Stellaris 4.0 added babies to the galaxy, along with a bug that implies they are edible
Stellaris's recent 4.0 update, which launched alongside the (pretty unpopular) BioGenesis expansion on May 5, finally introduced the concept of babies. Their lack of inclusion previously made plenty of sense, of course. Babies are useless. Especially when it comes to giant space empires. But they are here now, which means a fun new bug has reared its head.
The nascent stage trait is a negative trait that can be applied to humanoid, mammalian, reptilian and arthropoid species. Here's how Paradox describes it:
This species gives birth at an early stage of development, resulting in a prolonged period where the young are incapable of contributing to society. During this time, they remain blissfully unaware of the responsibilities and burdens that come with sapience.
So when this species spawns a new pop, they are considered babies for the first five years. After that, they become productive members of society. 5-year-olds and up can definitely work in alloy refineries. It's perfectly safe!
Where things get a bit wonky is their categorisation as "pre-sapient". This category already existed in Stellaris prior to the introduction of babies, you see. On your travels through the cosmos, you might encounter species that are more intelligent than a planet's simple fauna, but which have not yet reached the Stone Age. These pre-sapient species can be uplifted and put to work in a matter of decades, but left to their own devices it would take millions of years.
Stellaris allows you to establish how you treat pre-sapients, codifying it with an edict. These options include treating them as animals, which means you can hunt them and eat them. Or you can just purge them completely, using the extermination edict.
I think you can see where this is going.
As spotted by some players last week, this policy of extermination does indeed apply to your babies. And while this might at first seem like it's in keeping with Stellaris encouraging you to become the most awful kind of space emperor you can be, it's probably not a good idea to start killing off all of your kids. At the very least, it's bad for population growth.
While this initially seemed like a pretty critical bug, from my own testing it actually looks like it's purely visual. I made an empire full of weird little guys and then tasked them with purging all the pre-sapients. In the species menu, it absolutely showed that this extermination policy applied to the babies, but despite this it didn't actually have an effect.
For the first five years of my campaign, the baby population continued to grow, and when it did start to shrink, it matched the population growth of the adults. So they weren't being purged, they were just being moved from the pre-sapient group to the adult group.
I confess I'm a tiny bit disappointed. There are plenty of critters who will eat their young. Including hamsters. And who's to say an intelligent species of spacefaring hamsters wouldn't continue this fine tradition?
So while Paradox should probably fix this minor bug, it should absolutely give us an option to cook delicious baby steaks.