“By far the funniest bug” sci-fi strategy hit Stellaris has seen in a minute won’t be fixed immediately because the devs want to see what players do with it

The popular sci-fi strategy game Stellaris has a new bug that lets players capture and take control of enemy ships, and the game’s director has no plans of fixing it until all ships have been captured.

In a Reddit thread, user TCF518 shared a discovery made by the Chinese Stellaris community on forum site Tieba in which “you can now capture ships with the new Boarding Cables component unlocked by Treasure Hunters origin.” TCF518 clarified that this seemingly applies to “any ships” and listed all of the ships that have been taken over so far, as well as the ones yet to be confirmed.

Anyway, it seems like Stellaris players are having a lot of fun using a bug to do the thing they haven’t been able to do since launch, and game director Stephen Muray is equally amused.

“This is by far the funniest bug of the cycle,” he said in a Reddit reply. “Props to the Chinese Community to finding it.”

Muray also confirmed he’s “not gonna fix it until [version] 3.14.1592 so they can catch them all. I want to see someone catch an incoming asteroid.”

I can link to a whole bunch of comments replying to Muray, or I can just leave you with this popular meme to sum up the collective reaction:

(Image credit: Bethesda/YouTube Gaming)

But that would be lazy, so I’ll provide some specific responses.

“Love this lmao,” said one Redditor with 267 upvotes at the time of writing. “Based as fuck,” said another.

“The perfect attitude for a director,” said another. “Fun > everything else.”

Others have asked Muray to leave an option for modders to “unfix” the bug so that, even after it’s patched out, players have an option to still capture ships. 

“Let’s go even further. Make it so that when you capture something, you can reverse-engineer it and replicate the ship and all of its modules, including those that aren’t normally researchable,” suggested one player. “That’s something I’ve always wanted this game to have.”

As Stellaris is typically patched a few times each month, it’s unclear exactly how long this bug will be in the game, and it’s even less clear whether Muray and co. will acquiesce to its community’s requests that the hotfix allows for mods to unfix it, so I’d suggest going out and capturing as many ships as you possibly can before it’s too late.

Otherwise, here are the best strategy games to play right now.