The Efficient Guide to Stellaris Achievements [Vanilla & Utopia, 2.1]

So after getting all the achievements I could a few days ago, I decided to write up this guide as per how to get them efficiently – Stellaris achievements are fairly easy to get, though they usually require specific runs to do so. Cheesing via the game options is usually not necessary, but it is possible to get many at a time. I’ll also try not to spoil much of anything. (TL;DR at bottom)

The basics: Achievements you probably already have
The ethics: Achievements requiring a specific Ethic, or is ideal.
The crisis: The 3 achievements related to the Crisis
The unique: Uncommon and specific Achievements
The Utopia: Achievements related to the Utopia DLC
Glossary: Achievement names of each “run”, specifics.

The basics

A fairly large portion of Stellaris achievements are easy, and usually earned in one game. If it’s your first ironman game, but you feel confident about being able to win, you probably want to build a wide empire of at least 200 systems, (resource achievements, star struck achievement, victorious, win a war, etc), and stack on as many ethic achievements as possible, (and Utopia if you have it, since a wide empire will have lots of minerals anyways), get 10 strategic resources, and try to get the Crisis achievement. So not much to write up about here.

The Ethics

The ethic-based achievements primarily rely on having a wide empire of 500 pops. In general, by picking three ethics, you can get all three done in one game:

Xenohpile (possible fan), Pacifist, egalitarian (alt: materialist), non-imperial. For this one, you have to be at peace for 200 years, have 10 migration treaties, and either have 500 pops under utopian living standards, or get 75% of pops being robotic (also synth ascension achievement, if utopia) While not ethic-specific, you should also get 10 alien pops on one planet, (you could take the gaia terraforming ascension perk for this achievement as well) and have an alien ruler. This will quickly give you 7 achievements in one run (8 if utopia, potentially 9 if synthetic, crisis).

Set the fallen empires to 4 to guarantee an observer, you also want to fulfill its request for a pop (most common event) so it will gift you things. Ideally, you want to expand quickly to get to the 500 or 200 pop range, and maintain a large military – nothing keeps the peace better than a large deterrence fleet, so that’ll last for 200 years pretty easily. If a military isolationist FE wakes up, don’t worry, if you become his thrall you won’t be dragged into his wars.

Spiritulist, Xenophobe, and Authoritarian. It’s another wide game. You want to conquer a spiritualist FE and claim its planets, and hopefully find and open a shielded world (beware). You also need to conquer the galaxy, and enslave 5 species as livestock (utopia), and enslave at least 200 pops and have over 500 total pops. and once all is done, purge all xenos. You also want to take the psionic ascension path. You should get 6 achievements (7 if utopia)

Pretty simple one here. You can just exterminate the galaxy if you already have xenophage (tip: devouring swarm does not make aliens count as livestock, but 5x primitives makes this easy, if necessary), but otherwise you want to conquer the galaxy, enslaving all xenos, and make sure to take out the spiritualist FE so you can hopefully find a shielded world and its 4 holy worlds to colonize. (In my run, the FE was blocking the route to the holy worlds, but it is possible to colonize all 4 sometimes, if you must do it early). Once all the galaxy is under your rule, exterminate it all.

You will also need to do a egaltarian or materialist run, depending on what you did in your pacifist/xenophile run. If egaltarian, go bio ascension, if materialist, go synth ascension.

The Crisis

There’s only 3 Crisis achievements, and two are easy, but one as of 2.1 will take a long time.

Rift sealed

The most straightforward achievement, you want to get jump drives, or ideally go psi ascension (During your xenophobe/spiritualist run, ideally) and get psi jump drives, and then destroy the portal. In other words, “defeat crisis”.

Voight-Kampff

This one is even easier. Ideally trigger the event by going synth ascension, then wait for it to happen. A few years into the crisis, you will get a special project, research it and bam, achievement. Don’t even need to defeat it here.

Queening

sigh

Okay so don’t do anything with synths or jump drives, and this crisis will happen. In a nutshell, contain this crisis to a few systems, have some science ships on standby, but don’t destroy its last planet. Simply build up a fleet at chokepoints, build stations (if possible), fortify it, then wait a few hundred years. The MTTH for this event to fire is 80 years, but I waited 140 years and it still didn’t trigger, it takes a stupid amount of time. When the event does pop up, send a science ship and your military in (get jump drives once you get the subspace echos alert), and research the project. I got this done in a matter of a few years in 1.6, but it was modded. So It’s the only achievement I save-scummed a little to get it to trigger.

The Unique

So these are interesting achievements, they generally don’t fit in to a specific run, but if you can, grab em.

You want to try to do the following:

Enlighten (not infiltrate) a bronze or stone age civilization
Invade Earth in the middle of WW2 (take note of what it says, this is the most RNG achievement, but I got it on my first attempt at doing it)
Infiltrate (not enlighten) the homeworld of pre-FTL reptilians, as a humanoid species.
Terraform a planet into a gaia world
Get synth tech and complete the “in limbo” anomaly
Explore as many black holes as possible, and then send a crewed science ship in between two black holes, until an event happens. Don’t rig the explosives. Embrace it. What was, will be.