Chaos Dwarfs / Squats Empire Build

June 17, 2025 by Solar Cross

The Chaos Dwarfs are a Warhammer Fantasy faction that logically could have been ported into Warhammer 40k, along with their non-chaos equivalent, but never was. Do not let that stop you porting them into Stellaris. And if you are going to do that, then this article shows the recipe and strategy that I suggest.

Chaos Dwarfs (Squats) Empire Build Summary

The Chaos Dwarfs are a lot like my Squats Empire Build but eviler.

Chaos Dwarfs Strategy

The above formula for the Chaos Dwarfs was contrived to be thematic more than effective. Still it does have particular strengths and weaknesses which do suggest some very effective strategies.

Cave Dweller & Noxious Species Trait Combo

The first thing to note is that for our species traits we have the benefit of the Cave Dweller and Noxious combo for a flat 80% habitability on any planet even tomb worlds. We take Non-Adaptive because it is a free penalty given Noxious and Cave Dweller together override it entirely.

Any subterranean empire is tilted towards a colony rush alongside a robot rush. The Noxious & Cave Dweller combo however allows us to go far more aggressively with a (“fast”) colony rush and delay robots or go slavery instead.

Relentless Industrialists and Species Trait Synergy

The Relentless Industrialists civic is like the evil version of the Masterful Crafters civic used by my Squats build. Relentless Industrialists is all about raw industrial output no matter the environmental cost. This civic has some two very strong penalties for the powerful bonuses to consumer goods and alloy production.

The first penalty is that the boost to industrial output, via the coordinated fulfilment centre (is that an Amazon reference?), will turn the host colony into a tomb world.

Many empire builds using the civic will solve this by picking the Post-Apocalyptic origin. Who cares if your industry turns your planets into tomb worlds if that is your preferred habitat anyway? However our Chaos Dwarfs solve this by simply not caring about habitability at all through stacking minimum habitability floor modifiers (noxious + cave dweller).

It is worth mentioning here that the robots produced by subterranean empires also get the cave dweller trait. Robots get a minimum habitability floor of +50% which also stacks with cave dweller, so subterranean robots get a flat 100% habitability on any planet including tomb worlds.

Mutagenic Spas Civic

The second penalty from Relentless Industrialists is a powerful debuff to pop growth on our Industrial planets powered by coordinated fullfillment centers. This compounds with the pop growth penalty from cave dweller / molebot.

Fortunately Mutagenic Spas gives us a way to mitigate this. Mutagenic Spas gives us a way to greatly boost pop growth at the cost of habitability and happiness.

Note that pop growth from migration is not touched by the pop growth penalties from coordinated fulfilment centers. So the smart way to use mutagenic spas is on non-industrial planets, mining worlds, tech worlds etc. Then we can let internal migration populate the industrial hellscapes boosted by coordinated fulfilment centers.

Governing Ethics

Xenophobe lets us be proper evil, not just using slaves (nice with noxious) but also making xenos into livestock. Livestock make for a particularly compelling food source for subterraneans due to their low housing cost and non-existent need for agricultural districts. Old people like me will think of the Morlocks from The Time Machine by H.G. Wells.

Authoritarian is taken mainly for the stratified living standards. The Chaos Dwarf build is challenged by happiness most of all and stratified living standards helps us largely ignore it, especially if our noxious ruling pops have xeno-slaves to torment.

It would be nice to take militarist for our final ethic but I put materialist simply for the rush to robots. That said robots matter much more for the regular Squat build than our noxious Chaos Dwarfs. If you want to lean harder on slaves than robots then materialist can be swapped for militarist.

Subterranean

Subterranean is thematic for the Chaos Dwarfs as with the Squats, otherwise we are mainly taking it for the Cave Dweller trait. Beyond that Subterranean still has a few useful quirks.

This origin makes our colonies very resistant to planetary bombardment but this does nothing at all if the planet can easily be taken by an army. To really become indomitable we should have a number of armies. Soldier jobs do this but so do enforcer jobs. The Subterranean Urbanisation districts give us a few extra urban building slots which we can use for extra Holo Centres and Precincts. Precincts generate defence armies.

Stacked enforcers can become significant sources of unity, with the Unyielding and Domination traditions.

Share this article to my twitter @SolarCrossGames or my reddit community r/SolarCrossGames and let’s chat about it.

For more great Stellaris articles see here!

Play Stellaris on the best PC gaming gear, see what is available on Amazon now!

Leave a Reply