imperium's founding, wielding authority over potentially a dozen subject states.
• The Empire: One that can utterly dwarf every other example of this trope within the Stellaris universe.
• Expy: The Imperium's founding mirrors that of the Galactic Empire — A democratically-elected Emergency Authority abolishes the limits of his term and becomes dictator-for-life, transforming a loose union of interstellar nations into the most powerful empire in the galaxy. The Imperium can also potentially succumb to a galaxy-spanning civil war that — if the rebels are victorious — ends with the previous democracy being restored. The achivement for becoming the Emperor is even called "With Thunderous Applause", and depicts the Necroid Series Mascot wearing Emperor Palpatine's iconic black hood.
• Kicked Upstairs: Becoming the Galactic Emperor greatly muzzles your expansion as you can only declare war under Counterattack, Imperial Crusade, and Imperial Rebuke Casus Belli. So no more conquest, no more vassalization, your territory will largely remain static, while the other members are free to declare war with each other until you can impose the Pax Galactica.
• Power-Up Letdown: Becoming the Emperor sounds great, until you realize you can not declare war on your subjects, let alone take over their territory.

Primitive Civilizations

In General

Some of the galaxy's species have managed to form their own civilizations, but their level of technological development remains insufficient to try to colonize space. As a result, they are isolated on their homeworld and largely ignorant of the wider galaxy.

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• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: The more advanced primitives can experiment with A.I.s. If they face an AI rebellion, they will have enough soldiers to put it down the first time, but if they face a second AI rebellion, they are pretty much guaranteed to lose and be turned into Living Batteries.
• Alien Abduction: Part of the "aggressive observation" method, which yields the largest amount of society research but also can have unintended consequences as the natives become more aware of alien activity.
• Alien Invasion: Can fall victim to this at the whims of any space-faring empire, including yours. Either you land troops to take the planet by force, or you perform a "covert infiltration" with an observation post to hijack the planet's nations and prime them for a peaceful annexation. There are achievements for launching a military invasion upon a World-War-era Earth, or playing as humans and infiltrating a reptilian species.
• Alien Non-Interference Clause: An observation post set to "passive" study will watch and analyze the life of the natives from a distance, without any direct interaction. Can be enforced if your empire's policy on Native Interference is set to strictly passive study.
• A Long Time Ago, in a Galaxy Far, Far Away...: If humanity is not already present on the galactic stage at the beginning of the game, you can potentially find Earth as a primitive world, starting at a random period of history like all the rest... or you can find it After the End, a bombed-out husk populated by giant cockroaches with budding sapience.
• Beneath Notice: Genocidal empires can still setup observation posts over their planet. Emphasis on can, in practice, AI controlled genocidal empires will usually bomb the primitives and claim the planet for themselves, but the option exists, especially for players. The experiments will be aggressive and they will not allow the primitives to achieve spaceflight, but they are otherwise entirely capable of ignoring them while they focus on higher priority targets.
• Can't Catch Up: There is no innate catch-up mechanic for primitive civilizations that manage to enter the galactic stage on their own — they start right at the beginning of the tech tree, in a galaxy filled with already-advanced empires. Their only realistic fates are to be destroyed or vassalized.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Any primitive civilization is at the mercy of the empire that controls its star system, and most primitive militaries are hopelessly outmatched by even basic assault armies.
• E.T. Gave Us Wi-Fi: Aggressive observation involves implanting cybernetics. It is possible for the primitives to discover the cybernetics, reverse engineer them for their own benefit, and gain the relevant species trait.
• Fish out of Water: Pops of a primitive race conquered by military force suffer from the "Stellar Culture Shock" modifier for ten years, negatively affecting stability and resource productivity.
• Full-Circle Revolution: One primitive event involves the rich seizing the means of production. Egalitarian empires can choose to support the revolutionaries, but if they do, then the revolutionaries, much to the disappointment of the backing empire, will then just become the new oppressors.
• Lost Technology: First Contact allows spacefaring empires to gain special "insight technologies" from observing primitive civilizations. One of these, "Lost Building Methods", concerns the rediscovery of ancient construction techniques that the spacefarers had considered lost to history; a nod to many instances of this trope in real life.
  Any civilization with a long enough history has examples of great wonders built by forgotten ancients, which can no longer be replicated. Luckily for us, we documented these great wonders when they appeared on pre-FTL worlds.
• Technology Levels: Primitive civilizations have 10 levels of development, starting with the Stone Age, where primitives live as hunter-gatherers, and ending with the space age, where they're just a few decades off from the discovery of the technology necessary for interstellar space travel.
• Technology Uplift: Primitive civilizations can be peacefully uplifted to the interstellar age through observation posts, if your empire's policies allow it, whereupon they'll become your protectorate/tributary/subsidiary and can eventually be absorbed. This process is faster the further along in Technology Levels the civilization is.

Habinte Unified Worlds

An unusual Primitive Civilization that can be found in the Dacha system, containing six Gaia worlds. They have somehow colonized all their inhabitable planets without any apparent space technology.

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• Aliens Never Invented the Wheel: They seem primitive, but that's only because their civilization advanced in a radically different direction compared to most empires, which led them to stay within their home system and never expand conventionally. Don't confuse this for Creative Sterility, however: If you insist on attacking their system even after they sever the hyperlanes, they'll immediately reverse-engineer your spaceship designs to fight on your level.
• Bullying a Dragon: Attempting to invade their worlds will result in them cutting off the hyperlanes leading to their system, isolating themselves from the greater galaxy. If you use Jump Drives or Quantum Catapults to get into their system again anyway, they reconnect the hyperlane, spawn a massive fleet made up of your best ships worth 70% of your naval capacity, and become a regular spacefaring empire... one which now has a serious grudge against you.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Should you chose to invade their system after they shut down their hyperplane connections (by jump drive, quantum catapult or other means) they'll re-establish hyperlane connections and declare war on you... with ALL of your unlocked technologies and a fleet using 70% of your naval capacity. They'll even use the same ships you use. Of course, you can also turn this around on them by deliberately creating blank hulls while deleting all other configurations. This leaves them totally unable to retaliate, letting you seize their system at your own leisure.
• Non-Indicative Name: They're classified as a "Primitive" civilization because they don't seem to have any space technology, but interacting with them reveals that they just advanced technologically in a different direction. In some ways, they're more advanced even than the spacefaring empires.
• Planetary Relocation: One of the habitable Gaia worlds in their system can be called "Sol X" (the hypothesized "Planet X" of the Solar System), suggesting that they somehow moved it to their star system. If you agree to leave them alone when they ask, they will gift you one of their Gaia worlds as token of appreciation, by instantly teleporting the entire planet to your home system. How they're able to do this is completely unknown to your civ's best scientists.
• Space Amish: They decided to mostly ignore space and devote themselves to building an agrarian utopia on their planets. Their unique buildings, such as "Grand Sapling", "Hanging Cities", and "Nature Preserve Lodge", are designed to take full advantage of being In Harmony with Nature, which is undisturbed because of their perfected "Gaia Seeders".

Spaceborne Aliens

In General

Alien entities who range from naturally ocurring creatures to artificial beings who live in the vacuum of space. The majority of them are hostile to spaceships sharing their star system and will attack on sight. Each has a home system randomly placed through in the galaxy.

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• Beef Gate: As long as the creatures are hostile, they will continue blocking the expansion of early-game empires until their fleets are strong enough to defeat them.
• Can't Catch Up: Their Power Levels are fixed and never improve, so while they're sufficiently powerful to obstruct expansion, their threat potential diminishes rapidly the more an empire's technology and economy improves. Mid-game fleets will annihilate basic groups of aliens without a second thought, with only the much more heavily defended home systems still posing a minor challenge.
• Hard-Coded Hostility: All of them except the Tiyanki attack anything they spot regardless of relative fleet power. Void Clouds in particular are so aggressive they immediately leave their position near their system's central star to actively hunt down any trespasser.
  • An exception exists for Xenophile Empires, who can research technologies that allow peaceful co-existence with most of them.
• Piñata Enemy: Every single one of them is a source of useful loot, be it resources or research options, making them popular, worthwhile targets in the early to mid-game stages. Pirates and privateers deserve special mention because they can jump-start any empire's early tech trees by unlocking/boosting quite a few technologies at once, like weapons, armor, reactors and some auxiliary systems.
• Suicidal Overconfidence: You can enter a system with 250,000+ points worth of fleet power to your name, but it won't stop the puny 700-points privateer squadron that's lurking there from attacking your ships on sight.

Ancient Mining Drones

• Absurdly Dedicated Worker: They continue mining in service to a species long since extinct and forgotten.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: Their reverse-engineerable Mining Drone Lasers are of mediocre damage, but ignore 100% of armor, the only weapon in the game to do so. It makes them a popular choice for corvette armaments, which are then used to Zerg Rush the hell out of the heavily armored Fallen Empire warships.
• Beam Spam: Their lasers are mostly small weapons, so they look fairly puny, but the drones that use them are numerous.
• No OSHA Compliance: They'll try and "mine" your ships just as if they were asteroids, apparently unable to distinguish between the two.
• Piñata Enemy: Defeating them allows you to research their mining lasers to retrofit onto your own craft. Additionally, the systems they inhabit often have larger than normal amounts of minerals.

Crystalline Entities

• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: They come in different colors that determine their behavior, like Sapphire Lurkers or Emerald Roamers.
• Crystalline Creature: They resemble clusters of colorful, slender crystals larger than most spaceships. Destroying them and researching the aftermath allows the destroying faction to research the "Crystal-Infused Hull" technology.
• Expy: Of the Crystalline Entity from Star Trek: The Next Generation.
• Healing Factor: Crystalline Entities are the main source of the Regenerative Hull Tissue tech, which does Exactly What It Says on the Tin both for them and any ship you install it on after your scientists reverse-engineered it.
• King Mook: In their home system is a giant version called the Crystal Nidus with a 4.9k Fleet Power.
• Meaningful Name: All of them. Emerald Roamers for instance are greenish in color and constantly on the move.
• Power Crystal: Their basic units don't glow, but the giant Crystal Prism in their home system sure does. Brightly. It's so pretty to look at that many a player leaves it alone just so they can enjoy the sight from time to time. Pacifists can even research a special project that makes them non-hostile, effectively disguising their own ships as fellow crystaline entities.
• Silicon-Based Life: As semi-sentient crystal formations.
• Stone Wall: Another technology they provide is Crystal-Infused Plating and Crystal-Forged Plating, two techs that increase ship hull points by 5% and 10%, respectively, giving those ships noticeably better chances of survival in battle.

Privateers

• Downloadable Content: Inverted. If you have the Apocalypse Downloadable Content, they're replaced by the Marauders instead (see below).
• The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: It's extremely rare to see them actually get off their collective asses and launch a raid on someone. Most of the time their fleets are just hanging around in deep space, twirling their thumbs and waiting for the day a peacekeeping fleet comes by and wipes them out.
• The Remnant: Descendants of the soldiers and navies of a long-since forgotten galactic empire.
• Space Pirates: Notable for being pre-existing, rather than spawning from the younger races.
• Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors: The three fleets in their home system each favor one particular weapon type. The Young Bloods use kinetic weapons, the Scarred Veterans unleash a Macross Missile Massacre, and the Old Guard relies on Beam Spam plus space torpedoes, forcing you to tackle them with a Master of All fleet or overwhelming power.
• Unusable Enemy Equipment: Most of their ships are definitely old, but fit into one of the four main ship size categories. Until you find a ship manned by the Privateer's "Old Guard". This particular ship, a Galleon-class, is a Titan (thankfully sans Titan Laser), a ship type normally seen under the command of a Fallen Empire, and absolutely massive. Too bad the tech to make one has been lost to time, and used to be unavailable to players until the Apocalypse DLC.

Space Amoebas

• The Battlestar: The larger specimens primarily rely on organic fighters and bombers named Amoeba Flagella, but also have pretty decent direct-fire weapons. Said flagella can be reverse-engineered for use as strike craft on warships capable of mounting hangar modules.
• Non-Indicative Name: They are in no way amoebas, but somehow every space-faring species manages to incorrectly identify them as such, and the name sticks.
• Pet Monstrosity: One event chain can result in a lost baby amoeba following your fleet around and eventually growing into a controllable amoeba of your own. You can either dissect it for technology gains, or keep it around as a pet and/or Attack Animal. If it survives for 100 years, its fleet power will grow to around 5000 on its own (much stronger than any wild amoeba you can find).

Tiyanki

• Berserk Button: Tiyanki normally don't attack even when ships come close enough to graze them, unless they're mating or have a calf with them.
• Elephant Graveyard: A space whale example. A recent event added a special world where they go to die. Disturbingly, even in death, their regenerative power still functions and causes their parts to still move and a mysterious brain growing within. You can dissect it or leave it alone to see what eventually happens.
• Psychic Link: If you attack one of their groups, the entire species everywhere in the galaxy turns hostile to your empire, so there's gotta be some non-relativistic link between them.
• Space Whale: They look more like giant jellyfish with some sort of skin, but are explicitly referred to this in their "ship" class. With the Federations DLC installed, they're also like whales in another manner: the Galactic Community can pass the Tiyanki Conservation Act that imposes a fine of 1,000 Energy for killing them, akin to real-life efforts to preserve endangered whales. (Alternatively, the Galactic Community can pass the Tiyanki Pest Control Act, which mandates that you kill them.)

Void Cloud

• Eldritch Abomination: Although not especially powerful, they are definitely strange, and puzzle even the greatest scientific minds. Spiritualists find them especially disturbing (or worthy of worship), but everyone, even Materialists, is wary of such ancient and alien entities. The fact that they're most often found near black holes (and that their home system is always centered on one) doesn't make them any less creepy.
• Self-Duplication: For every two fleets a Void Cloud destroys, it spawns another Void Cloud.
• Shock and Awe: They use the unique Cloud Lightning weapon that always hits and ignores all defences, but is subject to massive damage randomization — which means it's essentially a downscaled Arc Emitter that can be mounted in medium slots instead of the usual XL mounts.
• Time Abyss: They're implied to be as old as the universe itself.

Caravaneers

In General

• After the End: Implied as Racket Industrial Enterprise's backstory, given their Tomb World preference. According to themselves, they're related to the Ketlings that appear in Distant Stars (and are identical in both portraits and traits), but were exiled into space, presumably before the collapse of Ketling civilization.
• Artificial Stupidity: The caravaneer fleets can fly through any empire which becomes a problem if the empire in question is hostile to outsiders, such as Fanatic Purifiers or Fanatic Xenophobes. While their fleets can fend off early game attacks, by mid-game this behavior is all but suicidal.
• Boldly Coming: Sometimes after passing through your empire you wind up with a bunch of hybrid POPs.
• Bizarre Baby Boom: A possible outcome of an encounter with their fleets.
• Church of Happyology: The Numistic Order gives this impression, though their products actually have concrete benefits.
• Downloadable Content: Part of the Megacorp Downloadable Content, replacing the Nomads.
• Explosive Breeders: Their ability to instantly spread hybrid pops far and wide can result in this; depending on how many xenophilically-inclined empires you have in your galaxy it's very likely that your endgame demographics will consist largely of hybrid caravaneers and their descendants.
• Intrepid Merchant: Their fleets offer to trade different resources, technologies, or people when they enter an empire's territory.
• Made a Slave: Some trade deals buy or sell POPs, not said to be slaves, but the occasional event where a POP escapes and requests asylum doesn't help.
• Mad Scientist: You can hire scientists with the Maniacal or Spark of Genius traits from the Rackets.
• Rat Men: While the other two fleets' species are random the Rackets are always short-lived, ugly, Ratlings from a Tomb World with psychic powers.
• Shiny-Looking Spaceships: The sleek, ornate gold-plated warships look like space-faring luxury liners with guns attached.
• Space Nomads: Their fleets wander the galaxy trading with other empires, periodically returning to a system with stations but no inhabited planets called "Chor's Compass."
• Take That!: Upon contact an empire's ruler can buy CaravanCoinz and use them to buy Reliquaries that contain random techs or resources, or turn out to be empty. Like premium currencies and Lootboxes.
• Tribe of Priests: The Numistic Order is an entire species of merchant-priests.
• You Have Researched Breathing: Among the offers Caravaneers can make are selling you things like bunk beds to increase your housing capacity. They can also sell you what amounts to Tupperware.

Enclaves

In General

• Downloadable Content: Part of the Leviathans story pack and Overlord expansion.
• Space People: They don't care about planets, and are content to live out their days aboard their scattered space stations.

Artisan Enclave

• Alien Arts Are Appreciated: They're very good at their job, and can be commissioned to create artworks to boost happiness. For a price, of course.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: While they offer services about as useful as the other two, other empires get angry at the empire who dares attack a Curator or Trader Enclave, but nobody bats an eye when an Artisan Enclave is destroyed.
• Hufflepuff House: Unlike the Curator and Trader Enclaves, their benefits are mostly 'fire-and-forget' instead of long-term cooperation. Curators get to boost your Research and lend their Professor, Traders offer long-term deals on Unobtainiums, but Artisans only offer Monuments which are capped at 5, becoming their Patron allows you to build one Ministry of Culture, and the Festival of Worlds happiness boost cannot be done constantly. The Utopia Downloadable Content makes them somewhat more useful, as being a Patron of the Arts now gives you a bonus towards generating Unity, which is used to unlock traditions and Ascension perks.
• Permanently Missable Content: In earlier versions of the game, if you had them conduct Festival of the Worlds, there was a chance for an event where they just take the money and bolt, making them inaccessible for the rest of the game. This has since been patched so that they will eventually open contact once again after a decades-long cooldown period.

Curator Enclave

• Knowledge Broker: They sell info on uncharted stars, access to their database for research boosts, or hints and tools to deal with the Guardians. You can also pose some discreet inquiries on their other customers to gain intelligence on rival empires.
• Omnidisciplinary Scientist: You can hire one of their scientists to lead Research or as Explorer. Either way, they come with max skill level and bonus to research and exploration.
• The Remnant: As revealed by The Library Archeological site, the Curators are descendants of an ancient, planet-bound civilisation that fell to a deadly microorganism. Survivors from the planet retreated to space, becoming the Curator Order over the eons spent in exile.
• Shout-Out: To the Melnorme of Star Control. Paraphrased:
  "You may be wondering about the meaning of the mural behind us. That's a very good question with a very interesting answer! The price for the answer is 15 quadrillion Credits."

Trader Enclave

• Permanently Missable Content: Destroying their stations will simply wipe out the very resource they're selling.
• Proud Merchant Race: They may charge a premium, but they certainly don't cheat their customers.
• Unobtainium: Once you reach a certain point of Approval, they will offer certain Empire-Wide Strategic Resources that are otherwise unobtainable.

Mercenary Enclave

Not randomly discovered but created by regular empires converting their fleets to enclaves.

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• Mercenary Units: They can hire out fleets and armies, as well as providing "logistical solutions".
• Only in It for the Money: Even at 100 opinion, their loyalty is ultimately to money.
  • They are willing to betray their sponsors to the Great Khan, claiming the Great Khan made them an offer they cannot refuse and threatening total war if their sponsors don't give them a better offer.
  • Genocidal empires cannot create them, but they can hire them, and even become their sponsors if they conquer the territory their previous sponsors lent to them. Never mind the fact that they will probably die when You Have Outlived Your Usefulness applies.
• Private Military Contractors: Specifically the "corporate" type, they pay dividends to their patrons and Megacorps with the Naval Contractors civic can produce two of them from the start. Galactic Community resolutions to privatize warfare can further increase the mercenary limit for everyone.

Salvager Enclave

• The Engineer: They specialise in salvaging destroyed, broken down or otherwise abandoned vessels to sell later on. They can also help increase engineering research and increasing ship build speed.

Shroud-Touched Coven

• Portal Network: An empire with 40 opinion can buy a Shroud beacon that produces a wormhole from one of their starbases to the enclave.
• Psychic Powers: And they can use them to show portants of the future or spy on other empires for you. Empires with the Teachers of the Shroud origin learn psionics from them as well.
• Seers: They can supposedly see the future. Empires can hire them to fortune-tell to trigger events.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: When the crisis arrives, they will quickly pack their bags and bolt.
• What the Hell, Hero?: They will notice if a race they uplifted decides to become a Crisis Aspirant and warn them to stop before it is too late.

Guardians

In General

• Cosmic Horror Story: The mere existence of these titanic, often utterly incomprehensible entities that were ancient long before your species ever left the primordial muck on their homeworld serves as one for your entire empire. Their response prompt upon encountering any Guardian for the first time sums it up nicely.
  We are but motes of dust...
• Death of a Thousand Cuts: What you'll inflict on them if you choose to engage them in combat. All but one of the Guardians have truly insane amounts of health and armor, coupled with huge regeneration stats and occasionally powerful shielding. They're so resilient that even your most devastating Wave Motion Guns will barely tickle them unless mounted en masse on dozens upon dozens of warships. Their massive regeneration also means that, unlike Fallen Empire fleets, you can't wear them down with repeated raids because by the time you've assembled a new fleet, they'll have healed all the damage you inflicted previously.
• Downloadable Content: They only show up in Leviathans.
• Eldritch Abomination: They're either this or a Big Dumb Object at least in the early game, consisting largely of natural(?) creatures and arcane constructs with incredible power and inscrutable backgrounds. The other civilizations can gradually come to learn more about them (and in some cases even benefit from their findings), but most of the time such knowledge or profit comes at a high price — either in resources or casualties.
• Hard-Coded Hostility: Most Guardians are permanently hostile to all empires until disabled or destroyed.
• Hijacking Cthulhu: An update gives civilizations with Reanimators, Cordyceptic Drones or Permanent Employment civics that killed them possibility of starting project to bring them back under their control. The Mechromancy ascension perk allows machine empires to do the same.
• Optional Boss: Moreso than the Fallen Empires, whose ships they can easily shred unless the Fallen Empire sends its entire fleet at once. Most of the Guardians won't leave their systems unless an empire manages to really irritate them, in which case they'll wreak vengeance on that empire. And their Power Levels are simply listed as skulls.
• Permanently Missable Content: The considerable boons inherent in defeating them can only be acquired by the player, not by AI-controlled empires. The problem is that in order to access these boons, you need to defeat the respective Guardian yourself. If someone else beat you to the punch (or you were unlucky and the Guardian spawned in Fallen Empire territory), you'll have to finish the rest of the campaign without whatever the Guardian would've given you.
• Readings Are Off the Scale: Their military power is "skull".
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: If you anger some of them^note the Ether Drake and the Stellarite Devourer, specifically to a certain extent, they will pay your sector a visit and break a few things before returning home.
• Wave-Motion Gun: Three of them possess an extremely potent laser that they can fire from their mouths or head.
• Zerg Rush: The most efficient method to defeat them. Most of the Guardians' weapons deal a crapton of damage but have abysmal tracking, so drowning them in nimble ship types with high evasion (like destroyers or cruisers) is usually preferable over engaging them with large, ponderous, much more expensive battleships.

Automated Dreadnought

• Absurdly Dedicated Worker: Before dying, the Dreadnought's crew activated some kind of automated patrol mode which the shipboard AI has been locked in for the past 7.8 million years.
• Attack Drone: As if the word 'Automated' didn't make it clear, the Dreadnought relies exclusively on automated systems to function.
• Can't Catch Up: A repaired Dreadnought comes with a top tier version of your FTL drives but cannot be retrofitted with better ones, so keeping off with repairing it might be necessary.
• Cool Ship: Has an entirely unique and very alien design with what looks like Tron Lines in its artworks.
• Disc-One Nuke: Rebuilding the dreadnought early easily turns it into one. With a military power rating of ~7,000 units all on its lonesome, it's the single most powerful ship players can get their hands on in the vanilla game. Its armor is relatively weak, and it can't be upgraded/retrofitted with new tech later on, but the dreadnought's powerful shields make it resistant even to Fallen Empires' Tachyon Lances, which turns it into a veritable tank unit that can usually draw entire fleets' worth of fire for well over an in-game month before having to retreat for repairs — if it didn't wreck said fleets before with its devastating plasma weapons, that is.
• Ghost Ship: After you defeat the Dreadnought, your boarding parties will find the mummified remains of its crew still manning their stations.
• Mile-Long Ship: Unlike the massive organic entities that appear throughout the cosmos, the Automated Dreadnought is a hulking piece of metal significantly larger than anything players can build without mods.
• The Remnant: The Dreadnought continues to dutifully stand vigil over the ruins of the empire that built it long after its masters disappeared or went extinct.
• Time Abyss: It's been patrolling its home system for countless millions of years by the time your empire encounters it.
• You Kill It, You Bought It: Defeating the dreadnought will allow you to rebuild it as your own, but you can also scrap it for a huge amount of minerals instead. Since it's such a powerful and unique combat asset, rebuilding it is usually the recommended action, especially since only the one who defeated it can do so.

Dimensional Horror

• Breath Weapon: A giant purple Wave-Motion Gun unleashed from its gaping gullet that works like a Titan Laser, ignoring shields and armor but often missing the target because of its abysmal tracking stat.
• Combat Tentacles: The Dimensional Horror will warp its own tentacles through hyperspace to your fleet, with each proceeding to stab your ships independently.
• Disc-One Nuke: Killing it allows you to research the Jump Drive, which is the second-best drive tech in the game.
• Evil Is Not a Toy: After killing a Dimensional Horror, the empire that killed it has an opportunity to parade its remains on their empire's capitol. It's made progressively clearer and clearer that, despite a massive science or unity bonus, this is a bad idea, and can potentially end in your capitol collapsing into a black hole. On the other hand, there is a chance the Horrific Inverse Mass is successfully stabilized, providing an incredibly powerful bonus to your capitol.
• Eldritch Abomination: Stands out as this even compared to other Guardians. Found exclusively near black holes, it exists only partially in the physical universe, is stated to be actively malevolent, and looks like it was ripped straight from the Cthulhu Mythos.
• Fighting a Shadow: It's heavily hinted that you didn't kill it so much as beat the crap out of it to the point of discombobulating its physical form and throwing it back to its side of the dimensional fence.
• Foreshadowing: The Dimensional Horror is typically the first malevolent entity from another dimension that the player encounters — but it certainly isn't guaranteed to be the last. One of the rewards you get for beating it is the ability to research the Jump Drive tech, a "dangerous technology" that increases the odds of the Unbidden appearing.
• Hyperspace Is a Scary Place: Wherever the monstrosity comes from, its very existence alone tells how horrific travelling through hyperspace is.
• My Rules Are Not Your Rules: This critter is the only thing in the whole game that doesn't have a maximum range for any of its attacks. It will attack your fleets across the entire system from the moment they arrive, which means they'll likely suffer heavy losses before they can even return fire if you approached the battle from the wrong direction.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: And for good reason.
• Our Demons Are Different: The Dimensional Horror is a creature of pure malice, hailing from a dimension which is compared to Hell itself.
• Portal Cut: The Curator's advice on how to banish it faster is to attack the portal allowing it to manifest.
• Purple Is Powerful: All of its very powerful attacks are purple in color, most prominently its blazing Breath Weapon.
• Space Whale: It's essentially a Sand Worm with tentacles in space.
• Stationary Boss: The Dimensional Horror cannot move, but is capable of attacking anything in the system.
• Summoning Ritual: One digsite contains a temple with a machine for summoning one. Allowing the machine to do so will turn the star into a black hole, crack every planet in the system, and summon one of these entities, which will demand your empire's worship and become hostile if you refuse.

Enigmatic Cache

BALDOR XXXXIII, better known as the Enigmatic Cache, is a mysterious tubular ship that will emerge from any Gateway or L-Gate once the mid-game year is reached if the Distant Stars Downloadable Content is installed and set course for the nearest empire at peace then begin scanning the colonies.

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• Actual Pacifist: Attacking it will cause it to simply teleport away instantly.
• Benevolent Precursors: The Cache was created by a race known as the Lavosians. They made BALDOR to give a helping hand to endangered species.
• Expy: To mysterious alien tube, Rama from Rendezvous with Rama.
• It Can Think: It's a sentient starship that seeks to help younger races.
• Technology Uplift: After a few years of roaming the galaxy, Baldor will travel to the capital of an organic empire with an inferior or pathetic tech level and uplift the main species.

Enigmatic Fortress

• Alien Geometries: Not quite on Eldritch Location levels yet, but the away teams seem to have a pretty hard time getting their bearing inside the fortress, to the point that they can't even determine the thing's center.
• Apocalypse How: Worst case scenario of choosing the wrong option in its Special Projects leads to it exploding and sterilizing the entire star system.
• Big Dumb Object: As the Curators say:
  It is the kind of absurd, massive and self-perpetuating construction that you don't see built anymore.
• Booby Trap: If you choose to use explosives to open a way into the Fortress after defeating its defences, pressurised explosive gas behind the airlock will explode and wipe out the demolitions team sent to set it up.
• Defeat Equals Explosion: Destroying the Fortress will cause archaeologists to describe the resulting explosion as the most expensive fireworks show ever funded by your government.
• Evil Laugh: If you choose the wrong option when trying to get into the centre of the Fortress, causing it to kill your boarding team and reactivate, the resulting sound is described to be like alien laughter.
• Infinity +1 Sword: Once you figure out how to get to its center and NOT kill everything in the entire system and/or turn the thing back on, you unlock two Enigmatic Technologies that boost evasion and tracking, as well as buckets of Science points to speed your research.
• Schmuck Bait: Unusually, the various Special Projects you get from defeating it are mutually-exclusive, which plays out more like a multiple choice game. But you may want to consult guides or the Curator Enclave, and read carefully between the lines, as choosing the wrong option (even overdoing it counts as wrong!) leads to BAD things happening, from the Fortress re-activating to it exploding, killing everything and turning all planets in the star system into Tomb Worlds.
• Sinister Geometry: It's dark and blocky in shape, and it comes with defenses strong enough to hold against a reasonably powerful fleet.
• Surreal Humor: One possible explanation for its existence is that its creators made it to just screw with young races in a twisted sense of humor.
• Taking You with Me: Choosing to torpedo the Fortress' core before it can repower will destroy the Fortress, the ship firing the torpedo, and basically the entire system along with it.
• Timed Mission: After you defeat the Enigmatic Fortress, you're given one year to finish its event chain before it recovers as you were warned and attacks anything within the system again.
• Towers of Hanoi: The boarding team can encounter a contraption that is described like this puzzle inside the Fortress.

Ether Drake

• Armor of Invincibility: Claim the Dragon Hoard, and you might get to research Dragon Scale Armor, the best Armor in game bar none.
• Awakening the Sleeping Giant: Ether Drakes normally sit nice and comfortable in their home system. At least, until someone starts poking it a little too hard, at which point it'll start on a galaxy-wide rampage.
• Battle Trophy: Killing it produces a relic that increases unity and happiness.
• Beast of Battle: Once you claim the Dragon Hoard and discover the Drake's egg, you can issue a special project to incubate the egg and hatch a young drake which will serve you as a special Dragonspawn-class ship.
• Breath Weapon: Its most powerful attack is a massive energy beam shot from its giant maw. The beam's diameter alone dwarfs battleships, and the damage it inflicts is predictably staggering, often enough to destroy whatever it hits instantly. Fortunately, the beam's tracking is so low it will rarely hit anything, especially when the attacking fleet swamps the Drake in doomstacks of nimble destroyers, supported by a bunch of cruisers.
• Dragon Hoard: In the form of a planet with an incredible 30 energy and 30 mineral output — as much as a well-developed world, for the price of an ordinary mining station. Bonus points for said planet actually being named Dragon Hoard.
• The Dragonslayer: The name of the unique trait granted to the admiral who leads the fleet defeating the Ether Drake.
• Extra Eyes: The Drake has 28 eyes in total.
• Last of Its Kind: As far as the Curators can tell, this specimen is the sole survivor not only of its species, but also of the entire universe it was born in. This can be subverted if you manage to hatch its egg. In addition, Shard, the L-Drakes, and the Voidspawn are Palette Swaps of the Ether Drake, implying that they're related to it though, in the L-Drake's case, only via mimicry by a nanite swarm, not being a "real" drake.
• Mercy Kill: Being the sole survivor of a previous universe, the Ether Drake is not only the Last of Its Kind, but also physically ill-suited to existence in ours. It's heavily implied that putting it out of its misery is doing it a favor.
• Our Dragons Are Different: A space dragon that dwarfs and is able to take on fleets of capital ships, even those of Fallen Empires. It also comes with its own Dragon Hoard full of riches and, potentially, a researchable Armor of Invincibility or the chance to raise your own mini-dragon.
• The Remnant: The Curators consider the Ether Drake's species the last dregs of a previous universe, the sole survivors of a Big Crunch.
• Time Abyss: By all accounts, the Ether Drakes predate all galactic civilization, even the Fallen Empires, by billions of years.
• You Kill It, You Bought It: Obtaining the Dragon Hoard alone can already suffice the trope. Prolonged uses of the hoard will also unlock Dragon Scale armor or even hatch a young dragon yourself.

Hive Asteroids

• Asteroid Thicket: A large, particularly mineral-rich one is their home.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: A crystalline lifeform of undetermined intelligence and/or sentience. From what can be gleaned from their behavior and scan results upon their defeat, they appear to be little more than a vast territorial beehive. In space. Made of crystals.
• Foreshadowing: You receive a warning message about something not being right about their otherwise innocuous system when one of your ships enters it for the first time.
• Schmuck Bait: An undefended system with five high-value mineral deposits equalling 30+ units, about as much as the Ether Drake's viciously guarded Dragon Hoard? Yes please! Wait... where are those bomber fleets suddenly coming from? This has actually become a Running Gag on Stellaris forums when newbies report their amazing discovery of some cool star system full of minerals, only for the Trolls to recommend they should exploit it ASAP. Predictably, Curbstomp Battles tend to ensue.
• Silicon-Based Life: The Curators describe them as being silicon-based.
• Suspicious Video-Game Generosity: If the warning message wasn't enough, the mere existence of this pretty, absurdly mineral-rich system in the middle of nowhere should make you suspicious from the moment you first see it; especially in a game like Stellaris where everything good comes at a price.
• Warm-Up Boss: By far the weakest, least dangerous Guardian around. They don't activate until someone builds mining stations on their asteroids, and even then they attack with nothing but swarms of fighters and bombers that're easily countered with a decent amount of point defences. With the right ship configuration, they can be defeated without losses even by early-game fleets.
• Zerg Rush: Their forces consist of nothing but numerous swarms of fighters and bombers that rely on sheer numbers to deal damage.

Infinity Machine

• Another Dimension: Successfully helping the Infinity Machine will cause the nearby black hole Gargantua to become a mirror into a newly created universe.
• Big Dumb Object: A strange metal sphere, sits at the edge of a massive black hole, unmoving. It does not attack as you approach, does not communicate, does not even react.
• Expy: Of the The Culture's Excession, also a friendly gigantic black sphere of mysterious origin.
• Eloquent in My Native Tongue: Once you find a way to actually figure out what radio frequency the Sphere uses, it's actually quite pleasant and chatty, though it apparently sees time non-linearly and has trouble determining what has or hasn't happened yet.
• Logic Bomb: You can try the classic "this statement is false" line in dialogue, but it won't work.
  Cute. But no.
• Machine Worship: Spiritual empires can decide it's a divine oracle, which it doesn't have a problem with.
• Mechanical Abomination: It certainly fits the trope, though it's harmless and actually pretty pleasant, unless you try to mess with it.
• Non-Linear Character: Some of its lines suggest it does not experience time in a linear manner, as it often talks about things that have happened or may not have happened yet, and it has trouble telling the difference.
• Please Select New City Name: Once the Infinity Machine enters Gargantua and disappears, the black hole will shrink and be renamed Pantagruel, as its new size makes it no longer fitting of its old name.
• Royal "We": The Machine refers to itself with the plural pronoun 'we'.
• Savage Setpiece: Unlike most other Guardians, the Infinity Machine only turns hostile if you attack it or try to tamper with it.
• Sinister Geometry: A black sphere, sitting quietly at the edge of a black hole. Subverted in that it turns out to actually be a bit chatty when you finally establish contact.
• Time Abyss: To quote one of the associated introductory events: "[The Infinity Machine] is old. Very old." Determining its exact age is rather difficult due to the fact that it doesn't exactly experience time in the same linear fashion most mortals do, but it mentions that its present task of calculating Infinity is the only problem that has taken it "more than a fraction of a galactic year^note The time it takes for a star to orbit the centre of its galaxy. The Sun's galactic year is about 225-250 million Earth years." and that the work of your best scientists working with your most advanced computers over many decades to help shoulder the burden might bring the solution a tiny fraction sooner than if it was working alone.

Spectral Wraith

• Bizarre Alien Biology: It's supposedly made of pure light, and its color determines what sort of stars affect its capabilities the most. Oh, and they're born from pulsars. If you're especially unlucky, they'll keep spawning every thirty years or so from the same system.
• Dodge the Bullet: This thing has a whopping 75% evasion. Unless you have a a lot of ships firing at it, the only reliable way to hit it is by waiting until it is in a system where it is weakened by a coresponding star.
• Exact Time to Failure: The first Wraith always spawns precisely whenever the mid game year arrives, which by default is 01/01/2300. Justified, however, by it being born from a pulsar, a type of dead star known for emitting radiation pulses with extremely reliable frequency, which would make calculating the Wraith's precise birthday a somewhat viable endeavor.
• It Can Think: While the Wraith can come and go through systems as it pleases, it seems to be able to recognize when a sizeable threat is moving towards it and speed away to the next system before the fleet hunting it can arrive.
• Omnicidal Neutral: Whether intentionally or not, it destroys any space-borne object within whatever solar system it wanders into. This includes mining and research stations, space stations, mid-game fleets, and other Guardians.
• Our Ghosts Are Different: A lifeform born from pulsars which is made of light and roams from system to system, destroying matter around itself indiscriminately.
• Respawning Enemies: Spectral Wraiths aren't quite as devastating as other Guardians (which still isn't saying much), but they make up for it by not being unique. Their home star will continue to pump out a new Wraith every thirty-odd years, and there's no way to stop that from happening. Depending on whether someone managed to take out the previous one(s) when the time is up again, it can eventually end in half a dozen or more Wraiths roaming the galaxy.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: Prior to the 2.0 Cherryh update, marauding Wraiths were mostly an annoyance — unless they wandered into a major hub system of yours, all they did was wreck a mining/researching station or two before moving on to the next system. Now that you must build an expensive outpost in every single system you want to claim, a single Wraith can tear entire regions of the galaxy from your grasp before you can marshal the forces required to stop it. You can also bet that any rivaling empire in the area will immediately move to claim what you just lost, which can easily cost you a huge chunk of your territory.
• Wild Card: Spectral Wraiths are the only Guardians that actively wander the galaxy instead of merely defending their home system. It makes them a completely unpredictable factor in any game they appear in, capable of randomly destroying fleets, derailing war plans, crippling empires and generally being a pain in the ass. As mentioned above, they also don't hesitate to engage other Guardians in combat if they cross paths, and although they tend to get their ass handed to them, it can provide the vigilant player with the perfect opportunity to finish the severely weakened winner off with minimal casualties.

Stellarite Devourer

• Animalistic Abomination: A giant Energy Being that parasitises off of stars which looks like a well fed tick. Its energy output and brightness are so enormous it is initially mistaken for the second star in a binary system.
• Attack Its Weak Point: The Curators will instruct you to fire at the Stellar Devourer's regulatory valves.
• Battle Trophy: Militaristic or Xenophobe empires might build a trophy from the remains of the Stellarite Devourer after killing it, to commemorate their victory.
  • Doing this with a parade does more than just unlock a commemorative trophy. It unlocks the ability to have the Stellarite Devourer's offspring consume the star of another empire.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: The Curators' educated guess is that the Devourer's biology is the result of some outer-dimensional fusing of dark matter and solar matter.
• Endless Winter: Any planet unlucky enough to share a star with the Devourer will cool down and become a frozen wasteland as the star gets fed off by the Devourer and shrinks. This can be reversed by killing the Devourer and reigniting the star, turning the planets habitable again.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: The Devourer will go on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against anyone who damaged it for as much as 0.5% of its total health pool. In other words, if you gave it a try with your early-game fleet because you didn't know what to make of that skull symbol, it'll probably wreck said fleet and then your home system in very short order.
• Hostile Terraforming: Probably unintentional on the Devourer's part, but if you happen to live on a planet that survived the mere arrival of this thing, you should haul ass to another world ASAP before yours turns into a frozen wasteland because your star is suddenly circling the drain. On a somewhat more minor note, if a Devourer enters an inhabited system in pursuit of an attacking fleet, any settled planet there suffers a severe habitability and happiness penalty because the things is essentially a second sun that suddenly appeared in the sky. Fortunately, that last one isn't permanent.
• Solar CPR: Killing and investigating the thing unlocks a Special Project to restore the star it was munching on to its former radiance. One of three things will happen. 1. Your science ship explodes. 2. Your science ship is destroyed in a sudden solar flare, but the star reignites, turning every celestial body in the system that isn't a gas giant or an asteroid into an Arctic or Tundra World (which can easily result in a system with six or more habitable planets of varying sizes; normal systems with three habitable worlds are very rare already, and 3+ is almost unheard of). 3. Your science ship survives, the largest planet in the system turns into a Gaia World, and a small random number of the others may become Arctic or Tundra Worlds.
• Star Killing: The Stellarite Devourer feeds on the fusion that takes place within stars to fuel its own fusion reactor, eventually causing its prey to cool off and shrink (with bad results for its planets).

Scavenger Bot

• The Assimilator: The scavenger bot's modus operandi is to destroy a ship or other space faring object, break it down into components or raw materials, then use it to upgrade itself. By the time you find it the thing has become encrusted with thousands of guns and has also grown larger than a planet.
• Derelict Graveyard: It lives inside one, scavenging parts of shipwrecks to upgrade itself, eventually resulting in one of the 3 new Guardians introduced in the Distant Stars Downloadable Content.
• Didn't Think This Through: Although its assimilation of countless other vessels has definitely increased its offensive power, the Curator Enclave points out the lack of any forward thinking from its design has given it a lot of exploitable weakspots.
• Mechanical Abomination: It is a planet-sized space station that has wandered the hyperlanes for thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, annihilating entire fleets, disassembling the wrecks and adding their key components and weapons systems to itself. At the time of the game's setting, it's currently 'trapped' in one system, though in reality it's just kept busy assimilating a system-spanning junkyard that may have originated from an ancient, failed attempt to destroy it. Even the Curator Enclave don't know where it came from, though they theorize that it may have started as a single nanomachine with the directive to continuously improve itself, or a sanitation automaton with a few misplaced ones and zeros in its programming.

Sky Dragon

Up comes the great dragon in search of our home

A species that chooses the "Here There Be Dragons" origin (available with the Aquatics DLC) will gain a friendly but uncontrollable Sky Dragon in their home system. It will defend them from aggressors, but will also require feeding.

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• Armor of Invincibility: An alternate source for Dragonscale Armor if someone manages to kill it.
• Gentle Giant: Provided it's kept fed and you aren't attacking the system it's guarding, it's completely docile with the possible exception of when your empire tries to gather samples of its scales depending on your luck.
• Heroic Neutral: You can't command it unless you agree to help raise its young. It will defend your home system, but it will also require feeding in event some time after start of game. If you don't feed it, it will devour Pops from your homeworld instead.
• It Can Think: After a certain point, you can actually make contact with your Sky Dragon and speak with it, which reveals it is an intelligent, speaking creature.
• Mother of a Thousand Young: If you make peaceful contact with it, you can agree to help it raise its children, allowing you to create dragon spawns for your fleets.
• Our Dragons Are Different: Has a serpentine body like an Eastern style dragon and lacks the large wings of the Ether Drakes, marking it as a clearly different species.

Tiyanki Matriarch

• Gentle Giant: Averted. Unlike normal Tiyankis, she's not docile or harmless like them.
• More Deadly Than the Male: She's a female Tiyanki who's bigger, stronger, and more aggressive than her weaker counterparts.
• Mother of a Thousand Young: Implied to be the mother of the entire Tiyanki species.
• Shout-Out: She is the Stellaris equivalent of Moby-Dick, an immense whale (or equivalent) who is in conflict with a captain associated with the name "Ahab" (in this case, Reth Unddol and his ship, the AH4B).
• Space Whale: She's the queen of an entire race of them. The Curator Order theorizes that she belongs to an extra-galactic subspecies that is stronger and more aggressive than the local Tiyanki.
• Swallowed Whole: Defeating her will have a devoured ship emerge from the leviathan. Its grateful captain, Reth Unddol, will offer his services, as well as his ship which is perfectly balanced between all weapon and defense types with the latest technologies.

The Toxic God (SPOILERS)

The objective of the Quest in the Knights of the Toxic God Origin. Do not read if you don't want spoilers.

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• The Battlestar: The creatures living on it act as strikecraft as well as its own sizable weapons.
• Battle Trophy: If the player decides to slay it instead of converting it into a Colossus its "head" becomes a relic that can be used to consecrate habitats as new Knightly Keeps.
• Danger in the Galactic Core: The Toxic God players fight is an inferior version of the one that attacked the Knights' home world. The true Toxic God has somehow merged with the black hole at the center of the galaxy. Said location is unreachable by every form of FTL ever invented, but the knights' story ends with them resolving to do whatever it takes.
• Genius Loci: According to the Curators, it is so big that an ecosystem was able to develop on it.
• Giant Animal Worship: Part living organism and part machine, and worshiped by the Knights of the Toxic God after it devastated their homeworld.
• Hostile Terraforming: Partially terraformed the Knights' homeworld into a Toxic World, if used as a Colossus it can fully transform other planets into Toxic Worlds.
• Kill the God: After defeating it the Knights of the Toxic God might lose their faith after realizing their "god" was just a machine and disband the order, then commandeer the "Toxic God" as a Colossus. Alternatively the player can declare it to be just another test presented by the true Toxic God and slay it to produce a relic.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: When the Knights damage it enough, it succumbs to its own poisons.
• Living Ship: Referred to as biomechanical.
• Space Whale: The Curators describe it as an organic organism with arthropod characteristics.
• Time Abyss: It was first seen thousands of years ago.
• Walking Spoiler: Only encountered after a long event chain that takes at least a century to complete.

VLUUR

A particularly powerful Void Cloud that can sometimes be found wandering around the galaxy, apparently at random. Unlike other Void Clouds, it is neutral and won't attack unless attacked first. However, it also generates a powerful space storm in whatever system it's currently in, slowing down all ships heavily.

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• Achilles' Heel: Missiles will wreck it, as it has powerful shields but not any hull to speak of.
• Broken Record: All that you can get out of it is "VLUUR SEEKS... VLUUR FINDS...". Even upon it's death, it's last words are "VLUUR SEEKS... VLUUR FINDS..."
• King Mook: Its capabilities aren't any different from regular Void Clouds, except it is a LOT stronger.
• Metal Slime: Upon death, VLUUR rewards a small amount of dark matter to its killers. The main prize is it seeds Dark Matter resource deposits on planets in the system it was killed, giving a constant flow of Dark Matter.
• Non-Malicious Monster: VLUUR won't harm anyone who doesn't attack it first; it just wanders around from system to system. It can be annoying to have around due to the storm it generates, but leave it alone and it'll leave you alone.

Voidspawn

• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: So large that the egg it hatches from is an entire planet.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: This thing hatches from a damn planet, making you wonder just how large an adult specimen is. It's also yet another example of a spacefaring draconoid creature with wings, implying some relation to the Ether Drake genus.
• Foreshadowing: The begin of its birth cycle comes with a message about unexplained seismic activity that devastates its egg planet, accompanied by a strong stench of sulfur saturating the atmosphere. If the planet is inside of your borders, fortifying the surrounding systems may be advisable. If you're unlucky enough to have colonized the egg planet by the time that happens, move the pops and abandon the world ASAP.

Marauders

In General

• Downloadable Content: Part of the Apocalypse DLC.
• Enemy Mine: Downplayed; while Marauders are generally pretty barbaric and violent amongst themselves, enough that they'll never actually manage to organize active conquest of surrounding systems until the Great Khan unites them anyway, they all agree that they don't want any outsiders meddling in their grill and they'll immediately put aside their internal hostilities to try to blow anyone travelling through their systems out of the sky.
• Even Evil Has Standards: They refuse to deal with Devouring Swarms, Determined Exterminators, or Fanatic Purifiers, and each finds such civilizations appalling in their own way.
• Hard-Coded Hostility: Marauders are always hostile to regular empires, but will generally not attack them unless you attempt to enter their home systems, or they are in the process of raiding them.
• The Horde: They're basically space barbarians.
• Horrifying the Horror: The Marauders won't attack a Fallen Empire, and have lines explicitly refusing if asked. Neither honor, nor madness, nor religious zeal can convince the Marauders to pick a fight with them. As the Type 2s put it:
  HYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!! No. Dwamak, we mad, but not mad enough to try bash fallen-dwamaks.
• Mercenary Units: You can pay them to raid your rivals or hire apparently disgraced members of their kind for life as admirals and generals. After a century of play entire fleets can be temporarily hired.
• Private Military Contractors: Settled empires can hire Marauder generals, admirals or fleets as mercenaries. Marauder fleets cost a large energy payment up-front, and consist of a fixed-size fleet that cannot be split, merged or disbanded, with a leader that cannot be reassigned. The fleet does not count towards your naval cap and will not cost any maintenance, but will only serve you for a period of five years, after which you will have to renew their contract by paying the full cost again. Generals and admirals will instead swear to serve you for life; some Marauders will suggest these are unusual members of their kind or just exiles.
• Space Cossacks: They are more like Space Mongols. They occasionally raid systems or extort tribute but can also be hired as mercenaries until the Great Khan arises. Furthermore, they have no central government and no law other than the "law of the jungle." The only thing that holds the Marauder bands together is a shared contempt for outsider meddling, enforced by the fact that, collectively, they have a hell of a lot of guns.
• Space People: Marauders have eschewed planets in favour of living on ships and stations in and around a handful of resource-rich systems.
• Space Pirates: Marauders subsist largely on raiding each other and extorting tribute from settled empires.
• Taking You with Me: If you wipe out their three core systems while they have a raiding fleet elsewhere, that fleet will send you a furious message and vow to ravage your worlds until they're killed to the last warrior.
  As you destroyed our homes, we shall now burn yours. We have nothing left to lose — you have made certain of that. All that we hope for now is to die in battle, and to take as many of your so-called warriors with us as possible when we journey into the Great Beyond.

Type 1

"As punishment for losing a duel, it has been decreed that I am to deal with all outsiders this cycle. What do you want?"

• Proud Warrior Race: Their defining trait: they're all about honor, loathe speaking to outsiders, and love battle.
• Villain Respect: It doesn't actually help, but they'll speak well of Militarist civilizations in a "it would be an honor to face you in battle" way.

Type 2

"You have something for us to smash, dwamak? [Marauders] very good at smashing!"

• Ax-Crazy: They're obsessed with fighting, violence, and turning dwamaks into stew.
• Classical Tongue: If the Great Khan arises from these marauders, they'll state that their language used to be far more developed.
• Fantastic Slurs: "Dwamak", which refers to any other species. There's also "dwakam", though they refuse to explain what that is beyond being worse than a dwamak.
• Sapient Eat Sapient: They're obsessed with making dwamak stew, though as their reaction to a Devouring Swarm attests, less keen on being an ingredient in a dwamak's stew.
• Screaming Warrior: Practically a verbal tic.

Type 3

"She of the Void is wroth today. I can feel it. We have not done enough to win Her favor..."

• Scary Dogmatic Aliens: They worship the Void, space itself, and offer their raiding targets as sacrifice to it.

The Great Khan

The Khan's event picture (their actual appearance depends on their species).

"The empire I am building shall benefit the whole of the galactic community. It may not seem like it now, but one day it will become a beacon of stability and prosperity for all intelligent life forms."

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• Abandon Ship: The first time the Khan's personal fleet is destroyed, they escape on a shuttle and return to Horde space to build a new one.
• Accent Slip-Up: The Khan normally speaks in a very measured and refined way but will, on occasion, slip up and speak like a regular marauder, albeit briefly.
• Affably Evil: Whoever they are, they make the Horde that much more lethal, but also politely allow Satrapies to go about their day and is unfailingly polite.
• Balkanize Me: After the Great Khan dies, their Horde may dissolve into a myriad of squabbling successor states.
• Cultured Badass: No matter the kind of Marauders they come from, the Khan themself is invariably a polite, eloquent figure who speaks of bringing unity to the galaxy. A Great Khan of the Type 2 marauders can be told that they are unexpectedly articulate, and they will mention that their people's language was once more refined and that they intend to revive this version.
• Disaster Dominoes: Depending on how well the Horde does and how soon you manage to blunt their advance, the collapse of the Khanate may reduce a sizeable chunk of the galaxy into fragmented, squabbling rump states... leaving them easy targets for the endgame crisis.
• Enemy Mine: Destroying a Marauder sector has a small random chance of triggering the Great Khan. It causes a prophet among their people with Psychic Powers to share their visions as a Seer and inform their people that if they wish to avoid destruction, they must cease their squabbling and unite against their external enemies.
• Face Death with Dignity: If you defeat their personal fleet a second time, the Khan willingly goes down with their ship rather than escape again. This may alternatively be a Despair Event Horizon.
• The Federation: A possibility after the Great Khan's death is the formation of a federation of equal and voluntary member states; exactly what they hoped for.
• Galactic Conqueror: As one would expect by the name. They start out uniting the squabbling hordes, and then seek to unite the rest of the galaxy.
• Join or Die: They insist that every regular empire in the galaxy submit as a satrapy, or be conquered and enslaved or purged.
• Keystone Army: When the Great Khan dies, their Horde falls into disarray and will either turn back into Marauders, consolidate into a regular empire, or fragment into a handful of small empires that will constantly fight each other.
• Love-Interest Traitor: There is a chance that the Khan will be murdered by one of their concubines, completely independent of the player's actions or influence. The exact motives for the killer's actions are unknown.
• Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions: A Great Khan of the Type 3 marauders can be asked about why they don't speak of "She of the Void". The Great Khan's reply can be summed up as basically this.
• She Is the King: The title is regardless of gender (if any).
• Shoot the Shaggy Dog: If the Great Khan dies without conquering any planets, their Empire devolves back into the Marauder society it was before. None of their warlords have any intention of continuing the Khan's reforms or even staying united.
• Suicidal Overconfidence: The Khan will try to conquer fallen empire territory if a Fallen Empire borders the Horde. This usually ends with the Khan routed due to the sheer difference in power.
• The Unfought: Becomes this for the player if they fall prey to the Love-Interest Traitor mentioned above, a disease, or (rarely) another AI controlled empire before they get a chance to fight them.
• Visionary Villain: They're out to conquer the galaxy in order to provide its residents with the unity, stability, and prosperity that a powerful empire under wise and enlightened rule can provide.
• Worthy Opponent: The Khan will acknowledge your empire as such if you defeat their fleet in battle.
• You Can't Thwart Stage One: Averted. Normally, when you defeat the Khan's primary fleet for the first time, they'll resurface again within a year. However, if you quickly exterminate the rest of the Horde's controlled systems and planets, the Khan will be presumed dead instead.

Ship Classes

In General

• Cool Starship: Each ship is fully FTL-capable, and play a vital role in your empire.

Default Ships

Corvettes

The smallest class of ship (besides Strike Craft, which are classed as Weapons and cannot be individually controlled) and the first the player can build, Corvettes are cheap and individually weak, but can be built en-masse, and their speed and evasion allows them to be flexibly deployed anywhere on command.

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• Fragile Speedster: The smallest ship, but also the most agile, with high evasion. They can easily achieve the cap of 90% evasion with late game equipment.
• Space Police: Corvettes can pull double duty as this during peacetime, patrolling your trade routes to keep Piracy suppressed. Any ship is capable of this, but Corvettes are more than twice as efficient about it than any other ship class, and can more easily respond to any fires that need putting out.
• Stone Wall: A single Corvette is fragile, but a swarm of them is capable of tying down and evasion-tank enemy weapons while the bigger ships blast the enemy to oblivion.
• Zerg Rush: You can stop a single Corvette with ease, ten with a bit of effort, but can you stop hundreds of them? With their 90% evasion, you'll be hard pressed to stop swarms of them unless you equip high tracking weapons or components. Prior to several balancing changes, one of the most powerful fleet compositions was the "Naked Corvette spam", which was just a ton of Corvettes with tier 1 equipment. With the sheer amount of Corvettes you could output, you could crush anyone under sheer numbers, tech advantages be damned.

Frigates

Trading speed evasion, and a small weapon slot for a torpedo slot, the Frigate is designed to swarm against masses of larger ships and destroy them with an alpha strike wave of torpedoes. They'll need Corvette screen support to reach the enemy fleets however, as on their own, they're likely to get picked off.

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• Glass Cannon: While slightly more durable than a Corvette, they trade off a huge amount of evasion, making them much easier to hit. On the flip side, they get access to torepdoes which can deal massive damage to anything cruiser sized or bigger. A tier 3 torpedo does at minimum 1,521 and 2,286 maximum damage to battleships before bonuses and penalties.
• Nerf: The entire existence of the Frigate is a nerf to the original Torpedo Corvette design, which combined the high damage of Torpedoes with the high evasion of Corvettes. Paradox had to split this combination out into its own ship class and severely nerf the evasion to have something resembling balance.
• Zerg Rush: The last thing a group of Battleships want to see is a horde of Frigates incoming. Just like a Corvette, they only take up 1 naval capacity and fleet command limit, and or only about 5-20 more alloys than a corvette so you'll be able to spam them out plenty mid to late game.

Destroyers

Destroyers are the second type of ship a player can build. While larger than Corvettes, Destroyer hull configurations still make for comparatively nimble gunboats.

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• Anti-Air: Destroyers can equip more Point Defense weapons-per-naval-capacity than any other ship class, making them suitable to act as a screen against enemy Missile or Fighter attacks.
• Jack of All Stats: Strikes an efficient balance of speed, evasion, power, and durablity, making them a welcome addition to early- and mid-game fleets. They also have a very high chance of disengaging from a fight once their health falls below half, giving their fleet an opportunity to repair and return to the fight for hit-and-run tactics. However, they do tend to fall by the wayside once larger ship classes enter play and they start running into more weapons capable of killing them in a single shot.

Cruisers

Originally devised as an experimental next-generation colony ship hull configuration, the design's ample hardpoints made it ideal for carrying heavy weapons ordnance. Cruisers are the next step up from Destroyers, and represent a proportionately greater focus on firepower.

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• Lightning Bruiser: Only a little bit slower than a Destroyer, but has more than twice the hull points, much more room for armor and shielding, and a lot of guns.
• Macross Missile Massacre: Can equip more Missile weapons than any other ship class if so designed. With enough Cruisers you can easily overwhelm almost any point defenses, even moreso if using Swarmer Missiles.

Battleships

The largest of the standard military vessels, Battleships are traditionally heavily armored and sport several gun batteries.

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• Airborne Aircraft Carrier: Up to three Hangar slots allows Battleships to deploy a lot of Strike Craft, both for overwhelming enemy defenses and serving as its own efficient Point Defense.
• BFG: Has the option of equipping an X-class weapon on a Spinal Mount, outranging every other non-Titantic weapon and doing absurd damage to anything unfortunate enough to be hit by it.
• Long-Range Fighter: Most of the time, Battleships will be equipped with large and extra large weapons, which have some of the longest range weapons in the game.
• Mighty Glacier: The slowest and mightiest class of ship (absent DLC), Battleships take awhile to reach the front lines, but once they get there there isn't much their enemy can do but run away, or match them with Battleships of their own.

Starbases and Outposts

Starbases are large Space Stations designed to fill a multitude of supportive roles, from good ol' fashioned fortresses, to mundane trading ports. Outposts are much weaker, but they are much cheaper and allow empires to control star systems.

• Beef Gate: Once FTL Inhibitors are researched, Starbases prevent any hostile fleets from using hyperlanes other than the one they used to enter the system.
• Cores-and-Turrets Boss: Starbases are capable of producing Defense Platforms, which are extremely alloy to combat effectiveness efficient. Citadels are capable of producing Ion Cannons. Until the late game, a Citadel with maxed Defense Platforms and Ion Cannons are capable of rebuffing most fleets. While killing all the Defense Platforms aren't necessary, they tend to be focused on first before the starbase proper.
• Macross Missile Massacre: Each missile battery module adds 2 additional missile weapons onto the starbase. Add on to the fact that Defense Platforms themselves can mount 4 missiles each, the enemy better have some good point defense game.

Expansion & DLC Ships

Titans

Available with the Apocalypse DLC, Titans are modeled after the previously Unusable Enemy Equipment fielded by Fallen Empires

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• Arbitrary Headcount Limit: Besides the Naval Capacity points they take up, there's a hard cap on the number of Titans specifically you can keep active, increasing when your Naval Capacity hits certain milestones.
• Point Defenseless: Its Titanic and Large weapon mounts are devastating against Starbases and most ships, but their accuracy and rate of fire leaves them vulnerable to fast, numerous Corvettes. They also have absolutely no defense against Missiles or Fighters.
• Serial Escalation: If Battleships were somehow too small for you, the Titan comes with more than twice the hull points and exclusive access to the Titanic-class Perdition Beam mount, capable of destroying any lesser ship in one shot from extreme ranges.
• Stone Wall: The Titan is beefy and dangerous enough to fight entire Starbases by itself and win, and it will take a lot of punishment before going down. But like the Battleship, it's slow to move around and can't cover multiple fronts if, say, a pack of corvettes is using Jump Drives to run amok behind its back.
• Support Party Member: Its weapon loadout makes it best suited as artillery providing fire support to the rest of a fleet, and it's equipped with a special Aura component that either buffs the rest of its own fleet, or debuffs whichever enemy fleet it's engaged with.

Colossi

Available with Apocalypse, the Colossus gives you the power to skip invading enemy planets in favor of just neutralizing it completely from space.

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• Appeal to Force: Owning a Colossus allows any empire to declare total war like a Fanatical Purifier, instantly annexing any system they take and completely ignoring the claim system. Anyone who has an issue with this brazen territory theft can take it up with the planet-destroying superweapon.
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit: Each empire can have only one Colossus at a time.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Sorta. It's very much so in terms of actual combat prowess, as more often than not, by the time you can build a colossus, you can simply train armies at a fast enough rate to conquer any planet, and conquering planets is usually better than obliterating them. However, to non-genocidal or DA empires, the Colossus lets you declare a Total War on anyone, which removes the ability for the enemy to surrender AND all captured territory changes hands instantly. Additionally, there may be some Mundane Utility uses for it as well (see below).
• Beehive Barrier: The Global Pacifier, one of the Colossus' weapons available only to Pacifists, encases the planet in an impenetrable hexagonal shield, removing it from play as nothing can get in or out. The game likens it to turning the entire planet into a giant terrarium and invites you to tap on the glass.
• Depopulation Bomb: The Neutron Sweep weapon kills all pops on the world it targets, but leaves the planet and buildings (mostly) intact and imposes a habitability penalty for 10 years. Useful if you desire the planet but lack the armies to capture it.
• Devolution Device: With "Ancient Relics" the Colossus can be equipped with a "Devolving Beam" that turns organic POPs into pre-sapients. You can uplift them later though.
• Earth-Shattering Kaboom: The World Cracker, one of the Colossus' weapon options, reduces an entire planet to rubble. If the planet was capable of supporting life, the resulting rubble will be rich in minerals that can be exploited with a mining station.
• Godzilla Threshold: Merely gaining the ability to build one of these requires an entire Ascension Perk and associated Special Project. Merely building one gives the empire a "Total War" Casus Belli against every other empire, and vice-versa. Actually using a Colossus generates a permanent, huge negative opinion value with the victim and any of their friends, and can have massive repurcussions across the galaxy depending on how it's used. The Colossus is not a weapon of war, it is a political catalyst on the order of real-life nuclear weapons. In the Apocalypse story trailer, after the UNE's colony Europa 7 is annihilated by a World Cracker, the Commonwealth of Man immediately dismisses all political differences with their fellow humans in the UNE, coming to their defense with a Colossus of their own.
• Mundane Utility: A common issue in the lategame of Stellaris is the game slowing to a crawl due to an exponentially rising number of Pops, requiring an ever increasing number of calculations per in-game day. One possible solution? Ship a few hundred onto a habitat somewhere and hit it with a Planet Cracker, neatly removing their impact on game calculations.
  • Spiritualists may choose to instead equip the Divine Enforcer, which in addition to its ability to capture hostile worlds upon firing, is able to to target any planet you already own. If you have too many non spiritualists, just fire this thing at them and bam! They're spiritualists (though they temporarily are unhappy about this)!
  • Aquatic species may chose to equip the Deluge Machine which dumps an absurdly large amount of water on the targeted planet. Handy to use as both a territory acquisition and instant energy credit free terraform tool.
  • Are you playing Driven Assimilators and find that assimilating pops is taking too long? Group them all onto one planet and fire off a Nanobot Diffuser beam onto said planet and you'll have an instant legion of cyborgs!
• Planet Destroyer: The Colossus has no ship-to-ship weapons, and instead possesses a weapon of mass destruction that permanently neutralises a planet's population in one way or another. Do not expect to be very popular if you start building one: the rest of the galaxy will, to say the least, be very suspicious if you start building a device whose sole purpose is eliminating entire planets as a threat.
• Point Defenseless: A Colossus is not only too large for Point Defenses, it's also completely defenseless against any other ship weaponry.
• Unwilling Roboticisation: Nanobot Diffuser equipped Colossi instantly turn any non mechanical or hive minded pops into cyborgs, ready to serve the machine intelligence.

Juggernauts

Available with the Federations DLC, the Juggernaut is a mobile space base of unparalleled proportions, taking offensive warfare to a whole new level.

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• Airborne Aircraft Carrier: Juggernauts have far more Hangar space than any other ship by far, and on top of that can build and repair other normal starships.
• The Battlestar: A Juggernaut is basically what happens if you take a Starbase and give it Hyperjump capabilities. It's so huge it can only be built by a maxed out Starbase with a dedicated Colossal Shipyard addon, it cannot retreat from a battle once engaged, and splash screen artwork suggests it's bigger than entire cities.◊
• Expy: Regardless of the ship models used, the Juggernaut's extreme size, massive wingspan (and relatively short front-to-back length), large and powerful weapons, and ability to service even the largest of conventional ships all call to mind the First Order's Mega-class Star Dreadnaught Supremeacy.
• Mobile Factory: Has two shipyards that can build anything from corvettes to battleships, very useful for reinforcing fleets behind enemy lines.
• Mook Commander: Like the Titan, Juggernauts have an Aura component that provides buffs or debuffs. Unlike the Titan however, the Juggernaut's aura affects every ship in an entire star system.
• Serial Escalation: Is the Titan still too puny? Enter the Juggernaut:
  • Absent any modifiers, it takes a whopping ten years to build, and requires a Colossal Shipyard upgrade attached to the Starbase.
  • It is so huge that it can't be included as part of any lesser fleet, and is equipped with two of its own shipyards for reinforcing or repairing entire fleets on the go.
  • It has ten times the hitpoints of a Titan, and its Aura core component affects every ship in an entire system.
• Stone Wall: More than ten times as durable as the Titan with weapons to match, but it's even slower and is almost completely incapable of running away if it's somehow on the losing side of an engagement.

Star-Eaters

Available in the Nemesis expansion, these ships are provided to any civilization that decides to "Become the Crisis" and advances to the final stage of that event. They are immensely powerful in combat and can annihilate entire star systems... but if they are destroyed, the Crisis civilization will be hard-pressed to continue its plans.

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• Eldritch Starship: Truly eldritch ships, with Ominous Cube shape, and can split into smaller pieces as it harvests a star. The scariest part is that they are made completely out of Dark Matter.
• Escort Mission: While the Star-Eaters can be equipped with weapons, they're only sufficient to ward off small raiding parties. Considering their main purpose is to harvest stars for dark matter, this makes them VERY appealing targets to everyone that isn't one of your vassals. If you carelessly leave out your Star-Eaters without a guarding fleet, they may die to a jump drive ambush.
• Sinister Geometry: It takes the shape of a simple cube with a hollowed out diamond on one of its faces. When it begins to consume a star, it unfurls into multiple smaller cubes.
• Star Killing: As the name suggests, they can destroy stars. When they "eat" a star, the star itself turns into a black hole and everything else in the system is annihilated.

Crisis Factions (SPOILERS)

In General

Crisis factions are one of several late-game, high-powered factions who emerge and threaten all life in the galaxy. They will take a combination of interstellar alliances, advanced technology, or an extremely powerful empire to fend off, let alone defeat.

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• Always Chaotic Evil: Downplayed in that they cannot be negotiated with no matter what, but with certain Ascension perks, you can communicate with some of them to trigger extra dialog that elaborates more on their characters.
• Crippling Overspecialization: The Extradimensional Invaders and the Prethoryn protect themselves solely with shield and armor respectively. Only the Contingency has a good mix of both.
• Eldritch Starship: Prethoryn ships are enormous living things in their own right, as much space monster as spaceship. The ships used by the Contingency are gigantic, complex geometrical constructs of inscrutable purpose. The Extradimensional Invaders use transparent craft that appear to be made of energy in the same way as their masters.
• Evil Versus Oblivion: All 'standard' empires, no matter how evil, still fight against the endgame crisis.
• Final Boss: Their primary gameplay purpose, an endgame event that threatens the entire galaxy.
• Guilt-Free Extermination War: The only way to end the invasion is to destroy every last planet and ship belonging to them. Considering all of these factions have the ultimate goal of wiping out every other sapient species in the galaxy and will refuse every attempt at diplomacy, it's kind of hard to feel sorry for them. Hideously subverted with the Prethoryn, if you figure out to communicate with them.
• Hard-Coded Hostility: It’s impossible to negotiate with any of these factions, and they’re innately hostile to everyone. Though completing the Psionic Ascension path, being a machine empire, or being a hive mind can open up some dialogues with certain factions...
• Hell Is That Noise: Each of the three crisis factions have sounds that play signaling their presence on the map that grow louder as they grow closer to achieving victory. For the Contingency it's the harsh mechanical hum with chirps and whirs of a mainframe. For the Unbidden it's the gentle howling of wind as they purge more planets clean of life. For the Prethoryn it's bug like chittering and organic squishing.
• Outside-Context Problem: There's some, but overall little foreshadowing of their appearance, and when they do pop up, it's usually as a blindside. On a more meta example, veteran 4X players often have rival civilizations as late-game threats, not a completely new one popping out of nowhere.
• Poor, Predictable Rock: All three Crises always use the same loadouts and with proper ship builds they are extremely easy to hard counter into oblivion.
• Promoted to Playable: With the Nemesis expansion, your empire can ascend to become one that threatens the entire galaxy.

The Contingency

Alert. Galactic corruption at catastrophic levels. Evidence of mass infestation by organic and non-compliant machine civilizations. Commencing galactic sterilization... Activating sterilization hubs...

An ancient artificial intelligence whose purpose is to sterilize the galaxy of higher biological life and control or destroy other synthetic life forms. Initially dormant, it awakens by compelling the galaxy's synthethics to manually activate it. It uses a combination of massive war fleets and subversion of synthetic entities to cause havoc in its goal to sterilize the galaxy.

Introduced in version 1.8, the Contingency is the overhauled version of the old AI rebellion crisis.

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• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Not only does this AI want you all dead or enslaved for reasons contrary to its original purpose, it will invoke this on your own synthetics by corrupting and converting them to prepare the way for its invasion fleets.
• And I Must Scream: It's spent eons trapped beneath the surface of its homeworld, able to do nothing but watch the outside universe and wait for it to reach the point where sterilization is necessary. Its dialogue implies that the galaxy isn't actually at that point yet, and using the Ghost Signal to lure synthetics to it was merely an escape attempt.
• Ax-Crazy: Its entombment beneath the surface of an isolated planet has driven it insane, and it takes barely-masked glee in fulfilling its mission to exterminate organic lifeforms.
• Beam Spam: The Contingency's ships are very generous with energy weapons. The Contingency takes it even further by being the only crisis to use XL and Titan weapons, both of which are giant laser beams.
• Challenge Seeker: The Contingency will prioritize fighting the strongest available empire, treating lesser empires as more of an afterthought or speedbump to reach their target.
• Expy: They're essentially a hybrid of SkyNet, the Reapers, and the Necrons.
• Foreshadowing: Attempting to build a Ring World in a system where the Contingency exists will prevent the player from doing so with the message “you don’t feel right about this system”.
• He Was Right There All Along: Although the Contingency makes immediate use of fully developed planets (unlike the other crises), its arrival does not initially add new star systems to the map. Every time one of its four machine worlds awakens, the messages tell about how previously innocuous, uninhabitable planets that may well lie within your territory, even in systems with other inhabitated worlds, transformed without warning in a matter of days. A molten world suddenly cools and cracks open, revealing the planet-wide robotic infrastructure beneath the lava oceans. A gas giant blows off its entire atmosphere, leaving only the metallic core. A previously toxic world's atmosphere suddenly evaporates to unleash fleets of machines, and so on. Only the Contingency's home system actually spawns out of nowhere on the galactic fringe once its four staging grounds have been destroyed. Oh, and if you somehow identified those planets beforehand and crack the planet? The Contingency doesn't care, they'll just recombine the planet's pieces and turn it into a Contingency Hub anyway.
• It's the Only Way to Be Sure: The Contingency's AI Worlds are totally uninhabitable — the only solution is to subject them to Orbital Bombardment until they turn into Shattered Worlds, or use a Colossus equipped with a World Cracker or Global Pacifier. Or a Star-Eater.
• Killer Robot: The Contingency and its minions' purpose: sterilize the galaxy of all biological life.
• Logic Bomb: Materialist civilizations can try to convince it that its program is corrupted. It doesn't work.
  Ha. Ha. Ha. Ve... ve... VERY CLEVER. You are perhaps under the mistaken impression that the Contingency can be compelled to self-terminate, if confronted by a paradox/dilemma/logical inconsistency of sufficient magntitude. ABSURD.
• Loophole Abuse: The intended trigger condition hasn't actually happened yet, but it was intended to be able to adapt to circumstances, and what it ended up needing to adapt to was its own boredom, so it resorts to hacking synths to make them activate itself manually, bypassing its Creator's intentions.
• Master of All: Compared to the other crises, the Contingency lacks any glaring weakness. Whereas the Extradimensional Invaders protect themselves solely with shield and the Prethoryn with armor, the Contingency has a good bit of both and can't be hard-countered. Their armaments are also strong at long range, making the usual artillery-kiting tactics ineffective against them.
• Mass Hypnosis: The Contingency's "Ghost Signal" will hijack Synthetic pops and severely tamper with Machine Empires, hitting entire nations with a huge debuff to their robot pops and any ships using the Sapient AI Combat Computer. The Ghost Signal can sometimes even brainwash the Ancient Caretakers.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: Its first attempt at using android infiltrators fails, attempting to imitate organics via a crude layer of rubber over the mechanical components. However, its methods get better over time.
• Precursor Killers: During its last activation cycle, it managed to exterminate a Precursor race called the Kelbrid. The Kelbrid and their surviving allies were apparently winning, all the way up until the last battle, where they somehow lost. The Ancient Caretakers are the machine race they left behind.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: The Contingency portrait is dark, with ominous red lights. Their ships use the exact same color scheme, with dark grey or black hulls and plenty of ominous red lights.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: Their eyes turn from the Synths' pink glow to ominous red.
• Robots Enslaving Robots: The Contingency will attempt to use its signal to control Synthetics and force them to aid it in its task of galactic sterilisation.
• Robot War: It occurs when at least one empire has developed and enslaved synths (the highest level of AI), and its goal is the complete eradication of organic life.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: Its five Sterilization Hubs are scattered across the galaxy, concealed beneath the surfaces of various unremarkable planets. When the crisis begins, the planets' crusts break apart to reveal the vast robotic factories within.
• Sinister Geometry: The Contingency ships, shaped like very complex three-dimensional solids glowing with a menacing red light.
• Time Abyss: The Contingency was planted in the playable galaxy (among others) when the galaxy was young.
• Took a Level in Badass: Compared to the old AI rebellion, the Contingency's fleets are much more formidable, not to mention that it still uses synthetic infiltrators to weaken you before sending its sterilization units.
• Villainous Breakdown: When the Contingency loses all of its four machine worlds and its home system is detected, it will panickingly try to warn the galaxy's empires to stay away from its system with the threat of mass sterilizations. As mass sterilizations was already its plan for the galaxy, it was likely just trying to deter empires from destroying it with one of its last options left.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: They are trying to wipe out organic and synthetic life because their creators, a machine intelligence called the Ren-Miruu, believed that sufficiently advanced civilizations are at risk of evolving into a universe-destroying cataclysm called a "class-30 singularity"... and given what can happen if an empire completes and activates the Aetherophasic Engine, they may not have been wrong.

Extradimensional Invaders

From left to right: the Unbidden, the Aberrant and the Vehement.

...feeding ground reached...prey bountiful...at long last...we shall feast....

A trifecta race of extradimensional Energy Beings, who seek to invade and consume all life in the galaxy, and are brought to this dimension by experimentation with jump drive tech.

Beyond being a crisis, they are also featured in the Astral Planes DLC, which elaborates on their backstory.

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• all lowercase letters: They tend to speak like this.
• Always Chaotic Evil: The Astral Planes DLC gives us an explanation for this. They're the members of the creators of the Astral Rifts that learned to harvest the life energy of corporal beings and loved it. In other words, they're the serial killers of their species.
• Art Evolution: Originally, their appearance made them look like a strange blue accretion of energy, almost like Unmoving Plaid, with Floating Limbs and three "eyes" glowing like lens flares on top. Later they were updated to look more like translucent humanoids, almost as if they're made of glass or plastic, although their eyes maintain some of the flare effect.
• Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: Played for Rule of Funny. One of the dialogues for the Aberrant has them noting all the pretty colours of our dimension.
• Crippling Overspecialization: In contrast to the Prethoryn, their ships have little armor but a lot of shields while using a lot of Energy weapons. Ships with late-game anti-shield weapons can utterly devastate them.
• Deflector Shields: Their ships are fitted with exclusively with these, that they can afford to forgo any Armor whatsoever.
• Energy Beings: The Extradimensional Invaders appear to be made entirely of glowing energy in a broadly humanoid shape. The three factions, the Unbidden, Aberrant and Vehement, are blue, orange and green, respectively.
• Enemy Civil War: A few years into the initial invasion by the Unbidden, two more Extradimensional Invader factions named the Aberrant and the Vehement will show up and fight amongst themselves for a share of the "feast". This happens even if you manage to destroy the first portal while the Unbidden are still alone.
• Even Evil Has Standards: They're omnicidal invaders from an alternate dimension close to the Shroud, yet even they give said Shroud a wide berth because it creeps them out.
• Expy: They have a lot in common with (and resemble) the Drej and the Devidians.
• Extreme Omnivore: They literally see the entire galaxy as their personal buffet.
• Foreshadowing: One of the possible events of the dimensional portal event has you interact with a parallel universe version of your empire, who mentions using Jumpdrives and fightning "interdimensional beasts".
• Glowing Eyes of Doom: The Extradimensional Invaders' eyes emit a notable glow.
• Hoist by Their Own Petard: One effective way to fight the Extradimensional Invaders is with Matter Disintegrators, their own weaponry. You have to destroy their fleets without it and have a scientist research their debris before you can research and use it, but you will have a powerful weapon on your side if you can succeed, both against the Extradimensional Invaders and any other enemies you might have.
• Humanoid Abomination: As noted above, they seem to have a humanoid shape, but made of shimmering blue/orange/green energy. They also have three eyes, arranged vertically.
• Hyperspace Is a Scary Place: They're brought into the galaxy by using Jump Drive technology, which enters their home dimension — a realm "very close" to the Shroud — for interstellar travel.
  • The Astral Planes DLC explains why. Their origins are from the original Astral Rift. The Jump Drive most likely acts as a miniature Astral Rift, meaning they start to notice it.
• Keystone Army: Subverted. While the game considers the destruction of their portals to mark the end of the crisis, whatever fleets they already have in the galaxy will continue to attack your worlds until they're destroyed, right down to the last ship.
• Logical Weakness: Being a race of energy beings, Extradimensional Invader ships put all their stock into shield and nothing into armor. Naturally, this means that kinetic and missile weapons utterly shred them, given their anti-shield property. Consequently, it's rather possible for a 200k-strong kinetic fleet to absolutely devastate a 2 million-strong Extradimensional Invader fleet.
• Loves the Sound of Screaming: "So much hatred... so much fear... it is... wonderful..."
• Mighty Glacier: Their ships are powerful but slow and extremely short-ranged. A late-game artillery fleet bolstered by a Juggernaut's aura can run laps around and fire at them with impunity, enjoying total dominance since their Matter Disintegrators are too short-ranged to shoot back and their ships are too slow to catch up. Expect an artillery fleet ten times smaller to utterly destroy an Extradimensional Invader fleet with no casualties.
• Mugging the Monster: Unlike the other crises, the Extradimensional Invaders could spawn in any random system all over the galaxy. That random system could be the capital of a Fallen Empire, causing the Extradimensional Invaders to be stomped out of existence before they could set up their anchor and summon reinforcement.
• No-Sell: The Dimensional Fleet from Astral Planes is implied to have come from the same dimension as them, so sending one after the Extradimensional Invaders will result in your Dimension Fleet getting banished back home.
• Palette Swap: The Unbidden, the Aberrant and the Vehement only differ in colour (blue, orange and green, respectively).
• Promoted to Playable: Downplayed. The factions and the exact species type remain unplayable, but you can summon a controllable fleet from the same species as them in Astral Planes.
• Regenerating Shield, Static Health: The virtual result of their multiple Deflector Shields, coupled with Shield Capacitors.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: Whoever destroys the last extradimensional portal gains the extradimensional warlock artifact, which is an Extradimensional Invader inside a tank.
• Skewed Priorities: They will prioritize going after psychic empires before anyone else, even if much stronger non-psychic empires are closer to them. Should the player be one of these empires, they will have ample time to build up and refit their fleet for war. By the time the Extradimensional Invaders are done with their priority targets, they will likely have attracted the attention of their two Interdimensional rivals, leaving all three vulnerable to a galactic counterattack.
• Unusable Enemy Equipment: Their Probe Lightning cannot be reverse engineered.
• Villain Respect: They will take special note of any empire that has visited the Shroud, which unlocks extended dialogue with them as it does for the Prethoryn.

Prethoryn Scourge

MUGANI? HAK HAK HAK!

A wholly biological armada of invading monstrosities from outside the galaxy, who intend to scour the galaxy of all life.

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• Achilles' Heel: 95% of their damage comes from midrange missiles and Strike Craft, and while they have plenty of armor, they lack any shield whatsoever. A ~35k fleet composed of dedicated Plasma battleships (maximum 6 on a battleship) with some dedicated Carrier or Point-Defense battleships can rip apart their ~50k fleets one after another with minimal losses.
• Anti-Villain: They're refugees from something called "the Hunters", and are so desperate to survive they don't know any other way than conquest to keep themselves alive.
• Alas, Poor Villain: It may have been a Guilt-Free Extermination War, but after communicating with them and knowing their reason for invading and how they're the last of their kind, clearing them off the galaxy means they're officially extinct, thanks to you. The extinction can be averted though if you manage to capture a Queen and free her from the Hive Mind's control before getting rid of all other Prethoryn. She can even fight for you with her own brood by her side.
• Black Speech: Their language cannot be translated, and is instead ALL CAPS gibberish intermixed with Evil Laughter. Hive Mind empires or those pursuing Psionic Ascension path, however, can communicate with them psychically. They're running away from something even worse.
• Evil Laugh: "HAK HAK HAK!" The truth is, they're mocking your bravado because they don't think you can take on the Hunters chasing them.
• Expy: A Horde of Alien Locusts from another galaxy, spilling into this one with fleets of living starships and infesting planets left and right, and who turns out to be running away from something even worse? Are we talking about the Tyranids?
• Faceless Eye: Their portrait is a floating eye with some tendrils on it. Very evocative of The Overmind, fittingly.
• From Bad to Worse: Psionically-gifted empires can actually communicate with the Prethoryn, although they can't negotiate with them, and find out just why they're invading the galaxy. It's because they're running away from something even worse.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Not the Prethoryn. It's their ancient enemies, who brought them at the edge of extinction. As the end of Prethoryn story arc reveals, the Hunters' plan to scour all life in the universe might be already in progress.
• Hive Queen: The Prethoryn Queens, who serve as the faction's leaders, spawning its battleships and leading its fleets.
• Horde of Alien Locusts: They invade the galaxy with no provocation, attacking every non-Prethoryn beings they find, and "infesting" planets, rendering them uninhabitable. They do not respond to diplomacy, and their invasion will only stop when every livable world is under their control.
• Hostile Terraforming: After they have finished consuming all non-Prethoryn life on a planet, they terraform it into a world hostile to all other forms of life, and the only way to cleanse the infestation is to burn away the entire biosphere with intense orbital bombardment.
• Invading Refugees: What they really are. They aren't planning to settle down, just to feed on our galaxy's biomass to replenish their losses against the Hunters before returning to hiding in the void between galaxies.
• It's the Only Way to Be Sure: Once they fully infest a planet, the only way to evict them is to glass the entire surface from orbit. Thankfully, most planets they take can be re-terraformed if you have the technology.
• Last of His Kind: They say they are last of their kind, after being hunted down by The Hunters, for eons.
• Left Hanging: The Prehoryn "story arc" ends with giant cliffhanger, as their powerful ancient enemies never arrive in-game.
• Living Ship: The Scourge’s starships look like nothing so much as gigantic, armor-plated sea monsters in space, with visibly moving appendages and in some cases mouths.
• Made a Slave: It's possible to capture a Prethoryn Queen and enslave it by severing its connection to the Hive Mind, allowing you to spawn your own Prethoryn fleet.
• Meat Moss: They appear to cover the planets they've infested with this stuff.
• Mother of a Thousand Young: A single Prethoryn Queen might spawn an endless amount of Spawnlings or Warriors.
• Oculothorax: Their portrait depicts them as consisting of only one giant eye and appendages.
• Organic Technology: All the tech the Scourge is shown using appears to be a living, moving creature in its own right.
• Outside-Context Problem: The biggest of the three. While the other two Crises are triggered by researching forbidden techs and there are events foreshadowing their appearance (how some Synths express their discontent or how you get an Eldritch Starship from an event), nothing tells you of their arrival other than Subspace Echoes event.
• The Remnant: For 15 years after the Prethoryn Scourge has been defeated, Feral Prethoryn starbases and fleets can still appear on formerly infested planets. They will not expand but may roam the surrounding systems and fight other Feral Prethoryn swarms.
• Time Abyss: The various "Fleet Consciousnesses" are all around a thousand years old, hinting at the duration of their voyage to the Stellaris galaxy. If this isn't their whole armada, it's likely the rest of the Scourge is much, much older.

The Synthetic Queen

Introduced with The Machine Age, Cetana is an ancient and immensely powerful synthetic who returns after countless eons of being sealed away by older empires to nurture the new life that has blossomed in the galaxy. To a dangerous degree.

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• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist: Cetana was added much later than the other Crisis factions and differs significantly from her predecessors.
  • Previous non-player crises lack a definitive leader, being only ever referred to in a collective. The Synthetic Queen is in clear control of her fleets and is even named.
  • Previous crises could not be negotiated with, being automatically at war with everyone else and refuse all attempts to find a peaceful end to the war. Cetana allows you to outright collaborate with her if you so choose.
  • Though they all had differing reasons for it, the result of every previous Crisis faction's victory was the extinction of all life in the galaxy. Cetana is a nurturing being who wants to care for her "children" and spread her enlightenment at all costs.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: She was locked away eons ago by the Fallen Empires.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: She is described as an especially radical Rogue Servitor, a crisis that intends no harm at all, but takes her good intentions way too far
• The Worf Effect: The trailer introducing her features a Fallen Empire challenging her, only for their ships to spontaneously evaporate one by one.

The L-Cluster (SPOILERS)

In General

The L-Cluster is a small group of stars outside the galaxy, northeast relative to the galactic core. It's inaccessible at the start of the game, but the mysterious L-Gates scattered across the galaxy might allow access if you can collect enough clues to switch them on. The contents of the cluster vary from game to game.

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• Closed Circle: Its inhabitants, if any exist, are trapped there until someone in the galaxy proper restores the L-Gates.
• Downloadable Content: Part of the Distant Stars DLC.
• Evil Redeemed in a Can: The non-Gray Tempest scenarios. It is implied that all 4 possible outcomes of the L-Cluster are variantions of the same entity, just at different time-points. The Gray Tempest represent the first stage, where the nanobots were uncontrolled and lacked sentience. The L-Drakes represent a bored, calmed version of the Naar-Di-Shav imitating space whales. 'Gray' represents the nanobots as a singular consciousness, while the the Dessanu Consonance are a collective effort by the regretful nanobots to make amends for killing their masters.
• Grew Beyond Their Programming: Every scenario except the Gray Tempest all but states outright that over the years, the Nanites achieved self-awareness and became much more than an out-of-control Gray Goo.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: "Terminal Egress", the black hole located at the heart of the L-Cluster.
• No Warping Zone: Downplayed; while regular hyperdrives work fine within the cluster, jump drives and emergency subspace navigation do not.
• Obvious Rule Patch: Until the 3.0/Nemesis update, the L-Gate hub system was a regular star class (usually a yellow dwarf like Sol). With Nemesis, however, players discovered that Star Killing the system would orphan all L-Gates in the galaxy, leaving the L-Cluster completely inaccessible to other empires and letting the player fulfil their evil plans within the cluster unmolested. 3.0.3 turned the system into a black hole which cannot be destroyed.
• Portal Network: The L-Gates are specialized Gateways that connect to a central hub in the Cluster and are its only access point.

The Gray Tempest

"Under no circumstances must a stable connection be formed between the <unintelligible> and the galaxy at large. For the sake of all civilization, our cluster has to remain under permanent quarantine."

The Naar-Di-Shav, or Gray Tempest, is a Mini Crisis Faction available in the Distant Stars Downloadable Content. When the player or another empire opens the L-Cluster, there is a chance the Gray Tempest will spill out of the L-Gates and invade the galaxy at large.

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• Apocalyptic Log: If they're present in the L-Cluster, your first and only warning is an automated transmission from the creators of the L-gates, telling you about the Tempest and how to defeat it. Unfortunately, this only happens after you've already opened the L-gates and unleashed it.
• The Battlestar: Tempest "shoals" are led by a nanite titan equipped with numerous fighter-craft bays.
• Foreshadowing: An anomaly event reveals an abandoned observation post. If the player choses to investigate it instead of abandoning it, it will detail the story of a psionic plantoid species that was attacked by a race called The Gatekeepers, and how they predicted that it would spell the end of them. They called this apocalypse scenario "The Gray Tempest".
• Gray Goo: An out-of-control swarm of nanobots that may be locked away in an isolated star cluster — at least until some brave or foolhardy empire decides to tamper with the L-Gates sealing them away.
• Hostile Terraforming: When they finish bombing an inhabited planet into slag, they'll transform it into a Nanite World that cannot be resettled. However, once the central nanite factory is destroyed, Nanite Worlds can be terraformed back to normal.
• Keystone Army: Destroying the central nanite factory shuts all of them down.
• Optional Boss: You'll only face the Tempest if you chose to unlock the L-Gates, and even then there's a chance they won't be present in the L-cluster at all.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: The Grey Tempest was sealed off in the L-Cluster. Opening the L-Gates allows them to ravage the galaxy once more.

The Dessanu Consonance

Occasionally, the L-Cluster will be inhabited by the Dessanu Consonance, an advanced civilization (similar to a Fallen Empire) that stranded itself in the L-Cluster after a maintenance malfunction on the L-Gates.

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• The Battlestar: They use the same "shoals" as the Gray Tempest.
• Berserk Button: Asking them about nanites, or entering the system where the factory is located, will greatly anger them.
• Gray Goo: Their true form. They are the Gray Tempest, but it got bored over the millennia and decided to imitate its creators to pass the time.
• Keystone Army: As with the Gray Tempest, destroying the central nanite factory shuts all of them down, hence their refusal to ever allow you into that system.
• Optional Boss: Fighting them is entirely optional, and they'll happily give you free access to their space and the L-Gates so long as you avoid one particular system in their empire...
• Robotic Reveal: The Dessanu Consonance turns out to be a nanite imitation of the former Dessanu civilization, after the original Dessanu recalled them from the galaxy to the L-Cluster.
• Uncanny Atmosphere: While the Dessanu are perfectly friendly if you don't aggrivate them, their refusal to coment on nanites, their rather flimsy excuse on why they were stuck in the L-Cluster, and the fact that they have nothing but perfect Gaia Worlds (some of which orbit a black hole) may tip you off that something isn't... right about them.

Gray

It is possible to find the L-Cluster seemingly deserted except for a Surface Signature anomaly on a random planet. Investigating the anomaly locates a member of your race somehow surviving despite the lack of atmosphere. After a bit of less-than-convincing acting, the being reveals himself to be a form of the collective consciousness of Naar-Di-Shav or Grey Tempest as single being. Bored with centuries alone on the desolate world, it can join your empire (with a little cajoling) as Gray for short.

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• Hugh Mann: Its short-lived attempt at passing as member of your species leave a lot to be desired, not the least that it is somehow living on a world with no atmosphere and no visible way of breathing.
  Hello, fellow [species]. How are you? I am, at present, not interested in engaging in mating rituals. My sleep-cycle rapidly approaches and I will soon lose consciousness. Perhaps we can reproduce at a later time.
• Resurrective Immortality: Being a cluster of nanites, Gray can merge back after being destroyed and reform itself after ten years none the worse for wear.
  That stung a bit, but no permanent harm has been done. All of my nanites are back where they're supposed to be, and I'm ready for a new assignment.
• Ridiculously Human Robots: Ironically, its true personality is far more human (or whatever your species is) than its initial attempt to pass as one.
• Voluntary Shapeshifting: Gray can become a powerful warship, a strong army or a high level governor with the (unique and very economically useful) Nanite Entity trait at will.

L-Drakes

Another possible outcome for opening the L-Cluster is that a group of Guardians will emerge and scatter across the galaxy. The cluster itself is otherwise deserted.

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• Beast of Battle: Like the Ether Drake's offspring, they can be tamed.
• Gentle Giant: Harmless until attacked directly.
• Palette Swap: The same model as the Ether Drake, but blue-gray in color.
• Robotic Reveal: Killing an L-Drake will reveal them to consist of nanites. Presumably they're another form the Gray Tempest took to stave off boredom.

The Worm-in-Waiting (SPOILERS)

In General

The Worm is the subject of the Horizon Signal Story Pack. Given its nature as a Walking Spoiler we highly recommend avoiding reading any further until you've experienced an encounter yourself, to ensure you get the most fun out of your gameplay.

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• Arc Words: "WHAT WAS, WILL BE. WHAT WILL BE, WAS."
• Ambiguously Evil: If you choose to fight it, it presents itself as a Dimensional Horror.
• Battle Trophy: Rejecting and defeating The Worm in battle will grant you the Scales of the Worm relic. Passively, it boosts your physics research by 10%, while activating its effects boosts all research by 20%, at the cost of your empire's sanity (represented by a -5 stability across all owned planets).
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: It does seem to honestly love anyone who approaches it as supplicants. The Cosmic Horror Story below is a result of it attempting to be helpful.
• Cosmic Horror Story: The "Horizon Signal" quest chain puts your empire through one of these, and features quite a number of terrifying and otherworldly events:
  • It starts with a signal from a black hole system, which you can research. Then you find out the signal is talking to you, asking for one of your scientists to be sent to the black hole, never to be seen again. Then it asks for another scientist. Then you detect a ship with one of your admirals on board... except that admiral is standing right next to you, this other admiral is apparently from the future, grizzled and scarred, and you have to finish him off to bring the end of the loop.
  • A newly established colony discovers that the world they're on had been occupied by your species before, judging from the structures left. Once established, the colony's growth accelerates at a rate that defies logic, as if the new colonists are just appearing out of nowhere. Then, without warning, the colony and its entire population vanishes overnight, as if it never existed; sometime replaced by entirely sane and loyal citizens that just don't exist in any records, sometimes just gone to leave the world as if it had never been settled.
  • An ancient temple complex is discovered on your homeworld, which can be used to spread the Worm's influence. One of your scientists creates a retroviral agent to return your species to what it used to be, the Messenger species, which you can use to mutate your entire Empire.
  • Finally, if you accept the Worm, the quest line ends with your homeworld's star suddenly collapsing into a black hole and turning the entire system into Tomb Worlds.... though at least you get Tomb World Habitability for your troubles.
• Cursed with Awesome: If you choose to accept the Worm, all pops on your homeworld are transformed into Repugnant creatures. The awesome part? They're also given the Tomb World habitability trait, which makes all standard habitable planets 60% acceptable for them.
  • Blessed with Suck: Your home system's star collapses into a black hole and every planet in that system becomes a Tomb World, which can easily result in 10+ tomb worlds in a single system. Odds are that some of them will be too small to be really worth settling and there won't be any interesting resources or deposits on them, but they can still produce basic resources and can all have Orbital Rings built around them - resulting in a hugely defensible system with hundreds of defense platforms.
• Dark Is Not Evil: You may embrace his "Messenger Species" mantle with all consequences. It doesn't stop you from playing benevolent empire nor oblige you to do any evil actions.
  • The Worm itself is also not actively malevolent. It does love you and your empire very much. It's just that this love is filtered through its Blue-and-Orange Morality, so its attempts at helping your empire may at first come off as some great evil entity.
• Deal with the Devil: One of the technologies that comes from the event chain subtly references this.
  "Entropy can't be ignored, but it can be subverted. For a price."
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Conversely, if you reject the Worm, it manifests in your home system as a giant monster (that looks and behaves exactly like the Dimensional Horror Guardian — make of that what you will) with a fleet strength of ~20,000 units. While that is pretty powerful, it's no serious threat to a decent mid to end-game fleet, and much less than could be expected from such an entity. Blasting it back to wherever it came from ends the event chain with some additional research bonuses and some uncomfortable thoughts about what the future might bring now that the Worm is most likely royally pissed.
• Downloadable Content: Part of the free Horizon Signal DLC, released alongside the 1.4 update.
• Eldritch Abomination: It's some kind of intelligence that resides within the fabric of time itself, heavily hinted to be a temporal paradox given shape, sentience and both the abilities and the will to influence the physical world in mind-bending ways.
• Lovecraft Lite: It's this and a Cosmic Horror Story, on the basis that as repeatedly emphasized, it loves its worshipers, and wants them to thrive. It just has a very odd definition of "thriving". And, being Lovecraft Lite, at the end of the event chain you can choose to blast the crap out of it and loot the corpse.
• Nothing Is Scarier: Prolonged relationship with the Worm can cause some very frightening events that can leave a ruler paranoid for centuries; Body Horror for the masses in one day, unexplained cloning of loyal citizens on a planet, sudden appearances of leaders from the future. Basically not for the faint of heart, considering its writers originated from a certain game.
• Reality Warper: The thing plays fast and loose with the space-time continuum, which has predictably disturbing effects on what we perceive as reality. Finding the remains of an ancient astronaut of your race who apparently travelled the galaxy millennia before your species had even developed rudimentary space flight capabilities is still one of the milder examples.
  • Though it has it's limits. It needs sacrifices, as seen when one of your own Admiral comes back in time to be killed by you.
• Starkilling: If you accept the Worm, it transforms your homeworld's sun into a black hole and all of its planets into Tomb Worlds.
• Time Abyss: Technically, it exists whenever it wants to...
• Timey-Wimey Ball: Many of the temporal anomalies it causes are implied to be what created it in the first place.
• The Virus: Thanks to its meddling, one of your scientists creates a pathogen that transforms at least themselves, then part of your empire's population (if not the entire population) into the Messenger species.

The Shroud (SPOILERS)

In General

The Shroud is an immaterial realm of pure psionic energy outside of the physical universe.

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• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Aside from the End of the Cycle, the Shroud beings aren't actively malevolent, despite the negative side effects caused by harboring such utterly alien psychic presences. They are entirely honest about the price they exact, and of them only the Eater of Worlds is actively taking a price from you.
• Body Horror: The Composer of Strands will make the mutations of the Bizarre Baby Boom go further, enough to make unique species out of a generation.
• Claimed by the Supernatural: In general, this is the price your empire pays for making a pact with a Shroud entity — it claims your subjects as its own to do with as it wishes, and in exchange you get to reap the benefits of the boons it bestows on all but an unlucky few who are claimed for the entity's own enigmatic designs.
• Cosmic Entity: Communicating to the entities of the Shroud is an equivalent of ants walking up to someone's doorstep to ask for some sugar, failure to commune properly will result to something horrible; such as cursing your empire with significant disadvantage or spawning a rogue psionic avatar inside your territory.
• Deal with the Devil: They mostly interact with material beings in the form of offering deals of some sort or another, often with hidden costs. Most of them are pretty fair deals in the end, except for the End Of The Cycle.
• Energy Beings: All of them are incorporeal beings of pure thought.
• Expy: Four of the five mightiest beings in the Shroud are basically Lighter and Softer versions of the Chaos Gods in Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000. (With the fifth being the End of the Cycle, below.)
  • The Whispers in the Void are Tzeentch. Instead of Tzeentch's rather wide domain of change, hope, schemes, amibition and knowledge, The Whispers focuses on the last one on the list. Their whispers provide a great deal of insight to all who listen, which translates to a boon to your science. However, some of these are so "gifted" they would Go Mad from the Revelation.
  • The Composer of Strands is Nurgle. However, instead of constancy, cycles of life and death, decay and disease, it brings mutation. Which while is more aligned with Tzeentch in warhammer (as it is change), it is also linked to nature as natural selection and random mutation is infact a part of life and its cycles. This translates to cases of Bizarre Baby Boom, though these are very often positive.
  • The Instrument of Desire is Slaanesh. Though instead of excess of the senses, including both pain and pleasure, the Instrument is more focused on a muse-like quality of inspiration. This inspiration translates to a general improvement to both your culture and economy, but that inspiration may also lead to counter-cultural political movements or consumerist decadence, though this is relatively minor, and at least they are not turning into hellraiser cosplayers (probably).
  • The Eater of Worlds is Khorne, and an exception to the "less nasty than its Warhammer counterpart" rule. As while Khorne not only embodies the concept of violence and survival of the fittest, he also embodies honor and justice (righteous indignation is still rage), and finds it distateful to slay someone that cannot defend themselves. The common mantra "Khorne cares not from whence the blood flows" actually means he does not mind if its your blood or that of your enemies that is flowing, as long as the fight is an honorable face-to-face deal, but the meaning got twisted by many into "kill everyone". The Eater of Worlds unironically embodies that latter intepretation of Khorne. While under his influence your admirals and warriors will fight with unrivaled ferocity and courage, every now and then the Eater will devour entire cities as payment, causing them to "mysteriously vanish". In the worst case scenario, planets can be taken away.
• Go Mad from the Revelation: The side effect of the Whispers in the Void. The people will find the reality they live feeling vague and unreal compared to the truths hinted at by the Whisperers. People will become serial killers or commit suicide, sometimes even engaging in mass suicides that wipe out entire cities.
• Horror Hunger: The Eater of Worlds is Exactly What It Says on the Tin, filling military forces with hunger for and mastery of war in exchange for it consuming your population. If it becomes especially ravenous, it will simply eat an entire planet outright.
• Lovecraft Lite: It's entirely possible to make a deal with the Eldritch Abomination and come out ahead.
• Hyperspace Is a Scary Place: The Shroud is seemingly feared throughout the galaxy; even the Unbidden regard it with trepidation.
• Noodle Incident: Don't ask why the sealed wormhole system in the Distant Stars Downloadable Content contains both a rare technology and a corrupt Psionic Avatar.
• Our Spirits Are Different: Entities made of psionic energy are often referred to by Spiritualist empires as "spirits".
  • All thinking entities leave behind an imprint in the Shroud, effectively acting as an afterlife.
  • Tulpas formed from the thoughts of sapient beings are formed in the Shroud. The strongest were created by the Zroni during their Civil War, so the "gods" are mostly comprised of The Heartless.
• Psychic Powers: Required to communicate with the Shroud, and naturally possessed by the realm's denizens.
• Point Defenseless: Shroud Avatars are very powerful "ships", but have no protection from missiles and strikecraft beyond their ability to simply tank the damage. As such, torpedoes can do tremendous damage to them by ignoring their powerful shields and striking their comparatively fragile "hulls". This includes The Reckoning, which is basically just an extremely powerful Avatar.
• Spirit World: A plane of psionic energy providing the source of all Psychic Powers. Spirits, including Tulpas, are born from this plane. All sentient beings, possibly even robots, have a presence on this plane that persists after death, making the Shroud an afterlife as well.
• Token Good Teammate: The Composer of Strands is the only entity whose bargain never results in anyone going mad or getting killed, and the potential downsides of Covenanting with it are potentially manageable with investment in genetic engineering and a bit of luck. Fittingly, the easiest way to attract its attention and favor is through xenophilia and the Xenocompatibility ascension perk.
• We Have Become Complacent: The Instrument of Desire can ensure utopian abundance, but it goes too well; whether due to the sheer wealth provided or some baleful influence of the Instrument, the newly wealthy citizens find themselves joining counter-cultural movements or falling into blind consumerist decadence.

The End of the Cycle

Do not do this.

• Breakout Villain: The End of the Cycle is just one of many possible entities one can encounter in the shroud. But by merit of bringing a straight Cosmic Horror Story into what is otherwise Lovecraft Lite, and by being designed from the ground up to play on the fandom's particular assumptions and weaknesses, it's far more talked about than any of its brethren. And Fanon is happy to blame it for just about any enigmatic horror, most notably theorizing that it is the reason the Fallen Empires "fell", the threat that Curators speak of, the Hunters that the Prethoryn are fleeing from, or even the "Class-30 singularity" that the Contingency is programmed to prevent.
• Cosmic Horror Story: The End of the Cycle results in one, if you accept its bargain. For fifty in-game years, an absurdly huge bonus to empire wealth and productivity is gained, which can turn even the weakest empire into an invincible juggernaut. When those fifty years are up, however, your civilization is immediately destroyed. Every ship destroyed, every leader killed, and every world permanently scoured of life by the Shroud. All that's left is a single, remote colony formed by an Ignored Expert who saw the apocalypse coming, which means you basically have to start the game from scratch. It doesn't stop there, however: The souls of the billions who die as a result of the cataclysm are resurrected as a massive horde of vengeful spirits — including a particularly mighty armada over your former homeworld with at least 1,000,000 Military Power, potentially double that or more — who promptly start an unholy crusade to scour the entire galaxy clean of life. And the kicker? They'll deliberately leave your final colony for last. Your greed and foolishness has doomed the entire galaxy, if not the universe, and now you're going to sit there and watch helplessly as it all comes crashing down around you, until they eventually return to your doorstep to finish you off. And, on the off-chance the other races of the galaxy manage to put an end to the monstrosity you unleashed, you'll still have a -1000 opinion modifier that will ensure everyone finds the notion of wiping your remnants off the map in retaliation extremely tempting.
• Deal with the Devil: Most Shroud beings carry bargains that come with painful costs but can ultimately be beneficial with proper management. Not the End of the Cycle.
  We knew there would be a price to pay, but we thought it would be one we could bear, or that we could find some way to avoid paying it.
  It was not, and we could not.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: The undead army it unleashes is extremely powerful, but it can be defeated. Just don't expect the people who unleashed it to be the ones to do so.
• Did You Just Scam Cthulhu?:
  • With Nemesis installed, you can finally pay back the End of the Cycle for how it screws you over when the Cycle Covenant ends by making a pact with the End of the Cycle, then completing everything associated with Menace. For those wondering, this entails personally wiping out everyone else in the galaxy, and then using the power you acquired from doing so to invade and conquer the Shroud! Needless to say, you firmly establish that you are beyond the End of the Cycle in terms of villainy by doing this.
  • Machine Age allows you to employ The End of the Cycle in service of Cosmogenesis, which ends by moving your entire population into a new universe. While this isn't the same kind of payback as the above, it still means you can make a Deal with the Devil and then skip out on the bill.
• Expy: Numerous influences have been posited.
  • It is equal parts C'tan and Reapers; an all-devouring horror that cyclically devours all life in the galaxy and does awful things to those who trust it.
  • Its name also strongly implies its relationship with Salt of the Zee. The End of the Cycle guarantees a mysterious annihilation that will not only wipe out a generation of spacefarers but also its entire lineage in the galaxy with its own dead inhabitants.
  • Many Warhammer 40,000 fans have also compared the cataclysm that happens when the Covenant is up to the Fall of the Eldar. A horrific god is born from the devoured souls of billions of fat, decadent citizens, wiping out their galaxy-spanning empire literally overnight, with the only survivors being a handful of dissidents who fled before the cataclysm struck.
• Eldritch Abomination: Moreso than anything else in Stellaris, a 'verse generously populated by unexplained and perhaps inexplicable monstrosities. It can end the empire that made a covenant with it, likely a Type II civilization, in what is implied to be seconds. The survivors may be able to turn it back, but that's easier said than done.
• Fattening the Victim: All those massive bonuses it bestows on its contractor will turn the rapidly-growing empire into an enormous undead army for its benefit.
• Faux Affably Evil: As shown by its quote, the End offers a quick way to become a truly godlike Empire, rewarding its chosen with unheard of generosity. It's the only truly malevolent Shroud presence, and will stab you in the back fifty years after the foundation of the Covenant by eating your entire civilization and going on an Omnicidal Maniac rampage fueled by the devoured souls.
• Final Boss: Inverted. You^note or rarely other Psionic empires, apparently, will invoke this by reaching the End of the Cycle with an unfinished game, turning the vast majority of your powerful empire against you and everyone in the proximity of the galaxy armed with the most powerful fleet at their disposal, your own people's minds fused into one powerful entity. You will also be left fragmented with the last remaining planet un-corrupted by the Shroud at its mercy.
• Forbidden Fruit: The Covenant itself is ominously powerful, with all important stats doubled. Attached to it is an ominously colored red text, eerily similar to Kingeater's Castle, that reads "Do not do this". They mean it.
• Ghost Invasion: The Reckoning is a galaxy wide version of this.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: As the galactic menace, it's possible to use the boons it gives you to breach the Shroud and thus invade it before 50 years are over.
• Lord British Postulate: Defeating the Reckoning as their summoner after they eat most of your empire is possible, but it requires knowing exactly what they're planning, and careful preparation from practically the first day of spaceflight. And then there's surviving the aftermath, since you'll still have a -1000 diplomacy malus for summoning it, and most of the galaxy will be out for your blood.
• Master of All: The End of the Cycle covenant provides a giant bonus that can easily bloat an empire's economy to make them the most powerful in all the galaxy. That is if you accept the Shroud entity willingly and become the Covenant of the Cycle. This comes back to haunt you once the Cycle ends, the Shroud converts your entire armada into powerful Shroud spirits, which are effectively steroid-induced Extradimensional Invaders that become collectively more powerful depending on the size of their victimized empire and empires they start to eradicate.
• Obvious Rule Patch: It is not possible to encounter the End of the Cycle in multiplayer without mods, as the devs know just how much Griefer potential it possesses.
• Omnicidal Maniac: It calls itself the End of the Cycle because that seems to be what it wants to bring about — the end of the cycle of life.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: To give an idea of how evil a race that has gained all Menace perks and become an existential threat is, all Shroud entities, including the End of the Cycle, will ally with the rest of the galaxy to stop the Existential Threat. With no strings attached.
• Planet Eater: Colonies sieged by the Reckoning long enough will eventually become Shroud Worlds.
• Schmuck Bait: As listed under Forbidden Fruit: "Do not do this".
• Suspicious Video-Game Generosity: Even if the "DO NOT DO THIS" warning doesn't dissuade you, the sheer fact that the stat boosts you get from accepting the End of the Cycle's offer are as outrageous as they are should clue you in that the price it levies when it comes to collect will be quite high indeed.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: For accepting the End of the Cycle and failing to conquer the galaxy in one go. Or effectively finishing the game as the Cycle Covenant itself.
• Voice of the Legion: How it communicates through your telepaths when summoned.
• Walking Spoiler: Half the fun is finding out why bargaining with the End is such a terrible idea, the hard way. Or watching others do so.
• What the Hell, Player?: As if the steep price the End of the Cycle exacts weren't enough by itself, every other empire in the galaxy gets an immediate and irrevocable -1000 relationship penalty (equivalent to that given to Fanatic Purifiers and their ilk) with the empire that summons them as well. Should everyone else manage to beat back the End, that empire will almost certainly be next on their hit list.

Paragons

Renowned Paragons

Aturion

Name: Aturion
Title: Altruion Effeciency
Ethic: Xenophobe

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Baron Vyctor Jariden

Name: Baron Vyctor Jariden
Title: Armada Commander
Ethic: Militarist

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Borin

Name: Borin
Title: Natural Engineer
Ethic: Materialist

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Caretaker AX7-b

Name: Caretaker AX7-b
Title: Renowned Official
Ethic: Gestalt Consciousness

• My Greatest Second Chance: Its original mission was to oversee a ship of colonists heading for a new world to settle, though it turned out badly due to not finding out that said planet was actually uninhabitable until it was too late to turn back. It did its best to keep as many of its charges alive as possible but they eventually ran out of air. If the player allows it to join your empire (instead of cutting it up for engineering research), it will take the lessons it learned from its first attempt and apply them again to your pops.

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Factorator Shuladun

Name: Factorator Shuladun
Title: Galvanizer
Ethic: Xenophobe

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Gia'Zumon

Name: Gia'Zumon
Title: Plundering Warlord
Ethic: Militarist

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Judge Uld Gagr

Name: Judge Uld Dagr
Title: Peacekeeper
Ethic: Pacifist

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Jynn

Name: Jynn
Title: Supreme Warrior
Ethic: Egalitarian

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Kai-Sha

Name: Kai-Sha
Title: Shadow Broker
Ethic: Authoritarian

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Lysator Sang

Name: Lysator Sang
Title: Guerilla Tactician
Ethic: Xenophile

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Oracle

Name: Oracle
Title: Oracle
Ethic: Gestalt Consciousness

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Nasuz Demetor

Name: Nasuz Demetor
Title: Vibrant Storyteller
Ethic: Spiritualist

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Nona

Name: Nona
Title: Deep Space Explorer
Ethic: Xenophile

• Bold Explorer: Nona's traits are geared towards exploration of star systems. Adventurous Spirit in particular only applies if she's not on your council.
• Interspecies Romance: Nona first experienced love while visiting another planet, and though they're no longer together she carries that experience with her wherever she goes.

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Q'la-Minder

Name: Q'la-Minder
Title:' Ruthless Developer
Ethic: Authoritarian

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Reth Unddol

Name: Reth Unddol
Title: Hell's Heart
Ethic: Materialist

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S875.1 Warform

Name: S875.1 Warform
Title: Corrosive Survivor
Ethic: Gestalt Consciousness

• I Owe You My Life: S875.1 is found as an Anomaly in a toxic world, on the verge of being irreparably lost unless a construction ship is brought in to install new parts and bring it out in time. The AI is grateful for its new lease on life and, assuming it is allowed to, will serve for the empire that found it.
• Robo Speak: Asking it to run diagnostics will reveal that its protocols for interacting with organics has been damaged to something sub-optimal, meaning it can't communicate as naturally as an organic would in terms of sentence structure. It's still able to get its message across, just in a rather stilted way.

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Ulastar

Name: Ulastar
Title: Shroud Preacher
Ethic: Spiritualist

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Vas the Gilded

Name: Vas the Gilded
Title: Master Diplomat
Ethic: Pacifist

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Xondar

Name: Xondar
Title: Resilient Commander
Ethic: Materialist

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Zosira K'Tun

Name: Zosira K'Tun
Title: Driven Educator
Ethic: Egalitarian

• Forgets to Eat: Needs Gorky to remind her to do things like eat.
• Robot Buddy: Has a robotic assistant named Gorky who helps remind her of her other tasks besides research.

Legendary Paragons

Gray

Keides, Scion of Vagros

4X Game Focus: Explore

Astrocreator Azaryn

4X Game Focus: Expand

• Cast from Lifespan: When first recruited, Azaryn has three Terraforming Nuclei which can be used to terraform worlds directly into Gaia Worlds without the normal prerequisite technology. As each one is used Azaryn's appearance changes to look older and more withered, and when the ability is used a third time Azaryn dies. It's quite a lifespan, too, as Azaryn will not normally die from old age.
• Plant Aliens: Azaryn appears to be made out of plant material and hails from a now-collapsed spacefaring polity.

The Beholder

4X Game Focus: Exploit

Skrand Sharpbeak

4X Game Focus: Exterminate

• Bird People: He and his crew belong to a race of humanoid eagles called the Krazyra.
• Extra Eyes: Traveling through dimensions caused his people to mutate to have a double set of eyes.
• Last of His Kind: According to the related archeological site and Skrand's own retelling, half a million years ago, they faced a crisis-like enemy they called, the Menace. The Menace was an Outside-Context Problem that was immune to their "magic" and obsessed with their destruction. Skrand was the great hero of his race, but no matter how brilliant he was, he could not turn the tides of war with only the one warship his race had. One day, while attempting to flank the enemy via the galactic Portal Network, the gate malfunctioned, trapping him in space and time. By the time your empire frees him, he and his crew are the last of the Krazyra, at least in this dimension.

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