Stellaris is a grand-strategy MMO game that involves space exploration of a technologically superior species in a race to conquer the galaxy. This cosmic sandbox game allows players to interact, explore, research and formulate a strategy for expanding your galactic empire. While expanding your influence or your jurisdiction over the cosmos, you may subjugate planets of enemy empires. These planets may have different species of Population or ‘Pops’ that would not like being colonized, depending on their Pops type. In such cases, you may want to Purge the entire or part of a population of a planet. According to the Stellaris Wiki, Purging involves systematic elimination of specific pops in a population or a species-wide extermination. So in this guide we will show you how you can Purge a planet in Stellaris.

How to Purge a Population in Stellaris

Before attempting to purge a pop in Stellaris, we recommend checking if your Empire has Xenophobe-aligning Ethics and have allowed Purging in your governmental policies. This is because empires with Xenophile Ethics generally have bad consequences to Purging unless specific types of Purging like Displacement is allowed. The only exception to this is Gestalt Consciousness empires that can Purge anyone they want apart from Bio-Trophies.

In order to Purge a Population in Stellaris, all you need to do is select the Planet > click on ‘Surface’ > Select the species and click on ‘Set Rights’ > Go to the ‘Citizenship’ menu and select ‘Undesirables.’ This begins the Purging process.

Now, for you to Purge particular pops on a planet, you must have set the Citizenship type of that species set to Slavery. In this case, you can change the Citizenship type of this species to ‘Undesirables’ to start the extermination process which may take several months to years. There are also prerequisites to special types of species in order for them to be purged.

  • Pre-sapient species purging requires a Non-Protected status under Pre-Sapients policies.
  • Robot species purging requires them to be Outlaws under Robotic Workers policies.
  • Synthetic species purging requires Artificial Intelligence policies to not give them Citizen Rights.
  • If your enemy empire has given a Hive-Mind species on a planet an Evolutionary Mastery ascension perk, the species is Assimilated and therefore cannot be purged. However, this perk is only available in the Utopia DLC.

There are various types of Purging in Stellaris, but the default is set to Extermination of any Population you deem Undesirable. That is everything you need to know of how to Purge in Stellaris, if you found this article helpful and want more related content, check out this guide on how to build a habitat in this game.