I like my games to be challenging – and that’s doubly true for a 4X grand strategy game like Stellaris.
There’s no point spending your precious brainpower polishing the perfect economic system, designing the deadliest ships, and genetically enhancing your species if there aren’t obstacles in your path to galactic dominion.
Still, sometimes we just want to breeze through a campaign.
So here are some remarkable mods that’ll help you become the OP space god you always wanted to be.
First up, we’re looking at a classic when it comes to overpowered mods: a Cheat Menu.
There’s nothing quite as overpowering as being able to spawn any kind of vessel, give your empire significant buffs, and freely multiply the resources in your inventory.
You can even create new systems and reveal hyperlanes that weren’t there before for easier navigation. Never again will bad luck keep you from expanding your empire.
Whether you use it to give yourself infinite energy credits or spawn an army of Juggernauts and Star Eaters, you’ll definitely steamroll your opponents.
A surefire way to power up your species is through Godly Traits Redux, which introduces eleven completely unfair traits you might expect to find in precursor species.
Some of the most interesting traits in this mod are Hyper Fertile, which supercharges your Pop Growth Speed and Planetary Build Speed, and Godly Species, which gives your people a massive boost to every stat.
If that wasn’t enough, the mod also features some “cheat” traits meant to give you extra trait points. The most powerful among them gives you a ridiculous 32 extra points!
Roleplayer’s Paradise was designed to help players develop their perfect species for roleplaying without worrying too much about balance by adding a bunch of sincerely OP traits.
The idea is that if you want to roleplay a species whose main characteristic is producing Exotic Gases as a byproduct of digestion, you’d be able to with one of these traits.
The thing is, nothing is forcing you to stop there.
Want to make an empire with massive military bonuses and the ability to keep their slave population happy? Go ahead!
Just want a species that produces every resource just by existing? No prob!
A healthy and powerful empire depends on the wisdom of its government and the efficiency of its policies.
Overpowered Civics brings a wealth of new, somewhat unbalanced civics that’ll put your empire on the fast lane to success.
These include fun stuff like Galactic Annihilators, which massively increases your empire’s warmongering potential, and Biomatter Mastery, which brings abundant food to your lands.
Additionally, you can choose the God Mode civic at the start of the game, combining most bonuses included in the mod to make your empire nigh-invincible.
Sometimes it’s better when you need to work for it first.
Ancient Cache of Technologies won’t make you any more powerful at the beginning of the game. Still, it opens the doors to technological development by adding around 460 all-new technologies spread out across four advancement tiers.
Once your hard-working scientists start delving into the new tech, you’ll begin discovering buildings, vessels, armies, and even some new strategic resources that’ll give you an edge over your rival empires.
You also get three new origins that let you start at a more advanced stage of technological development, a bit like a Fallen Empire in the base game.
In a similar vein, Gigastructural Engineering won’t make you overpowered from the get-go, but it’ll put the tools you need to dominate the galaxy in your hands… or tentacles, or whatever.
The mod adds a staggering 45 new megastructures with a wide range of powerful effects. These include wormhole generators, colossal system-wide computers, and, my favorite, weaponized planets.
Who doesn’t want their own Starkiller Base?
If you want to reap the benefits from earlier in the game, you can choose one of several new origins based on ancient megastructures.
Few things feel quite as overpowered as a Fallen Empire. Their incredible knowledge and massive military power can make it suffocating to spawn near one of them.
But what if you could become one yourself?
Nobody is trying to become a “fallen” empire, but you can strive to develop your technology to the point where you can call yourself an “Ascended Empire” – what Fallen Empires used to be before they, umm, fell.
The Zenith of Fallen Empires expands Stellaris’ gameplay to let you steal the divine flame of knowledge from a Fallen Empire and take their place as the galactic hegemon. There are tons of events, new mechanics, and even a couple of new crises that’ll test your power.
Easily my favorite overpowered mod is Zero’s Infinity Stones, which lets you follow the steps of Thanos and wage a bloody war to get your hands on the most powerful items in the galaxy.
This mod introduces every one of the six Infinity Stones as powerful relics that’ll give your empire massive advantages over your rivals.
You’ll be able to manipulate time, terraform planets and control the minds of the representatives of other empires to get your resolutions approved by the Galactic Community, depending on which stone you have.
If you’re diligent, you might even gather all six plus the Infinity Gauntlet – giving you the ability to bring “balance” to the universe. I’ll let you find out what that means for yourself!
Nelson Chitty is a Venezuelan expat living in Argentina. He’s a writer and translator passionate about history and foreign cultures. His ideal weekend is spent between leisurely playing games of Civilization VI and looking for the next seinen anime to marathon.
