Drones needing re-assimilated

[bootsy81]

Hey guys, I'm pretty new to stellaris so was wondering if anyone could clear this up for me. I'm playing a machine race of assimilators and I've conquered and assimilated a couple of empires now. I got the ability to do some genetic tinkering with my drones so I thought "great, let's get to making these guys a bit more useful".

So I changed my dudes to remove a negative trait (negative unity I think) and added a positive one (less housing required) then ran the project to alter them. I thought that was awesome until the month ended and it basically sent my planets and economy to ♥♥♥♥.

For some reason it's like they are now considered a new race and they need to be reassimilated before they will do any work. So I've got like 20 unemployed pops on various planets, jobs not being done etc. But they all still have the cybernetic trait and seem like they are part of my collective.

Anyone got any idea why they don't just carry on as they were, just better genetic specimens? Seems like genetic engineering is kind of a pain in the butt if this is what happens every time tbh.

[Jagothegamer]

Are you sure they still have the cybernetic trait? I would double check and if so, it's a bug, however if they don't, make sure later when geneticly modifiying your pops that the template has the cybernetic trait. Additionaly, you could try waiting an in game month if you haven't already and it should normalize.

[O-Dog]

I had the same issue. I can confirm that I had the cybernetic trait on my pops, it was a species I had assimilated decades earlier. It crippled my economy as it was still pretty early in the game. I could get away with it when my empire was much larger with many species but by that point the advantages were minimal.

[bootsy81]

Hey guys, so I went back and redid the gene altering just there. This time they still needed reassimilated but didn't show the cybernetic trait after the genetic tampering was finished which made a bit more sense, although I'm still not sure why they are lost to the collective temporarily. I could have sworn the cybernetic trait was still there last night but maybe I'm wrong.

Anyway, upshot is that it does appear that altering your drones will hit your economy quite hard until they are reassimilated and put back to work. You will need to make sure you have enough resources stored to handle going into the red on your balance sheet until the process is finished and you can get back to normal. Might be a few years of ill effects depending on how many pops need assimilated. It didn't seem to take too long for me and I was able to take the hit with about 19k energy stored up and capacity overload edict running. Just had to handle the unrest caused by unemployment for a bit by running a social program or something.

Not sure if this is a bug or a feature it's the way it is for now at least. But of a pain but it can be done if you can put up with a bit of a wonky economy for a while.