I've Been Playing Stellaris For 8 Years And This Is Absolutely The Wildest Fucking Galaxy I've Ever Seen

I've been playing Stellaris for 8 years and this is absolutely the wildest fucking galaxy I've ever seen

I'll try to explain this so people who don't know the game will understand it.

my empire, the Fen, spawned in a totally isolated part of the galaxy, sandwiched between, on one side, an ancient empire with technology centuries ahead of mine and no interest in letting me through their borders, and on the other, a "devouring swarm" species that kept trying to eat me. so I basically hunkered down behind a whole bunch of defense platforms and didn't meet anyone else until halfway through the game.

that situation lured me into a false sense of calm.

about an hour into the game, another ancient empire from the other side of the galaxy "awakened", slaughtered the devouring swarm in less than five minutes, and started closing in on my borders right around the time a violent warlord popped into the middle of my territory through a wormhole.

shortly after this I accidentally imploded my home planet into a black hole.

then, because apparently I had accidentally set the "crisis" option to "ALL", the galaxy was attacked by:

ghost invaders from the dimension where telepathy happens

a rogue AI that made half the robots in the galaxy turn evil

a "scourge" from outside the galaxy intent on consuming everything, including my ships

another rogue AI that wants to erase all consciousness from the universe

in response to this I leaned hard on my bioengineering technology and created a sort of space Godzilla the size of a planet. the entire galactic community then decided that makes me the real problem, and every single civilisation declared war on me.

I evolved my space Godzilla until it got big enough to eat planets, at which point a sort of space Cthulhu emerged and started rampaging through the galaxy trying to challenge it for dominance.

so now, I'm just running around eating planet after planet trying to make my space Godzilla strong enough to fight space Cthulhu, basically doing ranked competitive genocide with the other remaining crisis factions. the galactic population has dropped by like 70%. a dozen empires have fallen. my economy is crashing because apparently this situation is bad for trade and general citizen morale. somewhere there's a planet that keeps sending me notifications because the indigenous species is about to achieve FTL travel and I'm just like. oh buddy. pal. you do not want to be out here.