What do the Necromorphs from Dead Space, The Flood from Halo, and the Brain Slugs from Futurama all have in common? They are assimilators.
Assimilation is the change of one species into another, often by force. Becoming an empire of assimilators is a possibility in Stellaris, too, provided your empire has the stomach for it.
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This mechanic is very similar to purging, but instead of destroying pops, they will change to match your primary species. This guide will teach you everything there is to know about how to assimilate in Stellaris.
To assimilate pops in Stellaris, you first need to have the driven assimilator robot civic or unlock an assimilation tradition tree perk. Once one of those is true, you set the citizenship rights of the pop you wish to assimilate to assimilation.
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How to Assimilate in Stellaris
While there is no doubt that forcing another species to become something else is a very unethical thing to do, Paradox is not shy of allowing players to commit evil acts.
These acts typically occur off-screen, but the implication is very much there.
One of these acts is assimilation. Which is a unique citizenship rights stance in the game.
While other citizenship rights dictate a pop’s place in society or whether they get killed, assimilation rights change the target pop into your primary species.
Every year, a set amount of pops will assimilate into your primary species. This will be either three, six or twelve pops. Extra pops are great, so why would you not always do this?
Assimilation is a very niche gameplay mechanic and will only be available if very specific parameters are true. These are gone over in full later in the guide.
To change a species’ rights and begin assimilation, you first need to open up the species menu. The shortcut for this is F6 by default.
This menu will display all the different species that live in your empire right now. Navigate to the one you wish to assimilate and select them.
Their portrait will appear on the left. Below the portrait will be a green button that says “Set Rights”.
This will open the rights pop-up menu. If this is the first time you have seen this menu, you should spend some time and get to know it more.
There are loads of useful tools here, such as: forbidding military service and setting living standards, and this is where you set pops to get purged. What we care about when assimilating is the top section that says “Citizenship.”
Click that, and a drop menu will appear. The second option in that menu is assimilate. If you are able, select it, and your empire will get to work on bringing them into the fold. Then it is a waiting game.
A point to note is that robot pops can never be assimilated, and genocidal empires cannot assimilate.
If a pop has the cybernetic or psionic trait, the act of carrying out an assimilation on them removes it.
Which Empires Can Assimilate?
The short answer to this is that every empire can. With Stellaris being a grand strategy game, it is not as simple as that, though.
Assimilation becomes available in one of two ways. The first is using late-game traditions. The second is through one specific civic, available only to robots.
During empire creation, if you create a robot species, one of the civics you can select is “Driven Assimilator.” Your robot species is now obsessed with bringing all the pops it can into its network.
Yes, this is a rip-off of The Borg from Star Trek.
While I would not recommend it if you are new to the game. After getting a bit of experience, it is a nice change of pace from standard empires.
If you are not playing a robot empire or don’t want to play as a driven assimilator, your only choice is to unlock some late-game traditions.
Not normal traditions either. You will need a tradition from one of the ascension path tradition trees. This will involve unlocking an ascension path perk and then working through the tree that perk unlocks.
Being a driven assimilator only allows you to create cybernetic pops. With perks, the trait the host species gains will depend on the tree you selected.
A list of the gained traits and traditions required is as follows.
- Creating a psionic victim requires the great awakening tradition.
- To make cybernetic pops needs the Transubstantiation Synthesis tradition.
- The creation of mechanical pops requires the synthetic age tradition. Also, your main species cannot be a machine intelligence.
- Machine intelligence empires can assimilate more robots by adopting the Synthetic tradition tree.
- The Engineered Genesis tradition can remove or add the hive mind trait.
This is everything you need to know about how to assimilate in Stellaris.
If you have any questions or suggestions for this guide, please let us know in the comments section below. As always, have fun assimilating aliens in Stellaris.
