Stellaris: How to Build Megastructures

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Your goal in Stellaris is to take your young, space-faring Empire to the highest heights possible! What does that look like for you? Complete control of the galaxy? Effective and solid partnerships with your neighbors? Destroying the galaxy entirely?

RELATED: Stellaris: Your Complete Guide To Terraforming

Whatever your plans are, there's a Megastructure to help you get there. Megastructures are special constructions that perform particular tasks on a massive scale. There are tons of them, and this guide helps you build every single one. For your ease of reading, we've divided them up based on the DLC that unlocks them.

The only Megastructures you can build for free are the Gateways, which allow you to transport ships instantly across the entire galaxy. All of the active Gateways in a galaxy are connected to one another, so you can use one Gateway to travel to any of them.

At the start of the game, a certain number of abandoned Gateways will spawn into the galaxy. If you use the 'Galactic Doorstep' Origin, one of those abandoned Gateways is guaranteed to be in the solar system where your Empire starts. To reactivate an abandoned Gateway, follow these steps:

Now that you've reactivated a Gateway, you can build your own new ones! You'll want to be careful with how and where you place them, since they're as useful to your enemies as they are to you.

You cannot place a Gateway within the system's gravity well (basically, it needs to be pretty far from the sun).

L-Gates operate a lot like Gateways, in that they let you travel vast distances in a ridiculously short amount of time. However, instead of connecting to all the other L-Gates in the galaxy, all L-Gates travel to the same place: a little system outside the galaxy,