Easter Eggs and Hidden Events

Uncover the secrets of Stellaris! This guide details how to find and interact with various Easter eggs and hidden events scattered throughout the galaxy, enriching your gameplay experience.

This guide details the various Easter eggs and hidden events that can be discovered within Stellaris. These often appear through specific events, anomalies, or discoveries, adding unique flavor and challenges to your empire's journey.

Specimen Collection: The core mechanic for many discoveries involves collecting specimens. These can be obtained from events or discoveries and are stored in an empire's collection. The collection requires the Galactic Archivism technology and a Grand Archive megastructure to display specimens, offering various benefits. Specimens have different rarities (Common, Rare, Epic, Exceptional), affecting their upkeep and sell value.

Grand Archive and Upkeep: The Grand Archive megastructure has an Energy upkeep that increases with Empire Size. Specimens can be sold for Energy, and the storage can be set to automatically sell specimens of a certain rarity. Each empire can store a limited number of specimens for exhibition and an additional amount of any category. If storage is full, new specimens are automatically sold.

Security and Theft: Specimens can be stolen if the starbase of the system containing the Grand Archive is occupied. The number of stolen specimens depends on the attacker's civics, with Barbaric Despoilers stealing more. The Grand Archive megastructure can also be destroyed in such an event.

Unlocking Galactic Archivism: Shortly after obtaining the first specimen, players can pay 1000 Energy to unlock the Galactic Archivism technology as a research option with 50% progress.

Specimen Categories: Specimens are categorized into Aesthetic Wonders, Galactic History, and Xeno Geology. Each category has exhibit slots, and the cost to unlock them increases with each slot used. Genocidal empires gain Unity after unlocking specific numbers of exhibit slots from each category.

Example Specimen: The Sembelami Alms Basket is an Epic rarity specimen. It provides +10% Trade from Jobs if the empire is Individualist and +6% Energy from Pop energy output. Its source is tied to the Sembelami Nomads, ascetic pirates who stole from corporations to fund refugee outposts.