The latest Stellaris patch just launched, fixing a whole host of bugs, but one of the remaining ‘known issues’ seems to feature flesh-eating machines.
The patch, complementing the colossal 3.1 Lem Update, is designed to fix a couple of community-reported bugs and issues, such as Clone Armies accidentally creating ‘invalid species’ and crashing the game.
As spotted by PCGamesN, the patch notes include a section headed ‘known issues’, going on to name one such issue as “Machine Empires can spawn with the necrophage origin”. What this means for Stellaris gameplay is that the recently introduced Machine Empires can spawn with a trait that makes them eat flesh to reproduce.
Machine Empires usually self-replicate, but this bug seems to have introduced a random chance that they can spawn looking for living creatures to consume. As this is listed as a known issue, Stellaris players can expect it to be patched out eventually, but for now it is probably worth keeping an eye out for any strange robot behaviour.
The Stellaris team wrote in a blog post announcing the patch that “the Custodian team has spent the last week fixing issues raised by the community” and thanked the community for their bug reports. They also provided some context regarding the workload around fixing issues, revealing that on the day the Lem Update launched, the game had around 18,000 concurrent players.
“On launch day we peaked at ~18k concurrent players on Steam,” reads the post on the Stellaris Steam page, “supposing each of those players plays one hour, that’s 18,000 hours. Assuming a 40 hour work week, that’s 450 workweeks.
“This isn’t meant to make excuses, but just to put into context that our community does more playing in the hour after release than we could hope to accomplish in the time between the release of Nemesis and now.”
